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THE HIMALAYAN DISASTER: TRANSNATIONAL DISASTER MANAGEMENT MECHANISM A MUST

We talked with Palash Biswas, an editor for Indian Express in Kolkata today also. He urged that there must a transnational disaster management mechanism to avert such scale disaster in the Himalayas. http://youtu.be/7IzWUpRECJM

THE HIMALAYAN TALK: PALASH BISWAS TALKS AGAINST CASTEIST HEGEMONY IN SOUTH ASIA

THE HIMALAYAN TALK: PALASH BISWAS TALKS AGAINST CASTEIST HEGEMONY IN SOUTH ASIA

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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Fwd: [bangla-vision] Two pieces on Libya from inside Tripoli...



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Romi Elnagar <bluesapphire48@yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 9:28 AM
Subject: [bangla-vision] Two pieces on Libya from inside Tripoli...
To:


 

(This message was posted in another Yahoo! group.  Donald Debar's address is at the bottom of it.  Romi)

The media - including OUR media that we sustain with our contributions to such
as Democracy Now! - is LYING to us in concert with the US war on Libya.
 
This is an interview I did with Davey D of Hard Knocks Radio at KPFA-FM in SF
Bay area which was recorded at about 7am yesterday (22 August 2011) -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD6dEfuNhL0
 
This piece includes a transcript of my comments on PressTV yesterday at 2:30 pm
(link to video at the end):
 
Media Wars - Many Mouths, One Voice
Libya Coverage Provides a Peek Behind the Curtain
 
By Don DeBar
 
Coverage of the situation in Libya over the past three days, while useless to
anyone trying to understand what is actually happening in Libya,
nevertheless provides an interesting peek into the modus operandi of the global
media that has broad application for the decoding of its coverage of all of the
issues that touch our lives.
 
The manufacture of events in Libya has been underway since the lead-up to the
US-led invasion, including the narrative that enabled the UN resolutions 1970
and 1973 - prominent among these were the claim that the Libyan government was
conducting an aerial war against protestors, countered by satellite evidence
from the Russian military showing no such attacks took place, and the claim that
African mercenaries were firing on protestors, which was both untrue and
provoked racist killings of Libyans with African features and skin by rebel
gangs.
 
Absent from the manufactured narrative was the report by the Pakistan Observer
on February 25th that US, UK and French troops had landed in Benghazi on
February 23rd and 24th. Also absent were photographs of captured Qatari weapons
that were intended for rebel forces in Brega, and reports of French arms also
sent to the rebels.
 
Since March 19th, a US-led NATO bombing campaign has been conducted against
Libya. On one day alone, former Rep. Cynthia McKinney reported from Tripoli that
she and a group from the African Union counted 89 bomb explosions in that city
alone during a twelve-hour period. In terms of TNT poundage, that is somewhere
in the neighborhood of 25 to 50 World Trade Center explosions in a city the size
of Manhattan EACH DAY for more than 180 consecutive days.
 
I discussed some of the issues surrounding the coverage of the Libyan invasion
with PressTV yesterday and thank them for allowing me to get this information
out, including my statement - made some 7 hours before Saif al-Islam Gadhaffi
surfaced in Tripoli not as a captive, but a free man cruising the city in his
SUV - that the press claims of the capture of the Gadhaffi sons was "suspect."
Here's a transcript of my remarks:
 
Press TV: How do you see the events that have been taking place in Libya? It
seems that they have changed very rapidly and when we talk to a lot of our
people on the ground in Tripoli, they were also quite taken aback at the speed
of which everything changed in Tripoli especially.

Don DeBar: Well, I was fortunate enough to be in touch with people on the ground
in Tripoli who somehow were able to stay on the internet and stay in touch.
Almost all of the reporting that is coming from there is coming from inside a
hotel that the reporters cannot leave. One reporter was shot at trying to post a
press sign out. Several have been threatened by the western journalists in the
building with death. There was an article published calling for the killing of a
French journalist from a website in France - the Voiltaire website - and Lizzie
Phelan who you have featured here before.

So the information itself, a lot of it, is coming from the people pointing a
camera out the window of the hotel, and the information that has come to me from
some of the people on the ground there, including Lizzie Phelan, has come from
calling around to the contacts that they have nurtured in Tripoli over the last
month that she has been there, with reports from different neighborhoods. And
those reports were quite different.

Keep in mind that since Friday the western media has been saying that Gaddafi
left the country. They were reporting him in Tunisia on Friday afternoon on NBC
and this was parroted in the western media all weekend. Now today again
- somehow - he is back in Tripoli and they are trying to find him and they have
arrested his sons and so the information itself is suspect.

But this entire war, people have to think about this fact: the United States has
been funding this and conducting the bulk of the military operations here. And
anyone on the ground, anywhere where the United States has their guns pointed,
including at Tehran, that takes comfort in that the fact that the United States
is about to achieve a military victory in Libya should really reconsider that
position and think about what's the next step going to be for this type of
policy which, believe me, has a map. And they've expressed Tehran as a
destination now for the last 20 to 25 years.

So I would be mostly concerned about what does this mean for the people that
these guns will be pointed at next and I would question every report you are
hearing out of Tripoli right now that says that they are in charge because they
have been saying it for days before there was anyone there.

The last point is that the reports that we got were that the people that had
come into Tripoli from the outside with arms were actually Qataris - with their
own commanders running this operation - and I am told that there are many dead
Qataris on the ground in Tripoli.

Press TV: Don DeBar, you mentioned as far as the role of the media - let's
expand on this in general. How do you see the role in general, especially in
this situation that is taking place in Tripoli from the beginning till today, as
far as the role of the mainstream media and how they have reported the events
that have taken place?

Don DeBar: OK, the enabling rhetorical point is that this is a popular uprising
against Gaddafi, OK? And from there it was that the government is brutalizing
protesters - including with aerial bombardment - and that was the enabling
narrative for resolutions 1970 and 1973 out of the United Nations Security
Council.

Now the Russians, who conduct satellite surveillance of planet Earth, because
they have been prepared for 50 years for a nuclear strike from the United
States, said that, on the specific dates that the charges were delineated  that
Gaddafi had attacked his people from the air, here are the photographs: there
are no planes in the air, there were no aeral activities conducted whatsoever.

This has not made the media in the west at all - including on programs like
Democracy Now and on Al Jazeera which is carried on progressive radio networks,
if you can believe that, in the United States.

In addition to that, it was reported in the Pakistan Observer, the English
language daily in Pakistan, on February 25 that there were US, UK and French
troops that landed in Benghazi from Indian naval vessels on the 23 and 24 of
February. Now this is in advance of the UN Security Council Resolutions and that
also has never been reported and I personally reported both that and the Russian
intelligence information to Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, for example, and other
progressive media outlets here, and have yet to hear them even set it up as a
straw man to shoot down, let alone actually report these things that were
reported elsewhere, including from government officials - the foreign minister
and defense minister of Russia.

So the media has been not just deficient but, in my mind, active and complicit
with this effort by NATO to take the oil of Libya and to establish for anyone
that does not do what the United States tells them, you're next.

Press TV: If the Gaddafi regime has totally fallen, or will fall, how likely is
it that the Libyan people will actually go further towards independence and be
freer people as a lot of them who have been in the streets, and they have been
showing some of them today, are saying? What's the likely scenario in your
perspective?

Don DeBar: The likely scenario is colonialism, and the reason for the invasion
of Libya is that Libya was one of the places organizing against colonialism of
the continent of Africa.

This is the second stop for AFRICOM [Africa Command], the first direct stop for
AFRICOM under Obama's regime. AFRICOM came online about two months before he was
elected but after Cote D'Ivoire - where they carried the elected president out
of the country at gunpoint, the French did, the former colonial power - this
episode began. And Libya has played - if you want to believe Nelson Mandela
- Libya played a major role in ending apartheid in South Africa, and Muammar
Gaddafi in particular played a major role in doing that. He has been active in
building a communications infrastructure and a financial infrastructure owned by
Africa in Africa.

The people of Libya, by the way, went from being the poorest people on the
planet in 1969, by every objective measure, to having the highest standard of
living in Africa, and one of the highest standards of living in the Muslim
world - housing is owned by the people, free of any mortgages, everyone, it is a
human right there under the law - and the entire education system and free
healthcare...(out of time).
 
Video at http://presstv.com/detail/195306.html

Don DeBar
87 Ferris Place
Ossining, NY 10562
914 945-0815
dondebar@...


Follow News and Developments at WBAI/Pacifica at http://www.wbixradio.org
See what's happening this week at www.WBAIX.org with the voices of WBAI-in-Exile

__._,_.___


--
Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/

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