http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017205797

Sorry, that was a bad link - here's a YOUTUBE link

and it's part of a pattern of disinfo and BS where pro-Putin DUers put up fake news from RT and liars like Pilger to support a fake-progressive view that Putin is a hero being victimized by the west

It can't be said often enough, explained well enough -- not until it stops.

I've read lots of posts on DU explaining those awful facts. But the right-wing, even were it to read them, wouldn't absorb them. Wouldn't remember them even for a minute. Because it isn't what they want to know. Because they simply do not care. I'll repeat it: they do not care. I've given up attempting any kind of debate with them, because they don't care. They don't give a flying fuck for what's been done to Iraq, just for one. They only care about promoting war and more war.

you'll figure out if he is a progressive or not.

http://johnpilger.com/videos

You don't like John Pilger.

No where in the video does he say President Obama worked FOR the CIA.

Maybe you should watch the video you posted.

I found nothing untruthful in the video.

I think criticism of the president is what ruffled your feathers.

Last edited Tue Dec 23, 2014, 09:43 PM - Edit history (1)

A defense of John Pilger.

Those of us here at DU in 2002 were in shock what our country was doing. I posted this article years ago. I have wondered how in the world they could have been any kind of threat to us after all those years of sanctions and daily bombings.

From the Guardian UK March 2000:

Squeezed to Death

Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a plastic ball. "It carries death," said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields."

Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to clean up its contaminated battle-fields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same time, the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and British, has blocked or delayed a range of vital equipment, chemotherapy drugs and even pain-killers. "For us doctors," said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like torture. We see children die from the kind of cancers from which, given the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate." Three children died while I was there.

A 95% literacy rate before the 1st Gulf war.

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience," Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or children begging was unheard of. Iraq had reached a stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world, to the highest."

More about the care being withheld:

Just before Christmas, the department of trade and industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited his Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him. A courtly, eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite of senior officials. He had made his career in development, "attempting to help people, not harm them". His was the first public expression of an unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy. "I am resigning," he wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that . . . Five thousand children are dying every month . . . I don't want to administer a programme that results in figures like these."

Just including this as a background on the voices of both parties. In These Times has a paragraph called The B Team.

Strangers to the Truth

The B team

On the other side of the aisle are the shining lights of the Democratic Party, James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Bob Shrum (the consultant who ran Kerry’s campaign and shied away from confronting the Swift Boat Veterans). These three men founded the Democracy Corps, a nonprofit “dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people.” Recall that on Oct. 3, 2002, prior to the Iraq war resolution votes, Democracy Corps advised Capitol Hill Democrats: “This decision to support or oppose an Iraq war resolution will take place in a setting where voters, by 10 points, prefer to vote for a member who supports a resolution to authorize force (50 to 40 percent).” In other words, Carville and friends advised Democrats to cater to public opinion and let Bush have his war.

This invasion will define us forever. Perhaps Rachel's special Monday will bring it to the forefront again so our younger Americans won't forget.

We don't go to known fabulists and highly biased voices for news and facts. Our loathing of the Iraq War cannot make us get all loyal about flakes like Pilger. He's motivated by other things than the truth. There are other voices reporting or writing on the same things that don't have this problem. In discrediting himself, he tends to discredit the causes he triumphs--and that's the big problem.

Rachel Maddow I'll stick with. Have you ever noticed that she's rarely in the vid forum, but flaky Putin-defenders like Pilger are there all the time? Hmmmm.

Where can I get info on the Maddow documentary you mentioned?

See below.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/18/rachel_maddow_special_hubris.html

Might also be on You Tube.

A writer is not biased or a fabulist just because he criticizes our leaders.

you're right, a writer is not biased or a fabulist just because he criticizes our leaders. A writer is biased or a fabulist because he fabulizes and pilgerizes.

Thanks for the link. Maddow criticizes our leaders all the time--and she does it with integrity and skill.

The guy with a Pulitzer who has risked his life in war zones to cover stories or an internet cold warrior? It takes a lot of gall to sit safely in your home and criticize others who are walking the talk on the ground and essentially trying to make them out to be liars and cheats.

Last edited Wed Dec 24, 2014, 01:18 AM - Edit history (1)

These ad hominems, along with wholesale denial of provable facts is far past old.

I used to believe the left was much better at processing reality than the right - and that's still true, but to a lesser degree every year. I now have to put in the caveat that people on the left deny reality, too, every time I debate a right-winger. And it's because of posts like this, the embracing of ubiquitous spying, etc., and it pisses me off.

Stop it. If you prove him wrong; just like with every subject in the universe, I will change my mind. Evidence. If you don't bring that, you bring nothing.

Here is your link to the last paragraph :

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/guardian-columnist-putin-is-a-great-democrat.html

Yes, a masterful take down there. But The Spectator... well... And Auberon Waugh was known more for being a wit, but was a Journalist who clearly spoke his own mind.

The differences in English terminology and ours makes criticism of ideology difficult. Some may claim you are using a RW source. I'm not so sure... And English definitions and experiences are very different.

I'll get back to you on that, or maybe not.

In the meantime, Obama and his time with the CIA are well documented by Wired:

Forget Kenya. Never mind the secret madrassas. The sinister, shocking truth about Barack Obama’s past lies not in east Africa, but in outer space. As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.

White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars



By Spencer Ackerman - January 3, 2012

...Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories - the more awesomely insane, the better. Each week during 2012, when the Mayans tell us to expect the apocalypse, Danger Room will peel back a new layer of crazy to expose those oh-so-cleverly hidden machinations powering this doomed plane of existence. Welcome - back - to Tinfoil Tuesday.

Officially, the White House says Obama never went to Mars. “Only if you count watching Marvin the Martian,” Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, tells Danger Room. But that’s exactly what a secret chrononaut wants you to believe...


OMG, Marvin is also black!

It is not known what exactly Obama did on Mars. (Socializing Martian health care, perhaps? Building a birth-certificate printing press?) His mission was a perilous one, according to Basiago and Stillings. The CIA wished to “establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space” as well as a legal claim to “territorial sovereignty,” making Obama something of a Martian conquistador. Presumably, Obama’s CIA handlers needed him to “acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence” in order to secure the U.S.-Martian alliance. (We’ll bet you weren’t even aware of Martian animals.)

“Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten,” an elder chrononaut, retired Army Maj. Ed Dames, is alleged to have told a young Obama...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/obama-mars/

Never heard of that one, huh?

My favorite next to how cats were sent to Earth to spy on us for extra-terrestrials and how Alex Jones is a reptilian shape shifter who was once Bill Hicks and an agent of the Illuminati.

Haven't forgotten your posts on cop killing Infowarriors and their ilk. Now you've heard it all.

Have a Happy Holiday in your world, uhnope.

heck even the year but there's only a bit left. OK I am humbled so Happy Holidays to you,

Pilger has a Pulitzer prize to his name and is one of the very few journalists with the guts and integrity to tell the truth as he sees it.

You put quotation marks around "one of the worst journalists writing in the English language". Who are you quoting? Yourself?

John Pilger has a vast body of extremely well referenced and cited journalism in his name, and is a legend in journalism.

Who the heck are you?

As you mentioned Pilger is a Pulitzer prize winning Journalist.

Pretty soon the OP will call it the "Putlitzer" prize LOL.

The OP has essentially declared his list of official media to be shunned. I am waiting for him/her to start making a list of books to be banned.

Thought we were done with this kind of cold war mentality but apparently (just as with Racism it is deep in some people's psychology), it can be easy to stir back up.

... what is the "OP"?

Shorthand way of referring to the starting post in the thread.

I had to ask the same question several years ago...in fact about 10 years.

The cold war throwback is the Russian brigada, the embarrassing agitprop they put out--mainly to dupe their own citizens but also to recruit "useful fools" in the west. RT is a much more sophisticated version of the same thing.

You actually believe Pilger won a Pulitzer? Yeah, and Putin won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Your arguments are getting more and more cracked and factually wrong. To the victory, comrade!

and the answer to the question is in the Op, which you clearly didn't even bother to read before you left to your agitprop defense of this third rate fabulist

I will post the "Praise" of Pilger's work also from Wikipedia just above "Criticism" which you conveniently left out. Notice the controversial, flawed Conservative writer Christopher Hitchens finds Pilger's work on Vietnam something he agrees with....but, he felt Pilger "Anti-American" which is a usual criticism thrown at anyone who independently reports "Inconvenient Truths" about corruption in MS/Corporate Owned Media and those others paid to Hide Truth from the Public to push for endless wars."

------------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Pilger

Praise

In Breaking the Silence: The Films of John Pilger,[83] his appraisal of the journalist's documentaries, Anthony Hayward wrote, "For half a century, he has been an ever stronger voice for those without a voice and a thorn in the side of authority, the Establishment. His work, particularly his documentary films, has also made him rare in being a journalist who is universally known, a champion of those for whom he fights and the scourge of politicians and others whose actions he exposes."[84]


Noam Chomsky said of Pilger: "John Pilger's work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration."[85]


Martha Gellhorn, the American novelist, journalist and war correspondent, said that "[John Pilger] has taken on the great theme of justice and injustice... He documents and proclaims the official lies that we are told and that most people accept or don't bother to think about. [He] belongs to an old and unending worldwide company, the men and women of conscience. Some are as famous as Tom Paine and William Wilberforce, some as unknown as a tiny group calling itself Grandmothers Against The Bomb.... If they win, it is slowly; but they never entirely lose. To my mind, they are the blessed proof of the dignity of man. John has an assured place among them. I'd say he is a charter member for his generation."[86]


John Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, has said, "A country that does not have a John Pilger in its journalism is a very feeble place indeed."[87]


Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens said of Pilger: "I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again I'd probably still admire quite a lot of it. But there is a word that gets overused and can be misused – namely, anti-American – and it has to be used about him. So that for me sort of spoils it... even when I'm inclined to agree."[88]

thanks for backing me up on that. Too bad you don't seem to understand, or you pretend not to