Osama bin Laden: Dead

[Coito ergo sum]

I'd much rather read CNN than "prison planet" or "alternet" or some other basement opinion site.

Well, that's where we disagree.

Why do you think Prison Planet and Alternet have the facts right, but CNN wrong? I mostly see Prison Planet and Alternet just expressing a different opinion, not reporting actual events that other news sources don't get. Have they scooped any big stories?

The people that own one outfit or another are free to publish what they like.

exactly. So, mainstream news outlets are free, as far as "free" means "free to print what they wish". Of course, the problem with that is a "news" service that is extremely biased. The problems being omission (stories that run counter to the prevailing propaganda lines), concision (only telling partial stories and partial truths) and, at time, running flat out lies. I think perhaps we are simply disagreeing on the term "free".

That's what "free" means. You, me, or Sandinista, Inc., or Coito Ergo, Inc. - we get to print what we wish.

You're worried about bias, but you like Alternet and Prison Planet? They are hugely biased.

And, on what basis do you assess Prison Planet or Alternet as truth telling?

But, if you're good, you can build up a media outlet

such as znet, alternet, democracy now etc. True, but the majority of the people still rely on mainstream news outlets.

So, your complaint is about what the majority of people want to read. You wish these other press outlets were more popular.

Well, free press does not mean that the press you like the best is also liked the best by most people. You're on the fringe compared to the bulk of American and Canadian society.

Your idea of freeing the press would be to bring MSNBC and CNN and FoxNews under public control, right? That's the exact opposite of what I think of when I think of a free press. Freedom from the government, not some notion that by being publicly owned the press would magically be "free."

Well, partially true. Where you think that the press should be free from the government (which they are not seeing as the government is the corporate sector anyway) I think the press should be free from corporate powers. If...the government represented the people (a fancy notion) then it would follow that a government media would represent the people more so than corporate media which only represents their advertisers and CEO's.

The thing is - corporations are just groups of people. When you say that "corporate powers" can't own press outlets, then you're saying groups of people can't own press outlets. I suppose we could do that - we could say that only individuals could on press outlets, but then all that groups of people would do is appoint a titular head who is nominally the owner of the press outlet but is contractually bound to turn it over to someone else if directed by some group of people.

How, exactly, do you expect to free the press from corporate powers?

If you and I form a newspaper with a website - we're two people. If I own 50% and you own 50%, then we are either a partnership, corporation, limited liability company or similar entity. If we need more money, and bring in financial backers, they will likely want equity. So, we give up part of the business. We incorporate because people who invest money don't want to sign on to liability when all they are are silent financial backers. So, you and I maybe retain management of the company and 20% of the equity, and then sell off 80% of the equity, say to 100 other folks. This gives us working capital, and we still have big chunks of the company. However, now we have 100 stockholders to answer to.

Are we "corporate power" yet?

Have you read, or seen the film, manufacturing consent? I would recommend a viewing or reading. Might change your mind as to what "free" really means when it comes to media control.

Yes, I have read it, but not seen the film.

[Coito ergo sum]

Historically Free meant Secular.

On what planet? In what historical century?

Free press never meant "secular" press. It never excluded secular press, but sectarian press is just as protected under freedom of the press than secular press.

[Gawd]

Historically Free meant Secular.

On what planet? In what historical century?

Free press never meant "secular" press. It never excluded secular press, but sectarian press is just as protected under freedom of the press than secular press.

China!

[Coito ergo sum]

Chomsky's Follies
The professor's pronouncements about Osama Bin Laden are stupid and ignorant.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 9, 2011, at 2:36 PM ET

Noam Chomsky
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism. This cognitive dissonance—to give it a polite designation—does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida's martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the "operation." As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

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I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.) He is still arguing loudly for moral equivalence, maintaining that the Abbottabad, Pakistan, strike would justify a contingency whereby "Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." (Indeed, equivalence might be a weak word here, since he maintains that, "uncontroversially, [Bush's] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's.") So the main new element is the one of intriguing mystery. The Twin Towers came down, but it's still anyone's guess who did it. Since "April 2002, [when] the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it 'believed' that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan," no evidence has been adduced. "Nothing serious," as Chomsky puts it, "has been provided since."
Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on "turning to the facts." So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?
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With the paranoid anti-war "left," you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next. At the Telluride Film Festival in 2002, I found myself debating Michael Moore, who, a whole year after the attacks, maintained that Bin Laden was "innocent until proved guilty" (and hadn't been proven guilty). Except that he had, at least according to Moore one day after the attacks, when he wrote that: "WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!" So, innocent unless tainted by association with Langley, Va., which did seem to have some heartland flying schools under surveillance before 2001 but which seemed sluggish on the uptake regarding them. For quite some time, in fact, the whole anti-Bush "narrative" involved something rather like collusion with the evil Bin Laden crime family, possibly based on mutual interests in the oil industry. So guilty was Bin Laden, in fact, that he was allowed to prepare for a new Pearl Harbor on American soil by a spineless Republican administration that had ignored daily briefings on the mounting threat. Gore Vidal was able to utter many croaking and suggestive lines to this effect, hinting at a high-level betrayal of the republic.
And then came those who, impatient with mere innuendo, directly accused the administration of rocketing its own Pentagon and bringing about a "controlled demolition" of the World Trade Center. This grand scenario seemed to have a few loose planes left over, since the ones that hit the towers were only a grace note to the more ruthless pre-existing sabotage and the ones in Virginia and Pennsylvania, complete with passengers and crews and hijackers, somehow just went missing.
It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' " Perhaps this is not so true in the case of Tomahawk, which actually is the name of a weapon, but the point is at least as good as any other he makes.
In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

http://www.slate.com/id/2293541/

The Hitch skewers Chomsky.

I always found it funny how folks like to claim on the one hand that we had 9/11 coming, but then on a different day they'll claim that we did it to ourselves.

[sandinista]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

[.Morticia.]

Historically Free meant Secular.

On what planet? In what historical century?

Free press never meant "secular" press. It never excluded secular press, but sectarian press is just as protected under freedom of the press than secular press.

you have refuted what I didn't write

read what I write

[Coito ergo sum]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

In the debate I saw between Galloway and the Hitch, Galloway sounded like a fool and an apologist for Saddam Hussein (which, of course, he was).

But, Chomsky is just one one of those guys that will imply on the one hand that Al Qaeta or Arabs didn't "do" 9/11, and then call it a justifiable counterattack, and then of course he'll claim a moral equivalence (or more likely claim that the Americans are actually worse than Al Qaeta).

[Gawd]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

In the debate I saw between Galloway and the Hitch, Galloway sounded like a fool and an apologist for Saddam Hussein (which, of course, he was).

But, Chomsky is just one one of those guys that will imply on the one hand that Al Qaeta or Arabs didn't "do" 9/11, and then call it a justifiable counterattack, and then of course he'll claim a moral equivalence (or more likely claim that the Americans are actually worse than Al Qaeta).

The Americans *did* create Al Qaeda and weaponized it, you know? Funny how you never hear any Americans apologize for creating terrorist organizations that come back to bite them.

[.Morticia.]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

In the debate I saw between Galloway and the Hitch, Galloway sounded like a fool and an apologist for Saddam Hussein (which, of course, he was).

But, Chomsky is just one one of those guys that will imply on the one hand that Al Qaeta or Arabs didn't "do" 9/11, and then call it a justifiable counterattack, and then of course he'll claim a moral equivalence (or more likely claim that the Americans are actually worse than Al Qaeta).

The Americans *did* create Al Qaeda and weaponized it, you know? Funny how you never hear any Americans apologize for creating terrorist organizations that come back to bite them.

created as in it doesn't really exist in the way the USA gov/mic says it does

[Coito ergo sum]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

In the debate I saw between Galloway and the Hitch, Galloway sounded like a fool and an apologist for Saddam Hussein (which, of course, he was).

But, Chomsky is just one one of those guys that will imply on the one hand that Al Qaeta or Arabs didn't "do" 9/11, and then call it a justifiable counterattack, and then of course he'll claim a moral equivalence (or more likely claim that the Americans are actually worse than Al Qaeta).

The Americans *did* create Al Qaeda and weaponized it, you know? Funny how you never hear any Americans apologize for creating terrorist organizations that come back to bite them.

Might be because Americans did not create Al Qaeta or weaponize it.

[Coito ergo sum]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

In the debate I saw between Galloway and the Hitch, Galloway sounded like a fool and an apologist for Saddam Hussein (which, of course, he was).

But, Chomsky is just one one of those guys that will imply on the one hand that Al Qaeta or Arabs didn't "do" 9/11, and then call it a justifiable counterattack, and then of course he'll claim a moral equivalence (or more likely claim that the Americans are actually worse than Al Qaeta).

The Americans *did* create Al Qaeda and weaponized it, you know? Funny how you never hear any Americans apologize for creating terrorist organizations that come back to bite them.

created as in it doesn't really exist in the way the USA gov/mic says it does

How does it really exist and how do you know?

[Coito ergo sum]

Historically Free meant Secular.

On what planet? In what historical century?

Free press never meant "secular" press. It never excluded secular press, but sectarian press is just as protected under freedom of the press than secular press.

you have refuted what I didn't write

read what I write

You wrote, "Historically Free meant Secular." Ignoring the grammar problem and the weird capitalization, historically "free" never meant "secular."

Did you write something else? Suggesting that "free" meant "secular" is just plain wrong.

[Gawd]

skewers? Holy shit man, you call that "skewers"? Not even close. Hitch needs to stick to religious debates because politically he consistently falls short. I would love to see him debate Chomsky and get destroyed like he was against George Galloway. Admittedly, Hitch isn't as far off politically as, say Sam Harris but

In the debate I saw between Galloway and the Hitch, Galloway sounded like a fool and an apologist for Saddam Hussein (which, of course, he was).

But, Chomsky is just one one of those guys that will imply on the one hand that Al Qaeta or Arabs didn't "do" 9/11, and then call it a justifiable counterattack, and then of course he'll claim a moral equivalence (or more likely claim that the Americans are actually worse than Al Qaeta).

The Americans *did* create Al Qaeda and weaponized it, you know? Funny how you never hear any Americans apologize for creating terrorist organizations that come back to bite them.

Might be because Americans did not create Al Qaeta or weaponize it.

The Americans did. You think Al Qaeda just popped out of nowhere as an organized group with weapons, money, and military training galore?

[.Morticia.]

the taliban was supported by the USA

Al qaeda are not an organised group with weapons and such

al qaeda is a philosophical movement

[.Morticia.]

Historically Free meant Secular.

On what planet? In what historical century?

Free press never meant "secular" press. It never excluded secular press, but sectarian press is just as protected under freedom of the press than secular press.

you have refuted what I didn't write

read what I write

You wrote, "Historically Free meant Secular." Ignoring the grammar problem and the weird capitalization, historically "free" never meant "secular."

Did you write something else? Suggesting that "free" meant "secular" is just plain wrong.

historically

as in it meant something different to what it means now

and in europe, and not only the english language