U.S. urges insurers to implement Iran sanctions
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 10 Sep 2008
Summary: The United States has been interpreting three U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions as broadly as possible and has long been pushing global financial institutions to sever ties with Iran due to suspicions it has a covert nuclear weapons program, diplomats and government officials have said. In recent months, diplomats in New York say, Washington and its European allies have turned their attention on the insurance industry so that the world’s top insurers would refrain from providing coverage to Iranian companies or firms doing business with Iran. source: Reutersread more

US slaps sanctions on Iranian shipping firm
Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) - 10 Sep 2008
Summary: The action means that any bank accounts or other financial assets belonging to the company that are found in the United States are frozen. Americans also are forbidden from doing business with the company and its affiliates in Iran and at least nine other countries, including Britain, Belgium, China, Egypt, Italy, Germany, Malta, Singapore and South Korea. source: APread more

Letters from an Abu Ghraib Interrogator
AlterNet: War on Iraq - 10 Sep 2008
How an interrogator working for the U.S. Army had a spiritual awakening at Iraq’s most notorious prison.

Newspaper stories say Muslims are ‘a threat’
UKWatch.net - 10 Sep 2008
A new report has found that, since 2000, two thirds of newspaper articles about Muslims in Britain portray British Muslims as either ‘a threat’ or ‘problem’ and increasingly utilise negative and stereotypical imagery. The forty-page report, entitled Images of Islam in the UK, set out to analyse a representative sample of newspaper articles in British tabloids and broadsheets between 2000 and 2008. In particular the authors, the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, sought to engage with the ‘routine, everyday coverage of British Muslims’ over and above the coverage which occurred around key events, such as 11 September 2001 attacks and 7 July 2005 London bombings. A growing focus Coverage of British Muslims was shown to have increased significantly year on year, and by 2006 had reached a level twelve times higher than that in 2000. In both 2007 and 2008 coverage continued above 2005 rates, although it had dipped slightly from the peak in 2006. The authors describe how this coverage generated a momentum all of its own, ‘lasting well beyond and independent of’ the newsworthy events of 2001 and 2005. Consistently negative ‘news hook’ At the same time the report found that the context in which British Muslims were portrayed was of a consistently negative nature. The main focus, or ‘news hook’, for a third of stories on British Muslims was either terrorism or the ‘war on terror’ over the period of the survey, whilst religious and cultural stories highlighting the cultural differences between British Muslims and other British people amounted to 22 per cent. Eleven per cent of all stories focused on Muslim extremism. In stark contrast, only 5 per cent of all stories covered ‘attacks on or problems for British Muslims’ and ‘the notion of Islamophobia scarcely featured as a news topic’. A significant yet subtle shift in story focus involves the steady increase in the proportion of stories which focus on religious and cultural differences, to such a degree that by 2008 these stories had overtaken terrorism as the single largest subject matter. It could be argued that this change in focus reflects the shift in British government policy, under the cloak of the ‘community cohesion’ framework, which quietly insinuates that ‘British’ and ‘Muslim’ are mutually exclusive identities. The knock-on effect is that coverage of stories about anti-Muslim racism and attacks on British Muslims are elbowed out: from 10 per cent in 2000 to only 1 per cent in 2008. Pervasive cultural stereotyping The report found that four of the five most common story threads associated Islam and/or Muslims ‘with threats, problems or in opposition to dominant British values’ whilst only 2 per cent of these stories suggested ‘that Muslims supported dominant moral values’. In particular, the report highlights a number of stories which frame Britain as ‘becoming a place of Muslim-only, “no-go” areas, where churches were being replaced by mosques, and Sharia law would soon be implemented’. This insidious perception of Islam as a threat or a problem was further enhanced by the choice of descriptive language in the articles surveyed: the most common nouns employed in relation to Islam or Muslims were ‘terrorist’ or ‘extremist’ whilst the most widely used adjectives included ‘fanatical’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘radical’ and ‘militant’. In all, ‘references to radical Muslims outnumber references to moderate Muslims by 17 to one’. This choice of descriptive language was consistently used by both broadsheet and tabloid newspapers. ‘Single Muslim male’ or ‘unidentified male Muslim group’ The newspaper articles surveyed also appeared to rely on a stock set of images: that of the ‘single Muslim male’ or ‘a group of unidentified Muslim men’, often portrayed as either praying or preaching. The insinuation behind these portrayals of groups of Muslim men is, states the report, that they are ‘the object of rather than the source of statements’. Moreover, ‘a group of unidentified Muslim men is seen as an image that “speaks for itself”’: British Muslims are portrayed as one undifferentiated mass. Islamophobic discourse A recent report by the Institute of Race Relations, entitled Integration, Islamophobia and civil rights in Europe, concluded that the presence of an Islamophobic discourse across Europe was ‘the primary barrier to integration’. This discourse was, the report found, constructed and disseminated ‘by political parties, the media and the “liberati” in pursuit of an assimilationist agenda’. The findings of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies complement and support these conclusions. Images of Islam in the UK makes for a stimulating and thought-provoking read. It is delicately argued and convincingly supported by a powerful body of evidence, and effectively demonstrates the degree to which the portrayal of British Muslims in the print media has been hijacked by an Islamophobic climate, which resorts to lazy racial stereotyping and the repetition of negative and damaging stock stories.

NUJ film shows police obstruction of journalists
UKWatch.net - 10 Sep 2008
The NUJ has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations. View it here The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job. Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: ?Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.? The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work. Release of the film follows numerous complaints from media workers who have experiences of the police going beyond their powers in attempting to restrict the ability of journalists to do their work. The NUJ?s motion to the TUC was part of a wider campaign for a greater recognition of press freedom by the UK government. The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information. In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent. Jeremy said: ?The terrorising of journalists isn?t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin. ?The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists? material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.? The speech concluded: ?This isn?t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom ? and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers. ?And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media ? already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting ? to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised. ?The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies ? they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government. ?As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq ? not just the billions spent on war ? but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers? charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use. ?The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has. ?Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.?