Atlantic Free Press was launched in September 2006 by Dutch-Canadian R.G.
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands and American Expatriate Chris Floyd of
Oxford, UK.
Brick Ogden, an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
Assistant Editor Canadian Chris Cook hails from Victoria, British Columbia and Senior Writer Paul William Roberts is based in Toronto - but often on the road.
The mission of AF 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. AF 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.
William Kristol, the New York Times and Nazi Gunter d'Alquen
It was an offhand remark, in 1971, by a Penn State professor to his political science students, that prompted me to become a devoted reader, then decades-long subscriber, to the New York Times: "If you don't read the New York Times, you can't begin to know what's occurring in the U.S. and the world." Over the years, I found overwhelming evidence — much of it amusing and delightful — to support his claim, even as I suppressed my suspicions that the "Old Grey Lady" was pimping for a muscular U.S. presence around the world. For years I lived with the conceit that sophisticated people spent much of their weekend mornings reading Sunday's Times
But, my-oh-my, how "Times" have changed! First, copy-cat journalism by Times' "wannabes" undermined the paper's claim to be the "paper of record." Subsequently, that reputation was further eroded - as was the general appeal of newspapers - by the emergence and widespread appeal of "24/7" cable and internet news. Finally, the Times suffered severe self-inflicted wounds - by such dishonest reporters as Jayson Blair and Judith Miller - from which it has yet to recover.
The final straw for me, however, was the December 30, 2007 decision by the Times to hire William Kristol (editor of the Weekly Standard) as a columnist. Although the Times calls Kristol a conservative, he is, in fact, a notorious neoconservative - a member of a political cult that many traditional conservatives disavow. Readers who noticed this Orwellian elision by the Times might also recall that in January 1998, Kristol (and Robert Kagan) wrote an Op Ed titled, "Bombing Iraq isn't Enough," which the Times was reckless enough to publish.
Reckless? Yes, because, as Robert Parry has observed: "Under
principles of international law applied from Nuremberg to Rwanda,
propagandists who contribute to war crimes or encourage crimes against
humanity can be put in the dock alongside the actual killers." [Consortium News,
Posted August 21, 2006] Simply recall that, under international law,
the unprovoked invasion of another sovereign state is considered the
most egregious of war crimes.
The decision by the Times to hire this effete, cowardly warmonger smacks of rank hypocrisy, especially when one considers that in May 2004, the Times
issued an "apology" to its readers for "problematic articles" that
"depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi
informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq,
people whose credibility has come under in creasing public debate in
recent weeks." Yet, who has made more bogus warmongering assertions
about Iraq than William Kristol? Who has less credibility today than
William Kristol?
As I've written elsewhere, "According to
Scott McConnell, in the very first issue published after 9/11, the
Weekly Standard 'laid down a line from which the magazine would not
waver over the next 18 months.' Their line was 'to link Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the
hip in the minds of readers, and then lay out a strategy that actually
gave attacking Saddam priority over eliminating al Qaeda.' [McConnell,
"The Weekly Standard's War," The American Conservative, September 21,
2005]"
With this immorality, hypocrisy and criminality in mind, I called the New York Times
this morning to cancel my subscription. One might pity that poor
customer representative who handled my call. As I spewed invective
against her employer, all she could do was apologize, ask me to spell
the name of the columnist I found so offensive (K-R-I-S-T-O-L) and urge
me to "have a nice day. Thank you for calling the New York Times."
Having cancelled my subscription, I then sent the following email to the Times' Executive Editor and the VP for Circulation:
"I canceled my subscription to the New York Times — with prejudice — a
few minutes ago. I've terminated my decades-long subscription because
somebody at the Times made the immoral decision to hire William Kristol
— as close to a war criminal as a so-called "journalist" can become.
You see, I can have nothing further to do with such a morally tainted
newspaper. It's a matter of principle.
You might use this moment to reflect on how the reporting by Judith
Miller (AKA stenography for Perle and Chalabi) and your editorial
decision to delay reporting on Bush's illegal wiretaps contributed to
America's poor moral standing around the world. Now, with the hiring of
effete coward and warmonger Kristol, who (possessing any morals at all)
can consider the Times to be anything but a whore?
I will use my website to inform my thousands of readers about your
immoral decision and I will exhort them to cancel their subscriptions
as well.
Sincerely,
Walter C. Uhler
After all, simply consider that, ten years after the end of World War II, the editor of Das Schwarze Korps,
Nazi SS leader Gunter d'Alquen, was fined 60,000 Deutsch Marks,
"deprived of all civic rights for three years and debarred from drawing
an allowance or pension from public funds. He was found guilty of
having played an important role in the Third Reich, of war propaganda,
inciting against the churches, the Jews and foreign countries, and
incitement to murder." [Wikipedia, see also Saul Friedlander, Nazi German and the Jews, Volume I, pp. 311-313]
Think about it: If you do something similarly egregious in Bush's Amerika, you get your own column at the New York Times.
Walter C. Uhler
is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been
published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the
Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).
Jimmy Montague: Why did you wait so long to cancel?
I quit paying for The New York Times when The New York Times hired former Nixon speech writer William Safire for the op-ed page. Yes I'm upset that NYT just hired Bill Kristol, not because Kristol is full of greasy shit but only because so many of the yahoos out there still think of the Times as a liberal paper. Next thing you know, the yahoos will start thinking Kristol is a liberal, too.
People keep referring to The New York Times "the paper of record". It isn't so. It hasn't been so for 30 years, now, and it's time the public quit thinking of it that way. The best one can say for the Times these days is that it's one of the best-tuned of all print-media house organs in mainstream journalism -- which isn't saying a whole hell of a lot.
At last I've concluded that it would be better for the country if Rupert Murdoch would buy the Times and install Bill Kristol as publisher and managing editor. No one then would be confused about whether or not the Times is a source of record.
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January 01, 2008
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