The biggest story in years -- and nobody is touching it [Guantanamo murders]
Michael Pollak
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Which nobody? The outside media, or us on LBO?
I watched an interview with Scott Horton, yesterday on Democracy Now(?). I thought about posting a link, then didn't bother. I was still looking around for dirt on US military in Haiti. Haiti seems to have dropped off the US media radar.
There was also an okay, but nothing special interview by Riz Kahan On Aljazeera.net of Amy Goodman and John Maxwell Hamilton over why foreign policy news is so little covered in the US. Hamilton said the lack of coverage was due to the expense of covering foreign events and a low reader interest. Goodman thought it was a cause effect, fewer readers, because of less coverage. She also mentioned the danger these days.
I think its both and the low readership is due to the fact the US is always up to no good, and people just get tired of reading or listening to how their country fucked up the world, or how the US made things worse, or about all the people the US has killed, maimed, imprisoned, etc. As to the dangerousness in war zones, that has at least some to do with the heavy pro US bias in those stories.
Cine Institute put up a request for a Bgan Inmarsat, which is a high speed portable satellite phone connection used by many news crews. If anybody is interested, they should go to the site and email them, to see if they still need one. There are several comments posted below the request, so they might have gotten one. The link is here:
http://www.cineinstitute.com/news/2010/01/16/urgent-need-for-bgan-inmarsat-in-jacmel/#comments
The email contact is: alana at cineinstitute.com
I looked around briefly to figure out how much one of these cost, but couldn't find any price, except a rental, and a per minute rate of 0.99. My guess is they are expensive.
As to the Guantanamo murders... My opinion is that the Obama administration will try to make it go away with some `investigation' conducted as far away from public scrutiny as possible. Certainly AG Eric Holder must have found about them when he was doing his behind closed doors investigation of the CIA and other agencies involved in torture last summer.
So I think the bigger story is the cover up story and the continued cover up and stall by the Justice Dept and Pentagon. What I think is going on, behind closed doors is how to manage the discovery of these atrocities, through a selection process that keeps the worst cases stuck in military tribunals where there is no right of discovery motions. In civil actions, DoJ stalls information requests under cover of national security reasons, where DoJ can decided in advance what is of national security interest. I wonder how long that kind of stall can last.
I also think that there is no establishment interest in getting to the bottom of all the US government wrong doing. Most Republicans think all that stuff is just fine because the people were terrorists. Most Democrats don't want to know about it, because it will obviously undermine Obama and their own creditability.
So, like Haiti, the Gitmo stories flash for a few days and then go away. The US media seem to have even shorter memories than the US public.
CG