AMERICAS: U.S. Media Miss Rumsfeld's 'Dirty Wars' Talk

http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26412

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WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (IPS) - If three, five, or 10 years from now, Latin America returns to the military dictatorships and ''dirty wars'' of its all-too-recent past, analysts may point to the past week's conference in Quito of the hemisphere's defence ministers -- and particularly Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's role in it -- as a milestone in that journey.

If they did, however, their assessment would surely draw a blank among the readers of U.S. newspapers or viewers of its television. For the vast majority of them, the conference was the equivalent of the proverbial tree toppling unheard and unseen in some vast, unobserved forest.

While the major media were filled with speculation about Rumsfeld's future in President George W Bush's second term, his contribution to the meeting was entirely ignored by the electronic media and major newspapers with just a handful of exceptions.

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Indeed, in remarks to his fellow-defence ministers, Rumsfeld even suggested that, given the challenges posed by 21st-century threats, it was time to re-think the separation of the armed forces from the police -- a major reform pursued by U.S. and Latin American human-rights organisations as a way of asserting civilian control over the military and reducing abuses.

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''They were essentially saying, 'terrorism is the priority for the region, and international human rights law is not a requirement in combating terrorism','' he told IPS. ''This is exactly the wrong message in a region where militaries used this philosophy during the dirty wars to commit gross human rights violations''.

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Although the major wire services, Associated Press and Reuters, carried some reports from Quito, only a few newspapers published them, usually in a much-abbreviated form.
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and global domination by the US and its allied fascist leaders continues unabated, virtually unnoticed.

i was agahst at an admiring article on Rove by (who else?) Fineman in which Fineman actually said the following, without batting an eye or wondering about the implications:

"In fact, Rove's formulation is a new hybrid, willing to use big government in the service of markets and morality."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6596809/site/newsweek

Just didn't seem to occur to Howie that that might be a BAD thing. Idjit.