NPR Dishonesty About Massive Poisoning Of Charleston, W. Virginia Water Supply Continues

Another one of their young dweeb correspondents fed their victim-listeners more happy talk about the poisoning of the water supply for over 300,000 inhabitants of Charleston, West Virginia on their morning "news" program, Morning Edition, January 16. Once again the dozens of hospitalized victims went unreported. This time a particularly dishonest line ended the piece- that the EPA "has no information that [the chemical] is dangerous." See the slippery fast one they pulled? That leaves the impression it's NOT hazardous. In fact, there is "no information" that it is dangerous (if you ignore the burns people suffered) OR SAFE, because there are NO FORMAL STUDIES that TESTED the chemical. As with the majority of the hundreds of thousands of chemicals U.S. businessmen are allowed to use willy-nilly, there is no requirement that the chemicals be proven safe. ONLY when scientists manage to get funding to study a particular chemical (assuming some scientist somewhere happens to take an interest in a particular chemical) AND there are years of pressure which FINALLY forces government regulators to pay attention, is it even possible for a chemical to be controlled.

A non-deliberately-misleading statement would have been "there are no scientific studies on this untested chemical as to its possible long-term health effects on people."

Maybe someone should tell the EPA that a few dozen people had to be hospitalized. Do you think that constitutes "information"? NPR could have told them, for that matter. What despicable propagandists.

And if you wanted to know how many thousands of gallons were poured into the water supply, don't listen to NPR for that information. Nor would you have learned that the guilty corporation, the ideologically-named "Freedom Industries," moved the rest of the chemical to a nearby plant that has a "containment wall" with HOLES in it, same as at the original site.
That's what FREEDOM is all about! FREEDOM to do whatever you damn want to make a buck, everybody else be damned!

NPR- National Propaganda Radio- Commits Three More Crimes

The quasi-governmental U.S. national radio network NPR has a long history of egregious propaganda posing as neutral news and analysis. Here are a few of their crimes of the past few days.

There has been a major poisoning of the water supply of Charleston, West Virginia, by a criminally irresponsible company called "Freedom Industries." (The ideological arrogance of the criminals who appropriate words like "freedom" and "liberty" is truly galling.) A deadly chemical that causes burns on contact has contaminated the water for 300,000 people there. The company didn't even realize it was happening- the foul stench of the chemical alerted the local populace. The chemical is so dangerous that people have been warned not to even use it for washing. (Which didn't stop the company from issuing a mendacious statement claiming the chemical was non-hazardous!) [1]

What NPR has done for the past two days (January 13 and 14) is put a happy face on the situation. They have totally ignored the injuries caused by this befoulment of this basic necessity of life, blacking out the facts that two dozen people have been hospitalized, that people have sustained burns on their heads and faces and sores in their throats, that their homes have been filled with the stench of the chemical coming from their tap water (imagine how noxious it must be). Instead of reporting what is actually happening, NPR has put on a parade of braindead locals who aren't at all upset by the situation- at least in the edited portions of what they said to the NPR hacks- as if no one there is angry. (We know this is a lie because the local media there is up in arms, reflecting the popular mood, and Erin Brockovich went there yesterday to address a meeting of the people living there-NPR blacked that out too. Go to democracynow.org for a report on that, January 14th.)

NPR also ignored the criminal history of the company and its boss, as well as the feckless government lack of regulation, a product of the pernicious laissez-faire ideology that dominates U.S. society. (The plant hasn't been inspiected since 1991, over twenty years ago, despite being a storage site for 4 million gallons of dangerous chemical.) In fact NPR barely mentions the company at all. (I sure hope they hit the culprits up for a donation- they sure earned it!)

NPR's "coverage," in sum, consisted of putting on some locals to make anodyne comments (NPR apparently found no one who's even slightly angry at the corporation that did it) with NO suggestion of a need for regulation, or investigation, or punishment. It's covered as if it was a weather event! No one's to blame, as if it's unavoidable. This in the wake of repeated deadly chemical "leaks" and train derailments in the U.S. [2]

NPR is not only in effect defending a criminal corporation, (even the local U.S. attorney has launched an investigation), it is protecting the venal and anti-human ideological system in which it operates which allows such criminally negligent and reckless behavior by corporate leeches and government officials by hiding that system from view. NPR does everything it can to promote false consciousness by obfuscating the reality of American life.

A second crime: January 14th, 2 pm Washington, D.C. time, National Propaganda Radio at it again. Their “report” on the Egyptian military dictatorship's Constitutional plebiscite first of all ignores that this document was custom written for the military. They make it sound like a legitimate vote. “Egyptians are voting,” is the key phrase, technically accurate but misleading to the point of deception. NPR mentions “hundreds of thousands of soldiers” deployed for this Nazi-style plebiscite. No mention is made of the Muslim Brotherhood, the call for a boycott (thus guaranteeing a Saddam Hussein-style 99% “victory” for the generals), and no mention of the following facts that the BBC brought out yesterday in an interview with ruling class clique member Amr Musa (a “diplomat,” actually long-time Mubarak henchman and now serving the new dictatorship); there are big signs outside polling places telling people to vote yes; the “Constitution” continues the practice of military “trials” for civilians in political cases; the military will choose its own “Defense” Minister, not the figurehead puppet president fronting for the military dictators. (Musa brushed all that off as fine, fine.) And you know NPR must monitor the BBC. Many of their local stations run the BBC as part of their programming! (This very BBC interview was on NPR's most important station, WNYC in New York.)

So NPR ignores what even the BBC reports, so determined is NPR to pretty up the dictatorship now that it seems entrenched and the U.S. continues to funnel billions into the military's coffers for weapons purchases. (According to John Mersheimer, Israel guaranteed to the Egyptian generals that they and their American lobby would prevent a cut-off in aid, thus giving a green light to mass murder, arrests, and repression by the regime.)

Thus NPR ignores what even the BBC reports, so determined is NPR to pretty up the dictatorship now that it seems entrenched and the U.S. continues to funnel billions into the military's coffers for weapons purchases. (According to John Mersheimer, Israel guaranteed to the Egyptian generals that they and their American lobby would prevent a cut-off in aid, thus giving a green light to mass murder, arrests, and repression by the regime.)

Acting like a PR agency for a major polluter, legitimizing a tyrant regime's written-to-order “Constitution-” but NPR's not done. Since December they have virtually ignored the Egyptian regime's imprisonment of Aljazeera journalists. What kind of journalists stay silent when other (real) journalists are imprisoned by a military dictatorship? (The BBC is guilty of this too in this instance.) And the story was carried, for instance, in the New York Times on December 30^th, the lodestar for the rest of the U.S. media- but NPR had not a word about it on that date. [3]

Three strikes and you're out, NPR. Of course there are a lot more than three strikes against NPR, if we review their record over the years, which is beyond the purview of this brief essay.

These are crimes in a moral sense, based on ordinary human morality. They are also ethical violations of what journalism is supposed to be. Of course, propagandists posing as journalists is a total debasement of journalistic ethics.

1]  The chemical, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, is used to wash coal. Of course the coal industry controls West Virginia completely. Virtually every politician, government official, and judge there is a stooge of that industry, which is what is allowing the coal companies to literally destroy the state by "mountain top removal," the literal destruction of mountains and creation of a polluted wasteland in the place of green forests. Rivers are also wrecked in the process. See "West Virginia Democrats Tepid On New Regulations Following Chemical Spill," for a story about the criminal political accomplices to the polluters. Also “John Boehner On West Virginia Chemical Spill: ‘We Have Enough Regulations,‘”both at Huffington Post. [Jan 13 and 14.]


2]  The Huffington Post had no trouble finding angry locals. Their story January 14th describes an "angry" man watching out for his elderly neighbors. See "West Virginia Chemical Spill Aftermath Leaves Residents Struggling." In NPR's telling, on the other hand, everyone is taking it in stride.

3]  And one of the imprisoned Aljazeera reporters is even a "white" person! Peter Greste, an Australia, won a Peabody Award last year for his reporting from Somalia. And guess who he was working for then? The BBC! Yet the BBC ignores his plight. That magnifies the BBC's shamefulness even more.

I Have To Move

This site is a "service" of Google. I have been unable to get the email notification functions to work. There are no answers online for this problem, and Google does not provide answers or any way to contact them.

Therefore I will be posting my essays at http://jasonzenith.wordpress.com/ and hopefully people signing up for email alerts there will get them.

I do not know if the secret police, with or without Google's connivance, sabotaged this blog, or if Google did it at the behest of the secret police. I have experienced sabotage of Google gmail accounts however, which makes me suspicious. (Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo! email deleted all the messages from my accounts immediately after 9/11/01, obviously on instructions from the secret police.)

Unfortunately communications are more difficult in a police state such as the U.S. than in a free country.

WHO Did You Say “Endangers Lives”?

This is something I wrote back in August 2013 and posted on jasonzenith.blogspot.com, which I think would be right at home on this site devoted specifically to propaganda analysis.

Bradley Manning is currently groveling in the sentencing phase of his military show trial, apparently in a bid for mercy. (Maybe his tormentors will let him out of military prison when he's an old man, if he's “lucky.” Looks like he signed up for the Army for life, unwittingly.) [1]

This is as good a time as any to refute the propaganda line we keep hearing, including at this “trial,” that Manning (and Julian Assange, and now Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald), “endanger lives” by revealing U.S. crimes, surveillance, and oppression.

The U.S. power establishment constantly throws out the demonstrably false claim that the aforementioned people and their ilk “put lives at risk” by exposing U.S. crimes against humanity (as well as revealing various tittle-tattle, snarky comments about “allies,” and dirt from State Department cables and such). [2]

Of course, for a mass murdering empire to squeal when its “secrets” are revealed that “You're endangering lives!!” is the height of hypocrisy and breathtaking chutzpah (in addition to being calculated bullshit designed to manipulate ignorant public opinion). [3]

But there's another aspect of the establishment's hypocrisy that is less obvious. Take the New York Times, the establishment's self-anointed “newspaper of record.”

Today's print edition (August 16^th) has an article on the top of page one, “In Tense Cairo, Islamists Look To Next Move.” Subhead: “New Protests Expected After Friday Prayer.” The background: Two days ago the military oligarchy attacked the Muslim Brotherhood sit-in protest in Cairo. (The military overthrew the first democratically-elected president in all of Egypt's history, the Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, who they've kept in custody since.) Using snipers and other brutal methods, the military murdered 638 people and wounded almost 4,000. (Those figures are from the article.)

The author, David D. Kirkpatrick, interviewed some men outside a mosque being used as a morgue for some of the bodies. The last sentence of the fourth paragraph says of the men, “A few argued openly for a turn to violence.”

The next paragraph starts with a quote: “'The solution might be an assassination list,' said Ahmed, 27, who like others refused to use his full name for fear of reprisals from the new authorities. [Actually the same old military “authorities” who have been in power since Col. Nasser led a military coup that ended the monarchy.”Authorities” is a term that legitimizes whoever is in power. {4}] 'Shoot anyone in uniform. It doesn't matter if the good is taken with the bad, because that is what happened to us last night.” [That is, on Wednesday, August 14^th.]

Why was it necessary for the NYT to give Ahmed's age? Couldn't they have said “a young man” or “a man in his 20s”? What useful information does jeopardizing him with this detail serve?

But that's nothing. It gets much worse.

The next paragraph goes like this: “Mohamed Rasmy, a 30-year-old engineer, interrupted. 'That is not the solution,' he said, insisting that Islamic leaders would re-emerge with a plan “to come together in protest.”

The NYT fingered the hapless and naïve Mr. Rasmy with his full name, his age, and his occupation. Hey, why not publish his ID number too?

It's obvious what happens next. The secret police [aka “intelligence agents” or “security forces” as the Times calls secret policemen of "friendly" -to the U.S., of course- nations] pick up Mr. Rasmy for interrogation and torture, which is routine in Egypt. Kirkpatrick helpfully provided them with avenues of interrogation. What are your leaders plans? Who is the terrorist Ahmed?

And what if he doesn't know who Ahmed is? Then the only way t6o stop the torture is to finger someone else. And if the secret police decide he lied about that, then it gets worse.

The NYT knows full well that that is how things work in Egypt. You don't even have to be particularly sophisticated to know that.

Yet they named this man.

What useful information is imparted to the public by giving a full name, an exact age, and occupation of a stranger? He could be called “Mohamed, a professional in his 30s.” We lose nothing of value with that description. (Ironically, the NYT routinely blacks out very important information that they think it's better we don't know, often at the “request” of the government, especially “the White House.”)

The truth is, no one in a dangerous situation should even talk to the NYT. Secret police infiltrators could see you talking to them, as also may well have happened on this occasion. It would be quite incompetent of the Egyptian “security forces” to NOT have plants in that crowd, and also to not be shadowing the likes of Kirkpatrick, which doubtlessly they are. (Just as the FBI and CIA tails many foreign journalists in the U.S, and abroad too in the case of the CIA.)

The NYT consistently shows this callous indifference to the well-being of “nobodies” they use. They have done it during the Syrian uprising against Assad, endangering people rebelling or living in areas under siege. They did it to Libyans during the revolution against Qaddafi. Those are just the most recent examples.

They do this sort of thing all the time, with lowly average people in foreign lands. (They do it in the U.S. too, with the poor, the persecuted, the dissident. But many poor people are wised up enough to not give their names to such disreputable people as the NYT. For example, in the same issue of the NYT, in “Teenager's Errant Gunfire at Project In Bronx Leads to His Fatal Beating,” on page A21, not everyone in a public housing project will give the Times their names, which the Times attributes to fear of retaliation, probably correctly in this case. Fear of the police is another good reason for poor blacks to avoid mention in the establishment's media.)

The only people the NYT is interested in protecting is other members of the power elite. Daily, unnamed “officials” appear in their stories whispering alleged facts into the ears of Times reporters. Oftentimes the “information” is obviously “classified,” as I have pointed out elsewhere. [See “The New York Times Breaks the Law Again Today.”]

Might as well mention one other bad (and deceitful) habit of the NYT, which predictably occurred in the Kirkpatrick article. They like to hide the most important or damning to “authority” information that they are deigning to report (they refuse entirely to report even more important or critical info) in the third-to-last paragraph of articles. In this case, that's paragraph 26 of a 28 paragraph story. It describes what Kirkpatrick apparently saw in a mosque where victims of the slaughter were brought. Here is what it reveals:

“Many [bodies] were charred beyond recognition by the fires that Egyptian security forces set to eradicate the tent city.” It goes on. The important information, that the Egyptian military dictatorship burned people alive (or after shooting them) is deeply buried near the end of a long story. The rest of the U.S. media, especially broadcast, has virtually refused to report this detail at all, or tap-danced around the facts. At least Kirkpatrick tells it straight. My advice when reading the NYT: if you're pressed for time, just read the few and last couple of paragraphs of stories. The rest is mostly filler and repetition, many times.

1] A few words are in order here about that oh-so-fair “trial,” military court martial, technically. No transcripts, no recording devices allowed, reporters (real ones, not the establishment propagandists who only showed up on the first and last days) forced to act like spies to try and get info and report, military goons standing behind them in the press pen and spying on their computer screen, secret “evidence,” and so on. The officer acting as “judge” was promised a promotion to an appeals tribunal during the “trial.” A not so subtle message to her to make sure she reaches the expected decisions, in which case she will be rewarded. In other words, blatant bribery of the judge on behalf of the prosecution side, the military and government. Like I said, a real fair trial.

There's an old saying: military justice is to justice as military music is to music.

Of course, there is plenty of precedent for the government bribing judges. Most cases stay secret. One that didn't is the offer of the FBI directorship to the judge presiding over the prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for exposing the Pentagon Papers. When it was revealed during the trial, the judge insisted it didn't influence him. Contrary to myth, the charges were not dismissed because of this. Rather, the egregious misconduct of the Nixon regime (burglarizing Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to find dirt on Ellsberg, having Cuban fascist exile goons beat him up, and so on) is what led to the dismissal of charges by the judge. So Ellsberg wasn't “exonerated” by the courts, as a not guilty verdict would have done. Not that he needs exoneration from a criminal system.

2] The same day as the NYT printed Kirkpatrick's report (the 16^th, probably a day after it went up online), the former State Department Chief Flack, P.J. Crowley, was on Democracy Now, pushing the propaganda lines that Manning “endangered people” and he “violated his oath” and deserves severe punishment,

3] I'll just touch briefly on the most obviously galling aspect of this: namely that this power establishment caused the deaths of over 100,000 Iraqis (at a minimum) with an unprovoked war of aggression, falsely and cynically portrayed as self-defense against an imminent threat from non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of Saddam Hussein. (Hussein never made any threats to attack the U.S., so the propaganda was doubly false. The Bush regime used the 9/11/01 suicide airliner attacks, which were carried out under the watchful eyes of the CIA and FBI, which deliberately allowed them to proceed, as a golden political opportunity to carry out a long-held desire among the right wing of the power establishment to emplace a client regime in Iraq. In fact, back in the 1990s they'd even written a paper saying that “another Pearl Harbor” would be a perfect opportunity to carry out their scheme.)

Or take that the trove of military documents exposed by Manning and Assange.* The military records provided plenty of incriminating evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq. (See: “Dispatches – Iraq'sSecret War Files” a powerful documentary produced by Channel 4 (UK) and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, that mined the Manning trove to great effect. Naturally, it wasn't on U.S. television. There is also the “collateral murder” video, taken in Baghdad, Iraq, and viewable in various forms on youtube.com and elsewhere, which you should watch if you haven't already. That video shows a murderous U.S. helicopter crew champing at the bit to slaughter a group of obvious civilians just walking in the street below, unaware of their imminent deaths at the hands of flying barbarians. Two Reuters photographers were among those slaughtered, as well as a father of young children who, seeing the bodies in the street, behaved like a decent human being and stopped his van to help. When they shot his children, the helicopter crew laughingly sneered that that's he gets for being so dumb as to take his kids to a “combat zone.”

By the way, when the U.S. military murders civilians, they call it “engaging the enemy” or “the target.” As these murderous goons did. Engage is their antiseptic euphemism for “gun down” or “blow to smithereens” human beings.

Putting this evidence of murder into the public domain is probably Manning's greatest “crime,” in the minds of the U.S. rulers.

For this service to humanity, Bradley Manning is going to be imprisoned for the rest of his life. (They would execute him if they hadn't calculated it would be politically unwise.)

* To a lesser extent establishment newspapers in several countries, including the New York Times in the U.S., also revealed some of what is contained in the Manning trove. The NY Times showed its gratitude to Assange with a long term campaign of character assassination and juvenile sniping, including a ludicrous, junior high school dissing of Assange in a NYT Sunday magazine cover story by former executive editor William “Bill” Keller, who seems to have psychological problems of his own. [See: “Bill Keller's Character Assassination Hatchet-Job on Julian Assange.”]

Another ingrate was the Guardian (U.K.) Apparently personality is more important than issues to these high level hacks. If you don't charm them, they'll knife you. Or maybe it was a political decision to erect a wall between “real” journalists, namely made members of the establishment, and outsiders who are anti-establishment. In short, like the World War II alliance between the capitalist West and the Soviet Union against the Axis powers, this was a temporary and uncomfortable compact of convenience which the poohbahs of establishment propaganda found distasteful, especially the NY Times.

4] The word “authorities” to refer to those in power places an aura of legitimacy around them. It also presumes that one should submit to them. We are all trained from childhood to submit to “authority.” The word “authority” also means one with superior knowledge, as in “Professor X is an authority on the use of political euphemisms to shore up structures of power.” This sense of the word bleeds over into its usage to refer to those with power. Authoritative, derived from authority, means that which can be relied on as true, the last word on something, the truth that must be accepted and deferred to. An authoritative source is one that trumps your worthless opinion, jack. This meaning too subliminally rubs off on “the authorities.”

That's not to say that all ideas are equal, or that there are no facts. It just means be skeptical, verify things, and think for yourself. That is the rational, human way.