There’s a reason that you probably haven’t heard of Vincent Bugliosi’s new book The Prosecution of George Bush for Murder which is #12 on the New York Times bestseller list right now. That reason is he’s been blacklisted from the mainstream media because they apparently find his message too risky. Since I’m a fan of free speech and an independent press, I’m going to go ahead and post information about this book because he’s a brilliant (and determined) man. Here’s info via Bugliosi’s agent PMA:

In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder Bugliosi presents a tight legal case against President Bush as being criminally responsible for the deaths of more than 4,000 American soldiers in Iraq. In a searing indictment of the President and his administration, he sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence to put George W. Bush on trial for murder in an American courtroom for taking this nation to war under false pretences. In his groundbreaking book, Bugliosi also has outlined a legally credible pathway to holding our highest government officials accountable for their actions while in office. The book was published on May 27, 2008, by Vanguard Press, a member of the Perseus Book Group. The mainstream media has black listed this book in the U.S. and the book became a NY Times bestseller without one single review. The feature film adaptation of the book, presently entitled MAD AS HELL (working titles), is presently being edited and we are hopeful it will be distributed in theatres October.

Here Bugliosi describes the media blackout of his book:

Reports are surfacing that Youtube has been blocked in China since Saturday due to videos (like the one below) containing foreign and local footage of political unrest in Tibet.

AFP reported that the access problems were triggered by clips posted by users of violent protests in Lhasa. Domestic feeds of CNN in China have also been blacked out during coverage of the ongoing protests in Tibet. However, unlike before, when the PRC government was requesting self-regulation, the site is now entirely blocked.

Foreign journalists have been asked to vacate the premises. A National Geographic documentary filmmaker who happened to be in Tibet says that he was even escorted to the bathroom by a government official. [Willamette Weekly]

Several bloggers also report that Yahoo! and Google News were also been blocked over the weekend because photos of the Tibet riots posted on their homepage with related news stories.

I ran a search using an IT site that routes addresses through servers in China to check their availability. Yahoo seems to be doing fine, while YouTube is blocked. A friend in China further confirmed that YouTube is indeed offline with only an error message when users attempt to access the site.

The PRC government’s decision to block protest coverage in and out of Tibet has certain similarities with the web blackout that was imposed by the government of Myanmar amid protests last year. Although in that instance, internet access was entirely blocked, which is pretty unlikely to happen in China.

The Chinese government has not issued a statement on this, but neither should come as a big surprise, as Web content containing the Tibetan independent movement as well as teachings from the Dalai Lama have long been on the blacklist. And after all, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reports the riots and foreign press coverage to be a vast international conspiracy.

[P.S. I ran Fresh Cut through through the IT site and congrats! you are not blocked….yet!]

YouTube service was restored to Pakistan this morning after a turbulent 48 hours in which a government-imposed YouTube ban caused an accidental worldwide shutdown on Sunday night.

The New York Times is reporting that Pakistan “lifted its restrictions on its citizens’ access to YouTube after a video that it deemed blasphemous was removed,” although it’s unclear whether YouTube pulled them in Pakistan only, or if they are supposed to be off the site entirely. Either way, those videos are going to be hard to suppress (they can be found here and here).

We’re not certain that those two are the culprits, but the second one certainly fits the AP’s description: Continue Reading…

Since 2005, Internet access in the People’s Republic of China has become increasingly filtered and censored, a trend that will soon extend beyond traditional news sites and blogs and into the realm of Internet video. Beginning on January 31, a new set of regulations will go into effect, banning all web video content from broadcasting “politically or morally objectionable content” and requiring video-hosting sites to obtain a permit from the Chinese government. “Those who provide internet video services should insist on serving the people, serve socialism…and abide by the moral code of socialism,” the new law warns.

It’s difficult to tell exactly what the new regulations will mean for non-Chinese-owned video-hosting sites like YouTube and MySpace (and Fresh Cut) though; it’s possible that they will be banned outright, but the new laws may simply serve to pressure those sites into self-censorship. Part of the difficulty stems from the government’s inability to filter “subversive” or anti-Beijing video content in the same way that text filters work, so it’s likely that the government will coerce website operators into censoring users themselves. A recent article in Forbes speculates that video-hosting sites will be forced into compromising positions of self-censorship, like MySpace China:

The site has been criticized by bloggers for demanding that users report one another when they spot posts with objectionable political content. Its terms of service prohibit members from discussions that would “leak state secrets or undermine the government,” or “spread rumors and disturb the social order.” MySpace China, however, hosts no video.

Last fall, Yahoo! faced several lawsuits from human rights organizations after handing email records over to the Chinese government that served to jail a “cyber-dissident,” and other sites could soon find themselves on similarly uncertain moral footing. In addition to hosting some of the word’s tightest internet regulations, China also boasts the world’s largest prison population of cyber-dissidents, with 50 currently detained, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Censorship in China by Webel