Chevy S10

Is Current TV in the Wrong?

Filmmaker Isaac Brown made a film for Current TV last year called the The Art of Consumption. Brown also submitted, and was accepted in, the Media That Matters Film Festival, which needed non-exclusive rights to put the film on DVD, which would bring the important issue of the film to many more eyes. Current TV would not allow this because they have exclusive rights to the film.

The film is about artist Chris Jordan's creations, which show the overwhelming consumption of Americans.

Brown expresses his discontent on his website.

Un-Happy Anniversary: 5 years in Iraq

This afternoon I was pleased to see that the New York Times had Anti-War Protests as the subject of the leading article on their homepage. But there were a few things about it that kind of sucked.



It opens with this lead:

Police arrested more than 30 people who blocked entrances at the Internal Revenue Service building Wednesday morning, part of a day of protests to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Instead of that actual issue at hand:

The Iraq war has been going on for FIVE years. Five. 1826 days.



And another thing. The article was from Associated Press. What, New York Times, you can't get one of your own reporters to cover the anti-war protests?

But the part of the article that bothered me the most was this:

The Iraq war has been unpopular both abroad and in the United States, although an Associated Press-Ipsos poll in December showed that growing numbers think the U.S. is making progress and will eventually be able to claim some success in Iraq.

The findings, a rarity in the unpopular war, came amid diminishing U.S. and Iraqi casualties and the start of modest troop withdrawals. Still, majorities remain upset about the conflict and convinced the invasion was a mistake, and the issue still splits the country deeply along party lines.

Huh. The language is too vague here. Phrases like "growing numbers" and "diminishing U.S. and Iraqi casualties" don't mean anything without NUMBERS. Give proof. Why even put that paragraph in there?

Especially if you're citing a poll that your organization conducted. Come on.


Another thing bothered me. There was another article on the homepage of the Times about Bush's speech today defending the war. That alone bothers me. But anyway, I wanted to point out this paragraph, which belittles the anti-war protests today. Pay attention to the adjectives.

Mr. Bush gave his speech as sporadic and relative small protests erupted in several places here in Washington, and in other cities.

And was that supposed to say relatively small?

Winter Soldier Hearings

This past weekend, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan occured, which had testimonies of soliers that had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It iwasa chance for soldiers to speak out against the occupations, with photographic, video and sharing personal experiences. From what I've seen, only alternative news outlets seemed to cover the event. You can watch and listen to audio of the event here.

Here is part of the testimony of Jason Hurd, who served in central Baghdad from November of 04 to November
of 05.

I remember we were out on a patrol one day, a dismounted patrol, and we were walking by a woman¹s house.
She was outside in her garden doing somework. We had our interpreter with us, and our interpreter threw up his hand and said Salaam aleikum, which is their greeting in Iraq. It means Peace of God be with you. And he translated back to us what she said. She said, No. No peace of God be with you. She was angry, and she was frustrated. And so, we stopped, and our interpreter said, ³Well, what¹s the matter? Why are you so angry? We¹re here protecting you. We¹re here to ensure your safety.

And that woman began to tell us a story. Just a few months prior to this, her husband had been shot and killed by a United States convoy, because he got too close to their convoy. He was not an insurgent; he was not a terrorist. He was merely a working man trying to make a living for his family. To make matters worse, a few weeks later, there was a Special Forces
team who operated in the Kindi area. And as you know, Special Forces do clandestine operations. And so, even though this was my unit's area of operation, we didn¹t know what the Special Forces teams were actually doing there. They holed up in a building there in the Kindi Street area and made a compound out of it. A few weeks after this man died, the Special Forces team got some intelligence that this woman was supporting the insurgency. And so, they conducted a raid on her home, zip-tied her and her two children, threw them on the floor. And I guess her son was old enough to be perceived as a possible threat, so they detained him and took him away. For the next two weeks, this woman had no idea whether her son was alive, dead or worse. At the end of that two weeks, the Special Forces team rolled up, dropped her son off and, without so much as an apology, drove off. It turns out they had found they had acted on bad intelligence. Ladies and gentleman, things like that happen every day in Iraq. We¹re harassing these people, we're disrupting their lives.

Fighting for Peace??

No link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. What a shock.

So there's an official report that proves there never was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. I'm pretty sure that most of us knew that before the war even started FIVE years ago.

But the White House isn't ready to admit it quite yet. They canceled the press release and are no longer going to make the report available online.

Here is the official report, posted on ABC's website

In the New York Times today.

The money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers, according to Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, one of the largest global investment banks,.