Can Independent Media Be Asking Tough Questions of Politicians? #NCMR11 - Sat @ 4:00

Sat. 4:00
Room: Cambridge 1
Sam Husseini, founder, http://www.WashingtonStakeout.com
 
What are the prospects of getting more independent journalists into news conferences? Imagine if serious, independent journalists were in the White House news room asking tough questions during the buildup of the Iraq war. Or now, most of the questions asked in the White House are queued off of a corporate crit of the administration's policies.
 
Would having independent journalists at such news conferences -- not just White House, but also State Dept, Pentagon and Justice Dept, etc -- would that lead to a broader culture where citizen journalists could develop a culture of holding politicians' feet to the fire, asking them tough questions and putting material on YouTube?
 
What needs to happen to develop that culture?
 
This would be part presentation, part discussion, part brainstorming. What makes for good questioning of government officials? How should it get out? How should such questioning be presented? What should independent media really look like? Should it follow party alignment, or should it be able to seriously question all political factions?
 
Will feature videos questioning John McCain, Colin Powell, Nancy Pelosi, John Edwards, Mike Pence, John Negroponte and others.

.@blakehounshell @tobycraigjones Saudis benefit from Libya

Keeps protests away from Gulf and monarchies, Gadafi's violence makes
them seem ok, they pushed AL res, pushed Mubarak to use more violence,
they hate Gadafi anyway, might stop protests all together, takes focus
away from meaningfulness of Egyptian change, focus on US backing
tyrannical regimes obscured by Libya "humanitarian intervention".
Establishment goal to keep oil wealth in as few hands as possible
preserved.

Beyond Double-Standards: US Mideast Policy, In Fact, Quite Standard

Some are saying that the U.S. is engaging in double standards by intervening in Libya and not in Bahrain or Yemen or Saudi Arabia.


I don't agree. For several reasons:

First off, we're way beyond "double standards" when it comes to US policy in the Mideast. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the US government geared up its military machine against Iraq, some cried "double standard" at that time. After all, the U.S. continued to back Israel's gaining territory by war, as well as Turkey's having done so. 

Despite attempts by Iraqis and Palestinians and others to prevent that war by suggesting negotiated solutions, the U.S. attacked Iraq and then imposed an unprecedented set of sanctions, no-fly zone restrictions and disarmament regimes on Iraq. When questions were raised about why other states, most obviously Israel, were not having their weapons of mass destruction similarly scrutinized, the fact that Iraq had lost a war was sometimes cited as the reason why Iraq should have more scrutiny put upon it while Israel should be let off Scott free. So double standards breed triple standards.

Eventually, the phony WMD charges against Iraq -- and that state's inability to prove a negative -- led to the phony pretexts for the invasion of Iraq altogether. Many blame George Bush for this, but it was in fact the logical conclusion of long-standing U.S. policy and was backed by many of the same liberals who are backing the current Libya bombing. 
 
Secondly, as Jeremy Scahill noted on his twitter feed recently, in a very real sense, there are no double standards. The U.S. government backs whatever it wants to when it wants to as determined by the perceived self interest of its elite. That's just standard operating procedure. Activists can't pick and chose when the U.S. government uses violence, it's not optional. It's standard. But also automatic. 

Third off, the argument that the U.S. is somehow wrong by not intervening in Bahrain now is wrong. For one, the U.S. is already in Bahrain. That's where the Fifth Fleet is based. Which is likely part of the reason the U.S. is defacto backing the oppressive regime. Saudi troops moved into Bahrain on March 14 -- while many of us were grieving the horrific loss of life just after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan just a few days before. The oppressive monarch in Bahrain could no longer oppress his people enough with mercenaries it hired from Pakistan, so the Saudis moved in. The U.S. arms both the Saudi and Bahraini military with billions of dollars of arms sales, an extremely profitable endeavor for those who treasure money. 

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and others of these hyper oppressive Gulf sheikdoms are bombing Libya, in the name of democracy. 
 
Toby Jones, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, notes that the U.S. has been in Saudi Arabia since the 1930s, when Standard Oil of California (now Chevron) got a concession there. 

Standard.

We're way beyond double standards, we're at triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, septuple, octuple standards. It's standard.

[originally published on Common Dreams on March 24, 2011; posted on posthaven Dec. 17, 2015]