Impunity in Print: How Argentine Newspapers Benefited from the Dictatorship

Since Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, the nation's media laws and market have favored big corporations over independent media groups, leading to biased reporting. However, the wind has changed in the South American nation with the government taking on a number of initiatives to target corporate media in an attempt to democratize media ownership and access. Argentina's government has moved to seize the nation's only newsprint producer, Papel Prensa. The intervention into Papel Prensa is the latest in a two year old battle between the left-leaning government and the media corporation Clarín.

The clash between the government and Clarín has opened deep wounds left over from the bloody military junta which disappeared some 30,000 people. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner opened an investigation into the nation's largest newspapers Clarín and La Nación to determine whether the newspapers should be charged with crimes against humanity. Specifically, the investigation will determine whether the news groups conspired with the military government to appropriate the newsprint company which is jointly held by Clarín, La Nación and the government.

The investigation was unveiled during a televised news conference in which President Fernandez de Kirchner broke 33 years of silence regarding Papel Prensa's dark past and lack of government intervention. The investigation into Clarín's purchase of a majority stake in Papel Prensa has revealed torture, arrests and other illegal actions to acquire the billion dollar company.

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According to Papaleo's testimony in the investigation, the Graiver family sold the company in a secret meeting. Papeleo, Graiver's brother and his mother were separated during the meeting and told to sign without consulting with one another. “The only person who I spoke to was a man from Clarín. He told me to sign the deal to protect my daughter's life,” said Papeleo in a television interview. “I signed without knowledge of how much I was selling the company for. We didn't know what we signed, and we never got a copy of what we were signing.”

During the following year, Lidia Papaleo and her family were kidnapped in March of 1977. The former share holder of Papel Prensa was tortured during her detention.

The family's lawyer and right hand man of David Graiver, Jorge Rubinstein was kidnapped and tortured to death. The Human Rights Secretariat has opened charges against Dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, Former Navy Chief Emilio Massera, the former Economic Minister Jose Alfredo Martinez de Hoz and the former Industrial Secretary Raymundo Podesta who will face accusations of illegal detention, extortion, torture and murder in the case.

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How to Stop Living and Start Worrying - Simon Critchley's philosophical antidote to the self-help manual

...How to Stop Living and Start Worrying begins with a biographical sketch of Simon Critchley's early life and career. He relates his fascination with the radicalism of the 1970s punk music scene, and acknowledges his debt to the Penguin Modern Classics series (Orwell, Huxley, Sartre). His introduction to philosophy is cast in social and economic terms, where the work of Lois Althusser, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were inseparable from the demands of political activism. Critchley's interest in philosophy is also characterized by unexpected events, from traumatic physical injuries to the death of his father. Philosophy is valued as an everyday practice that we can all pursue, enabling reflections on the world and ourselves.

But the interviews provide an interesting counterpoint to the traditional self-help manual. Casting out the assumption that we are free and autonomous individuals, Critchley and Cedeström discuss human experience in terms of finitude and contingency. Finitude defines individuals according to a limit, whether it is death, or the limit of perception; while contingency acknowledges that we are culturally-constructed by social forces.

If there is a feel-good pep-talk element, it takes the form of acknowledging one's impotence and incapability, the contradictions and discrepancies that structure our identities, and our experience of the world. In a world where the self 'can never achieve mastery or authenticity', philosophy forms part of a continual process of emancipation from dominant social norms and values - a talking cure for existence that goes on as long as we do. For Critchley, philosophy accepts that we are 'ontologically defective', or, as Nietzsche puts it, Human, All Too Human...

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Musical Innerlube: The Webb Sisters - 'Words That Mobilize'

The Webb Sisters video 'Words that Mobilize' from the new EP 'Comes In Two's'.

Take a slide down the labyrinthine rabbithole of CIA wizard, Michael J. Riconosciuto

WILD BLUE YONDER:  Michael Riconosciuto was a Wackenhut-CIA employee who told researcher Michael Lindemann that he had attempted to get a whole helicopter full of documents and evidence detailing illegal biogenetic activities and non-Congressionally sanctioned projects involving 'illegal aliens' out of the Nevada Test Site. MJR claims, the chopper was blown out of the sky, killing all five personnel on board. Michael's father happened to be Marshall Riconosciuto, a fascist and a supporter of Adolph Hitler who was a very close friend of Fred L. Crisman. Crisman was involved in the Maurey Island 'UFO' sighting incident in 1947 near Tacoma, Washington, which researcher Anthony Kimory believes involved the test-flight of hybrid craft.

GENOCIDE: The PROMIS software eventually evolved into very bio-chemistry-specific versions named “Daylight” and “Oracle8i”.

This PROMIS software evolution is best understood by reading THE LAST CIRCLE by Cheri Seymour, aka Carol Marshall – particularly the 15th chapter. This chapter reveals the contents of files provided to Seymour by PROMIS program-modifier Michael Riconosciuto documenting the history of Ft. Detrick's biological warfare development and the stated desire of our nation's top “National Institutes of Health” and CDC scientists to use new computer technologies to create sophisticated “Designer Viruses” for covert CIA use. He also documents the INFILTRATION of ISRAELI AGENTS into the labs of Ft. Detrick.

Riconosciuto's “modifications” are so “sensitive to national security” that Riconosciuto was placed into forced detention in a high-security federal prison – not because any “crime” had been committed – but to keep him from being kidnapped by other competing “multi-national group's” interests.

According to Riconosciuto's files, the NEW GENERATON of PROMIS software, today trademarked as DAYLIGHT™ and ORACLE8i™ are unbelievably complex, and have exhibited incredible ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE capabilities as portrayed so well in the movie, “Eagle Eye”.

ORACLE8i™ not only has the ability to rapidly analyze gene clade sequencing in viruses and bacteria in mere minutes, it can build a model of a complex new viral structure just as quickly, and can calculate to the minutest detail its possible “drift” of mutations after its release. This software can not only predict the DEATH TOLL the virus would produce, but also the accurate final numbers of its genetic mutations over a given period of time. In short, this software can indeed control a complex GENOCIDE AGENDA in the form of an engineered, worldwide VIRAL PANDEMIC from beginning to end – Alpha to Omega. Evidence suggests that this agenda was indeed systematically set in motion in March of 2009.

The big question is “who in the cryptocracy would NOT want this man dead?”

Danny Casolaro was writing a book related to MJR called THE OCTOPUS. Inslaw, a manufacturer whose owner had accused the Justice Department of stealing its extremely powerful PROMIS case management software; the so-called “October Surprise” theory that Iran had held back the American hostages to help Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential election; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International; and Iran-Contra. The scheme was so vast and complex that Casolaro referred to it as “the Octopus”. Casolaro was found dead in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia in August of 1991, his wrists slashed 10 to 12 times. His death was, of course, ruled a suicide.

Casolaro's story might have continued its slow fade into the dusty corners of conspiracy theory folklore, except that charges were filed 10-4-2009 against a Miami-based missionary to Honduras named Jimmy Hughes for the 1981 slayings of Fred Alvarez and two associates in Rancho Mirage, California. It is believed that Alvarez was killed to silence him before he could carry out a threat to exposure financial improprieties and other illegal activity on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Riverside County, California. Incredibly, what happened on Cabazon land in the late '70s and early '80s reaches around the world and into the highest levels of the US government — part of Casolaro's “Octopus”.

Central to the story, especially when he tells it, is the mysterious Michael Riconosciuto, now serving a 20-year sentence for production and distribution of meth. Understanding “the Octopus” is like the old story of the blind men trying to comprehend their first encounter with an elephant: the parts you touch can appear to be completely different and totally unrelated. Running over the outlines of the case in about half an hour, we didn't even mention mainstream media reports — published prior to 9/11 — that FBI spy Robert Hanssen sold an upgraded version of PROMIS to Russia, which in turn sold it to Osama bin Laden. It's believed Al Qaeda used the software to penetrate databases and move funds between banks without being detected by US counterterror groups. A PROMIS derivative was also allegedly used by Chinese military intelligence to steal nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. So, like the Octopus, the tentacles extending from the modifications made by Michael Riconosciuto at the Cabazon reservation are many and far-reaching.

Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed in a motel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 10, 1991. He was a struggling writer and something of a romantic. Recently he had also styled himself as an investigator, contacting a variety of spooks-turned-victims and weaving their stories into an “Octopus” theory. This would be the book of his career: Danny as dragon-slayer. A year later, documents were missing from Casolaro's motel room. Was it suicide or murder?

THE OCTOPUS involves Inslaw, Inc. and its Promis software, as well as Michael Riconosciuto, a child prodigy who became a secret agent and drug pusher, and still keeps a bevy of fringe journalists busy by dispatching leads from his jail cell. Mix in several years of affidavits flying like shrapnel, mostly due to Inslaw's reasonable claim that Promis was stolen by the Justice Department. Add Riconosciuto's unreasonable claim that he hacked Promis, making it so magical that U.S. intelligence tried to install it everywhere as a Trojan horse. Include more prominent names than you can shake a stick at, each with loose but spooky connections to everyone else, and throw in a few more investigative trails that end in corpses.

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"The INSLAW Affair"