Censoring Protest: Black-Ops & Media-Whiteout

By libbyliberal

QUESTION: If a dramatic Veterans for Peace-led protest happens in the very front of the White House, Dec. 16, 2010, and 250 activists at least assemble in the cold and SNOW, and 135 of them stand tall in front of the White House fence, some even chaining themselves to it, and those 135 are arrested, but the mainstream media including progressive corporate media don’t see it and report on it … or saw but chose not to report on it more accurately …

… did it really happen?

Yes, yes, yes! but shame shame shame shame on our propaganda selling out fourth estate!!

More chilling than that punishing Wash. DC weather last Thursday is the stunningly widespread blackout of this inspiring exercise in civil disobedience. I don’t know about you, but I am calling and writing the sell-out news shows, sites and newspapers, including MSNBC faux-progressive line-up. I am appalled and sobered by the betrayal of these apparent enemies of truth, justice and morality. Enemies of the wagers of peace! Cherry-picking their stories, clearly, to serve at the pleasure and convenience of the Prez and the murdering status quo. Wow. Lackeys of the corporatist-imperialist class.

David Lindorff:

“Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president’s daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government’s Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital’s local daily, the Washington Post, which apparently didn’t even think it was a local story worth publishing.

Making the media cover-up of the protest all the more outrageous was the fact that most news media did report on Friday, the day after the protest, the results of the latest poll of American attitudes towards the Afghanistan War, an ABC/Washington Post Poll which found that 60% of Americans now feel that war has “not been worth it.” That’s a big increase from the 53% who said they opposed the war in July.”

Clearly, any honest and professional journalist and editor would see a news link between such a poll result and an anti-war protest at the White House led, for the first time in recent memory, by a veterans organization, the group Veterans for Peace, in which veterans of the nation’s wars actually put themselves on the line to be arrested to protest a current war.

Friday was also the day that most news organizations were reporting on the much-touted, but also much over-rated Pentagon report on the “progress” of the American war in Afghanistan–a report prepared for the White House that claimed there was progress, but which was immediately contradicted by a CIA report that said the opposite. Again, any honest and professional journalist and editor would immediately see the publication of such a report as an appropriate occasion to mention the unusual opposition to the war by a group of veterans right outside the president’s office.

And yet, the protest event was completely blacked out by the corporate news media. (Maybe the servile and over-paid White House press corps, ensconced in the press room inside the White House, didn’t want to go out and brave the elements to cover the protest.)

If you wanted to know about this protest, you had to go to the internet and read the Huffington Post or to the Socialist Worker, OpEd News, or to this publication (okay, we’re a day late, but I was stuck in traffic yesterday), or else to Democracy Now! on the alternative airways.

I can safely … well, wrong choice of word, maybe, but I can accurately say we as a nation are no longer at the top of the slippery slope of fascism, we are careening down it so much farther along. This blackout for me was further, gravely disturbing evidence of that.

So, let’s see, politically pimped legal teams are struggling right now in Virginia, rumor has it, to figure out how to prosecute Julian Assange for Wikileaks leaks, as high profile, political and media power elite celebs call out for extrajudicial punishment, even assassination, of him when he is has not even been charged in America for anything. Repeat, he has done nothing illegal. He has released evidence of U.S. government criminal activity. Is it a crime to report crimes? No, but a lot of adamant McCarthyite people are declaring it is. We are now living in the bizarro world of the United States of Amoraity. Of Non-accountability. Only the messengers of moral conscience are in danger in America now. And God help not only us, but everyone everywhere, due to U.S rogue, reckless and violent corporate-profiteering imperialism.

So the media that tried to sell us all on non-existing WMDs in Iraq and helped the Bush and Obama regimes keep the monster war machine going, destroying lives, literally, or displacing millions from the quality of life they could be having, have now rallied to persecute, disinform about, and/or ignore a leader of a news organization for accurate truth-telling (as well as persecute, disinform about and/or ignore the alleged soldier messenger of war crimes who passed on this evidence). Calling for the literal execution of those revealing evidence of criminal activity. Hang the bill of rights, apparently. What is left of it. Hang everybody, apparently, working to salvage it.

The death toll in Afghanistan Jonathan Ditz has reported for 2010 reveals it is the worst year for casualties so far. But Robert Gibbs reports that Obama is "pleased with the war." Say anything and avoid specifics Obama, while more and more "experts" declare it an unwinnable catastrophe. Drone attacks and night raids have escalated there. The war is likely to spread further into Pakistan and Yemen not only via drones but on the ground. But Obama smiles and stays the course. (The transformational supposedly president has transformed all right. Himself to arch Republican corporatist, war criminal in chief, protector of the craven status quo.)

50,000 troops are in Iraq still.

Gitmo is still open. God knows what chilling indecencies are happening in Bagram, that detention/torture hell hole. U.S. covert black ops (death squad) activities happening across the globe against any enemies of US corporatist-imperialism.

Let us also keep in mind the economic terrorism going on now from our own government, the willful and gratuitous dooming of millions of Americans to unavoidable hardship.

Alas, American exceptionalism and the effective branding of Obama as deserving of the public trust still enthralls a vast number of hearts and minds. We have got to stay earnestly pro-active, those of us awakened in conscience. We must wage peace! We must assert loudly from the right side of history. We must communicate at a grass roots level since we are clearly continually being betrayed by the fourth estate.