Author: mopress

[Late Edition]

Unplugging Al-Manar TV

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch Expanded Version (Dec. 21)

Alternet Concise Version (Dec. 20)

They are not even a dozen strong, but the Islamic activists (mostly Shiah women) who posted recent statements at Houston IndyMedia say they are backed by principles found in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the USA, Article 19 of United Nations Declarations of Human Rights, and Islamic principles, “which call for the pursuit of knowledge throughout one’s life and the dissemination of knowledge.”

At the time that Houston activists posted their first statement Friday morning, the State Department had not yet announced its decision to place Hezbollah-backed television station Al-Manar on the terrorist watch list. But within hours, the decision had been announced and the Intelsat satellite company had stopped relaying the station’s signal to USA audiences. The year-old group known as Texas Muslims for Islamic Change (TXM4C) said on Friday that it was “dismayed at this development and considers it to be part of the American government’s assault on Constitutional rights.” On Sunday the group countered claims by the State Department that Al-Manar incited terrorist violence.

“On the other hand, TXM4C sees this as yet another step in America’s progression away from democratic values. To date, it has not seen properly documented evidence brought forward that would support the State Department’s claims that Al Manar ‘preaches violence and hatred’ or ‘serves to incite … terrorist violence’. Rather, this Houston-based group of Muslim thinkers and activists feels that the loss of access to Al-Manar will remove from the American people a valuable source of information about the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, governmental policies of countries around the world, and especially Islam.”

Meanwhile, a Washington-based civil rights group on Friday pointed to a Cornell University study showing that 44 percent of Americans believe that the government of the USA should curtail the civil liberties of Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on public officials to address rising levels of Islamophobia.

A State Department spokesperson on Friday claimed that action against Al-Manar was justified because “terrorist activity” by Hezbollah was linked to “incitement” by Al-Manar television.

“The designation is to put Al-Manar Television on the terrorist exclusion list because of its incitement of terrorist activity. Our law says that the organization can be put on the list if it commits or incites to commit any terrorist activity, and that is what we’ve found them,” said Richard Boucher.

The terrorist exclusion list (TEL), authorized by Section 411 of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, authorizes the exclusion and deportation of aliens who support terrorist organizations. According to the State Department’s website, TEL also deters donation or contributions to named organizations, heightens public awareness and knowledge of terrorist organizations, alerts other governments to U.S. concerns about organizations engaged in terrorist activities, and stigmatizes and isolates designated terrorist organizations. Journalists at the State Department briefing on Friday were curious about the effects that such principles might have on Americans at home.

“What about any Americans in this country that provide programming or things like that? Are — ,” begins a follow-up question. The spokesperson interrupted, insisting that, for the time being, we should remain focused on foreigners, not legal principles. It would have been interesting to hear the complete question in order to determine if the reporter was asking about Americans who provide pro-Arab programming such as provided by Al-Manar or anti-Arab programming such as provided by Fox, Viacom, or MSNBC.

“I don’t know what the legal implications might be,” said the spokesperson who had earlier begged journalists to bear with him while he looked up the exact State Department language concerning the Al-Manar decision: “Let me look it up because it is a legal matter and I want to get it right.”

“I think this list, in particular, only has to do with the exclusion of aliens from the United States,” said the spokesperon. “So whether there are other designations that might imply something for Americans, I don’t know. I’m not aware of any restrictions at this point on finance or things like that.”

As news reports have pointed out, “the US Treasury could further decide to include Al-Manar on its terrorism blacklist, freezing its assets and making any financial dealings with the channel illegal.”

What about Americans who help to distribute Al-Manar in the USA?

“I’ve given you the criteria,” said the spokesperson. “We will be examining people and activities to see whether they fall within that criteria.”

Does the move by the State Department reflect undue influence by Israeli lobbyists? The spokesperson denied the allegation by spinning Hezbollah’s terror as an interference in Palestinian affairs. Palestinians, said the spokesperson, were trying to win peace by peaceful means.

“It’s not a question of freedom of speech. It’s a question of incitement to violence, and we don’t see why, here or anywhere else, a terrorist organization should be allowed to spread its hatred and incitement through the television airwaves.”

International legal scholar Francis Boyle says Arab advocates should sue Fox News for “inciting terroism.” Via email, Boyle says he just gave an interview to that effect while visiting Dubai.

In Beirut, meanwhile, Al-Jazeera reports that 50 cable operators have cut signals from French TV5 in retaliation for France’s decision last week to suspend Al-Manar’s signal.

“Al-Manar was dropped from French-based Eutelsat’s broadcasts on Tuesday after a Paris court found it guilty of being anti-Jewish,” reports Al-Jazeera. “On Friday, French-owned satellite carrier GlobeCast removed al-Manar from US airwaves after the state department announced it had added the channel to its list of suspected terrorist organisations that face sanctions.”

An analysis of the French initiative by New York Sun staff writer Eli Lake gives credit to former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky for leading the campaign against Al-Manar. In America, too, says the report, Sharansky showed videotapes of Al-Manar clips to members of Congress.

Meanwhile, one of the satellite companies, Intelsat, that quickly pulled the plug on Al-Manar’s signal, is undergoing a stormy year of privatization. An Initial Public Offering has been delayed several times. In October, the company announced that it would sell itself to a coalition of venture capitalists operating out of Bermuda under the name Zeus.

According to a release posted at Intelsat’s website, Zeus is a mosaic of other captial venture firms such as Apax Partners Worldwide, LLP and Apax Partners, Inc., Apollo Management V, L.P., MDP Global Investors Limited and Permira Advisers LLC.

Directors from Apax and Permira (Richard Wilson and Graham Wrigley) joined the board at satellite company Inmarsat in December 2003. According to FCC documents, one Inmarsat rival accuses the company of engaging in anticompetitive practices. Inmarsat unfairly uses “proprietary protocols and technology” says rival MSV (Mobile Satellite Ventures–owners of MSAT satellites 1 & 2).

At the Apollo group, one of the founding principals, Marc J. Rowan, has been known to exhibit an appetite for XM Satellite Radio stock.

As these satellite giants are targets for capital ventures seeking communication dominance, the unplugging of Al-Manar by Intelsat raises questions about rights to free speech in a privatized communication infrastructure.

An August report by the European Institute for the Media reports on page 211 that, “In order for the media to carry out its function as the fourth estate, and in order for the citizen to be fully informed regarding the democratic process, a ‘freedom of information’ system is also required in a democratic system.”

“The ‘war on terrorism’, the fight against crime and the fight against right wing extremism can pose problems for the practice of investigative journalism,” says the report. Under the cover of anti-terrorism, the state is exercising new forms of surveillance and control over journalists (p. 214).

As a handful of conservative, Texas, Islamic activists suggest, the listing of Al-Manar by the State Department and the rapid disconnection by satellite giant Intelsat indeed poses deep questions about the structure of information freedom at the advent of a second Bush administration.

NOTES:

(1) A concise version of this story is posted at Alternet.

(2) Also see statement by Reporters Without Borders.

Bob Dacy at InfoWars traces the connection from Clear Channel to e-Slate voting machines through investments managed by Clear Channel vice-chair Tom Hicks, whose capital venture firm Hicks, Muse, Tate, & Furst, is a named player in Stratford Capital Partners. In turn, Stratford’s Co-Managing Partner, John G. Farmer, is listed as a director of Hart InterCivic, the e-Slate maker. So we have a director at Hart InterCivic who is backed by Hicks bucks. And Hicks bucks have been saturated with Clear Channel profits since 2000, when the Mays company buyout of the Hicks company (AMFM) was approved by the FCC (a buyout that relieved the Hicks group of about $6 billion in debt). Read more about Tom Hicks as Bush backer and financial operative at Texans for Public Justice, Common Cause, and BushWatch. On the general tenor of Clear Channel’s political activism, see buzzflash and Vital Source. Attempts to view the Hicks, Muse, Tate, & Furst website at hmtf.com were greeted with prompts for secure login, but we don’t have a password for that. While the Mays family (in-laws to Congressperson Michael McCaul) appears to be closely connected to this chain of influence via corporate relationship to Hicks, it is not clear whether the family is personally invested in either the Hicks fund, the Stratford fund, or Hart InterCivic. With all these clarifications on the record, the original question stands as asked by Alex Jones: Do we want our votes counted by machines this closely linked to influential family and political interests of Congressional candidates? No, we don’t.

By Greg Moses

[Paragraph 10 revised Dec. 19.]

Houston IndyMedia has put together a tight package, “Republican Cites Voter Fraud,” that includes links to this and two other dispatches of interest. Story also linked at IndyMedia North Texas, Austin, ILCA Online, and CounterPunch

“Today across the country a citizen uprising begins,” says Kip Humphrey, giving the first speech of his life, under a pure blue sky in Texas. It is the day before the Electoral College meets, and Humphrey is here to demonstrate his anger and disappointment with the way that election 2004 has gone down.

Just two weeks ago Humphrey and his son set up a website called 51 Capital March dot com and, using internet chain-mails, began asking folks to make signs and show up at their state capitols. When I show up to the rally in Austin around Sunday noon (with a notebook instead of a sign) a young woman hands me a white button with slim black letters that say, “I Showed Up.”

“Thank you for showing up,” she smiles. “You’re welcome,” I smile back. In the background I can hear, “the times they are a’changin’”, playing live from the steps of the Capitol.

Humphrey reports from the podium at the Texas Capitol that 29 rallies were being held this weekend, not bad for a two-week old idea. Looking over the Austin crowd of about 200 people, Humphrey declares that each person here represented thousands of others.

“March like a Ukrainian,” says one sign in the hands of a teenage girl. “Live Free or Die Bold,” says more than one other sign. “The Vote was Rigg’d,” shouts one sign in plain language. “We need paper trails,” insists another. And finally, in a turn of phrase that mocks a local computer company, “Dude, where’s my vote?”

It is not difficult to imagine that the sentiments expressed on these signs are more widely shared than the size of the rally would indicate. Houston Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee sends a written statement with Humphrey, assuring the rally that her colleague John Conyers would take his time investigating the vote in Ohio, “until we find the truth”–a pledge that draws applause.

Next up to speak is Austin-based infowars guru, access cable host, and emerging radio personality Alex Jones, who turns up the heat with his raspy allegations that e-voting machine systems are “a complete and total fraud.”

“What a beautiful day to be standing up for our Constitutional Republic against enemies foreign and domestic,” exclaims Jones in a pure patriot opening. Jones carries a loaded automatic in his throat, and he sprays his audiences with rapid fire allegations of conspiracy, corruption, and confoundedness in high places. For Jones it’s the ballot box or the cartridge box, and right now the ballot box is looking like a stolen weapon.

Then he starts talking about my own congressman elect, Michael McCaul, telling me that I am now represented by the son-in-law of Lowry Mays (oh great, just what I needed to hear). Lowry Mays, in case you don’t know, is the affirmative-action-killing chairman of the board at my alma mater, Texas A&M University, and founder of Clear Channel Communication, the powerful right-wing radio company.

As if all this isn’t enough to make my pen a little nervous, Jones tells me that McCaul’s in-laws also have close business associations with Tom Hicks, a high-profile Bush supporter and major investor in the company that makes the very e-voting machines used at the polling place where I voted against McCaul. [This is a corrected paragraph, see Dec. 19 Focus.]

(Not that McCaul was in any danger at the ballot box this year. His district was tailor made for him by Majority Leader Tom DeLay. And he was a big spender, even by Republican standards, defeating a fellow millionaire who actually outspent him in the primary. In the general election, the only thing to do was write in the name of an opponent, since there was not a Democrat in sight. And yes, I “wrote in” my choice, a process that required a lot of dialing and button pressing.)

On top of it all, what Jones doesn’t mention today is that McCaul is a former counterterrorism specialist from the Justice Department. Now personally, I am feeling just a little less free when I drive home today, pulling out of parking place number 38 at the Employees Retirement System of Texas, right across the street from the Eastern Orthodox Chruch. But enough about my problems. I still have the Holidays in front of me, and about two more weeks to live under the jurisdiction of Congressman Lloyd Doggett.

Alex Jones asks: Did we want Congress to pass a bill mandating national ID cards? No we did not. Did Congress do it anyway, just three days ago? Yes, they did. A chilling report at Infowars.Com spells out the scenario. When our children are born, they will be assigned federal ID numbers attached to genetic, biometric markers. Pretty soon, everything we do will be ID’d and cross-referenced, beginning sooner rather than later with an airline passport that we’ll all need to fly.

Jones is a horror show. I keep waiting for the sky to turn black. But this is how crazy the truth sounds when someone dares to speak it plain. Opium in Afghanistan, oil in Iraq, with guns and Halliburton contracts for everyone. Jones has it all at the tip of his tongue. And at his website, he reminds us, there are always tons of clips.

“If we don’t have our vote,” concludes Jones, “then America is dead.” Did you catch that note of hope there? What if we do get our votes back?

In my notes, the next key word at the rally is “Stalinism” spoken by David Van Os, who ran as a Democrat for the Texas Supreme Court. He is referring to the airline passport that we’ll soon be carrying, and he compares it to the “internal passports” of Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. Disenfranchisement and vote rigging, these are the tools of totalitarianism rising, even if they are not the watchwords that win you elections in Red States this year.

“We’re at war, folks,” says Van Os. There is nothing normal about our times. What we’re losing are the very rights that “farmers with squirrel rifles charged into British cannon fire to win.” Yet we let the Bush machine steal two elections in a row? As for the media, they are nothing but house organs for the ruling Republican Party.

Pacifica broadcaster Pokey Anderson of Houston’s KPFT is next up in this fight club. She quotes Texas journalist Bill Moyers to the effect that the delusional is no longer marginal. We live in a world centered upon delusion. For her, WMD’s are Weapons of Mass Disenfranchisement.

“But we are awake,” declares Anderson under the glorious sky, “and the trumpet is sounding!” By this time, the crowd has mostly parted into the shaded, grassy areas on either side of the broad walkway that leads uphill to the Capitol steps. The Texas sun, even in December, can get pretty close to your head.

“Real patriotism is not running half way around the world to shoot children,” says Anderson. “Real patriotism is what you are doing here.” Anderson takes us back to Volusia County, Florida, 2000, where a strange computer error has given Al Gore about 16,000 negative votes. Soon after the election, the story is normalized by the Washington Post, reported as a quickly fixed glitch. But a follow up investigation by Black Box Voting’s Bev Harris says the problem remains real and strange.

The normalizing report from the Washington Post had failed to ask why two different chips with two wildly different vote numbers could each be placed into the machine without one of them setting of a security warning. How could a chip containing something so sinister as a 16,000 negative vote count been accepted by the machine as “clean”, containing not only a bad vote count but a clean security checkdigit, too?

Delusionland, that’s where we all live now, says Anderson. Which if you believe this world is back to normal, then you’re the one living at the fringe of truth and reality.

“Ohio state authorities were not allowing international observers free access to polling stations?” asks CodePink organizer Debbie Russell incredulously. She’s the next one up to speak. “It’s time to get rid of these battleground states,” says Russell, get rid of the electoral system that creates them, and start electing national offices on the basis of direct, national elections. And all voting places should have voter verified ballots with paper trails. Also, argues Russell, we need to take the administration of elections out of the hands of partisan elected officials.

“But let’s not ask anymore for these things,” says Russell. “Let’s demand them!”

Fellow CodePinker Deborah Vanko steps up next to support Russell’s call for verifiable ballots. Paper receipts that can be counted by hand, that’s what we need in order to know for sure who’s won.

The rally is winding down now, only two more speakers to go before the crowd heads South for a march to the local newspaper, where they will protest the media blackout that attends all these issues. I have decided not to follow the march today, although I think the target selection is genius. How will the media behave when we stop allowing them to bounce us back and forth all the time?

Co-chair of the local county Green Party, Bill Holloway, speaks next to last. For him both parties of the government are unreliable because they both follow orders given by their corporate handlers. Same with the media, says Holloway. From NPR to Rush Limbaugh, all were singing the choir song of “free and fair elections” in the good ole’ USA, when we had more business behaving like Ukrainians.

“If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results, then stopping this madness is up to us,” says Holloway.

And last, but not least, is Vicky Karp, National Chairperson of the Coalition for Visible Ballots.

“I want a recount, how about you!” she cheers. “I’m here to talk about the F-Word–Fraud!” We never asked for electronic voting, we don’t trust electronic voting, and we need verifiable ballots that we can count. There is not much new left to say. But some things are worth repeating:

“Media consolidation is bringing an end to the day when we could count on an informed public.” With that, the band strikes up a Woody Guthrie tune, and the folks raise their signs to march South, across the Colorado River, down from the no-good Capitol across to that no-good newspaper, saying someday this little gang’s going to be remembered for something!

As I watch their backs, I realize I’m standing under a monument that reads in all caps: “Thermopylae had her messengers of defeat. The Alamo had none.”

Thanks, Greg, for connecting me to the article [see below: Ask Not Who Bankrolled Falluja].

I like the connections you draw: that our tax dollars get drafted, that we are morally — although not legally [as IRS officers are quick to point out] — responsible for how that money is spent, that we have choices even in our routinized, consumerized, and alienated culture. For future reference, there is a culture of hope within the shell of the old: various forms of living and buying coops and alternative markets that try to avoid slave and slave-wage products, companies that fuel militarism and environmental degredation, etc., not to mention alternative media [which you probably know more about than I do], and alternative cultural venues.

I also like the paraphrase from John Dunne, historically, one of my favorite poets.

It is important, too, that your readers know that war tax resistance is civil disobedience and can be a pretty lonely road, especially for those not connected with a group of some sort (another of the parts of the culture of hope). I was [am not currently] a war tax resister for 25 years AND you are right about having a spouse who doesn’t agree with the act — even if she/he agrees with the concern. I was married — and still am to the same person! — for 19 of those 25 years. And the resistance was particularly hard on her. She had no support group, unlike me, to which she had a “natural” affinity.

In peace,
Steve Gulick
Philadelphia War Resisters League
gunorlickton@mac.com