Moon of Alabama — Syria - The Alternet Grayzone Of Smug Turncoats

Moon of Alabama takes Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton (and others) to task for unprofessional behavior that some might view as unethical.

Blumenthal knows this well. His piece about the "White Helmets" for Alternet Grayzone was obviously sourced (if not plagiarized) from earlier work by Vanessa Beeley and other authors at the above sites. To then market Alternet Grayzone, which only exists a year or so, as "the only progressive outlet that's consistently" "provide[s] a critical perspective" is worse than marketing talk. It is an outrageous lie.

Any writer, me included, can err in the evaluation of the available facts. One can learn of new facts and one's opinion can turn out to be wrong and change. But one obligation to readers is to stay honest, to admit when one went wrong and to explain why ones opinion has changed. A certain humbleness is an essential ingredient of good writing.

Yet none of that can been seen in the output of Blumenthal and his fellow writers. No apology has been issued by him to the colleagues at Al Akhbar who he publicly smeared and accused. Neither Norton nor Khalek have explained their change of position.

Blumenthal now publishes pieces based on the archive material of those progressive outlets which have long had a critical view on the Syria issue. Yet he claims that no such outlets exit.

If they are helpful for the cause Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton and Rania Khalek are welcome to join those writers who all along published against the imperial designs for Syria. It would feel much better through if their newly discovered "progressiveness" on Syria would not have the distinct smell of mere opportunism.

Moon of Alabama
Syria - The Alternet Grayzone Of Smug Turncoats

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Max Blumenthal clarifies official reaction to Occupy protests — Jaw-dropper

Since charges have made that mayoral and police reaction to OW-99% was coordinated, a controversy has emerged. Previously I posted claims that Naomi Wolf made to that effect, whose accuracy Joshua Holland of AlterNet disputed. I also posted previously that Washington's Blog provided evidence on the presence of a advisor to DHS being in on the phone call among the eighteen mayors just prior to t he recent crack down.

Now Max Blumenthal is now out with a post that ups the ante exponentially. For those who are not familiar with him, here is his bio from his page at The Huffington Post.

Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast and contributor to outlets including The Nation, Al Jazeera English, Salon.com, Alternet, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Monthly. The winner of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Award for his investigative print journalism, he has produced numerous widely-recognized video reports that have garnered hundreds of thousands of hits on Youtube. His book, "Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party," will be published by Basic Books in 2009.

I emphasize his credentials, reputation and history, since without it one might suspect that the post that has just appeared — which clinches the argument over coordinated involvement — is conspiracy theory.

Read it at AlterNet

From Occupation to “Occupy”: The Israelification of American Domestic Security — The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed against the OWS, has taken place at every level of law enforcement.

by Max Blumenthal

I am not going to pull out any quotes to summarize this. It is an investigative piece that requires reading in full to do it justice. This is really a jaw-dropper. 

Blumenthal's exposé accounts for what many have been wondering since we saw the police reaction to the protests, displaying tactics that had never been used so brazenly against American citizens before. Was this widespread unprofessionalism and a "few bad apples" gone rogue (remember the explanation for torture of prisoners in US control at Abu Ghraib), or was there something more going on here. Blumenthal explains what it is, and it is both shocking and alarming.

Senators are now speaking of the US as part of the "battlefield" in their defense of their indefensible passage of a bill giving the president authority to "disappear" US citizens within the United States and hold them indefinitely without recourse to the judicial process mandated in the US Constitution. Coupled with the Patriot Act and the submerging of the proposed total awareness program behing the wall of secrecy involving national security, the Constitution seems to be hanging by the thread of judicial interpretation. The present constitution of SCOTUS gives little comfort here. After Citizens United it is clear whose side they are not and it is not the 99%.

Given all this, it is easy to be a pattern emerging and a trend gaining steam. It is time to be concerned, very concerned. The noose is tightening. The US is swiftly turning into a total surveillance police state in which the government, controlled by and representing the interests of a plutocratic oligarchy, claims absolute power as a matter of "national security." We've heard that before elsewhere.

UPDATE: People Locked in Tiny Cages, Crying in Pain: What I Saw and Heard When the LAPD Threw Me in Jail for Exercising My Right to Protest the Oligarchy
by Yasha Levine at The Exiled

Don't believe the PR. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD's attack on Occupy LA -- or the way detainees were later treated....

There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent, myself included. Now I’m in America, at a demonstration, watching exactly the same brutal crackdown… 

Read Levine's entire report and tell me this wasn't borderline torture. However, it is not vastly different from treatment that some fairly large groups of anti-war protestors were subjected to in DC back then.


UPDATE: Prior to Violent Occupy Oakland Raid, OPD Trained Alongside Bahrain Military and Israeli Border Force by David Harris-Gershon at Tikkun Daily

David Harris-Gershon's work has recently appeared in The Jerusalem Post, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and elsewhere. His memoir, Shrapnel -– which chronicles the author's attempt to reconcile with the family of the Hamas terrorist who injured his wife in the 2002 Hebrew University bombing – is currently being shopped for publication.

UPDATE: Picked up by Raw Story
Report: Israeli model underlies militarization of U.S. police
By Muriel Kane

UPDATE: Hundreds of OccupyLA Demonstrators Held for Days Without Charges on $5,000 Bail in Often Deplorable, Illegal, and Unconstitutional Conditions

by Ernest A. Canning, The Brad Blog | Report