Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Putin and the Press
by Katrina vanden Heuvel With Russia's parliamentary elections scheduled for December 2 and the pro-Kremlin United Russia party expected to win an overwhelming majority in the voting, President Vladimir Putin has intensified attacks on his opponents -- most recently, accusing them of being in the pocket of Western governments. Most of the country's state-run media have fallen in line.
Attacks on opposition forces are not confined to verbal demonization. On November 21, Farid Babayev -- the head of the Yabloko party ticket in Dagestan was shot at the entrance of his apartment building.
Babayev, a human rights activist and fierce critic of the United Russia party and local authorities, died on November 24. That same day, Garry Kasparov, one of the leaders of the opposition coalition Other Russia, was arrested in Moscow and sentenced to five days in jail for leading an unsanctioned street march on Russia's Central Election Commission. (City officials had given the coalition permission to hold a rally but not a march.)
There's a war on across the country over who will be allowed to vote in 2008. One of the key battles in the election was fought on January 9 before the Supreme Court.
The case is called Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. It tests an Indiana statute, passed in 2005, requiring voters to present a government-issued ID before they can cast a ballot. The law is aimed at alleged fraudulent voting by unregistered or noncitizen voters. Republicans insist that these voters pose a major problem, despite the fact that every systematic study of the question has concluded that this kind of fraud--called "voter impersonation"--is all but unknown in the United States right now.
In fact, authorities in Indiana could not point to a single case of voter impersonation in the state's history.
A View From the Gallows
by Antony Black I don’t believe in capital punishment - as a rule. But I’m willing to make a few exceptions for our fearless leaders, indeed all the fearless leaders, who have so willingly prosecuted the totally bogus ‘war on terror’; who have, under the banner of peace, democracy and civilization, waged a ruthless campaign of war, terror and barbarism.
Now, truth to tell, I would likely give a moments pause before the gallows floor gaped open - on general humanitarian grounds you understand - though the obscene roll-call of their crimes would, I suspect, soon seal the court’s resolve.
Aldergrove man charged with murder of 2 prostitutes
by CBC News British Columbia RCMP have charged a 29-year-old man with two counts of second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of two sex-trade workers in the Fraser Valley.
The body of Sheryl Lynn Korrol, 50, was found July 7, 2007, in a business district of Langley, B.C.
(CBC)
Davey Mato Butorac was arrested over the weekend and charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Gwendolyn Jo Lawton and Sheryl Lynn Korrol, whose bodies were found last year at different times in Abbotsford and Langley, respectively.
Butorac is expected to make a court appearance later Monday.
Don't Cry for Venezuela's RCTV
by Charlie Hardy As I write this, I am looking at a Venezuelan newspaper, El Diario, from February 10, 1992. The editorial that would have occupied half of page 2 is missing. Page 4 is completely blank. The contents were censored by the government of the then president Carlos Andres Perez.
The newspaper is just one of many horrible memories of the pre-Hugo Chavez days in Venezuela’s “exceptional” democracy.
U.S. newspapers seem to overlook what Venezuela used to be like as they today discuss the actions of the current government. I have lived in Venezuela for most of the past 22 years and have never experienced such freedom as that which the Venezuelan population enjoys today under Hugo Chavez.
Below
is a reprise from June 2003, which appeared on CounterPunch and in my
Moscow Times column, a piece that was not included in the Empire Burlesque book.
It is a general argument that tries, briefly, to get at some of the
deeper issues underlying the bedevilments of the age, which, as noted
below, are by no means exclusive to our modern times.
We meant no offense to any Christian readers with our recent blast at the crude fundamentalism now riding herd on the American government and large swathes of American society as well ("Devil's Advocate," Counterpunch, May 31, 2003). We realize that it is not the fault of Jesus Christ or
even the Apostle Paul – that seminal master of marketing who repackaged
Jesus' harsh and quirky parochial ascetism into a handy
one-size-fits-all panacea for existential ills – that fanatics like
Bush and Company believe there is only one immutable Truth about
reality, which they just happen to possess.
It
is, of course, the fault of Plato, whose poetic fantasy of a changeless
Perfection behind the messiness of physical existence infected the
Western mind with the germ of ideological intolerance. For if Perfect
Truth exists, then it can be known, and once known, it must necessarily
be acknowledged as the sole measure, explanation and arbiter of "all of
life and all of history," as Mr. Bush likes to say.
With
Plato begins the slow death of the old gods: those powerful evocations
who in their conflicts and contradictions, their lusts and doubts,
their recklessness, sorrows, tempers – and manifold imperfections
– surely embodied the seething chaos of human reality far better than
the degraded Platonic idealism adopted by the Pauline Christians. We
leave aside here Jesus' ethical teachings, which despite millennia of
lip service have never been adopted or even taken seriously by any
society throughout history – although a few of Paul's more cranky
notions about sex and obedience (especially his ever-popular
injunction, "Slaves, obey your masters!") have been enthusiastically
embraced by Western rulers since the days of the murderous Constantine
the Great down to our present age, presided over by the warmongering
Christian Coalition of Bush and Blair.
Escalation or surge, look those words up in the dictionary and apply them to the situation in Iraq, to the re-deployment of National Guard troops, compare that fact to the complete avoidance of regular troops stationed around the world and you begin to get a picture of the terminology, you get an idea of the american economy becoming more and more local as skilled technicans are re-located to repeat tours in what could be certian death.
Edmund Burke wrote,
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
But what is the opposite of that quote? For bad men to do their worst? For good men to encourage or to only do what is required by law? When is force required to stop the abhorrence of evil? In Iraq it is whenever you are fired upon if it is humanly possible. If you can run, you run. Held to a higher standard is one way we describe our fighting men and women. That is one way we describe our means of waging war. All of that ended more or less with the waging of the current war in Iraq and the Bush administration. Still we hold our troops to a higher standard but who will hold their superiors to that same level of achievement?
John Nichols puts current movement for impeachment into historical context:
Cindy Sheehan:
Daniel Ellsberg on How Campaigns to Cut off War Funds and Impeach Criminal Presidents Help Each Other and Can Best Succeed in Tandem (Introduced by David Swanson):
Daniel Ellsberg on Bush and Hitler Seizing Right to Read Anyone's Mail:
Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights:
Exxon Suxx. McCain Duxx
by Greg Palast Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.
Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives.
Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.
Venezuela’s D-Day: The December 2, 2007 Constituent Referendum
by James Petras On November 26, 2007 the Venezuelan government broadcast and circulated a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations and which will influence the referendum this Sunday (December 2, 2007).
The memo sent by an embassy official, Michael Middleton Steere, was addressed to the head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. The memo was entitled ‘Advancing to the Last Phase of Operation Pincer’ and updates the activity by a CIA unit with the acronym ‘HUMINT’ (Human Intelligence) which is engaged in clandestine action to destabilize the forth-coming referendum and coordinate the civil military overthrow of the elected Chavez government.
"Myth" of Voter Fraud Focus of Senate Hearing
by Jason Leopold Last year, during the height of the Congressional investigation into the firings of US attorneys, David Iglesias and John McKay, two of the nine federal prosecutors who were ousted, revealed that they were pressured by Republicans to bring charges of vote fraud against people who intended to vote for Democrats in separate elections in New Mexico and Washington state several years ago.
Iglesias and McKay said they investigated the allegations but did not find evidence to support charges of voter fraud leveled by Republicans. Both men believe their refusal to convene a federal criminal grand jury to pursue the allegations led to their ouster.
“Agenda” is about right. How does 33 dead over a two and a half hour spree on a campus crawling with cops count as “very effective” and “very successful”?
About the same way as V-Tech is now apparently about “breaking down bureaucratic barriers among the courts, the school and the state as it relates to mental health information.”
by Lila Rajiva Dan Brown at the Huffington Post writes that there are only two ways to go on the Virginia Tech killings, ("Virginia Tech: Two Potential Paths, April 16) - either citizens will be encouraged to spy on each other and report suspicious behavior - the paranoid response, he calls it, or we tighten up gun laws that allow people to get as many guns as they want whenever they want it.
Talk about false alternatives. Would you really have to have been paranoid to have stopped some one like Cho Seung-Hui?
Dangerous Crossroads: US Sponsored War Games
by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) has announced the conduct of major war games under Vigilant Shield 2008 (VS-08).
Vigilant
Shield 2008 (15 to 20 October, 2007) is designed to deal with a
"terrorist" or "natural disaster" scenario in the United States. The
operation will be coordinated in a joint endeavor by the Pentagon and
the Department of Homeland Security.
Yet, VS-08, which
includes a massive deployment of the US Air Force resembles a war-time
air scenario rather than an anti-terrorist drill. The VS-08 war games
extend over the entire North American shelf. Canadian territory is also
involved through Canada's participation in NORAD. (See Nazemroaya,
October 2007)
Jimmy Carter was the latest to use the M Word. The former president said he
believes the "occupancy of Iraq and all the consequences of it are a big
mistake." This echoes John Kerry's infamous 1971 question: "How do you ask a
man to die for a mistake?" Hmm...perhaps recalling a few details about the
Vietnam "mistake" might shine some light on the Iraq "blunder."
In 1954, Vice President Richard Nixon explained the need for U.S.
intervention in Southeast Asia: "The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct
a war or govern themselves." Over the next two decades, the U.S. (by
mistake?) dropped the equivalent of one 500-pound bomb for every person
living in Vietnam. (Those bomber doors really needed better latches.) In
1966, David Lawrence, editor of U.S. News & World Report, wrote: "What the
United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of
philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our
times." When challenged with stories of American atrocities in Vietnam,
Lawrence corrected his little gaffe, "Primitive peoples with savagery in
their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized
existence." When at war with savages, you can rationalize dumping 400,000
tons of napalm on them.
What Americans (mistakenly) called the "Viet Cong" was really the National
Liberation Front (NLF) and the NLF enjoyed the broad support of the
Vietnamese people. In response, the U.S. Army began, as author Mark
Zepezauer explains, "destroying villages, herding people into internment
camps, weeding out the leaders and turning the countryside into a 'free-fire
zone' (in other words, shoot anything that moves)."
VFP LIGHTS THE WAY
by Mike Ferner
With the Republican Convention following hard on their annual meeting in this city, Veterans For Peace adopted two resolutions last week effectively firing signal flares into the path of whoever wins this November’s election, regardless of party.
The first was a resolution on Afghanistan, submitted by VFP president, Elliott Adams, which is likely to become a guidepost for a peace movement now almost exclusively concentrating on Iraq.
Veterans For Peace deliver 23,000 impeachment petitions to
House Judiciary Chair Conyers
by Mike Ferner
Yesterday, a 17-member delegation of Veterans For Peace resented some 23,000 petitions to Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), demanding the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Conyers, chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, is the Member of Congress with the authority to call for impeachment hearings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyQhZ8pSVZM
Also Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to send the 35 Articles of Impeachment, submitted Monday evening by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) to theJudiciary Committee for consideration and hearings.
Groups say DVBIA, Civil City actions discriminatory
by Pivot
Pivot Legal Society, VANDU and the United Native Nations have filed a Human Rights complaint against the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) and Geoff Plant in his role as Civil City Commissioner.
The complaint is filed on behalf of Vancouver’s street homeless population and alleges systemic discrimination by the Downtown Ambassadors program, which is run by Genesis Security and the DVBIA under the guidance of Geoff Plant.
“Our constituents have had some concerns about the program for a while,” said Pivot lawyer Laura Track, “However, the expansion of the program by Geoff Plant and the upcoming Olympics has pushed us to try to clarify the rules around private security guard conduct in relation to the homeless.”
No Smooth Sailing for PNWER Elites: Marina Entrance Blocked by Activists
by NOII Van A group of activists blocked access to the Westin Bayshore marina on Wednesday July 23 to protest the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER) summit.
“[PNWER] has had a profound impact on policymaking.” - Hon. Stockwell Day,
Canada’s Minister of Public Safety
In doing so, they prevented PNWER delegates from boarding a 190-person luxury boat tour of the Vancouver harbour. Approximately 10 people stood with a banner reading People Not Profit! and prevented access to the luxury yacht though the public boardwalk.
No, organized anarchism is not an oxymoron! And no, anarchism is not synonymous with chaos. Rather, anarchists seek to organize in a federated, that is, non-hierarchical, system that allows for self-governance.
The core values of mutual aid and autonomy dictate that each individual has the intrinsic right to exercise her or his own will, but that as a corporate body, individuals work to support each other.
As such, the local anarchists have been working hard all summer to bring together the Festival of Anarchy, September 7th through 12th, and the 3rd Annual Anarchist Bookfair, September 13th and 14th. The Festival is a week of events leading up the Bookfair.
Viking and Samurai Whale Killers Defy International Law
by Capt. Paul Watson
Without warning the Icelandic government authorized Icelandic whalers to begin their killing on May 20th in direct defiance of the global moratorium on commercial whaling.
Iceland has rejoined the trinity of whale killing nations along with Japan and Norway. The three rogue whale killing nations have thumbed their noses at the international community to continue a criminal barbaric practice that has been outlawed under international law.
The Iraq-gate Cover-up Continues
by Robert Parry In another show trial for Saddam Hussein’s compatriots – followed by more death sentences – an unnoted success for George W. Bush was how the U.S. press corps has continued to avert its eyes from the role of Westerners, including Bush’s father, in aiding and abetting Hussein’s murderous regime.
Major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, reported on the June 24 death sentences meted out to Ali Hassan al-Majeed and two other senior Hussein aides without a single mention of the American role in helping arm and protect the Iraqi regime in the 1980s.
Ah, Valentine’s Day approaches again — a good time to review one’s love life. Memories long buried may emerge, if one goes deep enough.
Over 40 years ago I was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, following the tradition of the many fighting men of my family who went into the military. I did basic training at Ft. Riley, Kansas, home of the Big Red One, First Division. During those turbulent sixties I took an oath to defend my country and its Constitution. I have kept that oath.
I have a short story to tell. It’s a veterans’, plural, love story. It combines my experiences with those of various members of our Veterans’ Writing Group, lead by author Maxine Hong Kingston. I tell it partly to plead for forgiveness for myself and others caught in war and for the things we do. Our story begins as a nightmare. Please stay with it to the end, through the difficulties. Love can be difficult, yet eventually can triumph.
***********
“AT EASE!” the young lieutenant barks at our rifle squads, tired from a long march. We are outside Da Nang.
"Fall out, ten minute break," his voice softens. We step off the trail and draw candy bars and cigarettes from our packs.
“You, soldier!” he points in my face.
“Yes sir!” I stiffen to attention.
“See that cave?”
“Yes sir!”
“Charlie’s in there. He’s hiding. Hunt him down. Smoke him out!”
On December 28, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias delivered his annual "greeting speech" to the National Armed Forces (FAN) and announced the operating license of TV station Radio Caracas Television (known as RCTV) broadcasting on VHF Channel 2 won't be renewed when it expires on May 27, 2007. The station played a leading role, along with the other four major commercial private television channels in the country controlling 90% of the TV market, in instigating and supporting the 2002 aborted two-day coup against President Chavez. Later in the year they acted together again in similar fashion as an active participant in the economically destructive 2002-03 main trade union confederation (CTV) - chamber of commerce (Fedecameras) lockout and industry-wide oil strike that included sabotage against the state oil company PDVSA costing it overall an estimated $14 billion in lost revenue and damage.
A collaborative alliance of the five media "majors" that include Globovision, Televen, CMT and Venevision (owned by billionaire strident anti-Chavista Gustavo Cisneros who's called the Rupert Murdoch of Latin America because of his vast media holdings) along with RCTV began their anti-Chavez campaign soon after Hugo Chavez assumed office in 1999. In addition, 9 of the 10 major national dailies were part of the joint corporate effort to harm Chavez's popular support and undermine his legitimacy even before he had a chance to implement his socially democratic agenda now flourishing under his Bolivarian Revolution. It included the country's new Constitution and all vital social missions it gave birth to and now deliver essential services to the people who never had them before including free health and dental care and education to the highest level - for everyone mandated by law.
The corporate media alliance, that included RCTV, had prior knowledge of the April, 2002 coup plot that was apparent from the front page of national daily El Nacional in a special day of the coup April 11 edition of the paper printed before it began and headlined: The Final Battle Will Be in Miraflores (the presidential palace). The same day, another daily, The Daily Journal (an English language paper), headlined on its front page (also printed in advance of the coup's initiation): State of Agony Stunts Government.
"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.
The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.
We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show
Advertise 
With Russia's parliamentary elections scheduled for December 2 and the pro-Kremlin United Russia party expected to win an overwhelming majority in the voting, President Vladimir Putin has intensified attacks on his opponents -- most recently, accusing them of being in the pocket of Western governments. Most of the country's state-run media have fallen in line.
I don’t believe in capital punishment - as a rule. But I’m willing to make a few exceptions for our fearless leaders, indeed all the fearless leaders, who have so willingly prosecuted the totally bogus ‘war on terror’; who have, under the banner of peace, democracy and civilization, waged a ruthless campaign of war, terror and barbarism. 
British Columbia RCMP have charged a 29-year-old man with two counts of second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of two sex-trade workers in the Fraser Valley.
As I write this, I am looking at a Venezuelan newspaper, El Diario, from February 10, 1992. The editorial that would have occupied half of page 2 is missing. Page 4 is completely blank. The contents were censored by the government of the then president Carlos Andres Perez. 
Escalation or surge, look those words up in the dictionary and apply them to the situation in Iraq, to the re-deployment of National Guard troops, compare that fact to the complete avoidance of regular troops stationed around the world and you begin to get a picture of the terminology, you get an idea of the american economy becoming more and more local as skilled technicans are re-located to repeat tours in what could be certian death. 
Nineteen goddamn years is enough. I’m sorry if you don’t like my language, but when I think about what they did to Paul Kompkoff, I’m in no mood to nicey-nice words.
On November 26, 2007 the Venezuelan government broadcast and circulated a confidential memo from the US embassy to the CIA which is devastatingly revealing of US clandestine operations and which will influence the referendum this Sunday (December 2, 2007).
“Agenda” is about right. How does 33 dead over a two and a half hour spree on a campus crawling with cops count as “very effective” and “very successful”?
Dan Brown at the Huffington Post writes that there are only two ways to go on the Virginia Tech killings, ("Virginia Tech: Two Potential Paths, April 16) - either citizens will be encouraged to spy on each other and report suspicious behavior - the paranoid response, he calls it, or we tighten up gun laws that allow people to get as many guns as they want whenever they want it.
U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) has announced the conduct of major war games under Vigilant Shield 2008 (VS-08). 
Jimmy Carter was the latest to use the M Word. The former president said he
believes the "occupancy of Iraq and all the consequences of it are a big
mistake." This echoes John Kerry's infamous 1971 question: "How do you ask a
man to die for a mistake?" Hmm...perhaps recalling a few details about the
Vietnam "mistake" might shine some light on the Iraq "blunder."
A group of activists blocked access to the Westin Bayshore marina on Wednesday July 23 to protest the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER) summit. 
In another show trial for Saddam Hussein’s compatriots – followed by more death sentences – an unnoted success for George W. Bush was how the U.S. press corps has continued to avert its eyes from the role of Westerners, including Bush’s father, in aiding and abetting Hussein’s murderous regime.
Ah, Valentine’s Day approaches again — a good time to review one’s love life. Memories long buried may emerge, if one goes deep enough. 
On December 28, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias delivered his annual "greeting speech" to the National Armed Forces (FAN) and announced the operating license of TV station Radio Caracas Television (known as RCTV) broadcasting on VHF Channel 2 won't be renewed when it expires on May 27, 2007. The station played a leading role, along with the other four major commercial private television channels in the country controlling 90% of the TV market, in instigating and supporting the 2002 aborted two-day coup against President Chavez. Later in the year they acted together again in similar fashion as an active participant in the economically destructive 2002-03 main trade union confederation (CTV) - chamber of commerce (Fedecameras) lockout and industry-wide oil strike that included sabotage against the state oil company PDVSA costing it overall an estimated $14 billion in lost revenue and damage.
"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. 
