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Economy
In reply to the discussion: Weekend Economists Ask: "What Were They Thinking?" March 16-18, 2012 [View all]girl gone mad
(20,634 posts)14. White House Pours One Out for All the Dead Journos, Waterboards the Living
I'm in no mood to be swarmed so I'll stick hide this devastatingly important piece from gawker here in the ghetto.
The most recent article from The Nation's Jeremy Scahill profiled the imprisonment of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. For covering American cluster bomb strikes in Yemen and the radicalization of Yemeni citizens and their support for Al Qaeda, Shaye has been beaten and tortured, imprisoned for two years and, at America's request, seen a presidential pardon from Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh indefinitely tabled.
You'd think that more bloggers would be furious about this. Extending a blithe imperial hand across the globe to support the torture and imprisonment of journalists is exactly the sort of half-assed fascism they were rabid about back when George W. Bush was exporting America's headaches to our Dracula in Cairo, Hosni "Drown People in Barrels of Shit" Mubarak.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. The Obama administration's boot-stomping journalists and whistleblowers is one of those polite misdeeds seemingly everyone prefers to ignore, like walking onto an elevator only one man is occupying and noticing that someone has farted. In fact, this topic was brought up in an even more dramatic fashion three weeks ago. And nobody really cared.
Back then, ABC News White House Correspondent Jake Tapper challenged White House Spokesman Jay Carney after what would normally have been a few inoffensive words of remembrance for journalists recently killed in Syria. Here's a condensed excerpt of the transcript, from Tapper's blog:
Both on video and in print, it comes off like a politely irritated squabble, but after translating it from Sanitized Beltway Elite Discourse into English, it reads like two guys saying, "Hey, fuck you, buddy!" Which they probably are. Carney doesn't want to have to duck bottles heaved at him from what he thinks should be a sympathetic outlet (broadcast TV newsi.e. nice haircuts talking to the elderly), and Tapper doesn't need to sit there and be fed a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit about journalistic bravery from an administration that's used a WWI-era anti-spy measure to muzzle more whistleblowers in three years than every preceding administration combined.
read more: http://gawker.com/5893564/white-house-pours-one-out-for-all-the-dead-journos-waterboards-the-living
You'd think that more bloggers would be furious about this. Extending a blithe imperial hand across the globe to support the torture and imprisonment of journalists is exactly the sort of half-assed fascism they were rabid about back when George W. Bush was exporting America's headaches to our Dracula in Cairo, Hosni "Drown People in Barrels of Shit" Mubarak.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. The Obama administration's boot-stomping journalists and whistleblowers is one of those polite misdeeds seemingly everyone prefers to ignore, like walking onto an elevator only one man is occupying and noticing that someone has farted. In fact, this topic was brought up in an even more dramatic fashion three weeks ago. And nobody really cared.
Back then, ABC News White House Correspondent Jake Tapper challenged White House Spokesman Jay Carney after what would normally have been a few inoffensive words of remembrance for journalists recently killed in Syria. Here's a condensed excerpt of the transcript, from Tapper's blog:
TAPPER: The White House keeps praising these journalists who arewho've been killed
CARNEY: I don't know about "keep"I think
TAPPER: You've done it, Vice President Biden did it in a statement. How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistleblowers to court? ... There just seems to be disconnect here. You want aggressive journalism abroad; you just don't want it in the United States.
CARNEY: ... I think we absolutely honor and praise the bravery of reporters who are placing themselves in extremely dangerous situations in order to bring a story of oppression and brutality to the world. ... As for other cases, again, without addressing any specific case, I think that there are issues here that involve highly sensitive classified information, and I think that, you know, those aredivulging or todivulging that kind of information is a serious issue, and it always has been.
TAPPER: So the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn't come out here?
CARNEY: Well, that's not at all what I'm saying, Jake, and you know it's not.
Both on video and in print, it comes off like a politely irritated squabble, but after translating it from Sanitized Beltway Elite Discourse into English, it reads like two guys saying, "Hey, fuck you, buddy!" Which they probably are. Carney doesn't want to have to duck bottles heaved at him from what he thinks should be a sympathetic outlet (broadcast TV newsi.e. nice haircuts talking to the elderly), and Tapper doesn't need to sit there and be fed a bunch of sanctimonious bullshit about journalistic bravery from an administration that's used a WWI-era anti-spy measure to muzzle more whistleblowers in three years than every preceding administration combined.
read more: http://gawker.com/5893564/white-house-pours-one-out-for-all-the-dead-journos-waterboards-the-living
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