On 9/27/06, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Wow. That sure does suck. I guess one could say that
> "at least" it's a written law and not an unofficial,
> unwritten policy that would happen anyway, as it does
> in many countries that don't bother to formally
> announce restrictions on civil liberties like this.
Quite often, governments resort to the "state of emergency," which then becomes the norm. E.g.,
<blockquote>Egypt
Egyptians have been living under an Emergency Law (Law No. 162 of 1958) since 1967, except for an 18-month break in 1980. The emergency was imposed during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and reimposed following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. The law has been continuously extended every three years since 1981. Under the law, police powers are extended, constitutional rights suspended and censorship is legalized.[2] The law sharply circumscribes any non-governmental political activity: street demonstrations, non-approved political organizations, and unregistered financial donations are formally banned. Some 17,000 people are detained under the law, and estimates of political prisoners run as high as 30,000.[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_emergency#Egypt></blockquote>
> Still, it really sucks. And I'm sure it's only worse
> in Iran.
The degrees to which peoples actually criticize their governments in public, demonstrate against them, and so forth and governments tolerate or repress criticisms and demonstrations can't be evaluated by looking at laws, however. For that, we have to examine what people actually do. The Bill of Rights of the United States theoretically guarantees the freedoms of press, assembly, association, and so forth, and arguably it's better than European laws concerning the same, but Americans criticize and protest against their government less frequently and vigorously than peoples of many other countries, and America also has the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than Iran and Venezuela.
The mass media here, mainly voluntarily, promote the USG's agenda when it really matters, so skillfully that Americans have far more illusions about their government than almost any other people have about their government in the world.
<blockquote><http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2964> Media Tall Tales for the Next War
Media Beat (9/26/06)
By Norman Solomon
The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is "A Date With a Dangerous Mind." The big-type subhead calls him "the man whose swagger is stirring fears of war with the U.S.," and the second paragraph concludes: "Though pictures of the Iranian president often show him flashing a peace sign, his actions could well be leading the world closer to war."
When the USA's biggest newsweekly devotes five pages to scoping out a U.S. air war against Iran, as Time did in the same issue, it's yet another sign that the wheels of our nation's war-spin machine are turning faster toward yet another unprovoked attack on another country.
Ahmadinejad has risen to the top of Washington's -- and American media's -- enemies list. Within the last 20 years, that list has included Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, with each subjected to extensive vilification before the Pentagon launched a large-scale military attack.
Whenever the president of the United States decides to initiate or intensify a media blitz against a foreign leader, mainstream U.S. news outlets have dependably stepped up the decibels and hysteria. But the administration can also call off the dogs of war by going silent about the evils of some foreign tyrant.
Take Libya's dictator, for instance. For more than a third of a century, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi has been a despot whose overall record of repression makes Noriega or Milosevic seem relatively tolerant of domestic political foes. But ever since Qaddafi made a deal with the Bush administration in December 2003, the silence out of Washington about Qaddafi's evilness has been notable.
When Qaddafi publicly celebrated the 37th anniversary of his dictatorship a few weeks ago, he declared in a speech on state television: "Our enemies have been crushed inside Libya, and you have to be ready to kill them if they emerge anew." The New York Times noted that Qaddafi's regime "criminalizes the creation of opposition parties."
Today, while the human rights situation in Iran is reprehensible, the ongoing circumstances are far worse under many governments favored by Washington. Here at home, media outlets should be untangling double standards instead of contributing to them. But so many reporters and pundits have internalized Washington's geopolitical agendas that the mainline institutions of journalism continue to rot from within. That the rot goes largely unnoticed is testimony to how Orwellian "doublethink" has been normalized.
These are not issues of professionalism any more than concerns about public health are issues of medicine. The news media should be early warning systems that inform us before current events become unchangeable history.
But when the media system undermines the free flow of information and prevents wide-ranging debate, what happens is a parody of democracy. That's what occurred four years ago during the media buildup for the invasion of Iraq.
Now, warning signs are profuse: The Bush administration has Iran in the Pentagon's sights. And the drive toward war, fueled by double standards about nuclear development and human rights, is getting a big boost from U.S. media coverage that portrays the president as reluctant to launch an attack on Iran.
Time magazine reports that "from the State Department to the White House to the highest reaches of the military command, there is a growing sense that a showdown with Iran ... may be impossible to avoid."
The same kind of media spin -- assuming a sincere Bush desire to avoid war -- was profuse in the months before the invasion of Iraq. The more that news outlets tell such fairy tales, the more they become part of the war machinery.</blockquote> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>