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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Lonnie Johnson

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues and jazz guitarist Lonnie Johnson. Enjoy!

^{Lonnie Johnson - Falling Rain Blues}

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

-- William J. Casey, CIA Director

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News and Opinion

CNN And Washington Post Busted For Pro-Israel Propaganda Shenanigans

Both CNN and The Washington Post have been caught engaging in some pretty shady journalistic malpractice with their Israel reporting in recent days.

In a new article titled “CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor,” The Intercept reports that all of CNN’s reporting on Israel and Palestine is funneled through a bureau in Jerusalem which slants reporting to benefit Israeli information interests and is subject to regulation by Israeli military censors. The Intercept also reports that last year CNN “hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter” at the onset of the war on Gaza.

Unnamed CNN staff told The Intercept that CNN’s iron-fisted protocols for regulating information related to the Israel-Palestine issue have had a “demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war”.

“‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the anonymous CNN staff member said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”

The Intercept reports that the former IDF spinmeister has been bylined in dozens of CNN stories since the attack on Gaza began, with one report being “little more than a direct statement released from the IDF.”

Kind of makes you wonder why CNN doesn’t just cut out the middleman and run all its reporting directly through IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Seems like it would be a bit more efficient, and certainly a lot more honest.

Meanwhile The Washington Post has been caught assigning a reporter with a history of anti-Palestinian bias to write a smear piece on independent media outlets Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone for their critical reporting on Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza.

Both Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone received emails from a Washington Post reporter named Elizabeth Dwoskin, who said she’s writing a piece on “efforts to minimize or misdirect information about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel” and interrogating them about their articles casting doubt on the official narrative about what exactly happened that day.

As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah highlighted on Twitter, when Dwoskin was at Columbia University twenty years ago she was authoring Nakba denialist claims that Palestine never existed and that prior to Israel’s formation the land was inhabited only by “desert Bedouins without a sense of national identity as we know it today.”

It’s bad enough for The Washington Post to be attacking independent media for asking the critical questions and doing the real journalism the Post itself should also be doing, but to assign someone with a public history of egregiously anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the task is especially lacking in journalistic integrity.

“If I’m following, a reporter that has denied the fact that Palestinians existed before the state of Israel is allowed to cover Israel/Palestine and write about ‘misinformation’ for Washington Post?” tweeted award-winning journalist Laila Al-Arian of Abunimah’s revelation.

Neither of these instances will come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying critical attention to the amazingly awful reporting the western mass media have been churning out about the Gaza assault these last three months, but they do offer some rare insight behind the curtain into how the sausage gets made.

The biggest misconception about propaganda is that it is something that happens to other people, and is done by other countries. Westerners like to think of themselves as free-thinking people whose worldviews are formed by facts and truth, contrasting themselves with nations like North Korea and China where populations are viewed as being subjected to conformity-enforcing propaganda. They believe that if propaganda does occur in the west, it comes here from nations like Russia trying to corrupt our minds and weaken our trust in our institutions, or if the propaganda is domestic in origin it only affects people in other political parties.

In reality the typical western mind has been marinating in domestic propaganda throughout its entire life, and its worldview has been manufactured for it by powerful manipulators who benefit from its intellectual compliance with their interests. The indoctrination into the mainstream western worldview began in school, and it continues throughout adulthood with the help of mainstream media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post.

Israel says Gaza fighting could last a year, amplifying fears of regional war

Israeli defence officials and former senior intelligence officers have said they expect fighting in Gaza to continue for at least a year, raising the prospect of thousands more civilian casualties, a deepening humanitarian crisis and a continuing grave threat to regional stability.

In a briefing, R Adm Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said the centre and south of Gaza, where military efforts are now focused, was “dense and saturated with terrorists” with “an underground city of branching tunnels”.

Three months would be needed to clear the area and fighting would “continue during the year 2024”, Hagari said. He said scattered fighting was to be expected in northern Gaza, along with rockets sporadically being launched from there toward Israel, but that Hamas militants were “without a framework and without commanders”.

Maj Gen Amos Yadlin, a former head of military intelligence who is close to senior serving officers, compared the campaign to that led by a multinational coalition against Islamic State in 2017 that took nine months. But in Gaza the situation was much more challenging, he said “It will take a year to dismantle Hamas,” he said. “It is not the six-day war [of 1967]. The timeline is long … [IS strongholds] Mosul and Raqqa were not fortified underground … and the coalition was 85 countries.”

Biden’s Refusal of Gaza Ceasefire Could Drag U.S. into Middle East War

Blinken returns to Middle East and warns of risk war could spread

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has returned to the Middle East for the fourth time in three months as he warned Israel’s war against Hamas risked spreading throughout the region.

Recent intensifying violence between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, increasing attacks by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and strikes by Tehran-linked groups on US bases in Iraq, have created an increasingly febrile atmosphere across the Middle East.

Israel admitted on Sunday that a Hezbollah rocket barrage the previous night damaged a strategic airbase in northern Israel. Images released by Hezbollah appeared to show a fire on or beside a dome at the Mt Meron base, which is less than 10km from the border with Lebanon.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on the extent of the damage and said backup systems meant the country’s air defences continued to function. But the successful hit on a sensitive military facility underlines Hezbollah’s capacity.

Israel’s security officials acknowledge the group would present a far more formidable enemy than Hamas if exchanges of cross-border fire escalate into a full conflict.

100 IDF Soldiers WOUNDED: US FREAKS As Israel Hezbollah War LOOMS

Israel Accused of 'Effort to Intimidate the Judges' Ahead of Genocide Hearings

The Israeli government has mounted a pressure campaign urging governments around the world to publicly denounce South Africa's genocide case at the International Court of Justice, which is set to convene hearings on the detailed charges on Thursday.

According to a cable obtained by Axios, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is calling on the country's embassies to pressure host country diplomats and political leaders to swiftly issue an "immediate and unequivocal statement along the following lines: To publicly and clearly state that YOUR COUNTRY rejects the outrage[ous], absurd, and baseless allegations made against Israel."

The cable warns that "a ruling by the court could have significant potential implications that are not only in the legal world but have practical bilateral, multilateral, economic, security ramifications." Israel is seeking to prevent an injunction ordering the country to suspend its attack on Gaza.

Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian American political analyst, called Israel's lobbying campaign "an effort to intimidate the judges" at the ICJ, which Israel has previously boycotted.

Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth argued that the cable shows Israel is "evidently worried about a judgment on the merits in South Africa's case."

"Israel is pressing others to denounce the case in the hope of persuading the International Court of Justice to decide based on politics rather than the facts," Roth wrote on social media.

The United States, Israel's top ally and arms supplier, has already rejected South Africa's case, calling it "completely without any basis in fact" even though the Biden administration has not formally assessed whether Israel is complying with international humanitarian law during its assault on the Gaza Strip, which is now entering its fourth month with no end in sight.

Attorneys have warned U.S. officials that they may be complicit in genocide if they continue arming the Israeli military, which has committed atrocities with American weaponry.

One human rights monitor estimates that roughly 4% of Gaza's population has been killed, wounded, or left missing by Israel's war on the Palestinian territory.

Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and genocide scholar, has called Israel's assault "a textbook case of genocide," which is defined under international law as "a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part."

According to Israeli channel 12, the Israeli line of defense at the ICJ regarding the statements of Israeli officials about destroying Gaza, that were quoted in the appeal will be that: “Some of those quoted are not decision makers, the ones that are - didn’t mean what they said” pic.twitter.com/I4J6eBPdK9

— Oren Ziv (@OrenZiv_) January 6, 2024

Alastair Crooke: Does the West Believe it is Morally Superior?

UK accused of hypocrisy in not backing claim of genocide in Gaza before ICJ

The UK is facing accusations of double standards after formally submitting detailed legal arguments to the international court of justice in The Hague six weeks ago to support claims that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya ethnic group through its mass mistreatment of children and systematically depriving people of their homes and food.

The UK made its 21-page “declaration of intervention” jointly with five other countries, but it is not supporting South Africa as it prepares to try to convince the ICJ on Thursday that Israel is at risk of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

The UK submission on Myanmar argues there is a lower threshold for determining genocide if the damage has been inflicted on children as opposed to adults. The submission said other actions that could be defined as genocidal, if systematic, include forced displacement from homes, deprivation of medical services and the imposition of subsistence diets.

It argues that given declarations of intent to commit genocide are rare, the court’s test should not solely be explicit statements or numbers killed, but reasonable inference drawn from a pattern of conduct and factual evidence.

Israel will defend itself at the UN-derived ICJ insisting it has been seeking to protect its civilian population in an attempt to destroy Hamas but not the Palestinian people. It says its post-war plans for Gaza involving Palestinian-led governance is proof of a lack of genocidal intent.

Israel Is Targeting Media in Gaza to Hide Its Atrocities from the World

'Eradication of Journalism in Gaza' Continues as Israel Kills Two More Reporters

An Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Sunday killed two Palestinian journalists and seriously wounded a third, adding to the war's grisly toll on media workers.

The Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that the Israeli military targeted the journalists' car as they were driving through the northern part of Rafah. The strike killed Hamza Dahdouh, the 27-year-old son of Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau chief, and Mustafa Thuraya, a freelance videographer working with Agence France-Presse. Hazem Rajab was injured in the Israeli strike.

"The assassination of Mustafa and Hamza, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh's son, whilst they were on their way to carry out their duty in the Gaza Strip reaffirms the need to take immediate necessary legal measures against the occupation forces to ensure that there is no impunity," the network said, imploring the international community to "hold Israel accountable for its heinous crimes."

Hamza is the fifth member of Wael Dahdouh's family killed in Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip. Earlier in the war, Israeli strikes killed Dahdouh's wife, younger son, daughter, and grandson. Wael himself was wounded by an Israeli drone strike that killed Al Jazeera journalist Samer Abu Daqqa.

CNN’s Gaza Coverage EDITED By Israeli Government

Tony Blinken Is A Cold-Blooded Sociopath

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just referred to the US-sponsored assassination of yet another journalist in Gaza as a “terrible tragedy”, as though the reporter was struck by lightning or died in a car crash or something.

Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Sunday, Blinken was asked to comment on the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh, who was killed in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike on a car has was traveling in with two other journalists, one of whom also died. Hamza Dahdouh was the eldest son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, whose wife, son, daughter and baby grandson were murdered in another Israeli airstrike in late October.

In response to an Al Jazeera reporter’s question about whether the United States condemns the murder of innocent journalists, Blinken replied as follows:

“I am deeply, deeply sorry for the almost unimaginable loss suffered by your colleague Wael al-Dahdouh. I am a parent myself. I can’t begin to imagine the horror that he’s experienced, not once, but now twice. This is an unimaginable tragedy, and that’s also been the case for, as I said, far too many innocent Palestinian men, women, and children — civilians, also journalists, Palestinian and other.”

Blinken went on to acknowledge the scores of journalists who have been killed in Gaza, saying that this shows the need to get humanitarian aid into the enclave and achieve a lasting peace. What Blinken did not do is issue anything resembling a condemnation of Israel and the clear and demonstrable fact that it has been highly focused on the task of murdering journalists in Gaza. He just offered his deepest condolences for Dahdouh’s death, framed it as a passive “tragedy” instead of an active assassination using highly sophisticated military technology under the sponsorship and support of the United States, and moved on.

It’s hard to say who’s worse, the far-right Israelis who openly revel in the butchery they are inflicting in Gaza, or the liberal Americans who directly sponsor that butchery and then look you dead in the eye and tell you how deeply, sincerely sorry they are to hear that another person in Gaza has died in a tragic accident.

Blinken is always doing sociopathic stuff like this. Late last month he tweeted, “This has been an extraordinarily dangerous year for press around the world. Many killed, many more wounded, hundreds detained, attacked, threatened, injured — simply for doing their jobs. I am profoundly grateful to the press for getting accurate, timely information to people.”

I mean, can you believe the gall of this freak? As though his own administration wasn’t responsible for most of those killings. As though Israel has not spent the last three months directing wildly disproportionate firepower at the places it knows journalists are hiding.

He’s standing there on top of a pile of corpses while mournfully shaking his head about their tragic unfortunate deaths.

There’s something about the job of US secretary of state that appears to require a significant level of sociopathy. From war criminal Henry Kissinger to Madeleine “We think the price was worth it” Albright to Mike “We lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo, the absolute worst person in any given presidential administration is very often the head of the State Department. A severe personality disorder is practically in the job description.

This is because while the secretary of state is officially the head of US diplomacy, “diplomacy” for the US empire looks a whole lot different from what it looks like for normal countries. US “diplomacy”, in practice, typically looks like going from country to country negotiating for international alignment behind wars, starvation sanctions, proxy conflicts and western-backed uprisings. In theory the State Department should be the department of peace, but in practice it’s just a subtler, sneakier military department.

Nothing epitomizes the depraved manipulations of the US empire better than Antony Blinken. There is no better representation of that empire than Tony standing there on his mountain of corpses, covered in blood, telling you how sorry he is to learn of the unfortunate accidental deaths of the people he just murdered, staring at you with his cold dead eyes, playing remarkably soulless blues guitar under the light of a bright red moon.

Israel assassinates top Palestinian negotiator

Israeli police having difficulty finding sexual assault victims from 7 October attack, says report

Israeli police are having difficulties locating the victims of sexual assault or witnesses to such acts which allegedly occurred during the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups, according to a report by Haaretz.

The report, published on Haaretz's Hebrew site, said that police are also unable to link the existing evidence with the victims described in it.

Adi Edri, an investigator in charge of investigating the alleged sexual crimes that occurred during the attack, told Haaretz police have "circumstantial indications" there are victims who are still alive that they have yet to make contact with.

The police are now appealing to the Israeli public to come forward with any evidence they may have of sexual-based violence conducted by Hamas and other groups from Gaza.

Iraq’s Prime Minister Moves to Expel US Troops After Drone Strike

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said Friday that his government is beginning the process that will lead to the expulsion of foreign forces, which includes about 2,500 US troops.

“We are setting the date for the start of the bilateral committee to put arrangements to end the presence of the international coalition forces in Iraq permanently,” al-Sudani said, according to a statement released by his office.

The statement came a day after a US drone strike in Baghdad killed a deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella group of mostly Shia militias that’s part of the Iraqi government’s security forces. The PMF was initially formed in 2014 to fight ISIS.

“The Popular Mobilization Forces represent an official presence affiliated with the state, subject to it, and an integral part of our armed forces,” al-Sudani said. “We condemn the attacks targeting our security forces, which go beyond the spirit and letter of the mandate that created the international coalition.”

Supreme Court Says Idaho Can Jail Doctors for Providing Abortions

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday opted to reinstate Idaho's near-total abortion ban, a draconian law that carries up to five years in prison for doctors who perform the procedure outside of extremely narrow circumstances.

The high court, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the summer of 2022, agreed to hear a Justice Department challenge to Idaho's abortion ban in April. In the meantime, it will be a crime in Idaho to perform or attempt to perform an abortion unless the procedure is deemed "necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman" or if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest. ...

The Supreme Court's unsigned order came days after the conservative-dominated 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas can ban abortions even in emergency situations. In Texas and across the U.S., people have faced dangerous health complications after being denied abortion care due to Republican-authored laws in their states.

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Biden Staffers Quitting “In Droves” Over Gaza Destruction!

‘We are working-class women of color’: the long-shot socialist run for the White House

In one of the first acts of Claudia de la Cruz’s presidency, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk watch on as the government seizes control of Amazon and Tesla, along with all of the top 100 corporations in the US. And that’s just the start. De la Cruz, America’s first socialist president, goes on to abolish the Senate and the supreme court – there isn’t a specific plan as to how – as well as disbanding the FBI and the CIA and reining in the military.

Barring a major miracle, none of this will happen. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which sees a socialist US as part of a step towards “the creation of a communist world”, won about 85,000 votes in the 2020 presidential election, slightly more than Kanye West. But De la Cruz, the party’s presidential candidate, is optimistic about this moment in American politics – even if she is realistic about what she and her running mate, Karina Garcia, can achieve at the ballot box next year.

“The only way that historically we’ve been able to transform anything in society is through struggle, through movement,” De la Cruz says. “Nothing that we have earned as working-class people in society has been something that has been granted to us by the benevolence of the ruling class: not voting rights, not access to the most basic human rights.” ...

The presence of newly prominent progressives in the House of Representatives represents hope for some, but De la Cruz says they won’t effect change. “There’s always been progressive politicians,” she said. “That’s not enough because we should not shortchange ourselves, as working=class people thinking that that’s like, the be all and end all, because it’s not.”

Ocasio-Cortez et al have shown no sign that they will sign on to De la Cruz’s signature plan to to seize 100 corporations – which would amount to the government gaining trillions of dollars in revenue and “serve as the foundation for a total reorganization of the economy”, the PSL says. The US remains the only western country that does not provide free healthcare for its citizens, and that would be an immediate focus. The money would also be used to provide housing, improve education and offer free childcare.

Obama ‘WORRIED’ About Biden’s SLEEPY Re-Election Campaign, Polls Predict DOOM for Incumbent

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African elephant populations stabilise in southern heartlands

African elephant populations have stabilised in their southern heartlands after huge losses over the last century, according to the most comprehensive analysis of growth rates to date. The latest analysis also provides the strongest data so far showing that protected areas that are connected to other places are far better than isolated “fortress” parks at maintaining stable populations, by allowing the elephants to migrate back and forth between areas as they did naturally in the past.

When numbers rise in highly protected core areas, corridors into less protected buffer areas allow the animals to disperse. They may also migrate if poaching increases or drought strikes. If numbers later fall in the core areas, or conditions improve, elephants can flow back again. However, many more people live in the buffer areas and the scientists said careful planning was crucial to minimise conflicts with the elephants, which can kill people and destroy crops.

In contrast to the connected areas, the scientists found that isolated parks, which keep animals in and people out, can lead to unsustainable population booms, and in turn sometimes mass deaths or culling.

“For decades, news from southern Africa was dominated by waves of poaching and other threats,” said Dr Robert Guldemond at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and part of the study team. “But there’s been a lot of good work done that has basically turned the tide and that story has never really been told.” Dr Ryan Huang, also at the University of Pretoria, said: “This is a good news story for a lot of elephants. We’re changing from just halting declines and to trying to achieve long term stability.”

Prof Stuart Pimm, of Duke University in the US, and also part of the team, said: “We need to protect elephants, but we also need to connect them. We have fragmented the world and we need to stitch it back together again.” The research, published in Science Advances, used 713 population surveys from 103 protected areas from Tanzania southwards to calculate rates of growth or decline from 1995-2020. This covered more than 290,000 savannah elephants, 70% of the total in Africa.

The scientists found that overall, populations had grown at 0.16% a year for the past quarter of a century. “Conservation has halted the decline of elephants in southern Africa over the last 25 years,” said Pimm.

Oil industry veteran to lead next round of Cop climate change summit

Cop29, the next round of UN talks to tackle the climate crisis, will be led by another veteran of the oil and gas industry.

Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural resources minister, has been appointed the president-in-waiting for the Cop29 climate talks when they take place in the country in November.

Before his entry into politics in the autocratic country in western Asia, once a Soviet republic, Babayev spent 26 years working for the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (Socar).

Close observers of the Cop process will see parallels with the appointment of Sultan Al Jaber, who moonlighted from his role as the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to preside over the summit when it took place in Dubai last year.

Sceptics have already begun to point to Babayev’s appointment as raising questions over the commitment to the global phase-out of fossil fuels in Azerbaijan. The country relied on oil and gas for more than 92.5% of its export revenue last year, according to the US government’s International Trade Administration.

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Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

How Israel Leverages Genocide With Hamas ‘Massacres’

Gaza death toll tops 30,000, as US escalates wider Middle East war

Israel Shifts to Targeted Escalation, With Justification for Entry into Lebanon One Likely Aim

Palestine SitRep: Lebanese Resistance Causes Enemy Losses - Is Ready To Fight Off Attacks

Let’s Discuss Israel And Gaza Again

South Africa Emerges as Moral Giant on Gaza

It’s Insane That Anyone Is Still Supporting Israel

Survivors recount harrowing Israeli field executions

'You Can’t Be Pro-Insurrection And Pro-American,' Says President Of Nation Founded By An Insurrection

Americans living in their cars are finding refuge in ‘safe parking lots’

Two Cuban documentaries show effects of US sanctions on island nation

HYPOCRISY: Claudine Gay Accuser's Wife CAUGHT PLAGIARIZING WIKIPEDIA

The Grayzone confronts Washington Post reporter LIVE

Biden admin denies the obvious about Israel

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A Little Night Music

Eddie Lang and Lonnie Johnson ~ Handful Of Riffs

Lonnie Johnson - Got The Blues For The West End

Lonnie Johnson - Swing Out Rhythm

Lonnie Johnson - Blue Ghost Blues

Lonnie Johnson - Playing With The Strings

Lonnie Johnson - Tomorrow Night

Lonnie Johnson - Summertime

Otis Spann & Lonnie Johnson - Trouble in Mind

Lonnie Johnson - Swingin' The Blues

Eddie Lang & Lonnie Johnson Guitar Duet - Hot Fingers

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