Dead Racists Society

Worse than Russia:

Last night, here in DC, I spoke with Stelios Kouloglou, a journalist with Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation in Greece. His program on the public television station has won several awards for investigative journalism and remains extremely popular in his country.

On the one year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, April of 2004, his station broadcast a documentary he produced entitled, “25 Lies to Sell the War,” a title which needs no explanation to anyone who is not fully encapsulated in denial.

“I found out through a leak that the US embassy in Greece was applying political pressure to our government in order for them to pressure my television station for running my documentary,” he told me at his hotel.

“It became clear, after your election in '04 when Bush stayed in office, that his administration became much more aggressive,” he explained. “The US embassy began asking for our program to be discontinued. They were telling this not just to our program spokesperson, but directly to our government! Their protest took a much more official character, and they did not even attempt to conceal this.”

Being a journalist for 25 years and having covered the war in Yugoslavia as well as having worked in Moscow during Perestroika, he said this type of overt political pressure to be a first for him.

“I've never experienced political pressure like this, not even in Russia when I was being critical of Gorbachev, nor in Yugoslavia when I was being extremely critical of Milosevic,” he added.