Mahler's Prodigal Son

" MediaLens is a response based on its conviction that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world. It is convinced that the increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests. The costs incurred as a result of this propaganda, in terms of human suffering and environmental degradation, are incalculable." That is the way the group describes itself. In its latest report it deals with the UN's investigation into Israel's attack on and in Gaza: "On December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a massive assault on Gaza. 22 days later, around 1,400 Palestinians, including over 300 children, and 13 Israelis were dead; about 5,000 Palestinians were wounded. Israeli forces bombed and shelled schools, medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, United Nations buildings (including UN schools), power plants, sewage p...

However you view the country, it can't be ignored. China has already made an impact on the economies of many nations around the globe and will increasingly do so. James Fallow spent 3 years as The Atlantic's resident correspondent in China. He was interviewed in Beijing by Anthony Anderton for a piece " Modern China: Handle with Care " in the new Sydney Ideas Quarterly [well worth accessing and reading incidentally!]. Anderton writes: "Getting China right has never been more important for Australia. We are now acutely aware of China’s critical role in our economic prosperity. Yet there is considerable uncertainty about the rise of China and what this means for Australia and our region. How, for example, should we interpret and respond to China’s growing military and strategic influence in our region? What about Chinese ownership of our resource assets? In debating these issues, China is often depicted in one-dimensional caricatures: China the boundless ec...

From Scott Horton writing on Harper's Magazine : "Ted Sorenson is best known as the writer who filled the speeches of John F. Kennedy with wit, humor, and elegance. Today, Sorenson is 81 and bothered by failing eyesight. But he shows penetrating vision in a speech delivered last week at his alma mater, the University of Nebraska Law School in Lincoln. Addressing a class of newly minted lawyers, Sorenson raised a loud note of concern about what has occurred to the legal profession in the last eight years. In particular, his subject is the lawyers who betrayed their calling by implementing the Bush Administration’s torture policies. The Lincoln Journal-Star reports his remarks: “Most of you as new lawyers will soon find it easy to make a buck but find it hard to make a difference. Yes, torture gets results. It has resulted in easier, swifter, more successful recruitment for terrorist organizations among the millions of young Islamic fanatics who are willing to use the one weapon...

Frank Rich, writing his weekly column in The NY Times , makes the point that no matter what Obama might want to do to forget the Bush years, that is simply not going to be possible. Revelations to come out in a GQ article in the next days are but an example of what is "out there" and still to see the light of day about the ever-increasingly smelly Bush Administration. "To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions. That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, e...

Most of us have little idea what Gitmo is like. Needless to say the Americans have denied most people any access to the facility or restricted what they can report on if they have been able to visit. TimesOnLine has had access to Gitmo and reports in " Inside Guantánamo Bay: Desperate prisoners ask ‘where is freedom? ’": "These are strange, unnerving days inside this prison complex on the sweltering Cuban coast toured by The Times this week — a vast maze of chain-link fences topped by millions of feet of razor wire. Spotlights blaze through the night while guards watch from towers emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. Life inside the jail continues unchanged, because nobody here knows — from the guards to the 241 remaining inmates — just how President Obama is going to make good on his increasingly shaky promise to close this symbol of US brutality and extra-judicial excess by January. The uncertainty has begun to take its toll. On Sunday one detainee, Adnan Latif,...

Reading about the stretch and extent of the American military machine is truly amazing - and troubling on many levels. For Americans the cost of keeping so many facilities and personnel around the world represents a financial headache, especially in the light of the GFC. A book review in The Nation explains: "In her foreword to “The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” an important collection of articles on United States militarism and imperialism, edited by Catherine Lutz, the prominent feminist writer Cynthia Enloe notes one of our most abject failures as a government and a democracy: “There is virtually no news coverage—no journalists’ or editors’ curiosity—about the pressures or lures at work when the U.S. government seeks to persuade officials of Romania, Aruba or Ecuador that providing U.S. military-basing access would be good for their countries.” The American public, if not the residents of the territories in question, is almost totally i...

"The few items merchants are allowed to trade in are divided into three categories: food, medicine and detergent. Everything else is forbidden - including building materials (which are necessary to rehabilitate Gaza's ruins and rebuild its infrastructure), electric appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines, spare machine and car parts, fabrics, threads, needles, light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses and animals. Many of the banned products are imported through the tunnels and can be found in Gaza's markets. Pasta, which had been forbidden in the past, is now allowed, after U.S. Senator John Kerry expressed his astonishment at the ban during a visit to Gaza in February. But tea, coffee, sausages, semolina, milk products in large packages and most baking products are forbidden. So are industrial commodities for manufacturing food products, chocolate, sesa...