Alternative Press
Week in Review

A semi-regular weekly roundup of news, essays and other items of interest.
March 9, 2003

Carnival of Chaos

Nice collection of satirical posters

Code Pink: The Day in Pictures

This Modern World: Loyal American’s Guide to War Preparedness

Website of the Week

INCOMING! – A short list of some of the more interesting items received at the Alternative Press Review office this week.

Publications of the week

Prison Legal News
Working to Extend Democracy to All
(Vol. 14 No. 2 - February 2003)

A 36-page monthly publication that provides information and analysis of prisoner rights, court rulings and news. Also contains reports on court decisions affecting prisoners and information designed to help them.

Clamor
New Perspectives on Politics, Culture, Media, and Life
(#19, March/April 2003)

A special issue on how real people engage in sports. Everything from bowling, to skateboarding, to martial arts, even breakdancing.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
The magazine of global security news and analysis
(Vol. 59, No. 2 – March/April 2003)

Coverage on the quagmire in Afghanistan, the administration’s near-gag order and less-than-satisfactory outcome to the congressional investigation of 9/11, how the Defense Department practices deception, and plenty more.

DVDs of the week

Noam Chomsky – Distorted Morality
(Epitaph / Silent Films)

Noam Chomsky – Power and Terror
(First Run Features)

A double dose of Chomsky with both DVDs dealing extensively with the so-called “war on terrorism.” In Distorted Morality, Chomsky provides a devastating critique of America's “War on Terror” while John Junkerman’s film Power and Terror pretty much mines the same terrority as Chomsky places the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the context of American foreign intervention over the past several decades. Both are highly recommended.

Articles of the Week

MSNBC's Double Standard on Free Speech: "Turd World" is OK-- "anti-war, anti-Bush" is not
Activism Update, FAIR
MSNBC's claim to be championing free speech by hiring hate-talk radio host Michael Savage is disingenuous in the extreme.

How American journalists censor themselves in the Corporate Era
Tamara Baker, American Politics Journal
Molly Ivins mentioned recently that, according to a recent nation-by-nation study of the the freedom and accuracy of the world's media, the US press comes in at -- guess where? Not first, not second, not even in the top ten... but seventeenth place. Seventeenth! Several former Soviet client states score better than we do.

Total Business Awareness: The Corporate Contracting Behind John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness Program
Adam Mayle and Alex Knott, Multinational Monitor
The Total Information Awareness System, the controversial Pentagon research program that aims to gather and analyze a vast array of information on people in the United States, has hired at least eight private companies to work on the effort.

Map Links Healthier Ecosystems, Indigenous Peoples
Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News
Central America and southern Mexico's forests and marine resources have been dwindling for decades. Now there's evidence that the scope of destruction depends on who uses the land and water. A new map shows that natural ecosystems have a better chance of survival when indigenous people inhabit them.

Who is in charge?
Edward Said, Media Monitors
It is no exaggeration to say that this war is the most unpopular in modern history. Before the war has begun there have been more people protesting it in this country alone than was the case at the height of the anti- Vietnam war demonstrations during the 60s and 70s.

Untold story of February 15 demonstration: NYC used city vehicles, extreme noise as weapons against peaceful demonstrators
Daniel Forbes, The Progressive Review
Overwhelmed by the unexpected crush of hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators on February 15 and losing control of the streets, the City of New York sent official vehicles barreling deliberately and at high speed through a mass of protesters on Second Ave.

We Say Liberation, You Say War Crimes
Terry Allen, New Scientist
"Whether I hate Saddam or not, and I'm not saying I do," one man told me quietly during my recent trip to Iraq, "I hate America – the government, not the people – for what it did and is going to do to our children." His is not a lone voice. The vast majority of the Iraqi people I spoke to believe the United States committed war crimes during the last Gulf war in 1991 by using depleted uranium (DU) weapons deliberately to cause cancer and inflict birth defects for generations to come.

Media Dodging U.N. Surveillance Story
Norman Solomon, Media Beat
Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about U.S. spying on U.N. Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. "This leak," he replied, "is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers."

Librarians as FBI Extension Agents
David H. Price, CounterPunch
The FBI is back in our libraries, and librarians and their professional associations are doing nothing to directly obstruct their access to private records of what we read.

US media ignore Sharon's embrace of ethnic cleansers in new Israeli cabinet
Ali Abunimah, Michael Brown & Nigel Parry, The Electronic Intifada
The inclusion in the new Israeli government of the racist National Union, which openly calls for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, received muted coverage in the US media and passed largely without comment.

Oops Journalism
Bev Conover, Online Journal
The corporate-controlled media's employees—who falsely call themselves journalists—breathlessly feed the American people a daily diet of lies, distortions and disinformation packaged as news.

Pentagon, media agree on Iraq war censorship; Reporters to be “embedded” in military
By Henry Michaels, World Socialist Web Site
During the 1991 Gulf War, the White House and the Pentagon imposed unprecedented censorship on media coverage. With the willing agreement of the corporate-owned media, American military activities in the region were mostly off-limits to journalists. Defense Department censors cleared photos, video footage and battlefield dispatches. Reporters were allowed to travel only in “pools,” accompanied by US military escorts.

The Unbalanced Hawks at the Washington Post
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Focus on the Corporation
What is going on at the Washington Post? We would say that the Post editorial pages have become an outpost of the Defense Department -- except that there is probably more dissent about the pending war in Iraq in the Pentagon than there is on the Post editorial pages.

Israeli officer court-martialled for refusing order to target civilians
Brian Smith, World Socialist Web Site
An Israeli military intelligence officer has been court-martialled for refusing to carry out an order that blatantly defied both international laws and Israel’s own statutes and would have led to the certain death of countless Palestinian civilians.

Bill O'Reilly's Enemies of the State: Journalism as McCarthy Hearing
Kurt Nimmo, CounterPunch
As O'Reilly points out, in the not too distant future you will be expected to either give your full support to Bush, or shut up. If you can't shut up, if you insist on taking to the streets in protest, if you insist the First Amendment (which O'Reilly exploits) means what it says it does, you will be "spotlighted." You will be declared an "enemy of the state."

The Disinformation Age
Dennis Hans, The Scoop
How George W. Bush and Saint Colin of Powell are lying America into an unnecessary war — and what honest journalists can do about it

As the Economy Crumbles #6
It should come as no surprise to see the conservative Daily Telegraph declare in an editorial that what the world needs is a war. They openly admit the world economy is in danger of falling off a cliff and seizing Iraq’s oil is a necessity to stave off an economic collapse.

NewsWire

Some military reservists will risk jail to resist Iraq duty

U.N. weapons inspectors say some documents presented as evidence by US were forged.

US Army field manual on large "civilian internment" camps

Afghan prisoners beaten to death at US military interrogation base; 'Blunt force injuries' cited in murder ruling

Students Worldwide Stage Walkouts to Protest War in Iraq

Over One Million Iraqi Children Might Die in War – Secret UN Document

Water scarcity could affect billions: is this the biggest crisis of all?

Lawyer Arrested for Wearing a 'Peace' T-Shirt

Hunger in Gaza

Week in Review editor: Dean Thomas

Alternative Press Review
PO Box 4710
Arlington, VA 22204