"Thanks to a wave of patriotism following the terrorist attacks on the United States, cartoonist Aaron McGruder's strip The Boondocks really has gone to the boondocks — and even disappeared — in some newspapers.

Last week, Huey Freeman — McGruder's Afro-wearing, pre-pubescent black revolutionary in The Boondocks — called the FBI's terrorist tip line and said he had the names of several Americans who helped train and finance Osama bin Laden, the United States' prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on America. When the FBI agent on the other end of the phone asks for the names, Huey responds, "All right, let's see … the first one is Reagan. That's R-E-A-G …"



A full story is at http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/entertainment/ DailyNews/wtc_cartoonists.html



And NY Indymedia has some samples of the strips at

http://nyc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=127 16&group=webcast"

Of lapel pins and buttoned lips

By ERIC DEGGANS

St. Petersburg Times, published October 4, 2001

Noam Chomsky, a brilliantly iconoclastic, leftist social
critic and linguist, calls them the limits of "thinkable
thought."



They're the invisible boundaries he says encircle every
mainstream U.S. journalist or commentator, ensuring they
don't say anything too subversive.



WFLA-Ch. 8 news director Forrest Carr ran into those
boundaries Sept. 20, after I reported his decision to take a
stand in his newsroom and say something controversial:
Objective TV journalists shouldn't wear red, white and blue
ribbons on their lapels on air.

Autonomedia writes: "October 2 — Noam Chomsky, MIT Professor and outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, discusses U.S.-Muslim relations and possible reasons for the tensions between the two. Professor Chomsky addressed the MSNBC.com chat audience through a typist over the phone from Boston. Chat producer Will Femia moderates.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/637155.asp#BODY"


or to read the transcript without the ads go to:
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=01/10/03/0667590

The New York Times has apparently adopted a policy to "not engage"
any of the eleven writers listed on an internal memo circulated by Times staffer Michaela Williams. All the writers are co-plaintiffs in a well-known class-action lawsuit by the Authors Guild and the National Writers Union against the Times over electronic rights and royalties disputes.


Three key documents in the dispute are reproduced here verbatim.


Missouri School of Journalism Associate Professor and previous Times freelance writer Mary Kay Blakely, one of the eleven blacklisted, has responded to the Times action in a letter to Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, reproduced below:

An international Gallup Poll on terrorism has some interesting factoids about the 9/11 bombing attacks.


For example, only two countries of those polled yielded a majority saying the
U.S. should attack those responsible rather than extradite the terrorists to
stand trial: USA and Israel.


Many respondents, in South America and Asia particularly, say they believe U.S. foreign policy has a negative rather than a positive effect inside their home countries.


Something like half of all respondents believe the attacks will precipitate "global economic crisis".


And, in a telling statistic, almost ninety percent of respondents all over the world say they learned of the attacks within the single first hour after their occurrence!

Louis Lingg writes: "Pakistani site dawn.com has posted an op-ed piece by Zubeida Mustafa examining the role of both the U.S. and Pakistani media in propelling the present crisis."

alex writes: Here's a link to an excellent article in the New Yorker by William T. Vollmann about his time in Afghanistan ... even if the reader is one who can't stand Vollmann, his take is always unique, useful:

http://www.newyorker.com/FROM_THE_ARCHIVE/ARCHIVES /?010924fr_archive05

And below, also from the New Yorker, Susan Sontag's reaction was more than I would have expected from her:

"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

"Autonomedia writes: "The New York Times is running an article on Alger Hiss.

The Alger Hiss case, which swirled through the second half of the 20th
century with low-tech evidence like documents that may or may not have come
from a certain manual typewriter, has made it into the 21st century and
onto the Internet. And so has the debate."
"

Autonomedia writes: "TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES OF 2000:
Project Censored has released it's 25th annual list of the most important stories of the year that were overlooked (censored) by the mainstream media.

Today's NY Times offers the following Lumumba editorial:

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

The Rise and Violent Fall of Patrice Lumumba

By BILL BERKELEY

There is a scene in the director Raul Peck's chilling biographical film
"Lumumba" in which the title character, the doomed Congolese Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba, played by Eriq Ebouaney, confers alone with his army chief
of staff, the soon-to-be military strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.