To the editor:

I read with great interest an Associated Press report in the May 22 edition of The Times Record titled “Chicago police get high marks for NATO protests.” It’s a perfect example of media censorship by omission.

The report was all about cops in Chicago being well trained and restrained in comparison to the 1968 “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when anti-war protests were violently repressed.

The article though said not a mumbling word about why up to 10,000 people, including me, went to Chicago on May 20 to protest the NATO summit. Not a word was mentioned about growing U.S. opposition to the Afghanistan occupation that is costing us more than $10 billion every month. (69 percent of Americans now want us out of Afghanistan, including a majority of Republicans.)

Nor was there any mention in the report that more than 40 U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that day threw their war medals back toward where NATO was holding its meeting.

Nor was anything written about NATO’s controversial and dangerous decision to expand socalled “missile defense” deployments farther eastward to surround Russia.

The United States and NATO now have bases and/or military operations in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

In addition the U.S. and NATO will deploy Navy Aegis destroyers, outfitted with missile defense systems, in the Mediterranean, Black and Baltic seas.

Why would the U.S. and NATO be encircling Russia today essentially restarting the Cold War? Could it be because Russia has the world’s largest supply of natural gas and significant supplies of oil?

Haven’t we come to realize by now that the Pentagon’s primary job today is to serve as the resource extraction service for corporate globalization?

Imagine if Russia or China were building military bases in Canada and Mexico and deploying their warships off our Atlantic and Pacific coastlines. We’d be going ballistic. But when the U.S. and its NATO allies do virtually the same thing to Russia and China hardly anyone knows about it because the story is not to be found in our newspapers.

Instead we get stories about the police in Chicago getting “high marks” for how they handled protests.

Who is doing the protesting and why they were there does not matter? Those issues are not relevant in our media any more.

Bruce K. Gagnon
coordinator
Global Network Against
Weapons & Nuclear Power in
Space
Bath