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UK Guardian Censors Truth regarding Iraq Invasion
by quill Sunday, Apr 4 2010, 8:32pm
international / mass media / commentary

In a published interview with the UK Guardian, Mohammed ElBaradei, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former head of the IAEA, levelled a strong, unambiguous criticism at those responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq. ElBaradeie, cited WMD as a fabricated excuse for an illegal invasion and plainly stated that “regime change,” is not condoned under ANY international law! To date, Mohammed ElBaradei, is the highest ranking official to formally state that responsibility for the civilian holocaust in Iraq – OVER ONE MILLION INNOCENT CIVILIANS DEAD – rests with the US and its allies.

According to ElBaradei, and a world population growing extremely weary and impatient with America’s TISSUE-THIN LIES, all those responsible for the Iraqi HOLOCAUST should be held accountable for their criminal actions! Well, doh!

Mohammed ElBaradei inferred that international and domestic legal institutions have been thoroughly CORRUPTED and that criminals have taken control of the WESTERN WORLD – hardly a secret!

However, the newsworthiness of the story lies not with Mohammed ElBaradei stating the bloody OBVIOUS BUT with CRIMINAL ELITES attempting to CENSOR INFORMATION to the public -- all incriminating references in the original Guardian story were removed on ‘orders from on high!’ That’s ‘free speech’ and ‘democracy’ in action; SUCKERS -- ain’t it so, Tony, George, and Johnny!

For those still capable of independent thought and able to spell their names, the censored quotes have been cited in an article on WSWS, here inserted for your apathetic convenience:

Former IAEA chief: Iraq war killed “a million innocent civilians”
by Patrick Martin

The former head of the UN’s chief nuclear agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, said in an interview with the British newspaper Guardian Wednesday that those who launched the war in Iraq were responsible for killing a million innocent people and could be held accountable under international law. He was clearly referring to US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and their top military and security aides.

It was his first interview with an international publication since ElBaradei returned to his native Egypt, after a decade heading the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in large measure because of his opposition to the efforts by the Bush administration to use concocted charges about “weapons of mass destruction” as an all-purpose pretext for military intervention throughout the Middle East.

“I would hope that the lessons of Iraq, both in London and in the US have started to sink in,” he told the Guardian. “Sure, there are dictators, but are you ready every time you want to get rid of a dictator to sacrifice a million innocent civilians? All the indications coming out of [the Chilcot inquiry in Britain] are that Iraq was not really about weapons of mass destruction but rather about regime change, and I keep asking the same question―where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who is accountable for that?”

This suggestion that Bush and Blair were guilty of war crimes, coming from a high-ranking former UN official, would ordinarily be considered major news. The Guardian interview was reported by the main British and French news agencies, Reuters and AFP, but the entire American corporate media gave it zero coverage. Not a single major American newspaper or television network mentioned it.

The discussion of the violation of international law in launching the Iraq war came in the course of a longer discussion of the bankruptcy of US-British foreign policy in the Muslim world. ElBaradei criticized the longstanding support of Washington for dictators like Mubarak. “The idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is Bin Laden and Co. is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophecy come true.”

He warned of “increasing radicalization” in the Arab world: “People feel repressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see―they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.”

“Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view,” he said. “It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it’s been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.”

ElBaradei warned of the hypocrisy and double standard of Western policy. “The West talks a lot about elections in Iran, for example, but at least there were elections,” he said. “Yet where are the elections in the Arab world? If the West doesn’t talk about that, then how can it have any credibility?”

ElBaradei is now reportedly considering a presidential bid against 81-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, whose fifth six-year term expires next year. He clearly hopes that Western pressure will compel Mubarak to permit a more robust opposition campaign than during the last presidential election, when the largest opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, was barred from standing a candidate, and Ayman Nour, the bourgeois liberal candidate who finished second, was jailed for alleged petition fraud.

Speaking to a British newspaper, ElBaradei was in essence warning his old patrons, the major European powers, of the counterproductive character of Western policy, particularly that of the United States. “When you see that the most popular people in the Middle East are Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah [leader of Hezbollah], that should send you a message: that your policy is not reaching out to the people,” he said.

He also took note of the extreme social tension in Egypt, where the vast majority of the population lives in crushing poverty. The Guardian account reads: “In Egypt the rich live in ghettoes,” he said, waving his hand at the beautifully manicured garden, complete with pool. “The gap in social justice here is simply indescribable.”

In addition to the US media blackout of the interview, the Guardian engaged in apparent self-censorship. The initial article appeared at 6:01 GMT on the Guardian web site, including the implicit reference to Bush and Blair violating international law. It is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/31/mohamed-elbaradei-tyrants-support-militants

Just over two hours later, that article had been replaced by a longer profile of ElBaradei, containing additional comments about the political situation in Egypt. But the reference to the Chilcot inquiry and the killing of one million innocent people had been excised. The revised article is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/31/mohamed-elbaradei-profile
Copyright applies to inserted text.

Sickening!



Corporatist Google/Youtube is almost certain to delete evidence that incriminates the US -- it's good to be aware of Corporatist Google's 'integrity' -- LOL! Follow this excellent link to Raw Story for a local copy of video.

We have also downloaded a copy of the video, which is distributed on a (receive 1 burn and distribute 3 basis) browsable CD of the entire Cleaves Newswire site (updated regularly). Australian CENSORSHIP policy has forced us to go underground with browsable CD releases of ALL our material! It's what you CAN'T SEE that hurts you, (CFR) Murdoch, you CENSORSHIP MORON!

audio Bird is the Word - Trashmen

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Collateral Murder
by chela Monday, Apr 5 2010, 2:40pm

Truth

How Wikileaks shone light on world's darkest secrets
by Archie Bland via stan - The Independent UK Thursday, Apr 8 2010, 8:15am

When the Ministry of Defence first came across Wikileaks, staffers were stunned. "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge." The website, an online clearing house for documents whose authors would generally prefer them to stay in the private domain, has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too.

The authorities were right to be worried. If any further proof were needed of the website's extraordinary record in holding the authorities to account, it came this week, in the release of shocking video footage of a gung-ho US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US government had resisted Freedom of Information requests from Reuters for years. But when an anonymous whistleblower passed the video on to Wikileaks, all that quickly became futile. An edited version of the tape had received almost 4 million hits on YouTube by last night, and it led news bulletins around the world.

"This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up," said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at New York's Columbia Journalism School. "It's not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."

And yet despite Wikileaks' commitment to the freedom of information, there is something curiously shadowy about the organisation itself. Founded, as the group's spokesman Daniel Schmitt (whose surname is a pseudonym) put it, with the intention of becoming "the intelligence agency of the people", the site's operators and volunteers – five full-timers, and another 1,000 on call – are almost all anonymous. Ironically, the only way the group's donors are publicly known is through a leak on Wikileaks itself. The organisation's most prominent figure is Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and journalist who co-founded the site back in 2006. While Assange and his cohorts' intentions are plainly laudable – to "allow whistleblowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public", as he told the BBC earlier this year – some ask who watches the watchmen. "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background."

Against all of that criticism, Wikileaks can set a record that carries, as Abu Dhabi's The National put it, "more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years". By earning its place as the natural destination for anyone with sensitive information to leak who does not know and trust a particular journalist – so far, despite numerous court actions, not a single source has been outed – Wikileaks has built up a remarkable record.

Yes, it has published an early draft of the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wesley Snipes' tax returns; but it has also published the "Climategate" emails, an internal Trafigura report on toxic dumping in Ivory Coast, and the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Whatever the gaps in its procedures, there is little doubt that the website is at the forefront of a new information era in which the powerful, corrupt and murderous will have to feel a little more nervous about their behaviour. "There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilisation," Assange said in an interview with salon.com last month. "Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards. I like a good challenge."

Full disclosure: What we wouldn't know without Wikileaks

Trafigura's super-injunction

When commodities giant Trafigura used a super-injunction to suppress the release of an internal report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast in newspapers, it quickly appeared on Wikileaks instead. Accepting that the release made suppression futile, Trafigura lifted the injunction.

The CRU's 'Climategate' leak

Emails leaked on the site showed that scientists at the UK's Climate Research Unit, including director Phil Jones, withheld information from sceptics

The BNP membership list

After the site published the BNP's secret membership list in November 2008, newspapers found teachers, priests and police officers among them. Another list was leaked last year. The police has since barred officers from membership.

Sarah Palin's emails

Mrs Palin's Yahoo email account, which was used to bypass US public information laws, was hacked and leaked during the presidential campaign. The hacker left traces of his actions, and could face five years in prison.

Copyright applies.


 
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