Talk:Guerrilla News Network/Archive 1

Archive 1

Point well taken. Thanks. That's fine if you want to change any of the information about the various GNN productions. I was just trying to add balance by showing GNN's body of work - and that was the text that I had. If you're going to discuss GNN and the various accusations about us you have to show what we've done. If other editors are not going to take the time to add those sections and the decscriptions of our work, then someone has to. I've gone in and removed much of the text that I pulled from our site and rewrote some descriptions so that they are not promotional. I urge the editors to go in and add/change whatever text they want in the various sections. If you're not familiar with the work, please become so - because frankly it's unfair for people to write about us withour actually viewing our content. Furthermore, in my first post here I directly respond to several allegations. In my second post below, I was trying to illustrate that the accusations themselves are driven by personal grievances. In addition, I address the fact that Sunday magazine and the SmartAmerican are not reliable sources because they simply reposted the original forum entry written on GNN without any kind of fact-checking. Please let me know which other accusations I have not addressed and I will address them. Please ask the accusers to show evidence that we have "been hostile" to the 9/11 Truth Movement, for instance, or that I have told people not to protest the war. This is flatly not true and I won't allow it to be published. Here is my take on war protests (http://www.gnn.tv/B09283). If anything I'm calling on people to be more radical:

"We’ve been getting into a heated debate here over the relative merits of street protests. My position in a nutshell: they’re important (if anything, for making sure we still can, but also for energizing the activist base), but I don’t think have much effect on public opinion, I’m sad to say. They surely don’t scare the establishment unless they actually start shutting shit down, like they do in France. I was called a defeatist for saying so. But one person’s defeatism is another’s realism. I’m absolutely not arguing for people to stay home (for the record, I had a wedding booked long in advance I had to attend this weekned, so I didn’t make it) – I’m just saying that let’s not have illusions about what’s being accomplished by taking to the streets alone. I think the most important thing is to come up with a more concrete plan for withdrawal from Iraq.

Finally, if you're going to make the wild accusation that Ian Inaba is somehow tied to the Mossad because the CEO of a company he used to work with once worked in Israeli intelligence, then you have to provide balance that discusses the nature of Ian's recent work. He left the world of finance and the possiblity of making millions of dollars to join GNN. He reported the chapter in True Lies about Cynthia McKinney which details how AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into an effort to silence her. If you take the time to examine GNN's coverage of Israel, including a recent Guerrilla Journalism Fund supported trip to Lebanon by reporter David Enders, you'll see it has been overwhelmingly critical. Overall I think you did a great job cleaning up the page. But if you're going to talk about GNN (and me in particular) and 9/11 Truth you have to discuss our work on the subject, including the foreword I wrote for the Big Wedding. Lastly, what is your evidence that the Ford Foundation is currently "CIA" connected? I am genuiely curious. - Anthony


I have fixed much of the Disinformation Accusations section, and removed many weasel words and unncessary sentences. I am keeping the other sections that Anthony put in, but I am going to urge others to edit them in the future... Many of these things seem directly out of GNN's promotional material, word-for-word. This is an Encyclopedia, not an advertisement for GNN's products, so I imagine that this page will need major cleanup after Anthony's little makeover.

--CurtainCall29 02:06, 25 October 2006

Anthony Lappe, this talk section is not a soapbox for you to air out your personal grievances with other people. In your two massive rants on this talk page, you haven't addressed a single one of the accusations on the Wiki page itself, though it appears you have deleted and heavily edited many of them, as well as drowning the page in advertisements for GNN videos and products.

--CurtainCall29 01:51, 25 October 2006


Contrary to a recent entry, GNN is not represented by NS Bienstock. The fact that an anonymous person could come here and post that we were without checking their facts first is a demonstration of how reckless the accusers of GNN are. If I hadn't deleted it, I'm sure no one would have demanded proof. This is a warning and an appeal to the responsible Wiki editors to tread carefully here. There are personal agendas driving the barrage of unfounded accusations here and it doesn't make for accurate entries. For instance, one of the more active self-proclaimed enemies of GNN is a documentary producer named Andrew Stomowich. Andrew at least has the courtesy of revealing his real name, as opposed to the other anonymous and cowardly accusers. He frequently makes wild and unsubstantiated claims against GNN, Anthony Lappe in paricular. For instance, he claims Lappe was out to "smear" British PM George Galloway for his "support of the Palestinians," when in fact Lappe never said anything remotely close to that. Lappe, like BBC reporter Greg Palast, merely pointed out that Galloway met with the fascist dictator Saddam Hussein and told him he'd love to "march to Jerusalem" with him. He also claims GNN sought to discredit the idea that DU is dangerous, when in fact we did the exact opposite. We purchased a Geiger counter and did our own radiation tests in the battlefields of Iraq at great risk to our personal health and reported back that we found evidence of high levels of DU radiation and that after an extensive investigation in Iraq and back in the US that it is our belief that is a clear and present danger to Iraqi civilians and US troops - see our film BattleGround and our book True Lies. In other words, the exact opposite of what he claims. Lastly, while I appreciate the editors' attempts to provide balance here, it makes a mockery of the idea of this entire site when three or four disgruntled people can make a wild accusation with three or four unrelated facts and have them be an entire section in an organization's entry. These issues are "hotly contested" by less than a handfull of people. The way this page is written it is as if there were credible, reasonable people discussing these accusations. The fact that a magazine in Vancouver published the orginal rant does not validate it. I talked with the editor there and they made no effort to fact check it at all, they even admitted they had no idea who wrote it. If there is way to directly contact the responsible editors who have generously spent their time editing this page, please let me know. Much appreciated. - A.L. GNN

This is the new McCarthyism. Or more accurately, the new COINTELPRO. If you don't agree with someone, call them a government agent. It's the same tactic the FBI used with the Black Panthers and other radical groups to create dissention. Spread the lie that one member is an undercover agent and the group slowly turns on itself. Back then they did it with posters, pamphlets and whispers in back alleys, now it's electronic. It's called divide and conquer. I ask you, which is the real psy-op, the tiny group of anonymous netizens who spread lies and disinformation about a group of progressive journalists or the journalists themselves who have investigated the CIA and other government agencies, the governments lies about 9/11, and the US military's use of DU, among other topics?

The disinformation section is an absolute joke. It is not a "theory" - it's one or two people's paranoid idea. There is no mention whatsoever of GNN's large body of work which would provide the uninformed reader a counter to the absurd allegations made by two or three disgruntled anonymous former GNNers. This body of work includes investigations into the CIA's involvement in the drug trade (a short film that won the Sundance Online Film Festival), the U.S. military's use of DU (True Lies, BattleGround), the perils of electronic voting machines and the vicious attacks on the former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, one of the most outspoken critics of the Bush administration and the pro-Israeli lobby and one of the leading figures in the 9/11 Truth Movement (True Lies, American Blackout), among numerous other topics. GNN devoted a chapter in their book to the 9/11 truth movement and produced one of the first independent docs about the various unanswered questions. More recently, GNN's editor Anthony Lappe wrote the foreword to Sander Hicks' The Big Wedding, one of the best investigations into the unanswered questions about 9/11. More recently, he published an article by Hicks about the growth of the movement, in addition to an article critiquing it - in other words: balance. Also recently the GNN community sent a reporter to southern Lebanon, where he risked his life reporting on Israel's use of cluster bombs (he must have just been doing that to throw you off the Mossad trail right?). Another completely false accusation is that Lappe has called for people not to protest the war. Like all of their accusations, there is a grain of truth and a mountain of distortion. Here are examples from a thread discussing antiwar protests:

Lappe: More than anything street protests are get ways to energize people and show individuals are out there who share your values. I just saw last year people who spent literally the whole year preparing for the RNC protests – and for what? What was gained by the street protests during the RNC, very little. I think they were important. But all the planning, all the splinter groups, etc was a monumental waste of time. Time is finite, so are man/woman hours. There should have been one big march, where everyone showed up and marched. End of story.

This Wiki page proves how a small clique of disgruntled anonymous people can use Wikipedia to further their own agenda. It really is a shame. I urge the responsible editors here to do their homework and provide the proper balance and depth about GNN's work and ideas before they allow the lunatic fringe to use an open publishing platform to unfairly impugn the work of a small group of dedicated journalists. It's not a joke. This kind of disinformation can not only hurt honest and hardworking people's careers, it could possibly endanger their lives when they report from countries in which being a CIA agent can get your head cut off. - Anthony Lappe, GNN


Cleaned up the disinformation section a bit, added updated links. Seems to me like that section might become a battleground between people who believe that theory and people who don't. Hopefully we can find a neutral common ground for it. --CurtainCall29 02:05, 16 October 2006


I really don't think this page needs to become a forum for Fetch's paranoid grudge against Shogo, and nor does it need to overemphasize the disinfo allegations. Perhaps CurtainCall29 and Fetch need to realize that Wikipedia exists as an encyclopedia and a source of information, and not as a clearinghouse for personal grudges, speculation, and ranting. I deleted the entirety of the Fetch's additions to the page simply because they were pure opinion, and also inappropriate for Wikipedia. I'd like to emphasize to both of you that there are plenty of forums - which you're taking full advantage of - to air out your perceptions and greivances. This is not the place.


Point 5 in the allegations list is subjective and has no place. I already covered that above, and it's not evidence of anything but political moderation - which one can embrace or not, but it's not evidence. It's opinion.



I fixed many of MountainMan's spelling and grammatical errors, and removed several weasel words from the article.

Let's keep it neutral, please. Nobody has edited the primary header to describe GNN as an intelligence operation, and the accusations have been relegated to their own sub-section. Why that sub-section, then, needs to be heavily edited with a pro-GNN bias is beyond me.

--CurtainCall29 12:31, 19 October 2006


I think the page is adequately neutral at this point. What may be percieved as a pro-GNN bias is in fact nothing but an effort to remove anti-GNN bias and objectively analyze each point.

However, I think the current iteration is evenhanded towards each point of view, which is indeed sort of the point. I deleted the assertion that the accusation against the primary accuser was "disproven" as many believe he has some sort of personal agenda at work, whether or not he's involved with the new site. Furthermore, I added in a mention of the fact that some GNNers have rejected the "connecting the dots" strategy as logically unsupportable and unnecessarily speculative. Whether you agree or not, I think that's a valid criticism that has been raised at GNN, and it should be included.

If you're satisfied with the current state of things on this page, I don't think that back-and-forth counteredits supporting whatever point of view you defend is particularly productive - so let's cool it.

MountainBum83 19:37, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


Fair enough, I think it's reasonably neutral at this point.

--CurtainCall29 01:15, 20 October 2006