A tale of two media

While journalists at the Republican National Convention continue their dutiful reporting of the proceedings – commenting on the speeches, looking for the typical delegate, opining about whether the choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for Vice-President will reel in disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters – a veritable police state has sprung up in the streets of St. Paul. But you won’t hear much about this in the mainstream press. After all, out in the streets, those who dare to document the activities of law enforcement are roughed up, slammed to the ground, detained or arrested and charged with a felony.

Additionally, as happened when Amy Goodman and two producers of Democracy Now! were arrested, their press credentials and credentials for the convention were confiscated by Secret Service officers and not returned. When Goodman later questioned the St. Paul police chief on how journalists covering street demonstrations could avoid arrest, he said they should “embed” with the police department. Access, of course, is everything to the mainstream media, where hobnobbing with replaces speaking truth to power. The need for access clearly informed the “embedded” coverage of the Iraq war and the Bush administration in general.

Meanwhile the surveillance state inaugurated after the 9-11 attacks is alive, well, and unscrutinized by the embedded media organizations, as groups opposed to current US policies were infiltrated and raided prior to the Republican Convention. These organizations include I Witness Video, which films police tactics during demonstrations and whose film footage was instrumental in charges being dropped against many of the demonstrators at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. Law enforcement personnel raided the home where members of this organization were staying, searched their belongings, and detained them for three hours before releasing them without charges. Among the many tactics used by police and the FBI were the recruitment of moles to infiltrate groups of RNC protesters at such dangerous places as “vegan potlucks”.

The major media organizations are once again ignoring governmental overreach conducted in the name of national security. It appears that cowed by the specter of vegan terrorists, and just a week before the painful anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, the corporate media would prefer to ignore civil rights violations rather than face accusations of being “with the enemy” and losing access to power.

Convention notes

The Democratic National convention has certainly had some stirring moments – Hillary Clinton exhorting her delegates to support Barack Obama; Melissa Ethridge serenading the crowd with a rendition of God Bless America that links those lyrics with peace an justice rather than nationalistic fervor; the nomination of Barack Obama by acclamation. In addition to urging party unity in her speech, Mrs Clinton also celebrated the eighty-eighth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment and reminded the delegates of the importance of taking a stand, even at the risk of imprisonment, as many did in their fight to secure the right to vote for women.

Meanwhile outside of the convention hall, Denver had put a large portion of it’s 50 million dollars in federal convention grant money to use securing the city from antiwar protesters who don’t necessarily agree with the Democratic Party’s talking point, repeated by speaker after speaker inside the Pepsi Center, about withdrawing “responsibly” from Iraq; nor do they necessarily believe that we should continue bombing Afghanistan, where just the other day more than ninety individuals, mostly women and children were were reportedly killed in US airstrikes. The Democrats now assembled in Denver were elected in 2006 to end the Iraq War and to bring the soldiers home, not to leave a military presence there to protect an oversized imperial embassy, or to train Iraqi troops, or to keep bases in the region, and yet throughout their speeches, this is what we are hearing – responsible withdrawal, force protection, training of Iraqi troops.

There has been no mention in convention speeches of the massive police, secret service, and national guard security apparatus justified because within the vast numbers of peaceful protesters there may be some anarchists intent on disrupting the proceedings. Still, Denver officials do admit that they are preparing for a worse case scenario, and, as the New York Times reports:

Intelligence analysts, however, have not reported a heightened threat from Islamic extremists or domestic threats from antigovernment groups or environmental militants like the kind that operate in many Western states, according to federal officials. “We just aren’t seeing a credible threat,” said James H. Davis, the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Denver office.

Perhaps it is too much to ask, during this necessary exercise in party unification, that mention be made of the principled men and women risking arrest and imprisonment to demand the immediate end to an illegal war. Meanwhile, the same law enforcement organizations ready to quell protest are also available to protect private parties from the news media as was the case when press attempted to enter a party that ATT hosted for the very same Democrats who had voted to immunize that corporation from prosecution for its part in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans. No surprise here, though; ATT is one of the major sponsors of the Democratic National Convention.

Personality disorders

For the past five years American soldiers have been embroiled in the occupation of Iraq, and one of the ways our government has controlled the public dialog about its illegal action is to exhort us to “support the troops” by fully funding the mission until its completion. Those of us who opposed the war from its inception and thought supporting the troops meant ending the war/occupation were branded as unpatriotic. Yet nothing illustrates the shallowness and hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s rhetoric than the way injured soldiers are treated by the Defense Department bureaucracy.

A report in the Nation magazine last year uncovered the process. Faced with escalating costs which some estimates say may run into the trillions of dollars, our leaders are looking for ways to cut costs. Enter the convenient diagnosis of personality disorder, which us now being used to deny disability and medical benefits to injured war veterans. The Defense Department, borrowing from the worst of what medical underwriting has to offer, can now state that a soldier had a pre-existing mental disorder, discharge the soldier due to personality disorder, and deny coverage thus avoiding responsibility for the escalating cost of traumatic brain injuries, posttraumatic stress disorder, and other catastrophic injuries.

The reporting by Joshua Kors led to congressional hearings on the topic and the drafting of bills in both houses of Congress aimed at halting the process until specific acceptable guidelines are established. The bills were drafted in July 2007 and have languished in committee ever since. The House bill – The Fair Mental Health Evaluation for Returning Veterans Act (HR 3167) is now stuck in the Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel, number 166 out of 221 bills listed as referred to that subcommittee. The Senate Bill – entitled A bill to ensure proper administration of the discharge of members of the Armed Forces for personality disorder, and for other purposes (S1817) – is now in the Senate Armed Services Committee, and listed 96th on a list of 142 bills and resolutions. It is easy to see how these items can get lost or ignored. The only way to move this through Congress is if enough people contact their representatives in the House and Senate and insist on passage of the legislation. You can find out who represents you here. Please contact them and urge them to move these bills through the committees they are stuck in to an ultimate vote in the full House and Senate. It is long past time to put an end to this atrocious treatment of injured vets.