AFSHIN RATTANSI: The so-called West doesn’t like freedom of expression. When I began working at Al Jazeera, then investigating Al Qaeda, the Qatari company was violently targeted. When I was at the BBC, we had a source who was trying to tell the world that Tony Blair’s government was deceiving the public about evidence for an invasion of Iraq. The scientist David Kelly was allegedly driven to suicide. Afterwards, millions were made refugees, wounded or killed, in and around Iraq. Journalists who tried to be free to express themselves were driven out. The head of the BBC was removed.
When The Guardian tried to reveal the Edward Snowden revelations about everyone in Britain being bugged by the secret services, David Cameron sent in the heavies – not to kill editor Alan Rusbridger – but to smash up Guardian computers. Snowden had to flee to Moscow with the aid of Wikileaks. The mass surveillance state had already been used against Wikileaks for having the temerity to believe it was free to expose U.S. military killing of civilians. Thousands more than who died in Paris have been extra-judicially assassinated by President Obama’s drones. There was no place in the Western mainstream media for blame on NATO nations for aiding Israel as it killed and maimed thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the summer.
Britain bans TV stations. And as the recent dramatic reconstruction of the work of U.S. journalist Gary Webb – Michel Cuesta’s “Kill the Messenger” – tries to explain, the careers of Western reporters are destroyed if they try and publish stories against the state. Webb killed himself. Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings died when his car exploded in LA after he took down – in an article – the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan. One doesn’t need violent conspiracy theories to understand where the most pernicious attacks on freedom of expression come from in the West. They come from a system of powerful corporate advertiser-funded journalism that prevents real issues of life and death from ever reaching the consciousness of ordinary people in Western Europe. More here.