The Sex Police

posted: October 29, 2007 6:22 EST

An anti-porn crusader wants Kansas City juries to redefine what's obscene.

By Justin Kendall, The Pitch (Kansas City)

Inside the Hollywood at Home store in suburban Overland Park, a poster advertises Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's best-selling book Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth. The pornography baron watches over the shop like a portly guardian angel, and he's an appropriate one. Hollywood at Home is caught in a Flynt-style free-speech fight.

On September 25, a Johnson County grand jury indicted the video store on misdemeanor criminal charges of promoting obscenity. The store's alleged crime was renting out four allegedly obscene movies — Don't Kiss Me I'm Straight, Hellcats 12, Anal Machines and Real Female Masturbation. A man who gave his name as Sean O'Cleary rented the videos in late August and never returned them. He had paid a $100 deposit and, later, called to tell the store that he'd turned the films over to the grand jury.

The grand jury handed down 15 obscenity charges against the store and three other Johnson County businesses. They're accused of renting out racy videos, selling sex toys and displaying obnoxious Halloween costumes. Johnson County isn't alone. Citizen petitions have forced grand juries to convene throughout Kansas. This grassroots effort is the work of Phillip Cosby, a Ned Flanders look-alike and anti-pornography crusader. The 56-year-old retired Army master sergeant is the zealous leader of the Kansas City office of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families.

read on . . .

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» categories: Censorship | Church/sex | Justin Kendall

A Reporter on the Lam in Latin America

posted: October 22, 2007 6:33 EST

El Nuevo Herald’s Gonzalo Guillén is the latest victim of Bush buddy Álvaro Uribe.

By Chuck Strouse, Miami New Times

Gonzalo Guillén is on the lam. His wife and son are in hiding.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe publicly belittled the reporter. Strangers repeatedly threatened to murder him. His bodyguard disappeared.

"I got a call at my home ... a guy said, 'We can kill you,'" Guillén recalls from Lima, Peru, where he's been laying low for five days. "Then the threats started coming fast. Five calls at my home, e-mails, 24 death threats in 48 hours. I was afraid for me, for my family. I left the country in a sprint."

Sound like a spy thriller?

It ain't.

Guillén has for seven years been a reporter for Miami's El Nuevo Herald, one of America's top Spanish-language publications. He's one of two Colombian journalists whom President Uribe has dumped on in the past two weeks. Daniel Coronell, a columnist for the well-known magazine Semana, also went abroad after the president publicly called him "a coward, a liar, a swine, and a professional slanderer." In this South American country, where vigilante justice rules, insults can mean bloodshed.

"Outrageous," comments Joel Simon of New York's Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "President Uribe knows that to say this kind of thing opens the doors for [thugs] to potentially kill."

Venezuela and Cuba got most of the ink and opprobrium at last weekend's meeting of Latin American journalists in Miami. News of Hugo Chávez's closing an opposition TV station in Caracas, as well as restrictions on reporters and jailing of critics in Havana, was lapped up like milk by a gatito.

But it's even more difficult to report the truth in Colombia, which will receive $756 million in U.S. foreign aid this year. At least 39 journalists have been whacked for doing their jobs there in the past 15 years. These days, many reporters avoid criticizing the government. Why risk being murdered? More than 3,000 cases of self-censorship were recently documented in the country.

read on . . .

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» categories: Bush regime | Censorship | Chuck Strouse | Executions | The press

CIA Paranoia and the Lady from Vermont

posted: October 22, 2007 6:11 EST

9/11 hysteria, even surrounding 60-year-old documents about American spies

By Graham Rayman, Village Voice

On October 9, Charlotte Dennett, a prim Vermont woman uneasily holding her handbag, stood up in federal court in Manhattan to try yet again to pry the 60-year-old secrets about her father’s death from the U.S. government.

Daniel Dennett was an American spy working in the Middle East during and after World War II, at a time when the world powers were jockeying for control of oil in the region. He died in a mystery-shrouded 1947 plane crash in Ethiopia, when Charlotte was just six weeks old.

Now a 60-year-old journalist, Charlotte Dennett traveled to the stately federal appellate courtroom at 500 Pearl Street from tiny Cambridge, Vermont, this month to try to convince a three-judge panel to let her continue her lawsuit against the CIA for records surrounding her father’s work.

Even though the records pre-date the Eisenhower administration and most of the people named in them are dead, the CIA has blocked, resisted, and delayed her Freedom of Information Act requests for over eight long years. CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the pending litigation. In court papers, the agency argues that the release of the records could compromise national security and expose intelligence “sources and methods.”

To Dennett, also a self-taught lawyer, the case speaks volumes about the government’s post-9/11 obsession with secrecy.

“It’s hard enough to get documents from the CIA, but post-9/11, it’s 10 times more difficult,” she says. “I am concerned that there is an effort to secretize our history. This lawsuit has been a struggle to prevent that.”

John Taylor, a legendary archivist specializing in intelligence at the National Archives who assisted Dennett in her research, says he’s puzzled by the agency’s stubbornness. “The CIA is very reluctant to release anything on the Middle East regardless of date,” the 87-year-old Taylor says. “It’s not clear to me why, especially since these records are from the 1940s.”

Charlotte Dennett’s odyssey began 15 years ago, when she decided to learn everything she could about her father and write a book about that era. In 1943, she learned, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today’s CIA, sent her father, then 37, to the Middle East. Based in Lebanon, Daniel Dennett specialized in counterintelligence, or keeping an eye on other spies. His code name was “Carat,” and his working cover was as a cultural attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

read on . . .

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» categories: 9/11 | Censorship | Document of the Day | GWOT | Graham Rayman | Spies

Israeli Film Ruled Ineligible For Oscar

posted: October 11, 2007 2:34 EST

By Nikki Finke, LA Weekly

What was feared has come true. I reported here last month about an early controversy surrounding the Israeli movie The Band's Visit after it swept that country's Ophir Awards (that country's Oscars). Normally, this means the pic would be Israel's submission for the Academy Award's Best Foreign Language Film. But rivals were claiming that the political movie, about an Egyptian police band that mistakenly ends up stranded overnight in a small Israeli town, has more than 50% English dialogue and therefore must be ruled ineligible for the nomination.

Now Haaretz, the Israeli news agency, is reporting that The Band's Visit has indeed been disqualified. Israeli journalists say the Israeli Academy will appeal, but in all likelihood Beaufort, the runner-up for Israel's Ophir Award, will be the film nominated. But The Band's Visit's Oscar hopes could still be alive: Sony Pictures Classics, which bought the Cannes award winning film's foreign rights, may also enter the pic's Israeli writer and director Eran Kolirin in the Best Original Screenplay category.

(See my previous item "Early Controversy Over Israeli Oscar Entry.")

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» categories: Censorship | Nikki Finke | The press | Unfounded Optimism

Lee Bollinger's Triumph

posted: October 11, 2007 2:24 EST

The warfare on the Columbia president's alleged perversion of academic freedom.

By Nat Hentoff, Village Voice

With his achievements including the execution of women for alleged adultery, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to Columbia University unsurprisingly kicked up a furor here and around the world, much of it aimed at the university's president, Lee Bollinger, for inviting him.

While waiting for the show to go on, a Fox News camera outside Alfred Lerner Hall focused on a couple of students, one of whom ran down a list of some of the guest's crimes against his own people and against Americans. She angrily blamed Columbia for giving Ahmadinejad "a chance to legitimatize himself."

Standing next to her, another student disagreed, saying, "Justice Louis Brandeis used to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. What's happening right now at Columbia is a testament to that."

The second student walked away aware, I'm sure, that his was a decidedly minority view in the city, the state, and the nation. I heard no presidential candidate of either party supporting Bollinger, while there were bipartisan denunciations of him by politicians, many editorial writers, and other Americans who believe in freedom of speech—except for speech they hate.

For example, Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a long and valiant practitioner of free speech, wrote in USA Today (September 24) that having Ahmadinejad at Columbia was "a perversion of free speech." On the same day, USA Today's lead editorial was titled: "Let Iranian President Speak—To Showcase U.S. Values." (Instructively, USA Today's editor is Ken Paulson, former head of the First Amendment Center—a resource of mine—based at Vanderbilt University.)

Until now, I have not mentioned the free speech rallying cry, "the First Amendment," because Columbia is a private university and the First Amendment doesn't kick in unless there is action by an agent or agency of the state (local, state, and federal) to repress speech.

But the warfare on Lee Bollinger's alleged perversion of academic freedom has indeed become a First Amendment issue—thanks to Sheldon Silver, speaker of the New York State Assembly, and the most powerful behind-the-scenes operator in Albany.

On September 24, a front-page story in The New York Sun reported that because Lee Bollinger refused to bow to public pressure to cancel the radioactive invitation, Silver and other lawmakers "are considering withholding public funds [in the future] from [Columbia]" in protest. Said the assembly's Wizard of Oz: "We have an obligation because of the U.N. to allow [this sponsor of terrorism] to come to this country . . . We don't have to give him a forum. . . . He's clearly responsible for the deaths of Americans both in Iraq and elsewhere. And he remains as much a threat to the world as anybody today."

Added another summer soldier of the free exchange of ideas, David Weprin, chairman of New York City Council's Finance Committee: "We should," he told the Sun, "look at [our funding of] everything involving Columbia, whether it be capital projects, city and state, or other related things that we do in the city for them."

And that's a lot. The Sun's Jacob Gershman noted: "Albany awards Columbia millions of dollars a year in student financial aid. . . . Last year, Albany awarded the school $10 million for a nanotechnology center and $12 million for a cancer center in Washington Heights."

In solidarity with this proposed punishment of Lee Bollinger by our holders of the public purse, should patients at the Washington Heights cancer center now try to go elsewhere? And should this contemplated punishment of Columbia set a precedent for an Enemies' List in Albany, other states, and Washington to prevent taxpayers' money going to institutions harboring, however briefly, enemies or those linked to enemies of the United States? I expect Dick Cheney would help update such a list.

read on . . .

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» categories: Censorship | Nat Hentoff | The press

Buck Fush

posted: October 4, 2007 1:41 EST

The media’s coverage of a college newspaper’s profane two-word editorial deserves more than a few curse words.

By Michael Roberts, Westword (Denver)

"I think it's been really disheartening," says J. David McSwane about press coverage that's swirled around the Rocky Mountain Collegian, the Colorado State University-based student newspaper he edits, since an opinion banner reading "FUCK BUSH" was printed in its September 21 edition. "As a journalist, I'm extremely frustrated."

He should be. On September 25, for example, Channel 4's late newscast led off with anchor Jim Benemann stating, "The editor at the student newspaper up at CSU says he will sue if he's fired." As McSwane, who recently turned twenty, pointed out in an item he affixed to the Collegian's website, he did no such thing, since he hadn't been interviewed for the piece. Indeed, the person doing the talking was McSwane's attorney David Lane, who enjoys delivering provocative declarations; in this situation, he proclaimed, "If I can make a case that the government is putting a gag in David McSwane's mouth, they're going to federal court."

Nonetheless, Channel 4 news director Tim Wieland isn't troubled that Benemann's intro cited McSwane rather than his counsel, saying, "I'm comfortable with that" — and neither does he think the station blundered by failing to mention in this report and numerous others that McSwane helped the CBS affiliate win a prestigious Peabody Award in April 2006 and worked at the outlet as a paid investigative producer (not just an intern). Full disclosure is typically deemed a journalistic necessity, yet Wieland maintains that staffers initially felt McSwane's previous association with the outlet wasn't "germane" to the Collegian brouhaha, and only decided that it might provide "context" in some instances after skipping over it during three full days of reporting. Westword has a McSwane connection as well. In September 2005, the paper ran his feature "An Army of Anyone," which built upon the investigation that earned Channel 4 its Peabody: As a student journalist at Arvada West High School, McSwane posed as a pot-smoking dropout interested in joining the Army in order to document the dubious lengths to which recruiters were willing to go to get him into uniform. He was awarded with an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) prize for his high-school efforts and the Westword offering, which ran alongside a companion article written by yours truly that focused on recruiting in the wake of the scandal McSwane stirred. I also guested alongside McSwane on a KHOW talk-show segment hosted by Peter Boyles.

Is any of that germane? Damn right it is — because it gives news consumers the maximum amount of information, rather than treating them like children incapable of putting details into perspective. Then again, McSwane understands why Channel 4 took the tack it did. "Of course they're distancing themselves from me," he says. "If I was them, I'd distance myself from something like this, too."

McSwane and many of his Collegian colleagues set out to cause a commotion, albeit not as large a one as developed: "I didn't think it would go national," he admits. Too bad their concept was so clumsy. They were incensed about a September 17 incident in Florida in which disruptive college student Andrew Meyer was forcibly prevented from quizzing Massachusetts Senator John Kerry; a video of Meyer's "Don't tase me, bro!" plea to security officers quickly became a YouTube sensation. But after penning the ardent defense of free speech that appeared on the September 21 Collegian cover, they felt they should underline their point by exercising this right in the boldest way possible. Hence, the "FUCK BUSH" line, which McSwane says was intended as a "wake-up call" to students who passively accept the status quo instead of voicing their views, as college enrollees have in decades past.

Predictably, the decision to target George W. Bush, who was only peripherally related to the Florida dust-up (Meyer wanted to know if Kerry and the president had been in Yale's Skull and Bones society), transformed the editorial into a culture-war blast of the sort that sucks up far too much of the media's attention these days. "Fuck Bush" bumperstickers have been around for years, and the profane part of the expression is extraordinarily commonplace in settings like college campuses. But that didn't stop CSU student Republicans such as student Chelsey Penoyer from taking advantage of this golden opportunity for attention-getting by organizing protests against McSwane and hitting the media circuit.

read on . . .

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» categories: Bush regime | Censorship | Michael Roberts | The press