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Give your head a shake

When you’re wrapped in the North American media cocoon, it’s sometimes hard to know what to think. Is Iraq on the brink of civil war? Should governments deal with a Palestinian administration formed by Hamas? Paying for stories to be planted in Iraqi media sounds an awful lot like propaganda, but is there any justification for it? Is Zarqawi dead, or does he even exist?

Amy Goodman’s interview with Robert Fisk today has some answers to those questions from someone who has spent years in the Middle East, on the ground, in the war zones, and in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, not in the walled-off Green Zone or behind a desk.

You also get a fiery condemnation of American journalism by the renowned author. An absurd, even comical performance by an American military spokesman with a peculiar mustache in the Hitler style and a pathological inability to give a straight answer, even as the room erupts in laughter at his obvious discomfort and embarassment. And a call for the immediate end to the occupation of Iraq and why it needs to happen now.

This is 25 minutes of journalism that I guarantee you will enjoy. If you feel like you need to give your head a shake, this will do it. Check it out on Democracy Now! or pick one of these streams to watch:

Watch 128k stream | Watch 256k stream (You’ll need RealPlayer to watch these).

You can also get the MP3.

2 Responses to “Give your head a shake”
  1. Ade:

    April 7th, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    Rumsfeld: Iraqis Now Capable Of Conducting War Without U.S. Assistance

    Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that escalating violence in Iraq demonstrates that the Iraqi population is now capable of waging the Iraq war without outside military aid, and pronounced the American mission there “a complete success.”

    “Over the last month, the Iraqis have been fighting like you wouldn’t believe,” said Rumsfeld in a press conference at the Pentagon. “New Iraqis are joining the war every day—so many, in fact, that we don’t know where they all came from. It’s almost as if they came out of nowhere.”

    “The scope and intensity of the combat in Iraq is such that I believe the presence of American forces in the country will no longer be required to help the Iraqi people plummet into meaningless violence,” Rumsfeld added.

    (Satire)

  2. Ade:

    April 7th, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    Correlation does not equal causation, but this graph of Bush’s popularity versus the increase in gas prices is interesting.


This entry was posted on Friday, April 7th, 2006 at 11:40 am and is filed under Social & Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.