30 March 2004
If nothing else, the farce surrounding Andrew Gilligan’s/Dr David Kelly inadvertent revelations concerning British government’s dissembling and lying over the invasion of Iraq has revealed the true nature of what the British establishment likes to foist on an unsuspecting public as ‘objective’ journalism. But what is objective journalism and is there such an animal?
30 January 2004
In 2002 when I first returned to the UK after many years abroad and started my long period of readjustment to this malignant society, a major part of the process was getting a handle on the media here. I read many of the leading ‘papers, listened to the news and of course watched it on tv. I tried to immerse myself in the gallons of turgid prose that gurgled out of ‘news central’, for that’s what it is, a factory for the manufacturing of ‘news’ for passive consumption, designed it would appear for an audience with the attention span of a gnat.
29 January 2004
Do politicians lie? Do fish swim and birds fly? It’s difficult to know where to start with this ‘inquiry’ except to say that Hutton has transformed what was meant to be an investigation into the events surrounding the alleged suicide of Dr David Kelly and his being ‘outed’ by the government into a total whitewash of Blair’s rationale for going to war. Everybody involved in the entire disgusting and illegal invasion has been absolved of any wrongdoing, except the BBC, but more on this later.
19 September 2003
“The problem was how to convince the world that even a defeated Iraq still posed a serious threat. The answer came in 1991, with the setting up of a secret military intelligence operation whose existence has only now been uncovered by the Sunday Herald in the wake of damaging claims that Tony Blair and George Bush exaggerated intelligence reports to justify their invasion of Iraq this year. Continue reading
23 August 2003
The media’s complicity in putting spin on the spin
The media’s response to the ‘revelations’ of the Hutton inquiry reveals more about the nature of corporate journalism than it does about the role of the government’s propagandists. And especially, the back-peddling being performed in an attempt to justify the complicity of the media in not seeing what was patently obvious to anyone who cared to look, namely that the government lies and lies on a consistent basis about its reasons for invading Iraq.
14 August 2003
Far from being troubled about the impending invasion, Dr David Kelly could just as easily have been troubled by the use of ‘evidence’ that “takes away from the case for war.” In other words, Kelly’s statements can be interpreted as continued support for the war but that he objected to the way it was being sold through the crass intervention of the Downing Street propaganda machine, headed by Alistair Campbell.
24 July 2003
Did Dr Kelly commit suicide because he could no longer tolerate the fact that the government he worked for had lied in order to justify going to war? Or was he murdered because he was about to expose the lies?
21 July 2003
Who was Dr David Kelly?
Head of the infamous Porton Down, Britain’s own WMD factory from 1984 to 1992, and who in 1989 was approached by MI6 to help debrief a Soviet defector from the Soviet Union’s CBW programme, it seems inconceivable that a man with this kind of background and over such a long period of time, wasn’t privy to the most confidential government information, which gives the lie to the claim by the government that he was approached some time in 2002 to supply information to the September document simply because he was the most knowledgeable person in the field, unless he was utterly trustworthy on a political level. Moreover, there was a six month delay between the announcement of publishing the document and the date of its actual publication, a delay which hasn’t been explained.
21 July 2003
Who was Dr David Kelly?
Head of the infamous Porton Down, Britain’s own WMD factory from 1984 to 1992, and who in 1989 was approached by MI6 to help debrief a Soviet defector from the Soviet Union’s CBW programme, it seems inconceivable that a man with this kind of background and over such a long period of time, wasn’t privy to the most confidential government information, which gives the lie to the claim by the government that he was approached some time in 2002 to supply information to the September document simply because he was the most knowledgeable person in the field, unless he was utterly trustworthy on a political level. Moreover, there was a six month delay between the announcement of publishing the document and the date of its actual publication, a delay which hasn’t been explained.
20 July 2003
Acres of newsprint have been expended these past couple of days on the hapless Kelly, as well as endless ‘analysis’ of Campbell, Gilligan, Hoon, Blair, Straw, the MoD, of which the Independent’s coverage is, I suppose, pretty typical.
Investigating Imperialism 