Thousands protest National Association of Broadcasters

Compiled by AGR staff from independent media reports

San Francisco, California, Friday, Sept. 22— Thousands of free speech activists protested against the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) during its annual convention this weekend. People arrived to attend rallies and speeches sponsored by various organizations as early as Wednesday, Sept. 20, while direct actions at the convention began Friday morning.

At 7:30 am, about 100 media reformers chanted outside the Moscone Center while others laid down a giant “media monopoly” board, with placards representing the world’s biggest media properties and their annual revenues. Inside, activists disrupted the NAB’s FCC Congressional Breakfast by grabbing the microphone from NAB President Eddie Fritts. Andrea Buffa, executive director of San Francisco’s Media Alliance, made the statement that, “The airwaves are for the public, not the corporations,” before being forcibly removed from the stage.

Outside, four protesters locked themselves together with kryptonite bike locks around their necks and blockaded the front door of the building. The demonstrators pushed open the door and locked down inside the Moscone’s lobby.
“We are sick and tired of corporate media totally monopolizing and dominating the public’s airwaves,” said Jesse Nason of Santa Cruz, CA, one of the activists who participated in the lock down. “The FCC has given away not only our radio and TV airwaves, but also the digital spectrum.”

Nason also cited the heavy lobbying the NAB does to both political parties as one source of its corruption and immense influence over the FCC regulators.

“We are sending out a call for the FCC to move forward with their micro-radio proposal which would begin to democratize the airwaves, at least it’s a small start,” said Nason. “That’s the direction we want the FCC to move in. It was really very satisfying to disrupt the conference.”

Nason (above center with glasses) told Asheville Global Report that he was charged with two felonies; conspiracy and property damage over $50,000; and two misdemeanors; trespassing and delaying (similar to resisting arrest). Later on Friday, three National Lawyers Guild attorneys representing these activists were denied access to their clients and arrested for refusing to obey their ban from the Hall of Justice.

Nason spent 29 hours in jail. All charges were later dropped.

On Friday afternoon, nine activists were arrested during the course of a march and rally on Clear Channel Communications. When the marchers reached their destination, two members of KYLD’s “Dog House” morning show crew came out of the building and attempted to initiate a physical fight with protesters, verbally abusing and shoving protesters. Police did not attempt to discourage the KYLD crew’s aggression.

Shortly thereafter, as marchers began to voluntarily disperse, police arrested two more. One, activist Jason Buhle, was tackled by police and violently forced to the ground; he had been walking quietly and did not resist. Officers did not respond to requests that they stop hurting Buhle, who indicated that he was in pain, and would not answer questions about why he was being arrested.

“Ever since the NAB was founded 78 years ago, they have been acting against the public interest,” said Steve Rendall, senior analyst for media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). “At every turn the NAB is strategically between the people and their property: the airwaves.” Rendall was one of those arrested during the march to KYLD; he was attempting to comply with a police order to move from the street to the sidewalk at the time.

“When police abuse our laws to arrest peaceful, cooperative protesters for jaywalking, it has the alarming potential to chill free speech,” says FAIR’s Program Director, Janine Jackson. “It’s darkly ironic in this case, since the rallies are meant to remind the NAB that the airwaves belong to the public, and that free speech and democracy are at risk when media’s priority is profit, not the public interest.”

The National Organization of Women (NOW) joined in the four days of protest against the NAB with a rally and press conference designed to call attention to the impact the media have on women and girls.

NOW President Patricia Ireland sharply rebuked the commercial media for conveying to women the message that “there’s something wrong with every part of us-from our eyebrows, to our noses, to our lips, to our chest, to our waist, to our thighs.

“We want to also let the NAB know that we’re aware and we’re going to make everybody else aware that they’re blocking micro radio,” said Ireland. “We reject the stereotypical and exploitative images of women and girls, and we need to reject the NAB’s campaign to prevent independent voices.”

Saturday’s events included a rally attended by thousands of micro radio advocates and others upset about corporate control of the airwaves. From the rally, activists marched down Market and Powell Streets, then streamed into Union Square to hear a concert called “Broadcast This!”

Earlier in the day, micro radio supporters attended the National Public Radio (NPR) Board of Directors meeting to chastise NPR for lobbying against Low Power FM radio (LPFM). Media reform groups and public radio listeners called on the NPR board to change its position, and encouraged NPR listeners to withhold pledges until NPR ends its opposition to LPFM.

After the concert, protesters took to the streets chanting “What do we want? Free Speech! When do we want it? Now!” and “Whose media? Our media!” and marched to the Hilton Hotel to speak directly to the NAB. Thirty police in riot gear stood guard at the Hilton and prevented protesters from entering. Inside the hotel, the NAB, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the United States, presented its Marconi Radio Awards to radio personalities including Rush Limbaugh, who won “Network Syndicated Personality of the Year.”

“We are here in San Francisco to remind the FCC of their mandate to regulate the airwaves in the public interest. The airwaves belong to the people, but when we turn on our radios, we realize that our airwaves are controlled by corporations who are using this resource for private interest, greed, and profit,” said Greg Ruggiero, an editor at Seven Stories Press in New York. “Public access to communications is a non-negotiable demand in a democratic society.”

Protesters take over office of Commission on Presidential Debates

Washington, DC, Sept. 21— A group of protesters invaded and occupied the DC office of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) on Wednesday, Sept. 20, making some startling discoveries about the extent of the CPD’s secretive and anti-democratic nature.

Meanwhile, the weekly lunchtime demonstrations against the CPD continued on Thursday, Sept. 21, in front of the CPD’s office building at 1200 New Hampshire Avenue NW, in outrage at the exclusion of Ralph Nader and other third party candidates from the presidential debates.

Last week’s protest (Sept. 14) drew even more participants than the week before, including Jamin Raskin, Mr. Nader’s attorney in his lawsuit against the CPD, and John Anderson, independent presidential candidate in 1980 and currently president of the Center for Voting and Democracy.
The Man in a Chicken Suit (pictured left) also returned to mock Al Gore’s and George W. Bush’s cowardly fear of facing Mr. Nader, a notoriously expert debater.

The six members of the Open Debate Society who committed civil disobedience on Wednesday morning discovered that the CPD office uses two front groups, Wagner Communications and Brewer Consulting Group, and does not post its name on the office door or at any entrance to the building.

An employee of the office tried to disavow the office’s connection with the CPD, until the protesters found a box of pamphlets produced by the CPD, titled “Inside the Debates.” Another employee defended the CPD as a “public” and “nonpartisan” organization, despite its control by the Democratic and Republican Parties and funding by major corporations.

The DC protests have been called by The Open Debate Society, a group organized by members of the Maryland Green Party, the DC Statehood Green Party, the Alliance for Democracy, the Washington Action Group, and others who see the Commission’s policy as an insult to American democratic values and fair elections, and an assault on the right of voters to know about candidates whose names they’ll see on most or all state ballots.

The Open Debate Society calls the CPD –which is funded mainly by Anheuser-Busch, 3 Com, and US Airways — an illegitimate body with an interest in barring third party candidates.

According to The New York Times (Feb. 19, 1987), Democratic Party chair and CPD co-founder Paul Kirk said “he personally believed the panel should exclude third-party candidates from the debates.”

The nature of the CPD, under the exclusive control of Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush, contradicts Mr. Gore’s attempt to portray himself as an anti-corporate populist.

“The media has got to cover this issue. It is not so important that George Bush cannot speak English. It is not so important which Vice Presidential candidate is crossing the church-state divide today. What is important is whether or not we are going to have a real political debate and dialogue in the year 2000,” said Jamie Raskin, Professor of Law at American University of Washington, DC.

At least a hundred conscientious and outraged citizens had gathered outside the CPD office building. This was the third in an ongoing series of weekly demonstrations.

George H.W. Bush, the CIA, and state terrorism

By Robert Parry

In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, DC, George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other US media outlets, was planted despite the CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.

In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.

The new report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.

In the new report, the CIA also acknowledged publicly for the first time that it consulted Contreras in October 1976 about the Letelier assassination. The report added that the CIA was aware of the alleged Chilean government role in the murders and included that suspicion in an internal cable the same month.

“CIA’s first intelligence report containing this allegation was dated 6 October 1976,” a little more than two weeks after the bombing, the CIA disclosed.

Nevertheless, the CIA – then under CIA director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.

Relying on the word of Bush’s CIA, Newsweek reported that “the Chilean secret police were not involved” in the Letelier assassination. “The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing US support, could only damage the Santiago regime.” [Newsweek, Oct. 11, 1976]

Bush, who later became president of the United States and is the father of the current Republican nominee for the presidency, has never explained his role in putting out the false cover story that diverted attention away from the real terrorists. Nor has Bush explained what he knew about the Chilean intelligence operation in the weeks before Letelier and Moffitt were killed.

Dodging disclosure

As a Newsweek correspondent in 1988, a dozen years later, when the elder Bush was running for president, I prepared a detailed story about Bush’s handling of the Letelier case.

The draft story included the first account from US intelligence sources that Contreras was a CIA asset in the mid-1970s. I also learned that the CIA had consulted Contreras about the Letelier assassination, information that the CIA then would not confirm.

The sources told me that the CIA sent its Santiago station chief, Wiley Gilstrap, to talk with Contreras after the bombing. Gilstrap then cabled back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Contreras’s assurances that the Chilean government was not involved. Contreras told Gilstrap that the most likely killers were communists who wanted to make a martyr out of Letelier.

My story draft also described how Bush’s CIA had been forewarned in 1976 about DINA’s secret plans to send agents, including the assassin Michael Townley, into the United States on false passports.

Upon learning of this strange mission, the US ambassador to Paraguay, George Landau, cabled Bush about Chile’s claim that Townley and another agent were traveling to CIA headquarters for a meeting with Bush’s deputy, Vernon Walters. Landau also forwarded copies of the false passports to the CIA.

Walters cabled back that he was unaware of any scheduled appointment with these Chilean agents. Landau immediately canceled the visas, but Townley simply altered his plans and continued on his way to the United States. After arriving, he enlisted some right-wing Cuban-Americans in the Letelier plot and went to Washington to plant the bomb under Letelier’s car.

The CIA has never explained what action it took, if any, after receiving Landau’s warning. A natural follow-up would have been to contact DINA and ask what was afoot or whether a message about the trip had been misdirected. The new CIA report made no mention of these aspects of the case.

After the assassination, Bush promised the CIA’s full cooperation in tracking down the Letelier-Moffitt killers. But instead the CIA took contrary actions, such as planting the false exoneration and withholding evidence that would have implicated the Chilean junta.

“Nothing the agency gave us helped us to break this case,” said federal prosecutor Eugene Propper in a 1988 interview for the story I was drafting for Newsweek. The CIA never volunteered Ambassador Landau’s cable about the suspicious DINA mission nor copies of the fake passports that included a photo of Townley, the chief assassin. Nor did Bush’s CIA divulge its knowledge of the existence of Operation Condor.

FBI agents in Washington and Latin America broke the case two years later. They discovered Operation Condor on their own and tracked the assassination back to Townley and his accomplices in the United States.

In 1988, as then-Vice President Bush was citing his CIA work as an important part of his government experience, I submitted questions to him asking about his actions in the days before and after the Letelier bombing. Bush’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller, wrote back, saying Bush “will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.”

As it turned out, the Bush campaign had little to fear from my discoveries. When I submitted my story draft – with its exclusive account of Contreras’s role as a CIA asset – Newsweek’s editors refused to run the story. Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas told me that editor Maynard Parker even had accused me of being “out to get Bush.”

The CIA’s admission

Now, 24 years after the Letelier assassination and 12 years after Newsweek killed the first account of the Contreras-CIA relationship, the CIA has admitted that it had paid Contreras as an intelligence asset and consulted with him about the Letelier assassination.

Still, in the sketchy new report, the spy agency seeks to portray itself as more victim than accomplice. According to the report, the CIA was internally critical of Contreras’s human rights abuses and skeptical about his credibility. The CIA said its skepticism predates the spy agency’s contact with him about the Letelier-Moffitt murders.

“The relationship, while correct, was not cordial and smooth, particularly as evidence of Contreras’ role in human rights abuses emerged,” the CIA reported. “In December 1974, the CIA concluded that Contreras was not going to improve his human rights performance…

“By April 1975, intelligence reporting showed that Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta, but an interagency committee [within the Ford administration] directed the CIA to continue its relationship with Contreras.”

The CIA report added that “a one-time payment was given to Contreras” in 1975, a time framewhen the CIA was first hearing about Operation Condor, a cross-border program run by South America’s military dictatorships to hunt down dissidents living in other countries.

“CIA sought from Contreras information regarding evidence that emerged in 1975 of a formal Southern Cone cooperative intelligence effort – ‘Operation Condor’ – building on informal cooperation in tracking and, in at least a few cases, killing political opponents. By October 1976, there was sufficient information that the CIA decided to approach Contreras on the matter. Contreras confirmed Condor’s existence as an intelligence-sharing network but denied that it had a role in extra-judicial killings.”

Also, in October 1976, the CIA said it “worked out” how it would assist the FBI in its investigation of the Letelier assassination, which had occurred the previous month. The spy agency’s report offered no details of what it did, however. The report added only that Contreras was already a murder suspect by fall 1976.

“At that time, Contreras’ possible role in the Letelier assassination became an issue,” the CIA’s new report said. “By the end of 1976, contacts with Contreras were very infrequent.”

Even though the CIA came to recognize the likelihood that DINA was behind the Letelier assassination, there never was any indication that Bush’s CIA sought to correct the false impression created by its leaks to the news media asserting DINA’s innocence.

After Bush left the CIA with Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977, the spy agency distanced itself from Contreras, the new report said. “During 1977, CIA met with Contreras about half a dozen times; three of those contacts were to request information on the Letelier assassination,” the CIA report said.

“On 3 November 1977, Contreras was transferred to a function unrelated to intelligence so the CIA severed all contact with him,” the report added. “After a short struggle to retain power, Contreras resigned from the Army in 1978. In the interim, CIA gathered specific, detailed intelligence reporting concerning Contreras’ involvement in ordering the Letelier assassination.”

Remaining mysteries

Though the new CIA report contains the first official admission of a relationship with Contreras, it sheds no light on the actions of Bush and his deputy, Walters, in the days before and after the Letelier assassination. It also offers no explanation why Bush’s CIA planted false information in the American press clearing Chile’s military dictatorship.

While providing the 21-page summary on its relationship with Chile’s military dictatorship, the CIA has refused to release documents from a quarter century ago on the grounds that the disclosures might jeopardize the CIA’s “sources and methods.” The refusal comes in the face of President Clinton’s specific order to release as much information as possible.

The CIA could be playing for time.

With CIA headquarters now officially named the George Bush Center for Intelligence and with veterans of the Reagan-Bush years still dominating the CIA’s hierarchy, the spy agency might be hoping that the election of Texas Gov. George W. Bush will free it from demands to open up records to the American people.

For his part, former President Bush has declared his intent to take a more active role in campaigning for his son’s election.

In Florida on Sept. 22, Bush said he is “absolutely convinced” that if his son is elected president, “we will restore the respect, honor and decency that the White House deserves.” [NYT, Sept. 23, 2000]

Source: Consortium: www.consortiumnews.com

78 arrested in DC during Vieques protest

Washington, DC, Sept. 24— More than 1,000 people — at least 2,500, according to the San Juan daily El Nuevo Día — marched in front of the White House in Washington, DC, September 22 to demand an end to military exercises by the US Navy on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Some 78 were arrested when they refused to move from in front of the White House. The civil disobedience action included a group of protesters lined up so that their T-shirts would spell “Paz para Vieques” (“Peace for Vieques”). The first to be arrested was Argentine lay missionary Andrés Thomas Conteris, who had been on a hunger strike for 60 days in Lafayette Park across from the White House to demand that US president Bill Clinton meet with Vieques community leaders. He had lost 56 pounds as of September 22. The protesters who were arrested were let go hours later after being sentenced to a $50 fine. Those who choose not to pay the fine will have to face a trial.

Source: El Nuevo Dia, El Diario, La Prensa

Sit-in at Gore campaign office

By Bill Sammon

Washington, DC, Sept. 20— Ten protesters were arrested during a seven-and-a-half-hour standoff in presidential candidate, Al Gore’s campaign headquarters in Olympia, Washington , police said. No injuries were reported, although the Gore campaign accused protesters of breaking windows.

It was one of many actions this year by environmentalists protesting Mr. Gore’s ties to Occidental Petroleum. During the primary season, eight persons were jailed in New Hampshire after disrupting a Gore event by demanding he sever ties to the oil giant.

Yesterday’s protest began around noon when a small group of environmentalists entered the warehouse-style building that houses Mr. Gore’s local campaign in Olympia.

“As the afternoon wore on, the group swelled to about 200,” said Gore spokeswoman Maria Meier.

Environmentalist Kim Marks insisted she and the protesters were nonviolent, in the tradition of the U’wa Indians, a Colombian indigenous tribe whom Occidental have been struggling to displace from their land.

Source: Washington Times