Sheffield Other Press Newswire Archive

One thing should surely be clear and that is the pivotal role played by the corporate/state media in selling the Libyan 'no-fly zone' and the subsequent invasion by the Empire, albeit by first 'softening up the enemy' and then as illegal arms supplier. Thus the 'rebels', about whom absolutely nothing is known, become the West's 'democratic' torch-bearers and all pretence at it being some kind of 'humanitarian intervention', is dropped.

So intertwined are the state and the mainstream media that it's now impossible to see any kind of separation between the two. What's so incredible about the power of the media to transform reality for us is best illustrated by the fact that the political elite knew what the 'no-fly zone' really meant, that it was an act of war, the media just omitted this particular detail from its coverage, or rather it relegated it to a footnote, just as it did with the way it presented the illegal invasion of Iraq to the public. Crimes become 'omissions' and 'errors' and finally 'historical' footnotes.

Read more | 1 comment >>

“The Prime Minister [...] reiterates, on behalf of the British Government, that they have no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland. Their primary interest is to see peace, stability and reconciliation established”

[Joint Declaration 1993 (Downing St. Declaration) by UK Minister John Major and the Republic of Ireland’s Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, 10 Downing Street, London, 15 December 1993]



“Let me be clear to anyone watching in the Islamic or the Arab world: Britain has no selfish or strategic or oil-related interest in what is happening in Libya. Our interest has been to try to help save civilian life.”

[UK Prime Minister David Cameron, joint press conference with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, London, 31 March 2011]

Read more | 2 comments >>

Presented below are four reports of the same protest movement in the Southern Syrian city of Daraa, Associated Press, The Guardian, Israeli National News, Ya Libnan (Lebanese News).

Spot the difference.

Read more | 3 comments >>

The objective is not to come to the rescue of civilians. Quite the opposite. Both military as well as civilian targets have been pre-selected.

Civilian casualties are intentional. They are not the result of "collateral damage".

Early reports confirm that hospitals, civilian airports and government buildings have been bombed.

The objective of the media disinformation campaign is to blatantly obfuscate the loss of life of civilians.

Tomahawk missiles and aerial bombings are upheld as instruments of peace and democracy. They do not result in civilian deaths.

Read more | 4 comments >>

Here is a compilation of newspaper front pages announcing the launch of the war on Iraq (2003) and the war on Libya (2011).

Read more | 2 comments >>

"U.S. and coalition vessels and aircrafts attacked Libya’s air defense systems in the opening phase of “Odyssey Dawn” the international operation to establish a no-fly zone, military officials said today.

A coalition of as many as 25 U.S., Canadian, and Italian vessels, including the USS Mount Whitney command vessel, led an attack that included U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and aerial jamming, according to a Pentagon official"

Read more | 7 comments >>

Unlike the non-violent protest movements in Egypt and Tunisia, the armed insurgency in Eastern Libya is directly supported by foreign powers with a view to justifying a "humanitarian intervention".

A military intervention is now contemplated by US NATO forces under a "humanitarian mandate". US and NATO military advisers and special forces are already on the ground.

The operation was planned to coincide with the protest movement in neighbouring Arab countries. Public opinion was led to believe that the protest movement had spread spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya.

The real objective of "Operation Libya" is not to establish democracy but to take possession of Libya's oil reserves, destabilize the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and eventually privatize the country's oil industry, namely transfer the control and ownership of Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands.

Read more >>

The 2nd of March 2011, marked the 20th anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War on Iraq....

"Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest public relations firm, masterminded the Kuwaiti campaign to sell the 1991 Gulf War to the American public. By the time their lies were exposed TV newscasters were waxing ecstatic over the rockets' red glare, computerized 'smart-bombs' bursting in air, and 250,000 people were dead."

Read more >>

Historian Howard Zinn (1922-2010), would be remembered above all for his humanity and warmth, were it not for the crystal clarity of his insight. In 'A Power That Governments Can’t Suppress,' he wrote:

‘There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.’ (Zinn, A Power That Governments Can’t Suppress, City Lights, 2007, p.267)

Read more >>

The US and NATO bases in Italy are preparing for military action against Libya. Britain, France and the United States have dispatched hundreds of military advisors to Libya to set up military bases in the country's oil-rich east. British and US special forces entered Libyan port cities of Benghazi and Toburk on February 23 and 24.

Read more | 6 comments >>

As the wave of popular uprisings has spread across the Arab world, a flurry of articles have appeared suggesting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could be the next “dictator” to be overthrown.

Such arguments follow a pattern in the corporate media of slandering the Chavez government and the revolutionary process it leads.

They aim to conceal the real threat that haunts imperialism: that the Arab world may follow the example of Venezuela and other countries in Latin America — and break away from Western hegemony.

Read more | 4 comments >>

According to German Newspaper Der Spiegel, head of Germany's federal police Jörg Ziercke admitted that German state authorities had specifically requested undercover Met Police officer Mark Kennedy's presence in Heiligendamm in 2006/7.
An acknowledgement in the public domain of what some of us long suspected, on quote from the Guardian today: "The Newspaper [Der Spiegel] said Kennedy's involvement in criminal activity raised concerns that he was working as an agent provocateur and not just an observer "

Read more | 1 comment >>

George Monbiot is an award-winning investigative journalist with a regular column in the Guardian, has published several books and a screenplay to boot. His writing spans topics such as the environment, political corruption, corporate misdeeds and the ideologies behind current economic thinking. Perhaps his most insightful work describes the complex webs connecting these concepts. A tireless campaigner, advocate for human rights and never one to shy away from a thorny issue or controversial argument, we were happy to catch up with him ahead of his upcoming debate tour.

Read more >>

Sheffield Newspapers NUJ Chapel (workplace branch) has called 48 hours of strike action to take place this Wednesday and Thursday (Feb 9 and 10) to oppose the threat of compulsory redundancies as a result of the company deciding that the centralised page production hub in Sheffield should be cut almost in half, putting 9.5 full-time equivalent jobs at risk.

Read more | 1 addition | 1 comment >>

It’s not hard to spot the scientists in commercial advertising: they’re the ones wearing white coats. Whether hawking toothpaste, skin cream, or even cigarettes, the white coat vouches for the presence of a highly-trained, disinterested expert ensuring product safety and effectiveness.

Read more >>

Civil liberties groups raise alarm over extension of surveillance without warrant

[Not to be confused with GCHQ's extensive tapping of emails and other internet traffic, for which no warrant is required]

Read more >>

The looting of Cairo’s world-famous Egyptian Museum over the weekend seems to have engendered the desired news headlines.

‘Looters smash ancient treasures’, ‘Looters decapitate mummies’, ‘Looters rip off heads of artifacts’ etc., read a rash of headlines, following the apparent breaking into the country’s national museum, which is said to house the world’s biggest of Pharaonic antiquities.

However, it has since emerged, although with much less headline coverage, that some of the would-be looters apprehended by protesters outside the museum were identified as working for the state’s interior ministry.

The incident may be just a foretaste of a wider range of propaganda stunts or false flags, including atrocities and fatalities, that the Mubarak regime will enact in order to discredit the protest movement sweeping that nation.

Read more >>

Last week the respected alternative news project SchNEWS published a story revealing long term malicious use of indymedia by elements within the states police apparatus. The piece was base on the so-called 303 Gateway article written collaboratively by a number of indymedia admins and proposed in secret as a feature for the UK site over six months ago. The proposal was blocked by London and Northern IMC. They claim they failed to get agreement on amendments aimed at distancing themselves from admissions within the article that indymedia admins had in fact had access to IP logs despite having repeatedly said the opposite in the past. Both London and Northern said that they would have no objection to the article being published as a feature on Indymedia UK if it was made clear within the article that the IP logging was a feature found within the MIR content management system used by IMC UK and its regional sites Birmingham, Cambridge, Liverpool, Oxford, Sheffield and South Coast, not those using alternative CMS such as Bristol, London, Northern, Nottingham and Scotland. However it seem tonight that their claim has be proven a lie...

The draft article stated, "what has never been openly stated before is that the CMS system we use has a number of anti-abuse measures which include the ability to monitor for particular IP addresses and log their behaviour." The draft goes on to say, "site admins believed that they would never be able to gain the trust of posters, if the range of anti-abuse measures were made public. As is often the case, once a body has failed to be completely open about something, it becomes 'the elephant in the room' and so a situation was created where the new and current admins were actively blocked from bringing these measures into the open. The stalemate continued until now, with site admins proposing a new approach of coming clean about the measures that are in place, and others in the collective blocking this."

Prophetically, that stalemate over coming clean about the IP logging meant that no consensus was possible on publishing the article. There was no way that the information about the governments disinfo campaign could be published without revealing that indymedia had been lying about IP logs. Apparently some suggested it could be published via a different alt media outlet while leaving out the info about indymedia but the story would have been weak without the evidence gathered by indymedia admins.

The impasse remained but then the draft article was leaked by a disgruntled admin using the name 'indyleaks'. The posts were repeatedly hidden from the indymedia sites it was posted to and a filter set up on IMC UK to automatically hide it whenever posted.

There remains no consensus about publishing the article which includes a frank admission that indymedia has misled its user since 2003. However the lack of consensus is now a moot point since SchNEWS has ran the story and Birmingham IMC has published the 303 gateway article as a feature on it's own site.

 https://publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/01/472622.html

Both the story about the government running a disinfo campaign via indymedia, and the story that indymedia UK has been hiding the truth about IP logging for all these years, that is big news for activists at a time when trust is already in short supply.

As the article says "continuing to gloss over the reality in a misleading way was detrimental to Indymedia UK, and that there was no small likelihood that at some stage we could be outed." Now that the truth is out, lets hope indymedia can recover from the damage to its credibility and move on to become more open and honest with its users.

Fisher

Read more | 40 comments >>

“No - stuff that - SHUT the place: Let’s not all stand around like lemmings - lets shut the place!Bring ladders and wire cutters. If there are enough of us we can shut it!” - a pretty average comment on Indymedia you might think - if a little gung-ho. In fact it was posted there by the police - and SchNEWS has the proof.

Read more | 5 comments >>

The media has gone into a feeding frenzy over what was described by Newsnight as the "deepening controversy over police agents". Yet still none of them are putting together the evidence that political policing has been used to trash the 'right to protest' in this country,of which the use of undercover coppers is only a small part, with FIT Teams, kettling and general harrassment of protestors being other major parts of the ongoing police strategy. Perhaps this is because these same journos are part of the media circus that allows the cops to get away with it as we march towards water cannon and a police state.

However, the long term infiltration of environmental and direct action groups in the UK by PC Mark Kennedy for a seven year period, must be causing some discomfort for the cops, as his antics in the UK and ,according to the Guardian another 22 countries, are beginning to be unravelled.

Today's Independent claims that Kennedy, who is missing but believed to be in the USA, has called in publicity Guru Max Clifford as he "prepares to sell his story". The report further notes that Nottingham Police have launched an internal inquiry into the mess, which will run alongside a limited IPCC inquiry which 'Amerdeep Somal, of the IPCC, said will focus on the alleged failure of Nottinghamshire Police to disclose relevant material to prosecutors.'

Read more | 1 addition | 151 comments >>