COMMON DREAMS SENDS A NAUGHTY COMMENT POSTER TO GUANTANAMO

By Jerry D. Rose

I want to document here a case of suppression of dissent perpetrated by the online “progressive” news and views service, CommonDreams.org.  As I am wont to do, I commented on the January 3, 2009 article by David Michael Green, responding at 3: 50 pm to a 1:46 posting by a commenter with the posting name of CommonSenseParty (CSP). CSP aroused my interest by reporting that he was planning a run for Congress in a North Carolina district as well as to be involved in the formation of a new populist party; and had asked readers to contact him for more information but failed to provide a contact address. In my response, I posted my own e-mail for him or anyone else to contact and asked CSP to post his own address.  Sometime after 3:50 (the record is gone for a now-obvious reason) he did post his address and I wrote him by e-mail at 7:08 PM.  When he responded to me the next day he noted that he had been curious to see if there were other online responses to his original posting and went back to the website to discover to his suprise that both my e-mail requesting  his address and his response providing that address had disappeared. I had heard rumors that Common Dreams suppressed certain comments and even knew of one case when an article was removed shortly after it was posted.  No such removals of articles or comments are apparently ever explained by CD’s editorial staff.

My puzzlement about this situation was to turn shortly to outright indignation.  Early the next morning, I posted to another January 3 article by Bill Schein, replying to two posters who made some very uncomplimentary assertions about CD and my comment, as shown below, furthered that criticism.  Now suspecting that these comments would also be deleted, I took the precaution of saving them to my e-mail in-box before submitting, and also copying my comment and the two other comments to which I was responding.  This is a copy of that copy made directly from the CD website (as long as a poster is not “blocked,” one’s submissions are immediately posted.):

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quizmasterchris… January 3rd, 2010 11:57 pm

100% true!

The missed opportunity was tens of millions of spineless, halfwit Democrats voting for Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Johnny E., Barry O and Joe Biden THREE TIMES in 2000, 2004 and 2008 when you had the likes of Ralph Nader telling you the damn truth and sticking his neck out for you. The response from the Dem-witted was to pee on Nader and the Greens.

And the moral midgets at The Nation, CD and beyond carried water for the frauds the whole decade. How many people were censored and BANNED from this very forum a year ago for telling you the same things about Obama that are being printed as columns now?

“Fool me three times, put a Joe Biden sticker on my hybrid.”

www.NotOneMore.US January 4th, 2010 1:19 am

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

Fool me over and over, I’m a loyal voter for the democratic party.

I do blame commondreams as well as the others for not being brave enough, sensible enough, too short sighted, and maybe not even truly wanting, a sustainable, just, lawful, and compassionate society and future. Because otherwise they wouldn’t have made this a past election a choice between Obama and Hillary. And there would have been outrage when Kucinich, Gravel, Nader etc were excluded from the debates.

I’ve been a third party/Nader support for over the past 20 years, and the only things that change is how some of the former democratic party loyalists realize the betrayal. But no worry, they are easily replaced by a new crop of loyal democrats that are slowly being boiled by commondreams, the nation, and other supposedly progressives.

It’s harder to wake up than go to sleep. I’m not that worried about myself. I’m thinking of what future the kids of today have.

Jerry D Rose January 4th, 2010 5:56 am

Quizmaster and Not One More: I am amazed and confused at the way in which Common Dreams has apparently censored comments postings. On a site where profane and vitriolic comments are accepted, comments are either rejected for posting or, more blatantly and provably, are posted and then removed without any notification or explanation to the poster. It happened to me and one other poster yesterday, when we got the post-and-remove treatment for no provided reason, and I can think of none other than our “offense” at having posted our respective e-mails in hopes of generating some communication on matters of mutual support for grassroots political campaigns. I have heard from a previous victim of their post-and-remove policies that there is an editorial schism within the staff at CD that is reflected in this seemingly vacillating policy, but of course CD never writes “editorials” of its own to explain its own policies. Much as I do appreciate an instrumentality of communication like CD, it is frustrating as hell to have my postings subjected to seemingly capricious censorings without explanation and without any recourse to complaint from me or anyone else on my behalf. We’re getting great “stuff” from this website, but this makes me wonder what even better stuff lies on whatever is the cyber-space equivalent of a cutting-room floor. I’d dearly love to recover some of those sweepings! As it is, I’m going back to earlier practices of putting my postings in e-mails preserved in my e-box. I never thought I would reach such a paranoiac state as to feel the need of this “precaution”, but…(and by the way, I’m making a copy of this after it is posted on the website to prove my claim that a submission once posted has been later removed.)

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Sometime later on that morning of January 4,  I checked back to comments on the Schein article and found that, sure enough, my post, that of the two posters to whom I was responding, as well as two others whose posts I don’t remember, were deleted.  After a few hours of stewing and debating with myself whether I should respond to this provable and proven act of censorship, I submitted and they immediately posted the following:

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Jerry D Rose January 4th, 2010 10:20 am

Good morning, Mr. or Ms. Common Dreams censor/moderator: I posted at 5:56 this morning the 15th posting on this thread. This morning there are only 10. Since at least mine and two others were critical of Common Dreams either for its overall editorial stance or its removal of already-posted comments, I can only believe that these posts were removed for that reason. As I said in my now “disappeared” post, I made a copy for my own e-mail box of the now-deleted post (and the two preceding ones) before it became deleted. Should I re-post the deleted one? Could you explain to posters just what are the criteria on the basis of which you reject posts? Is censorship really consistent with a website which publishes articles critical of censorship?

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When, 10 minutes later, I re-checked the website, the post had disappeared and when I tried to log in for further response, I got the information that my account had been BLOCKED for further posting.  I searched high and low through the CD website for an editorial e-mail address to write. The best I could find was a “feedback” instrumentality form which said CD “welcomes” my input but they may not be “able” to respond and, as of this writing a day and a half later, they have not responded to my request for an explanation of why they had blocked my access to the comments boards.

I am left with all this by something of what must be felt by an unlucky “taxi driver” from Afghanistan, captured on some bogus information from a probably paid informant, and hustled off as a “terrorist” suspect to an Abu Graib or a Guantanamo to be held on unspecified charges with no chance to have a lawyer or any expectation of a fair trial.  I don’t really look good in orange jump suits and I don’t quite know how to get out of internet limbo; and I don’t even have any way to locate fellow inmates for any kind of commiseration—unless, like CSP, I’m able to grab his e-mail address before CD removes it from cyberspace.

There is at least one avenue of free and uncensored expression that will be available on the internet, at least until I am physically removed from the scene: the comments page of articles published on this website.  In fact, being that other sites don’t really offer this total freedom, I’m thinking of expanding the operation of The Principled Progressive to make it more a Common Dreams-style site with numerous original and re-posted articles with the opportunity of readers to become communicators with the authors and with one another, to help bring free speech back with the closing of Guantanamo of the Internet.

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Jerry D. Rose is editor of The Sun State Activist