Warmongers

The U.S. has slapped sanctions on a Chinese company and extended existing sanctions on several other Chinese and North Korean firms for selling sensitive arms technology to Iran.

Meanwhile British Ministers are backing a 20-fold rise in arms sales to Indonesia (a quote from this story: "exports approved for Colombia included toxic chemical precursors, technology for the production of toxins,...."). While it offers lip-service support to Bush's fictional "War On Terror", Indonesia is violently suppressing a number of separatist movements including Aceh and West Papua.

Further to the Media Wars:

1. Just five corporations rule the broadcasters in the United States. In Australia Rupert Murdoch controls 70 percent of the media.

2. US reporter Robert Fisk says the story in Iraq most correspondents chose not to report was the ”bomb now, die later” policy through use of depleted uranium. Since the Gulf war of 1991 the number of cancer patients had risen, and ”strange vegetables” had begun to appear on the market. The distortions were most likely to have been caused by use of depleted uranium.

3. Many more people have died so far in the war against terrorism than on September 11 2001. Twenty thousand people have died in the Afghanistan war alone, seven times more than died on September 11.

4. The U.S. administration has set up a committee for press censorship in Iraq. The Iraqi press can publish anything to remind people about the terror of Saddam, but they are not allowed to write freely about current events.

5. Reasons for optimism? ”There is a movement of resistance globally from the landless peoples movement in Brazil to the huge anti-war movement,” says Australian freelance journalist John Pilger. ”Nothing like this has ever happened before in my lifetime.” Pilger says the superpower in Washington is being challenged by the other superpower - the superpower of public opinion.