BBC Blackout Propaganda

The BBC “World Service” took a look at factory conditions in Bangladesh to see “if things have changed” since the collapse of the Rana Plaza sweatshop a year ago, causing massive loss of life of the workers there. [1] First a three-minute piece light on facts. We're told at the end of that segment that the monthly minimum wage was raised from $40 to $68. UNMENTIONED: is it actually enforced.

Also not so much as a hint about the violent government repression of labor organizers. There aren't unions among the garment workers because labor organizers are viciously and systematically repressed by the government, including being subjected to torture and murder. For example, a prominent Bangladeshi labor organizer, Aminul Islam, was brutally tortured and murdered by the Bangladeshi “security forces” in 2012. And just to be clear which side “the West” is on, New Zealand's version of the NSA (which is intimately connected to the NSA as part of the “Five Eyes” inner clique of electronic surveillance secret police agencies of the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) aids and abets the Bangladeshi secret police, with whom it has a cooperative relationship operating inside Bangladesh. This is supposedly an “anti-terrorism” op. Which of course is what the Bangladeshi state murderers call their crimes too. Obviously the Bangladeshis expect something in return for cooperating with the New Zealand eavesdroppers, like, oh, “sharing intelligence” (passing along the communications of targeted labor organizers, in other words). [2]

After the three-minute “reporting” piece by host Ed Butler, which provided atmospherics but scant hard information, BBC and Butler served up a business-centric roundtable discussion. Workers' rights and the violent suppression of attempts to organize them, which is KEY to improving conditions and wages, went unmentioned. No garment workers or labor organizers were included in this lengthy chitchat. It was an entirely top-down discussion. (A Bangladeshi factory owner was included, who claimed he was not only paying way over minimum wage, but paying medical costs for his workers, and for schooling for worker's children- which sounds extremely dubious.) This went on for 14 minutes, then aother piece of reportage by Butler, about a Cambodian garment worker, and their decrepit living conditions, was put on. This segment was under two minutes, and featured Butler allegedly in the home of a poor Cambodian garment worker, where he comments that the house stinks (smells bad), then back to the roundtable talking.

The focus now was around the accord that Western fashion companies hammered out to avoid more bad publicity building collapses and fires.

After two minutes of that, the BBC put on a tape of their regular Irish comedian to deliver a stand-up routine. The thrust of it was materialism and discarding possessions. The upshot: what would happen to the global economy without consumerism?

Then the discussion resumed, with the comedian joining in. They all scratched their heads over the conundrum of how the poor need the richer nations to consume for the livelihood of the poor. (The idea of poor workers producing for their own needs and consumption didn't arise.) Mass production for ultimate discarding is presented as inescapable.

“Is it going to take consumer movements or is it going to take government regulation?” to change things, asks the reporter/roundtable leader Ed Butler at the end. The answer he gets from one participant is “outside pressure.” Once again, the idea of workers themselves being active agents in any of this, as opposed to objects of sympathy, is unthinkable. Twenty-five minutes in total is taken up with mostly empty blather and chin-stroking by business reps and a “consumer advocate.” No labor voices at all, even though the show was ostensibly about them.

Of course, if you have to cover up the violent repression of mere attempts to start a workers' movement, you can't start talking about unions or organized labor, because then you'll have to ask why Bangladeshi labor IS so totally unorganized, and you'll come smack up against the fact of the Bangladeshi government's policy of repression, torture, and murder in order to force their people to work cheap for Western corporations. (A policy that the U.S. and its allies enforce in numerous countries, sometimes resorting to fascist military coups to implement. Of course, without willing implementers in the target countries, the U.S. couldn't do this.)

No “consumer movement” in the West is going to meaningfully confront the murderous Bangladeshi government. And a government that is in cahoots with sweatshop owners, that allows massive construction of death-trap buildings, that tortures and murders labor organizers, shows what a sick charade it is to posit “government regulation” as a solution.

What the Western corporations and their image-advisers want is no more collapsing buildings or mass immolations by fire. The routinized hyper-exploitation of the poor for their labor, enforced by secret police torturer-murderers, is perfectly acceptable since THAT is something that can be kept out of (Western) sight and thus out of mind.

1] “In The Balance” with Ed Butler, BBC, April 18, 2015. In an almost half hour segment, no mention was made of how many people died in the building collapse of the sweatshop factory on April 24, 2013. It was 1,134, a slaughter. Hundreds of others were injured, some losing limbs and thus being maimed for life. (The Bangladeshi government treats poor cripples as human refuse, providing no benefits.)

2] See “New Zealand Spy Data Shared With Bangladeshi Human Rights Abusers,” The Intercept, April 15, 2015.

BBC Rushes To Defend CIA Torturers- Again

The morally revolting things the BBC news does more than cancels out the interesting pieces they run. [1] 

They were at it again this morning. The occasion was the Senate “Intelligence Oversight” [sic] Committee finally getting up the backbone to release its own report on the CIA torture program. (Usually euphemized as “harsh interrogation program” allegedly to “protect us” from “terrorism.” There’s one way to get a scaredy-cat populace to endorse systematic government kidnapping and torture, in violation of treaty obligations and U.S. law.)

The BBC anchor said the report contained “details of harsh CIA interrogation” [hey BBC, can you pronounce “torture”?] during the “CIA’s campaign against Al-Qaeda.” At least, that was the excuse given. (Just keep in mind that it was secret police types who planted the explosives that blew up three (not two) buildings in lower Manhattan in 2001. [2]) (I didn’t catch the anchor’s name, but he’s a regular, a male with an African accent. There’s only one who hosts their overnight radio broadcast to the U.S.)

After this muddled intro, he brings on just ONE person- a “former CIA counterterrorism analyst.” (Rather like bringing on the axe-murderer’s lawyer to discuss the matter!) This man spouted such rhetoric as the “CIA’s sort of harsh methods,” (sort of harsh!) and “certain techniques” (unspecified) of the “enhanced interrogation program.”

The BBC man helpfully exclaimed that the report was old news, there wasn’t anything new about the [torture, the word they won’t say] in it. (In fact that was a flat lie, as the report DOES contain new details of the types and methods of torture.) The BBC creep also dismissed the whole thing as just “political.” “So what is the point of releasing this report? Is it political?” (Odd attitude for an alleged journalist! Who needs official records? Just keep everything secret! Is he angling for a job as CIA spokesman?) The CIA man happily agreed that the report is “a political football for those who have already made up their minds.” He also rebuked “the fecklessness of the Democratic Party who have tried to make the CIA a scapegoat.” “All of this was approved” by the White House, the lawyers [like John Yoo!], the CIA’s lawyers, he says. Well then no problem torturing people! Hey, your lawyers said it’s okay. (By the way, the Nazis had lawyers say the same thing about Hitler’s crimes. It means nothing.)

By the way, the report is 525 pages, but the BBC anchor already knows there’s nothing in it. No news here folks, move along!

Grotesque.

The BBC is acting as if it‘s a U.S. government propaganda agency. Oddly, even the U.S. government radio network NPR didn’t do that. The 12 noon (U.S. east coast time) NPR newscast called the report “scathing.”

Even secret police groupie and conduit for U.S. secret police propaganda Dina Temple-Raston, officially titled “NPR’s national security correspondent,” had to admit the report, even after CIA and Obama regime censorship, painted a pretty awful picture. Torture methods included days or weeks of sleep deprivation, and contrary to CIA lies, “Abu Ghraib-style” brutality, such as dragging their prisoners naked down hallways, Temple-Raston reports. But she made sure to end her brief news story with the CIA line that CIA says the report is all wrong. (The U.S. media has been parroting that CIA lie ad nauseam every time the story of the long-suppressed report has come up.)

Dina likes to imagine she's a secret agent. Exciting!

One thing the report asserts definitively is that NO plots were foiled by torture, Osama bin Laden WASN’T captured thanks to torture (a lie promoted by the movie Zero Dark Thirty, made with the help of illegally released “classified” info by the CIA and Obama White House), and in fact useful information was not obtained. The CIA of course contradicts all that- but they would, they’re the torturers. Oh, and they illegally broke into the computers of the Senate Committee staffers who were working on the report, a Federal felony (dozens in fact, the way the Federal government charges people) for which not only was no one prosecuted, but Eric “Due Process Means We Decide to Kill You” Holder, Jr., Obama’s Attorney General, refused to even investigate.

Obama and the CIA dug in their heels and resisted like mules the release of the report. Idiotically, the Senators let the CIA censor the report. And after months of Obama doing all he could to squelch the Senate report, his chief mouthpiece, Josh Earnest, had the nerve to say Obama very much wanted the report to be released.

Later the BBC World “Service” puts on “former” CIA dog Bob Baer, an arch reactionary who is one of the CIA’s public faces. Baer insists the only point of releasing the report is as a Democratic partisan attack on the Bush regime. Oh, and the details of torture “puts people’s lives at risk.” The old “sources and methods” mantra. Oh, and the Geneva Conventions are irrelevant because Al-Qaeda never signed them! (But the U.S. has, jackass. And anti-torture conventions too.) As for torturing innocent people, “that’s no different than the British police,” who arrest and release people. And he used “3,000” killed on 9/11 as justification. (Ironic, that, given the fact that most of them were killed because of the demolitions planted in advance by agents of the U.S. secret police deep state.)

Do they have Nazis on to discuss the Holocaust?

Hey, maybe next time there’s a U.S. torture scandal, ask a human rights lawyer! (This particular report, by Rebecca Kesby, did include a short description by a torture victim of what he suffered.)

NPR has a decent, succinct overview of the history of the development of the Senate "Intelligence" Committee torture report, which refutes the CIA’s and BBC’s bullshit, "Report Says CIA Misled Senate, White House On Interrogation Program," Dec. 9, 2014.

1] This is nothing new for the British government’s propaganda outfit. See for example “The BBC: Cover Up Central,” “Why Is The BBC Defending Chinese Computer Hacking?,” and “BBC, NPR Ignore Egyptian Seizure of Aljazeera Journalists.” for some absolutely breath-taking examples of egregious BBC propaganda that grossly distorts reality and covers the butts of some awful state criminals. (Which states might surprise you. In one case they hid Chinese computer hacking aimed at the U.S. Apparently their desire to suck up to the Chinese rulers so British capitalists could try to make a buck there outweighed even their slavish subservience to the U.S.A.!)

2] A thoroughly documented fact supported by over a thousand architects and engineers, plus demolitions experts. See for example “9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out (Full)” and “9/11: Blueprint for Truth-The Architecture of Destruction-114min.”