"Can't he make a living in a more reputable, less disgusting way, say, in child pornography?"

Randi Rhodes is asking you, Mr. Singer.  And we're still waiting for the answer.  [To hear the Palast/Rhodes report, click here.]

Paul Singer is a vulture. And a billionaire. And, with his underlings at Elliott Associates, the number one sugar-daddy donor to the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani, dropping $168,400 so far and, according to secret campaign documents, committed to raise $10 million for Rudolf the Great, Emperor of 9/11.

So who is this bird of prey Singer who holds Rudy in his beak?

Unlike feathered predators, Singer preys on the living.  Singer figured out a way to siphon off funds intended for debt relief to some of the poorest countries in the world.  Nice guy.

And by the way, I didn't come up with the moniker "vulture."  Just about everyone, from the new Prime Minister of Britain to the World Bank, calls Singer and his ilk "vultures." 

  Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
President, International Association of Educators for World Peace
Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education,
Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament
Professor Emeritus
Alabama A&M University

There has probably been no other nation in history that has used with such frequency the word “insurgents” as often as the United States. What does this word mean? Dictionaries tend to describe the word “insurgent” as one who rises in opposition to lawful civil or political authority, one who is rebellious. The New Webster Dictionary of the English Language tells us that an insurgent differs from a rebel in holding less pronounced position of antagonism, and may or may not develop into a rebel.

Analysis of Distorted Concept

So we bomb a school and then are aghast when seven children die. “If we knew that there were children inside the building, there was no way that that air strike would have occurred,” a spokesman for what the media still bother to call “the coalition” said afterward, by way of explanation if not apology.

The public has mostly tuned out of these wars. Of those who still pay attention, many do so from behind Fortress Patriotism, with its ramparts of cliche: “freedom isn’t free,” etc. Thus when children die and it’s our fault and publicity is unavoidable, the media will usually remove the stinger from each tiny death, and keep the American conscience untroubled, by putting the deaths in the larger context of U.S. strategy or mission.

We bombed the eastern Afghanistan compound, which contained a mosque and a madrassa (Islamic school), this past Sunday because we were hunting insurgents who may have been involved in the massive suicide bombing of a bus a few hours earlier in Kabul, which had killed as many as 35 people and wounded 52.

Got it? Next question . . .

It’s a popular notion: TV sets and other media devices let us in on the violence of war. “Look, nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens,” President Bush told a news conference more than three years ago. “I don’t. It’s a tough time for the American people to see that. It’s gut-wrenching.”

But televised glimpses of war routinely help to keep war going. Susan Sontag was onto something when she pointed out that “the image as shock and the image as cliche are two aspects of the same presence.”

While viewers may feel disturbed by media imagery of warfare, their discomfort is largely mental and limited. The only shots coming at them are ones that have been waved through by editors. Still, we hear that television brings war into our living rooms.

We’re encouraged to be a nation of voyeurs — or pseudo-voyeurs — looking at war coverage and imagining that we really see, experience, comprehend. In this mode, the reporting on the Iraq war facilitates a rough division of labor. For American media consumers, the easy task is to watch from afar — secure in the tacit belief we’re understanding what it means to