Newsweek Was Right
by Ari Berman
The Bush Administration's aggressive response to a Newsweek story alleging that US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed the Koran down the toilet in front of Islamic detainees displays the height of hypocrisy. After Newsweek clumsily issued an apology, followed by a retraction, White House spokesman Scott McClellan called on the magazine to "help repair the damage that has been done, particularly in the region," by explaining "what happened and why they got it wrong." Maybe the Bush Administration should do the same, by opening up its secret facilities for inspection to the Red Cross and other third-party observers. We are printing below a letter from reader Calgacus--a pseudonym for a researcher in the national security field for the past twenty years--that shows how the desecration of the Koran became standard US interrogation practice.
"Contrary to White House spin, the allegations of religious desecration at Guantanamo such as those described by Newsweek on 9 May 2005 are common among ex-prisoners and have been widely reported outside the United States. Several former detainees at the Guantanamo and Bagram airbase prisons have reported instances of their handlers sitting or standing on the Koran, throwing or kicking it in toilets, and urinating on it.
One such incident (during which the Koran was thrown into a pile and stepped on) prompted a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees in March 2002. Regarding this, the New York Times in a 1 May 2005, article interviewed a former detainee, Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi, who said the protest ended with a senior officer delivering an apology to the entire camp. And the Times reports: "A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans." (Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantanamo Bay," New York Times, May 1, 2005, p. 35.)
The hunger strike and apology story is also confirmed by another former detainee, Shafiq Rasul, interviewed by the UK Guardian in 2003 (James Meek, "The People the Law Forgot," The Guardian, December 3, 2003, p. 1.) It was also confirmed by former prisoner Jamal al-Harith in an interview with the Daily Mirror (Rosa Prince and Gary Jones, "My Hell in Camp X-ray World Exclusive," Daily Mirror, March 12, 2004.)
The toilet incident was reported in the Washington Post in a 2003 interview with a former detainee from Afghanistan:
"Ehsannullah, 29, said American soldiers who initially questioned him in Kandahar before shipping him to Guantanamo hit him and taunted him by dumping the Koran in a toilet. It was a very bad situation for us, said Ehsannullah, who comes from the home region of the Taliban leader, Mohammad Omar. We cried so much and shouted, Please do not do that to the Holy Koran. (Marc Kaufman and April Witt, "Out of Legal Limbo, Some Tell of Mistreatment," Washington Post, March 26, 2003.)
Full: commondreams.org/The Nation
rootsie on 05.18.05 @ 07:29 PM CST [
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"You're a Drink-soaked Former Trotskyist Popinjay!" Thusly, I Humiliated Norm Coleman (and Christopher Hitchens)
by George Galloway
Before the hearing began, the independent MP for Bethnal Green and Bow had some scorn to bestow generously upon the pro-war writer Christopher Hitchens. "You're a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay," Mr Galloway informed him. "Your hands are shaking. You badly need another drink," he added later, ignoring Mr Hitchens's questions and staring intently ahead. "And you're a drink-soaked ..." Eventually Mr Hitchens gave up. "You're a real thug, aren't you?" he hissed, stalking away.
--The Guardian
Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.
Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.
Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.
I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.
As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.
I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.
You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.
Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.
Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.
Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.
You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.
There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.
You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.
I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.
And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].
Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.
Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.
Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?
Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.
You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.
And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.
But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.
Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.
In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.
The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.
Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.
I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.
If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.
Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.
Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.
Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.18.05 @ 01:15 PM CST [
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Tuesday, May 17th
Demonize, Disguise, Divert: Pinning the Blame on Newsweek
by Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood
If there is a political playbook for right-wing conservatives these days, it no doubt begins, "Step #1: Whenever possible, blame the news media."
What to do if the U.S. invasions/occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have sparked resistance in those countries because people generally don't like being occupied by a foreign power that has interests in exploiting their resources and/or geopolitical value? Blame journalists.
That's exactly what the Bush administration and its rhetorical attack dogs are doing with the "scandal" over Newsweek's story on the desecration of the Quran at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo.
Full: counterpunch.orgREPORTERS RIP BUSH SPOKESMAN OVER NEWSWEEK MESS...The White House said the United States' image abroad had suffered irreparable damage by the story.
But it was the press's turn to fight back as Bush spokesman Scott McClellan opened his briefing to questions.
[Joined in progess]
Q With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?
MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not telling them. I'm saying that we would encourage them to help --
Q You're pressuring them.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm saying that we would encourage them --
Q It's not pressure?
MR. McCLELLAN: Look, this report caused serious damage to the image of the United States abroad. And Newsweek has said that they got it wrong. I think Newsweek recognizes the responsibility they have. We appreciate the step that they took by retracting the story. Now we would encourage them to move forward and do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done by this report. And that's all I'm saying. But, no, you're absolutely right, it's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report....
Q Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you're saying here?
Full: drudgereport.com
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 10:06 PM CST [
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How Many Schools Left Behind?
by Jessie Muldoon
By JESSIE MULDOON
THE NO Child Left Behind Act is the Bush administration's deeply flawed legislation that claims to be the solution to the many problems of public education. Signed into law in January 2002, it won bipartisan support--most notably, from liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.
NCLB promised to close the achievement gap between middle-class suburban students and those at under-funded inner-city or rural schools. Bush and others spoke of accountability and equity, but the critics of NCLB saw through the rhetoric for what the law really is--an attempt to privatize education and transfer the responsibility and cost of educating our children from the federal government to individual and often impoverished school districts.
NCLB is built around the use of standardized tests--with the promise that gaps in testing will be gone by 2014. Progress toward this goal is to be measured by Average Yearly Progress (AYP) scores, with sanctions imposed on schools that don't make the annual goals.
The law promises parents that their children will be taught by "highly qualified" teachers and allows them to request a transfer to a different school. The law opens the door to vouchers and charter schools, threatens to privatize services currently provided by unionized public school employees and welcomes faith-based groups into school programs. But the real centerpiece of NCLB is standardized testing.
...ONE LITTLE- known provision of NCLB requires high schools to turn over names, phone numbers and addresses of all students to the military, or risk losing NCLB funding. Parents have the right to opt out, and many school districts have organized to educate students and families of their rights.
In Montclair, N.J., schools tell parents about the requirement as soon as their child enters 9th grade and follow up with letters home and reminders. The school district reports that at last count, 92 percent of families had requested that their child's information not be sent to the military. At many high schools in the Bay Area, teachers have organized similar opt-out campaigns.
With the military regularly falling short of its recruitment goals, this NCLB provision is becoming even more important to the Bush administration. The movement to kick recruiters off campuses is a natural ally to the teachers' unions and parent organizations opposing No Child Left Behind.
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 09:59 PM CST [
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US terror arrest after Castro rally
A man accused of masterminding the blowing-up of a Cuban airliner off Barbados in 1976 which killed 73 people was arrested in Miami yesterday.
Luis Posada Carriles's arrest came hours after the Cuban president, Fidel Castro, led a march by an estimated 1.2 million people on Havana's US diplomatic mission calling for his extradition.
Mr Posada emerged from hiding for a blitz of media interviews after slipping into the US from Mexico two months ago.
Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president and a close ally of the Cuban president, asked Washington to extradite Mr Posada, who has Venezuelan citizenship and who lived there at the time of the bombing, last week.
Until last night, when he was taken into custody by immigration authorities, the US had made no apparent moves to detain him since his lawyer said a month ago that he was in the country. But the homeland security department said it did not normally return people to Cuba or to countries acting on Cuba's behalf.
Interviewed in the Miami Herald yesterday, Mr Posada denied any involvement in the 1976 bombing, but did not confirm or deny a role in bombings of hotels in Cuba in 1997 in which an Italian died.
Mr Posada was freed last August from a Panamanian prison when he was pardoned over a plot to kill Mr Castro in 2000, and, since entering the US via a people-smuggler, has applied for political asylum.
The presence of Mr Posada, a former CIA collaborator, has forced Washington to choose between an anti-terrorism stance and backing for Cuban exiles. Over the past five weeks, Mr Castro has charged the US with hypocrisy in 16 live televised speeches, each lasting up to four hours.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 09:54 PM CST [
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The deserters: Awol crisis hits the US forces
Sergeant Kevin Benderman cannot shake the images from his head. There are bombed villages and desperate people. There are dogs eating corpses thrown into a mass grave. And most unremitting of all, there is the image of a young Iraqi girl, no more than eight or nine, one arm severely burnt and blistered, and the sound of her screams.
Last January, these memories became too much for this veteran of the war in Iraq. Informed his unit was about to return, he told his commanders he wanted out and applied to be considered a conscientious objector. The Army refused and charged him with desertion. Last week, his case - which carries a penalty of up to seven years' imprisonment - started before a military judge at Fort Stewart in Georgia.
"If I am sincere in what I say and there's consequences because of my actions, I am prepared to stand up and take it," Sgt Benderman said. "If I have to go to prison because I don't want to kill anybody, so be it."
The case of Sgt Benderman and those of others like him has focused attention on the thousands of US troops who have gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave) since the start of President George Bush's so-called war on terror. The most recent Pentagon figures suggest there are 5,133 troops missing from duty. Of these 2,376 are sought by the Army, 1,410 by the Navy, 1,297 by the Marines and 50 by the Air Force. Some have been missing for decades.
But campaigners say the true figure could be far higher. Staff who run a volunteer hotline to help desperate soldiers and recruits who want to get out, say the number of calls has increased by 50 per cent since 9/11. Last year alone, the GI Rights Hotline took more than 30,000 calls. At present, the hotline gets 3,000 calls a month and the volunteers say that by the time a soldier or recruit dials the help-line they have almost always made up their mind to get out by one means or another.
Full: independent.co.uk
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 09:50 PM CST [
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Masai fury after judge told to halt white aristocrat murder trial
A court was told yesterday that a murder charge against one of Kenya's most prominent white farmers should be dropped on the recommendation of its attorney general.
The Hon Thomas Cholmondeley, 37, whose father, Lord Delamere, is one of Kenya's biggest landowners, had been accused of shooting and killing Samson ole Sisina, a plainclothes game warden, on the Delamere family's ranch, Soysambu.
The warden was on the 100,000 acre (40,000 hectares) farm, along with two colleagues, for an undercover investigation into the trade in "bushmeat" from illegally slaughtered buffalo or impala.
...Mr Sisina was a Masai, and dropping the charge may cause widespread anger. The Masai nurse grievances against white farmers for settling on land they once roamed with their cattle.
Outside court, Kitaei Ole Nkoiboni, a Masai councillor in the town of Narok, said: "We are very angry and bitter that once again we are not seeing justice done. One of our sons has died in the dedication of his duty; yet what we see today is that you can kill and get away with it."
The Delameres have lived in the Rift valley for more than a century, and enjoy close links with Kenya's ruling elite. The fourth Baron Delamere, father of the current baron, was part of the hedonistic "Happy Valley" set dramatised by the film White Mischief, set in 1941.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 09:46 PM CST [
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Lost tribe at risk after court victory for Amazon loggers
Campaigners in the Brazilian Amazon fear a group of as yet uncontacted indigenous peoples in a remote corner of the rainforest face "annihilation" after a court overturned state efforts to protect them from logging firms.
The supreme court ruled that the company can continue logging in the densely forested area at the Pardo river in north-west Mato Grosso state, which borders Bolivia.
In his ruling, Judge Luiz Fux said that the company Sulmap Sul Amazonia would suffer "irreversible damage" if logging was banned.
The group of hunter-gatherers, known by a neighbouring group as the "little people" was first sighted in the 1980s, but workers of the government's indigenous peoples protection agency, known as Funai, only found signs of a hurried departure in their abandoned villages when sent to contact them.
Arrows, hammocks, baskets of nuts and footprints have been found, but no direct contact has been made, as the group flees into the forest.
Full:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 09:41 PM CST [
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The People of Acoma Still Fight to be Free
by Petuuche Gilbert
...The conquerors should be so proud of themselves. We are profoundly brainwashed that we behave as conquered people. This is the legacy of Oñate and the conquerors. Colonialism remains alive and well. We have Spanish forms of civil governments and we select our own leaders to rule ourselves. We rely on the land grant system to have our land rights respected. We are devout Catholics. We are proud American citizens and we proudly put our hands on our chests as we say the Pledge of Allegiance. We are proud to be called Native Americans. How tragic and what a travesty this is. As indigenous peoples we never ask ourselves why. Why do we have blind patriotism to a nation that stole our land, committed genocide and instituted creative law intended to keep us as political prisoners.
Today we, the indigenous people, fight for our human right to be free, sovereign and self-determining people. To become this is the challenge is upon all of us here. The United States of America is the most ardent enemy of indigenous people. This nation refuses to respect and recognize us as PEOPLES because peoples in international law have the right to self-determination. During the Decade of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples we aggressively pursued for the right of self-determination to be enshrined in the draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This did not happen as the decade ended in 2004. Prior to this indigenous people at the last World Conference on Racism, indigenous people accused the world's nation-states of being racist by refusing to recognize indigenous people to be as peoples. This struggle for self-determination continues at the Organization of American States as they work to adopt an Inter-American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In it we are not considered to be indigenous peoples with the full right of self-determination...
Full:counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.17.05 @ 09:36 PM CST [
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Monday, May 16th
Al-Sadr Demands Americans Leave Iraq
NAJAF, Iraq - Anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr came out of hiding Monday for the first time since his fighters clashed with American forces in August, delivering a fiery speech demanding that coalition forces leave Iraq and that Saddam Hussein be punished.
Al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose militia battled U.S. forces in Baghdad and Najaf last year, held a press conference in his father's home in this holy Shiite Muslim city, 100 miles south of Baghdad. Al-Sadr criticized the American-led occupation and called for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.
He also demanded punishment for Saddam, who brutally suppressed Shiites during his three-decade rule and now is being held in a U.S. military detention facility in Baghdad awaiting trial on war crimes charges.
"I demand several things, including punishing Saddam and calling on the Iraqi government, religious movements and political factions to work hard to kick out the occupier," al-Sadr said. "I want the immediate withdrawal of the occupation forces."
Al-Sadr's reappearance coincides with mediation efforts involving Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi to get murder charges against the cleric dropped. An Iraqi judge has issued an arrest warrant charging al-Sadr and his key lieutenant, Riyadh al-Nouri, in the 2003 assassination of moderate cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei.
Al-Sadr also accused the United States of trying to foment a sectarian conflict, and he demanded the coalition release all detainees.
"The occupier is trying to make up a sectarian war between the Sunnis and Shiites," al-Sadr said. "It is not acceptable to direct the allegations of ugly acts committed by the occupier against the Shiites, to the Sunnis, we also condemn and denounce all the terrorist acts."
Full: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 07:28 PM CST [
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And Now, the News in Latin America's View
CARACAS, Venezuela - The United States has CNN and Fox, while the Arab world can watch Al Jazeera or American-financed Al Iraqiya in Iraq.
Now, an initiative pushed by Hugo Chávez, the left-leaning president of Venezuela, will soon give Latin America Telesur, a regionwide television station that he says is aimed at "counteracting the media dictatorship of the big international news networks."
A venture that involves Argentina, Cuba, Brazil and Uruguay but is largely financed by Venezuela, Telesur will have a decidedly Latin feel, says its director, Aram Aharonian. The station, scheduled to begin broadcasting in July and testing its signal late this month, will show long documentaries about landless peasants in Brazil or indigenous movements in the Andes while offering nitty-gritty reports about politics and sports from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.
The tussle over what is news, and who gets to tell it, is going on in many parts of the world. Here, it goes to the heart of a heated propaganda war that Venezuela's government is intent on winning, both in Venezuela and across Latin America, where Mr. Chávez and his nemesis, the United States, are trolling for support from neighboring countries as they try isolating each other.
Telesur journalists talk of an "antihegemonic network," a not-so-veiled reproach to American media. Anchors on Telesur - which is a truncation of Television of the South - will include journalists like Ati Kiwa, a Colombian Indian who dresses in the traditional white robes of her Arhuaco tribe.
"This is not just my dream, but the dream of many journalists in Latin America, that we will see our own reality on the air," said Mr. Aharonian, 59, an Uruguayan journalist who has lived in Caracas since 1986. "We want to see ourselves through television, showing the diversity and richness."
But critics say that here in a part of the world that has a long tradition of independent journalism, Mr. Chávez's intention is to stifle dissent rather than to broaden coverage with a propaganda machine financed by an ideologically driven government flush with oil money.
Full: nytimes.comIf Chavez is so intent on stifling dissent,why are all the tv stations but ONE in Venezuela run by the opposition? If there's anybody who should know about the 'propaganda' machine, it's the NY Times.
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 07:24 PM CST [
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A Battle Over Programming at National Public Radio
WASHINGTON, May 15 - Executives at National Public Radio are increasingly at odds with the Bush appointees who lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In one of several points of conflict in recent months, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates federal funds for public radio and television, is considering a plan to monitor Middle East coverage on NPR news programs for evidence of bias, a corporation spokesman said on Friday.
The corporation's board has told its staff that it should consider redirecting money away from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.
Top officials at NPR and member stations are upset as well about the corporation's decision to appoint two ombudsmen to judge the content of programs for balance. And managers of public radio stations criticized the corporation in a resolution offered at their annual meeting two weeks ago urging it not to interfere in NPR editorial decisions.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 07:16 PM CST [
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Lucas jabs at 'Bush's empire'
CANNES — The last episode of the seminal sci-fi saga "Star Wars" screened at the Cannes film festival Sunday, completing a six-part series that remains a major part of popular culture — and delivering a galactic jab to U.S. President George W Bush.
"Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith" was seen ahead of a celebrity-laden evening screening to be attended by its creator and director, George Lucas, and its cast, including Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen.
Reaction at advance screenings was effusive, with festival-goers, critics and journalists at Cannes applauding at the moment the infamous Darth Vader came into being.
But there were also murmurs at the parallels being drawn between Bush's administration and the birth of the space opera's evil Empire.
Baddies' dialogue about bloodshed and despicable acts being needed to bring "peace and stability" to the movie's universe, mainly through a fabricated war, set the scene.
And then came the zinger, with the protagonist, Anakin Skywalker, saying just before becoming Darth Vader: "You are either with me — or you are my enemy."
To the Cannes audience, often sympathetic to anti-Bush messages in cinema as last year's triumph here of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" attested, that immediately recalled Bush's 2001 ultimatum, "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror."
Lucas, speaking to reporters, emphasised that the original "Star Wars" was written at the end of the Vietnam war, when Richard Nixon was U.S. president, but that the issue being explored was still very much alive today.
"The issue was, how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship?" he said.
"When I wrote it, Iraq (the U.S.-led war) didn't exist... but the parallels of what we did in Vietnam and Iraq are unbelievable."
He acknowledged an uncomfortable feeling that the United States was in danger of losing its democratic ideals, like in the movie.
"I didn't think it was going to get this close. I hope this doesn't come true in our country."
Although he didn't mention Bush by name, Lucas took what sounded like another dig while explaining the transformation of the once-good Anakin Skywalker to the very bad Darth Vader.
"Most bad people think they're good people," he said.
Full: japantoday.com
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 07:11 PM CST [
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American way of life attacked in films at Cannes
CANNES, France (Reuters) - The dark underside of the United States has taken center stage in several films at Cannes this year, capped on Monday with a scathing attack of past and present racism in America by Danish director Lars von Trier.
"Manderlay," about a fictional Alabama plantation where people are living in 1933 as if slavery were never abolished, staggered festival-goers with a disturbing portrayal of America that fails, even today, to come to terms with its racist past.
There are a number of other films that examine dark and depressing aspects of the United States and "American Dream" losers, filled with violence, drugs and alcohol abuse. They were made by directors from the United States, Canada and Europe.
Full: reuters.myway.com">
Well there's a lot to examine...
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 06:59 PM CST [link]
Muslims skeptical over Newsweek back-track on Koran
KABUL (Reuters) - Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan were skeptical Monday about an apparent retraction by Newsweek magazine of a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran and said U.S. pressure was behind the climb-down.
The report in Newsweek's May 9 issue sparked protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan, India, Indonesia and Gaza.
Newsweek said Sunday the report might not be true.
"We will not be deceived by this," Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told Reuters in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan, referring to the magazine's retraction.
"This is a decision by America to save itself. It comes because of American pressure. Even an ordinary illiterate peasant understands this and won't accept it."
Aman was the leader of a group of clerics who Sunday vowed to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it handed over the military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Koran.
That call for a jihad, or holy war, still stood, he said.
Newsweek originally said investigators probing abuses at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay found that interrogators "had placed Korans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet."
Muslims consider the Koran the literal word of God and treat each book with deep reverence.
Last week's bloody anti-American protests across Afghanistan were the worst since U.S. forces invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.
"NOT CERTAIN"
Newsweek said Sunday its information had come from a "knowledgeable government source" who told the magazine that a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay said interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.
But Newsweek said the source later said he could not be certain he had seen an account of the incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts.
Afghans were unconvinced.
"It's not acceptable now that the magazine says it's made a mistake," said Hafizullah Torab, 42, a writer and journalist in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, where the protests began last Tuesday. "No one will accept it."
"Possibly, the American government put pressure on the magazine to issue the retraction to avoid the anger of Muslims," said Sayed Elyas Sedaqat, who heads a cultural group in the city.
Full: reuters.myway.com
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 06:59 PM CST [
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Mexico's Fox Defends Comment on Blacks
MEXICO CITY - President Vicente Fox refused to apologize Monday for saying Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won't — a comment widely viewed as acceptable in a country where blackface comedy is still considered funny and nicknames often reflect skin color.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City had raised the issue with the Mexican government. "That's a very insensitive and inappropriate way to phrase this and we would hope that (the Mexicans) would clarify the remarks if they have a chance," Boucher said.
Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, said the remark has been misinterpreted as a racial slur. He said the president was speaking in defense of Mexican migrants as they come under attack by the new U.S. immigration measures that include a wall along the U.S.-California border.
Stung by the U.S. crackdown on illegal immigrants, many Mexicans — including Mexico City's archbishop — said Fox was just stating a fact.
"The president was just telling the truth," said Celedonio Gonzalez, a 35-year-old carpenter who worked illegally in Dallas for six months in 2001. "Mexicans go to the United States because they have to. Blacks want to earn better wages, and the Mexican — because he is illegal — takes what they pay him."
But the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, two black U.S. civil rights activists, said Fox should apologize. "His statement had the impact of being inciting and divisive," Jackson said.
Lisa Catanzarite, a sociologist at Washington State University, disputed Fox's assertion. She said there is intense competition for lucrative working class jobs like construction and that employers usually prefer to hire immigrants who don't know their rights.
"What Vicente Fox called a willingness to work ... translates into extreme exploitability," she said.
Fox made the comment Friday during a public appearance in Puerto Vallarta, saying: "There's no doubt that Mexican men and women — full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work — are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States."
Full: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 05.16.05 @ 06:54 PM CST [
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Sunday, May 15th
The Way of the Commandos
by Peter Maas
Getting to Know the General
In a country of tough guys, Adnan Thabit may be the toughest of all. He was both a general and a death-row prisoner under Saddam Hussein. He favors leather jackets no matter the weather, his left index finger extends only to the knuckle (the rest was sliced off in combat) and he responds to requests from supplicants with grunts that mean ''yes'' or ''no.'' Occasionally, a humble aide approaches to spray perfume on his hands, which he wipes over his rugged face.
General Adnan, as he is known, is the leader of Iraq's most fearsome counterinsurgency force. It is called the Special Police Commandos and consists of about 5,000 troops. They have fought the insurgents in Mosul, Ramadi, Baghdad and Samarra. It was in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where, in early March, I spent a week with Adnan, himself a Sunni, and two battalions of his commandos. Samarra is Adnan's hometown, and he had come to retake it. As the offensive to drive out the insurgents got under way, the only area securely under Adnan's control was a barricaded enclave around the town hall, where he grimly presided over matters of war and peace, but mostly war, chain-smoking Royal cigarettes at a raised desk in the mayor's office. With a jowly face set in a permanent scowl, Adnan is perfectly suited to the grim realities of Iraq, and he knows it. When an admiring American colonel compared him to Marlon Brando in ''The Godfather,'' Adnan took it as a compliment and smiled.
Early one evening, I was sitting in his office when an officer entered with a click of his heels -- an Iraqi salute of sorts. He reported to Adnan that a rebel weapons cache had been discovered, and Adnan congratulated him -- but issued a warning. ''If even one AK-47 is stolen,'' he said, ''I will kill you.'' After a pause, he smiled and refined the threat. ''No,'' he said, ''I will kill your'' -- and he used a coarse word that referred to the officer's most private body part. There was nervous laughter. Everyone seemed certain that not a single gun, or single anything, would go missing.
Not long ago, hard men like Adnan, especially Sunnis, were giving orders to no one. Six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority dismissed the Sunni-led Iraqi Army, and the United States military set out to rebuild Iraq's armed forces from the ground up, training new officers and soldiers rather than calling on those who knew how to fight but had done so in the service of Saddam Hussein. By late last year, though, it had become clear that the new American-trained forces were not shaping up as an effective fighting force, and the old guard was called upon. Now people like Adnan, a former Baathist, have been given the task of defeating the insurgency. The new strategy is showing signs of success, but it is a success that may carry its own costs.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.15.05 @ 09:24 AM CST [more..]
Hundreds Dead in Uzbek Uprising
ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan (AP) - An estimated 500 bodies have been laid out in a school in the eastern Uzbek city where troops fired on a crowd of protesters to put down an uprising, a doctor said Sunday, corroborating witness accounts of hundreds killed in the fighting.
The doctor, who said she had seen the bodies, said residents were coming to Andijan's School No. 15 to identify dead relatives, who had been placed in rows. Soldiers were guarding the school, said the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety.
The doctor also said she believed some 2,000 people were wounded in the clashes on Friday, but it wasn't clear how she arrived at that estimate. The doctor spoke with The Associated Press by telephone; most outside journalists left Andijan Saturday after several reporters were detained by police.
Thousands of terrified Uzbeks trying to flee into Kyrgyzstan burned a government building Saturday and attacked border guards, a second day of violence triggered by a brazen jail break to free accused Islamic militants and a massive demonstration against economic conditions under the iron-fisted rule of President Islam Karimov.
There was no immediate word on casualties in Saturday's violence in this former republic of the ex-Soviet Union. Witnesses on Friday had said 200 to 300 people were killed in the gunfire; the doctor's report of 500 dead raised that estimate.
Andijan is Uzbekistan's fourth-largest city, about 30 miles from the country's easternmost border in the narrow finger of territory that protrudes deep into Kyrgyzstan, where an uprising in late March ousted that country's only post-Soviet leader.
Groups of armed people clashed with Uzbek government forces along the border with Kyrgyzstan on Sunday, killing several soldiers before fleeing to the Kyrgyz side, Uzbek villagers said.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.15.05 @ 09:12 AM CST [
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Old Foes Soften to New Reactors
WASHINGTON, May 14 - Several of the nation's most prominent environmentalists have gone public with the message that nuclear power, long taboo among environmental advocates, should be reconsidered as a remedy for global warming.
Their numbers are still small, but they represent growing cracks in what had been a virtually solid wall of opposition to nuclear power among most mainstream environmental groups. In the past few months, articles in publications like Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wired magazine have openly espoused nuclear power, angering other environmental advocates.
Stewart Brand, a founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the author of "Environmental Heresies," an article in the May issue of Technology Review, explained the shift as a direct consequence of the growing anxiety about global warming and its links to the use of fossil fuel.
"It's not that something new and important and good had happened with nuclear, it's that something new and important and bad has happened with climate change," Mr. Brand said in an interview.
For many longtime advocates of environmental causes, such talk is nothing short of betrayal. Because of safety fears that reached a peak during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and unresolved questions of how to dispose of nuclear waste, environmentalists have waged unrelenting campaigns against plants from Shoreham on Long Island to Diablo Canyon near the California coast.
But as mounting scientific evidence points to a direct connection between increasing carbon emissions and climate change, Mr. Brand and others have come to see conventional fuels like oil and coal as a greater threat.
In his article, Mr. Brand argued, "Everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production." He ran down a list of alternative technologies, like solar and wind energy, that emit no heat-trapping gases. "But add them all up," he wrote, "and it's just a fraction of enough." His conclusion: "The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon-dioxide loading is nuclear power."
Full:nytimes.comridiculous
rootsie on 05.15.05 @ 09:07 AM CST [
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Saturday, May 14th
MOVE Marks Police Bombing Anniversary
PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Under the watchful eyes of police and neighbors, the militant group MOVE marked the 20th anniversary Saturday of the police bombing that destroyed the organization's home and killed 11 members.
Group members and supporters gathered in West Philadelphia near the site where police trying to evict armed MOVE members from a rowhouse dropped an explosive from a helicopter. Officers then ordered firefighters to keep their distance as flames killed six adults and five children and consumed 61 adjacent homes.
``We will never allow another May 13, 1985,'' MOVE supporter Orie Ross shouted through a bullhorn to about 75 people. ``Our family can't be replaced.''
The group, which once espoused equality with animals...
Full: guardian.co.ukWell actually, there were no weapons found in the MOVE house. The article also does not mention that MOVE is a black organization. For which is reserved especially appalling 'journalism.'
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 10:15 PM CST [
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Anger as US backs brutal regime
Heated criticism was growing last night over 'double standards' by Washington over human rights, democracy and 'freedom' as fresh evidence emerged of just how brutally Uzbekistan, a US ally in the 'war on terror', put down Friday's unrest in the east of the country.
Outrage among human rights groups followed claims by the White House on Friday that appeared designed to justify the violence of the regime of President Islam Karimov, claiming - as Karimov has - that 'terrorist groups' may have been involved in the uprising.
Critics said the US was prepared to support pro-democracy unrest in some states, but condemn it in others where such policies were inconvenient.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 10:01 PM CST [
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Millions to link up for world's poor
Up to 20 million Britons are expected to protest against world poverty as part of the biggest mobilisation against global inequality ever seen.
In addition, 250,000 campaigners are planning to attend a rally in Edinburgh to coincide with July's G8 summit at Gleneagles where key talks among world leaders could witness Tony Blair securing a historic deal to help Africa's poor.
Oxfam yesterday ordered five million more white Make Poverty History wristbands. The charity has already sold three million.
Adrian Lovett, a campaign spokesman, said: 'At this rate we would expect between 10 million and 20 million will join the campaign.'
Meanwhile, the BBC is understood to have cleared its schedules on the same day as the Edinburgh march in anticipation of a huge global event.
Although the show of public support will bolster Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown's efforts to secure a breakthrough on debt, aid and trade, concern is rising in Whitehall that the key measures are failing to win US support.
This week Blair will embark on a charm offensive with President Bush and European leaders. However, there are fears within government that progress on reaching international consensus on increasing aid and writing off poor countries' debt is stalling.
Although officials maintain that plans to double international aid to around £60 billion a year and eradicate much of the debt of poor countries remain intact, privately they warn that agreement may not be reached during the talks.
Among attempts to build an international consensus, Blair will suggest to the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, that supporting Britain's moves to tackle Africa's problems will help Germany in its attempt to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
'A real commitment to Africa can only help them,' a Downing Street official said last night.
Full: guardian.co.ukWell I doubt that. And "concensus" for what? What is the purpose of a bunch of Europeans "ptotesting" poverty? Protesting to who? How about protesting continuing imperialism, the continuing 'Black Holocaust' (Aristide's words)? Just what the world needs, a bunch more muddy thinking from Europeans. Especially when they talk about 'helping.'
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 09:58 PM CST [
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The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"--and Global Terrorism?
by Frank Morales
The requirement of an ever-escalating level of social violence to meet the political and economic needs of the insatiable "anti-terrorist complex" is the essence of the new US militarism.
What is now openly billed as "permanent war" ultimately serves the geo-political ends of social control in the interests of US corporate domination, much as the anti-communist crusade of the now-exhausted Cold War did.
Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large. How could he be so sure of that? Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld. According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.
According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization--the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)"--would actually carry out secret missions designed to provoke terrorist groups into committing violent acts. The P2OG, a 100-member, so-called "counter-terrorist" organization with a $100-million-a-year budget, would ostensibly target "terrorist leaders," but according to P2OG documents procured by Arkin, would in fact carry out missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among "terrorist groups"--which, according to the Defense Secretary's logic, would subsequently expose them to "counter-attack" by the good guys. In other words, the plan is to execute secret military operations (assassinations, sabotage, "deception") which would intentionally result in terrorist attacks on innocent people, including Americans--essentially, to "combat terrorism" by causing it!
This notion is currently being applied to the problem of the Iraqi "insurgency," it seems. According to a May 1, 2005 report by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine, two of the top US advisers to Iraqi paramilitary commandos fighting the insurgents are veterans of US counterinsurgency operations in Latin America. Loaning credence to recent media speculation about the "Salvadorization" of Iraq, the report notes that one adviser currently in Iraq is James Steele, who led a team of 55 US Army Special Forces advisers in El Salvador in the 1980s. Maass writes that these advisors "trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses."
The current senior US adviser at the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which Maass writes "has operational control over the commandos," is former top US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official Steve Casteel, who worked "alongside local forces" in the US-sponsored "Drug War" in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, "where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel."
globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 10:16 AM CST [
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Is Bill Cosby Right or Is the Black Middle Class Out of Touch?
by Michael Eric Dyson
Do you view Bill Cosby as a race traitor?" journalist Paula Zahn bluntly asked me on her nighttime television show.
Zahn was referring to the broadside the entertainer had launched against irresponsible black parents who are poor and their delinquent children. Cosby's rebuke came in a May 2004 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. Not content with a one-off tirade, Cosby since then has bitterly and visibly crusaded against the declining morality and bad behavior of poor blacks.
Six months into his battle, Zahn snagged the comic legend turned cultural warrior for his first in-depth interview. Cosby clarified his comments and reinforced his position. No, he wasn't wrong to air the black community's dirty laundry. Yes, he would ratchet up the noise and pace of his racial offensive. And he surely didn't give a damn about what white folk thought about his campaign or what nefarious uses they might make of his public diatribe. One could see it on Cosby's face:
This is war, the stakes are high and being polite or politically correct simply won't do.
Since I was one of the few blacks to publicly disagree with Cosby, I ended up in numerous media outlets arguing in snippets, sound bites, or ripostes to contrary points of view. In The New York Times a few days after his remarks, I offered that Cosby's comments "betray classist, elitist viewpoints rooted in generational warfare," that he was "ill-informed on the critical and complex issues that shape people's lives,"
and that his words only "reinforce suspicions about black humanity."
Still, I don't consider Cosby a traitor, and I said so to Zahn. In fact, I defended his right to speak his mind in full public view. After all, I'd been similarly stung by claims of racial disloyalty when I wrote my controversial book on Martin Luther King, Jr. I also said that while Cosby is right to emphasize personal behavior (a lesson, by the way, that many wealthy people should bone up on), we must never lose sight of the big social forces that make it difficult for poor parents to do their best jobs and for poor children to prosper. Before going on Zahn's show, I'd already decided to write a book in response to Cosby's relentless assault. But my appearances in the media, and the frustrating fragmentation of voice that one risks in such venues, pushed me to gain a bigger say in the issues Cosby has desperately if clumsily grabbed hold of. This book is my attempt to unpack those issues with the clarity and complexity they demand.
Of course, the ink and applause Cosby has won rest largely on a faulty assumption: that he is the first black figure to stare down the "pathology" that plagues poor blacks. But to believe that ignores how figures from black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, in varying contexts, with differing results, have spoken controversially about the black poor. Equally intriguing is the leap of faith one must make in granting Cosby revered status as a racial spokesman and critic. He has famously demurred in his duties as a racial representative. He has flatly refused over the years to deal with blackness and color in his comedy. Cosby was defensive, even defiant, in his views, as prickly a racial avoider as one might imagine for a man who traded so brilliantly on dimensions of black culture in his comedy. While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle, he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table. Thus it's hard to swallow Cosby's flailing away at youth for neglecting their history, and overlooking the gains paid for by the blood of their ancestors, when he reneged on its service when it beckoned at his door. It is ironic that Cosby has finally answered the call to racial leadership forty years after it might have made a constructive difference. But it is downright tragic that he should use his perch to lob rhetorical bombs at the poor.
For those who overlook the uneven history of black engagement with the race's social dislocations and moral struggles-and who conveniently ignore Cosby's Johnny-come-lately standing as a racial critic-Cosby is an ethical pioneer, a racial hero. In this view, Cosby is brave to admit that "lower economic people" are "not parenting" and are failing the civil rights movement by "not holding up their end in this deal." Single mothers are no longer "embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband." A single father is no longer "considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father" of his child. And what do we make of their criminal children? Cosby's "courage" does not fail. "In our own neighborhood, we have men in prison.... I'm talking about these people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was two? Where were you when he was twelve? Where were you when he was eighteen, and how come you don't know he had a pistol?" Before he is finished, Cossby beats up on the black poor for their horrible education, their style of dress, the names they give their children, their backward speech and their consumptive habits. As a cruel coda, Cosby even suggests to the black poor that "God is tired of you."
zmag
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 09:06 AM CST [
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The Nobility of Slaughter: Tom Freidman, the Imperial Chronicler
by Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman is the most popular columnist in the United States. He's also the voice of the American establishment. From his perch at the CFR (Council of Foreign Relations) he delivers his affable-sounding polemics; spreading a gospel of free markets and endless war. His many accolades, including a stockpile of Pulitzer prizes, attest to his ability to convert the self-serving doctrine of personal accumulation into the highest form of personal virtue.
Friedman is forever the casual acquaintance, the man on the street, whispering a friendly word of advice to his readers. The world according to Tom is getting "flatter" all the time. This is his snappy, non-threatening expression for globalization. Friedman is the foremost pitch-man for the new economic paradigm; ignoring the tens of thousands of high-paying American jobs that have fled the country and the withering blow that outsourcing has delivered to the middle-class. He carefully avoids the details of how the neoliberal agenda has crushed third world nations with its austerity measures; privatizing resources, deregulating business and compromising national sovereignty. Instead, he champions the dismal results as a sign of emergent democracy.
"For globalism to work," Friedman avers, "America cannot be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is...The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist--McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonald-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." (NYTs March 28, 1999)
It's doubtful that anyone has ever written a more succinct defense of American militarism. Friedman's analysis casually mixes Machiavelli with Adam Smith; producing a poignant description of how the real world operates. Behind the illusion of "free markets" and globalization the same coercive, "hidden fist" is guiding events. For all his "folksiness", Friedman's world view is no different than that of George Bush.
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 08:51 AM CST [
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Muslims' Anti-American Protests Spread From Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 13 - Thousands of Muslims, from Gaza to Pakistan to Indonesia, emerged from prayer services on Friday to join Afghans in rapidly spreading protests over the reported desecration of a Koran by American interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In Afghanistan, at least 8 people were killed and more than 40 injured in clashes, bringing the death toll over four days of anti-American rioting to at least 16, with more than 100 injured. For the first time a policeman was killed in the violence.
Three protesters were killed and 23 people wounded as the police grappled with a crowd of more than 1,500 in Baharak, in far northeastern Badakhstan, the police chief of the province, Gen. Shah Jehan Nuri, said in a telephone interview. Ten police officers and members of the border police, who are based in the town, were among the injured, he said.
In three Pakistan cities, Peshawar, Quetta and Multan, hundreds of protesters led largely by religious parties burned American flags and chanted anti-American slogans after Friday Prayer. The protests were peaceful, though, thanks in large part to the large numbers of police officers deployed outside mosques and official buildings.
Hundreds of people gathered peacefully outside a mosque in Jakarta on Friday while a statement was read condemning the United States for the reported abuses. In Gaza, about 1,500 members of the radical Islamic group Hamas marched through the Jabaliya refugee camp as outrage spread over the reports, including a brief item in Newsweek, that interrogators at Guantánamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet in an effort to upset detainees.
Protesters carrying the green banners of Islam and Hamas shouted, "Protect our holy book!" Some burned American and Israeli flags. Anti-American protests are rare among militant Palestinians, who decry American support for Israel but emphasize that their struggle is with Israel, not the United States.
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Friday that officials at the Department of Defense were investigating reports of the desecration, and that "they take such allegations very seriously," but he did not indicate when the investigation would be completed, Reuters reported. "We will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran," he added.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.14.05 @ 08:47 AM CST [
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Friday, May 13th
History of empire lies forgotten in quiet tranquillity
by Randeep Ranesh
On the southern fringes of New Delhi, up from the city's latest spaghetti junction and past its military barracks, is a field that is forever foreign.
Behind a three-storey sandstone gatehouse are manicured lawns, watered gardens and 1,000 graves of the fallen heroes of the British-raised Indian army who died in two world wars. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, based in London, pays for their upkeep.
The plot is a study in quiet tranquillity far from the rude chaos of India outside. Hidden from most maps, the only pilgrims are the dwindling band of war veterans and the families of the dead.
Naresh Kalra, the official in charge of the cemetery, says barely 70 people come a year. Indians rarely ever pay homage to soldiers such as Captain CH Howard of the Burma Rifles or AJ Watson of the Royal Air Force who died serving "their motherland".
Many more know Nicholson's cemetery, a 45-minute drive away. Under matted shrubs lie the shattered marble tombstones of those who expired during the British Raj. Here also are war graves.
Most famous is that of Brigadier General John Nicholson. A strapping, 6ft Irishman, Nicholson "led the assault of Delhi but fell in the hour of victory" in what is known by Indians as the first war of independence, or recorded in British history as the 1857 Indian mutiny.
Nicholson's motherland has largely forgotten the 35-year-old brigadier general. The Raj has disappeared from the imagination of Britons, save for images of steam trains, "civilising" missionary work and impressive monuments built for royal visits.
It is easy to explain why. Modern states would rather remember their triumphs rather than the means they used to achieve them. But this leaves two truths - that of the rulers and that of the ruled. One people's heroes are another's villains.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.13.05 @ 10:25 PM CST [
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The true purpose of torture
by Naomi Klein
I recently caught a glimpse of the effects of torture in action at an event honouring Maher Arar. The Syrian-born Canadian is the world's most famous victim of "rendition", the process by which US officials outsource torture to foreign countries. Arar was switching planes in New York when US interrogators detained him and "rendered" him to Syria, where he was held for 10 months in a cell slightly larger than a grave and taken out periodically for beatings.
Article continues
Arar was being honoured for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organisation. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honoured guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: the tenuous "evidence" - later discredited - that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?
In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, "not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so." Fear of being the next Maher Arar.
The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: you are being watched, your neighbour may be a spy, the government can find out anything about you. If you misstep, you could disappear on to a plane bound for Syria, or into "the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay", to borrow a phrase from Michael Ratner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.13.05 @ 10:21 PM CST [
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Brazilians' long march to land reform
It's still dark when Juarez Santana Rocha tumbles off of his mattress, woken by music suddenly blaring from the truck carrying a noisy sound system.
He and more than a thousand others from the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia have half an hour to gather their backpacks, grab some bread, gulp a coffee and form a line on the BR-060 motorway.
Ahead of them the day will bring yet another leg of their epic 130-mile walk to the capital, Brasilia, calling for agrarian reform. At the same moment thousands of others are whooping their colleagues from slumber in 22 other giant tents in the camp, each from a different state, for the 17-day haul.
By first light there are 11,000 landless farmers, members of the Movimento Sem Terra, or MST, lined up in three strict columns along the motorway, a thin red line stretching for more than two miles.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.13.05 @ 10:15 PM CST [
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Pope sets predecessor on road to sainthood in record 26 days
Pope Benedict yesterday revealed that he had set his predecessor, John Paul II, on the road to possible sainthood just 26 days after the late pontiff's death.
Yesterday's announcement - in Latin - that the late pope was to be considered for beatification, the stepping stone to sainthood, broke all records. At least five years are meant to elapse after the death of a candidate before the Vatican initiates the necessary procedures.
The only other so-called "dispensation" since the rule was introduced in 1983 was for Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was beatified two years ago. But, in her case, it took more than a year for the Vatican to agree to an exception.
The Pope also yesterday resolved the most pressing staff issue in his in-basket with the appointment of a Californian to take over from him as the Roman Catholic church's doctrinal "policeman". As archbishop of progressive San Francisco, William Levada has been at the leading edge of the church's often awkward encounters with social change.
The purpose of the five-year rule is to let passions cool. Never has that seemed more necessary than in the case of John Paul II, who was cheered to the grave last month by a crowd chanting "Sant-o, Sant-o" ("Saint, Saint") and holding up banners demanding his immediate canonisation.
The Pope timed his announcement to coincide with the anniversary of what John Paul considered was his miraculous survival of an as sassination attempt in 1981. In his last book, published in February, the late pontiff said it was "just as if someone guided" the bullet that narrowly missed killing him.
Full: guardian.co.ukWell there's two ways of looking at that.
rootsie on 05.13.05 @ 10:12 PM CST [
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Geneticists Link Modern Humans to Single Band Out of Africa
A team of geneticists believe they have shed light on many aspects of how modern humans emigrated from Africa by analyzing the DNA of the Orang Asli, the original inhabitants of Malaysia. Because the Orang Asli appear to be directly descended from the first emigrants from Africa, they have provided valuable new clues about that momentous event in early human history.
The geneticists conclude that there was only one migration of modern humans out of Africa - that it took a southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australasia, and consisted of a single band of hunter-gatherers, probably just a few hundred people strong.
A further inference is that because these events took place during the last Ice Age, Europe was at first too cold for human habitation and was populated only later - not directly from Africa but as an offshoot of the southern migration which trekked back through the lands that are now India and Iran to reach the Near East and Europe.
The findings depend on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material inherited only through the female line. They are reported in today's issue of Science by a team of geneticists led by Vincent Macaulay of the University of Glasgow.
Everyone in the world can be placed on a single family tree, in terms of their mitochondrial DNA, because everyone has inherited that piece of DNA from a single female, the mitochondrial Eve, who lived some 200,000 years ago. There were, of course, many other women in that ancient population, but over the generations one mitochondrial DNA replaced all the others through the process known as genetic drift. With the help of mutations that have built up on the one surviving copy, geneticists can arrange people in lineages and estimate the time of origin of each lineage.
With this approach, Dr. Macaulay's team calculates that the emigration from Africa took place about 65,000 years ago, pushed along the coastlines of India and Southeast Asia, and reached Australia by 50,000 years ago, the date of the earliest known archaeological site.
The Orang Asli - meaning "original men" in Malay - are probably one of the surviving populations descended from this first migration, since they have several ancient mitochondrial DNA lineages that are found nowhere else. These lineages are between 42,000 and 63,000 years old, the geneticists say.
Groups of Orang Asli like the Semang have probably been able to remain intact because they are adapted to the harsh life of living in forests, said Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer, the member of the geneticists' team who collected blood samples in Malaysia.
Some archaeologists believe that Europe was colonized by a second migration, which traveled north out of Africa. This fits with the earliest known modern human sites - which date to 45,000 years ago in the Levant and 40,000 years ago in Europe.
But Dr. Macaulay's team says there could only have been one migration, not two, because the mitochondrial lineages of everyone outside Africa converge at the same time to the same common ancestors. Therefore, people from the southern migration, probably in India, must have struck inland to reach the Levant, and later Europe, the geneticists say.
Dr. Macaulay said it was not clear why only one group had succeeded in leaving Africa. One possibility is that since the migration occurred by one population budding into another, leaving people in place at each site, the first emigrants may have blocked others from leaving.
Another possibility is that the terrain was so difficult for hunter-gatherers, who must carry all their belongings with them, that only one group succeeded in the exodus.
Although there is general, but not complete, agreement that modern humans emigrated from Africa in recent times, there is still a difference between geneticists and archaeologists as to the timing of this event. Archaeologists tend to view the genetic data as providing invaluable information about the interrelationship between groups of people, but they place less confidence in the dates derived from genetic family trees.
There is no evidence of modern humans outside Africa earlier than 50,000 years ago, says Dr. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford University. Also, if something happened 65,000 years ago to allow people to leave Africa, as Dr. Macaulay's team suggests, there should surely be some record of this event in the archaeological record within Africa, Dr. Klein said. Yet signs of modern human behavior do not appear in Africa until the transition between the Middle and Later Stone Age, 50,000 years ago, he said.
"If they want to push such an idea, find me a 65,000-year-old site with evidence of human occupation outside of Africa," Dr. Klein said.
Geneticists counter that many of the coastline sites occupied by the first emigrants would now lie under water, since sea level has risen more than 200 feet since the last Ice Age. Dr. Klein expressed reservations about this argument, noting that rather than waiting for the rising sea levels to overwhelm them, people would build new sites further inland.
Dr. Macaulay said that genetic dates have improved in recent years now that it is affordable to decode the whole ring of mitochondrial DNA, not just a small segment as before. But he said he agreed "that archaeological dates are much firmer than the genetic ones" and that it is possible his 65,000-year date for the African exodus is too old.
Dr. Macaulay's team has been able to estimate the size of the population in Africa from which the founders are descended. The calculation indicates a maximum of 550 women, but the true size may have been considerably less. This points to a single group of hunter-gatherers, perhaps a couple of hundred strong, as the ancestors of all humans outside of Africa, Dr. Macaulay said.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.13.05 @ 09:55 PM CST [
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Protests Against U.S. Spread Across Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 12 - Anti-American violence spread to 10 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces and into Pakistan on Thursday as four more protesters died in a third day of demonstrations and clashes with the police.
At one of three anti-American demonstrations Thursday in Kabul, students set fire to a drawing of President Bush and tossed it into the air.
Hundreds of students took part in three separate demonstrations here in the capital, where they burned an American flag, and a provincial office of CARE International was ransacked in a continuation of the most widespread protests against the American presence since the fall of the Taliban government more than three years ago.
In the most violent single incident, the police fired on hundreds of tribesmen from Khogiani, a district in eastern Afghanistan, who were trying to march in protest on Jalalabad, the town where four people died and 60 were wounded on Wednesday.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.13.05 @ 02:57 PM CST [
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Thursday, May 12th
Aristide Interviewed by Amy Goodman
Haiti's former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune remains near death. He has been on a hunger strike for over three weeks. He was imprisoned in June and has yet to see a judge in his case.
Meanwhile, the convictions of 38 Haitian former military leaders convicted of atrocities in 1994 have been annulled. Among them could be Louis Jodel Chamblain, the death squad leader who helped lead last year's coup.
Today, in a Democracy Now national broadcast exclusive, we spend the hour with ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Fourteen months ago, Aristide was flown to the Central African Republic in what he called a modern-day kidnapping in the service of a coup d'etat backed by the United States.
Aristide was ousted by some of the same forces involved in the coup against him over a decade earlier. At that time, the leader of the FRAPH paramilitary death squad was on the payroll of U.S. intelligence agencies. The number two man - Louis Jodel Chamblain - was one of the leaders of this current coup.
Two weeks after this latest ouster, President Aristide defied Washington and returned to the Caribbean accompanied by a delegation of U.S. and Jamaican lawmakers. Aristide was eventually granted asylum in South Africa, where he now lives.
I reached him yesterday for the first extended broadcast interview in this country since moving to South Africa. I began by asking him about the condition of Yvon Neptune.
* Jean-Bertrand Aristide, speaking from South Africa.
AMY GOODMAN: Aristide was eventually granted asylum in South Africa, where he now lives. I reached him yesterday for the first extended national broadcast interview in this country since he moved to South Africa. I began by asking him about the condition of the ousted Prime Minister Yvon Neptune.
JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: It is very sad what we have as information about our Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune. He is still in hunger strike. How long he will be able to survive, we don't know. That's why we grasp this opportunity to ask everybody who can do something to not hesitate, because it is a matter of life and death. We need to save his life.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what you believe needs to be done?
JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: I think it's -- mobilization throughout the world, if I can put it this way, in the sense that we need many, many voices to equal the voices of Haiti. The people of Haiti want life and not death. They want peace and not violence. They want democracy and not repression. So Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and So Ann and hundreds of others who are in jail, they all need that mobilization. Whoever can say something, whoever can do something, please do it, because the Haitian people right now are waiting for your help.
Full:zmag.org
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 08:20 PM CST [
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Europeans warn Iran not to resume nuclear work
VIENNA (Reuters) - France, Britain and Germany have warned Iran they will break off talks and join Washington in seeking U.N. Security Council action if Tehran makes good on its threats to resume atomic work, EU officials said on Thursday.
The foreign ministers of the European Union's three biggest powers sent a toughly worded letter to Hassan Rohani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, warning that resuming potentially arms-related nuclear work "would bring the negotiating process to an end," an EU diplomat quoted the letter as saying.
"The consequences could only be negative for Iran," it said.
Full: reuters.my.comA UN war this time? All nice and 'legal'?
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:55 PM CST [
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France rejects migrant amnesty
The French interior minister, Dominique de Villepin, yesterday unveiled a package of tough new anti-immigration measures and warned that mass amnesties for migrants who had entered the country illegally were "completely out of the question".
Unlike the Spanish government, which this week issued residency and work permits to some 700,000 illegal workers, Mr de Villepin said Paris considered that previous mass amnesties, in 1981 and 1997, had encouraged further waves of illegal immigration.
"It is essential that we be extremely strict and firm," he said. Putting the number of illegal immigrants in France at "between 200,000 and 400,000", he said the phenomenon had become "a growing source of concern because of the mafia-like activities that feed these criminal networks."
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:26 PM CST [
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Americans seek bodily salvation through Jesus diet
Man does not live on bread alone, but Americans have become increasingly reliant on doughy carbohydrates in their diet. Now many in a rapidly expanding country are asking: "What Would Jesus Eat?"
That is the title of one of a growing number of Christian diet plans crowding the lifestyle shelves of mainstream bookshops. Other bestsellers include The Maker's Diet, The Hallelujah Diet and Body by God. For the persistently overweight, they hold the promise of spiritual and bodily redemption.
The selling strategies vary. Stephen Arterburn, the host of a Christian radio show and author of Lose it For Life, says: "If you want the world to notice Jesus, it helps to look and live like Jesus. We don't do this so we can look in the mirror and be more attractive. We do it so people can look at us and see Jesus."
Don Colbert, a Florida doctor and author of What Would Jesus Eat?, portrays his book as a way of putting some backbone into weak-willed believers.
"They're letting the flesh rule them and they're eating anything they want," he told the Guardian. "We're making them accountable. Many people will not eat the right kinds of food unless they're held accountable and before they put something in their mouths ask: 'Would Jesus eat this?'"
Dr Colbert said Jesus ate "whole grains, fresh fruits, seeds and nuts, rather than processed food". His book has recipes for Middle Eastern dishes such as hummus.
Full: guardian.co.ukoy the possibilities are endless: the loaves and fishes diet, the water and wine diet (new wine in new wineskin of course). The easiest thing though would just be to ask a billion Muslims what they eat over there.
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:23 PM CST [
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The film US TV networks dare not show
There will be no red carpet for Adam Curtis when his film The Power of Nightmares receives its gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival on Saturday. There would be no point: his film has no leading ladies who could disport themselves in backless numbers or lantern-jawed himbos to vogue fatuously before the snappers. Unless, of course, two of his chief protagonists, Osama bin Laden and Paul Wolfowitz, could be prevailed upon to pose together for the world's press on the Grand Palais steps.
"They did offer the full carpet treatment, but I declined," says Curtis. "I just had this horrible thought of me plodding up the steps and lenses dropping all around me." And yet the screening at Cannes is a great honour for Curtis. "They're suddenly talking about me as an auteur," he says. "I just think I'm a journalist. I do feel a bit like an animal in a zoo that's been put in the wrong cage and they'll find out and all go, 'Oi! that's not a giraffe, it's a vicuna!'" A vicuna, as you will know, is a llama-like ruminant.
Last year, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary, described by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw as a "barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary device into the crowded Cannes festival", won the Palme d'Or. This year something more discreet, but perhaps no less incendiary, is go ing to go off at Cannes in the form of Curtis's Bafta-winning documentary. Like Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and Woody Allen's Match Point, Curtis's film is not in competition, but it is nonetheless this year's Fahrenheit 9/11, shaking festival-goers out of their aesthetic reveries with a political analysis of the causes and consequences of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
Curtis does not care for the Moore parallel. "Moore is a political agitprop film-maker. I am not - you'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it. It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11. You see, up to this point nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world. It's weird that nobody had done before me."
Full:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:17 PM CST [
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Terror Suspects Sent to Egypt by the Dozens, Panel Reports
WASHINGTON, May 11 - The United States and other countries have forcibly sent dozens of terror suspects to Egypt, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch. The rights group and the State Department have both said Egypt regularly uses extreme interrogation methods on detainees.
The group said it had documented 63 cases since 1994 in which suspected Islamic militants were sent to Egypt for detention and interrogation. The figures do not include people seized after the attacks of September 2001 who were sent mainly by Middle East countries and American intelligence authorities.
The report said the total number sent to Egypt since the Sept. 11 attacks could be as high as 200 people. American officials have not disputed that people have been sent to countries where detainees are subjected to extreme interrogation tactics but have denied that anyone had been sent to another country for the purpose of torture. Among other countries to which the United States has sent detainees are Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria.
Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said sending someone to a country where he was likely to be tortured was banned under international law. "Egypt's terrible record of torturing prisoners means that no country should forcibly send a suspect there," he said.
The United States began sending terror suspects to Egypt in the mid-1990's when the practice, known formally as rendition, began to play a larger role in counterterrorism, according to officials from the Clinton administration.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:13 PM CST [
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McClellan Spars With Press, Claims No Need to Notify Bush
Q: Scott, yesterday the White House was on red alert, was evacuated. The first lady and Nancy Reagan were taken to a secure location. The Vice President was evacuated from the grounds. The Capitol building was evacuated. The continuity of government plan was initiated. And yet the president wasn't told of yesterday's events until after he finished his bike ride, about 36 minutes after the all-clear had been sent. Is he satisfied with the fact that he wasn't notified about this?
McCLELLAN: Yes. I think you just brought up a very good point -- the protocols that were in place after Sept. 11 were followed. The president was never considered to be in danger because he was at an off-site location. The president has a tremendous amount of trust in his Secret Service detail. ...
Q: The fact that the president wasn't in danger is one aspect of this. But he's also the commander in chief. There was a military operation underway. Other people were in contact with the White House. Shouldn't the commander in chief have been notified of what was going on?
McCLELLAN: John, the protocols that we put in place after Sept. 11 were being followed. They did not require presidential authority for this situation. I think you have to look at each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation. And that's what officials here at the White House were doing. ...
Q: Even on a personal level, did nobody here at the White House think that calling the president to say, by the way, your wife has been evacuated from the White House, we just want to let you know everything is OK?
McCLELLAN: Actually, all the protocols were followed and people were -- officials that you point out were taken to secure locations or evacuated, in some cases. I think, again, you have to look at the circumstances surrounding the situation, and it depends on the situation and the circumstance. ...
Q: Nobody thought to say, by the way, this is going on, but it's all under control?
McCLELLAN: And I think it depends on each situation and the circumstances surrounding the situation when you're making those decisions.
Q: Isn't there a bit of an appearance problem, notwithstanding the president's safety was not in question, protocols were followed, that today, looking at it, he was enjoying a bike ride, and that recreation time was not considered expendable to inform him of this.
McCLELLAN: Well, I mean, John mentioned 36 minutes after the all-clear. Remember, this was a matter of minutes when all this was happening. ...
Q: But has the President even indicated that even if everything was followed that he would prefer to be notified, that if the choice is: tell the commander in chief or let him continue to exercise, that he would prefer to be informed?
MR. McCLELLAN: Again, it depends on the situation and the circumstances. And you have to take all that into account, and I think that's what people were doing here at the White House, as well as those people that were with the president.
Q: I think there's a disconnect here because, I mean, yesterday you had more than 30,000 people who were evacuated, you had millions of people who were watching this on television, and there was a sense at some point -- it was a short window, a 15-minute window, but there was a sense of confusion among some on the streets. There was a sense of fear. And people are wondering was this not a moment for the president to exercise some leadership, some guidance during that period of time?
MR. McCLELLAN: The president did lead, and the president did that after September the 11th when we put the protocols in place to make sure that situations like this were addressed before it was too late. And that was the case -- that was the case in this situation. ...
full: editorandpublisher.com
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:10 PM CST [
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FBI Nabs Troops, Officers in Drug Sting
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - FBI agents posing as cocaine traffickers in Arizona caught 16 current and former U.S. soldiers and law enforcement personnel who took about $220,000 in bribes to help move the drugs through checkpoints, Justice Department officials said Thursday.
Those charged include a former Immigration and Naturalization Service inspector, a former Army sergeant, a former federal prison guard, current and former members of the Arizona Army National Guard and the state corrections department, and a Nogales police officer, officials said.
"Many individuals charged were sworn personnel having the task of protecting society and securing America's borders. The importance of these tasks cannot be overstated and we cannot tolerate, nor can the American people afford, this type of corruption," FBI agent Jana D. Monroe, who directs the bureau's operations in Arizona, said during a news conference in Tucson.
All 16 have agreed to plead guilty to being part of a bribery and extortion conspiracy, the result of the nearly 3 1/2-year FBI sting, acting assistant attorney general John C. Richter and Monroe said. Officials said more arrests are anticipated.
Full:apnews.myway.com
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:05 PM CST [
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Iris Scanning To Begin At Orlando International Airport
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Florida's busiest airport will begin using high-tech iris-scanning technology to filter out possible terrorists and add an additional layer of security, according to Local 6 News.
Workers and other people at Orlando International Airport will have both irises scanned at special computers to determine their identity.
"This will be an additional layer of information that is enrolled, which will be biometric information," OIA director of security Brigitte Rivera Goersch said. "Employees irises will be enrolled for the additional layer of security."
The Airport Access Control Pilot Program or AACPP is a first of its kind, according to the report.
A person would be required to stand in front of a special mirror and have both eyes scanned.
"It has to verify both irises, not just one iris," Goersch. "Statistically it is very reliable. Iris scanners -- the technology of iris scanning -- is considered one of the most reliable biometric technologies."
"You know just like we did with the airplanes with the cockpit doors and air marshals and all of that kind of stuff," federal security director Art Meinke said. It is just another step to try to figure out what can we do better."
Full:local6.com
rootsie on 05.12.05 @ 07:02 PM CST [
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Wednesday, May 11th
Medicating Aliah
ALIAH GLEASON IS A BIG, lively girl with a round face, a quick wit, and a sharp tongue. She's 13 and in eighth grade at Dessau Middle School in Pflugerville, Texas, an Austin suburb, but could pass for several years older. She is the second of four daughters of Calvin and Anaka Gleason, an African American couple who run a struggling business taking people on casino bus trips.
In the early part of seventh grade, Aliah was a B and C student who "got in trouble for running my mouth." Sometimes her antics went overboard—like the time she barked at a teacher she thought was ugly. "I was calling this teacher a man because she had a mustache," Aliah recalled over breakfast with her parents at an Austin restaurant.
School officials considered Aliah disruptive, deemed her to have an "oppositional disorder," and placed her in a special education track. Her parents viewed her as a spirited child who was bright but had a tendency to argue and clown. Then one day, psychologists from the University of Texas (UT) visited the school to conduct a mental health screening for sixth- and seventh-grade girls, and Aliah's life took a dramatic turn.
A few weeks later, the Gleasons got a "Dear parents" form letter from the head of the screening program. "You will be glad to know your daughter did not report experiencing a significant level of distress," it said. Not long after, they got a very different phone call from a UT psychologist, who told them Aliah had scored high on a suicide rating and needed further evaluation. The Gleasons reluctantly agreed to have Aliah see a UT consulting psychiatrist. She concluded Aliah was suicidal but did not hospitalize her, referring her instead to an emergency clinic for further evaluation. Six weeks later, in January 2004, a child-protection worker went to Aliah's school, interviewed her, then summoned Calvin Gleason to the school and told him to take Aliah to Austin State Hospital, a state mental facility. He refused, and after a heated conversation, she placed Aliah in emergency custody and had a police officer drive her to the hospital.
The Gleasons would not be allowed to see or even speak to their daughter for the next five months, and Aliah would spend a total of nine months in a state psychiatric hospital and residential treatment facilities. While in the hospital, she was placed in restraints more than 26 times and medicated—against her will and without her parents' consent—with at least 12 different psychiatric drugs, many of them simultaneously.
Full:motherjones.com
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:57 PM CST [
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King of Jordan to Pardon Chalabi's $300 Million Swindle
King Abdullah of Jordan has agreed to pardon Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi political leader, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for fraud after his bank collapsed with $300m (£160m) in missing deposits in 1989.
Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, asked the king to resolve the differences between Jordan and Mr Chalabi, now Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, during a visit to Ammanthis week.
Latif Rashid, the Iraqi minister of water resources, said Mr Talabani confirmed to him that King Abdullah had promised, in effect, to quash the conviction. He expected there would first be a meeting between Jordanian officials and Mr Chalabi "who has some questions of his own."
The expected pardon, is the latest twist in the extraordinary career of Mr Chalabi, now again in the ascendant as an important member of the Shia coalition and the new Iraqi government. Only a year ago US soldiers raided his house in Baghdad, put a gun to his head, arrested two of his supporters and seized papers. He was accused of passing intelligence information to Iran.
Previously an ally of the neoconservatives and of the civilians in the Pentagon whom he managed to convince of the need to topple Saddam Hussein, Mr Chalabi sought new friends. He cultivated Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia clergyman whose militia the US Army was trying to destroy. He became a leader of one of the main factions in the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shia coalition which triumphed in the election on 30 January.
Again Mr Chalabi has escaped not only political annihilation, but has emerged from a crisis with his power enhanced.
Full: counterpunch.orgspook
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:43 PM CST [
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Brazilian chief calls for tools to help save land from 'white man'
The chief of an Indian village in a remote area of Brazil yesterday unveiled the shopping list of basic equipment that could help him save a traditional way of life almost destroyed by agribusiness and forest clearance.
"We are fighting for the survival of our people and our language and culture," said Kuissi, of the Kisedje people, during a visit to the University of Manchester. "We can't say what the future is going to be like."
Kuissi and two colleagues have left Brazil for the first time to tell their story in Britain and Germany and explain that just £60,000 could make all the difference to the lives of their people.
The wishlist includes a tractor, a pick-up, a radio, solar equipment, an aluminium boat, an outboard motor and a computer. "We need the money to buy white man's tools to be able to recover the land from the white man's destruction."
The Kisedje were first contacted by white explorers in 1959 and moved to protected land in the Xingu Indian Park. But the people were not vaccinated and numbers dropped to 62. The population has now recovered to 378 people, all of them speaking their own language. They are also back on most of their homelands.
"We never forgot our village," Kuissi said. "We never imagined that the forest would be destroyed by the white people."
Full:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:39 PM CST [
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Israeli doctors experimented on children
A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorised and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals.
An investigation by the government watchdog, the state comptroller, has revealed that researchers in 10 public hospitals administered drugs, carried out unauthorised genetic testing or undertook painful surgery on patients unable to give informed consent or without obtaining health ministry approval.
At one hospital, staff pierced children's eardrums to apply an experimental medication yet to be approved in any country. At another, patients with senile dementia had their thumbprints applied to consent forms for experimental drugs.
Israel's health minister, Dan Naveh, said he was "shocked" at what he described as a failure of his department and some of Israel's hospitals.
Full: guardian.co.ukI will not mention the obvious.
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:34 PM CST [
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Arabs, South Americans Back Iraq, Palestinians
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - South American and Arab countries gave support for the Palestinians in their fight for an independent state but condemned terrorism on Wednesday at the end of the first summit of leaders of the two regions.
A final summit declaration -- seen as having little serious effect other than showing symbolic unity between two regions of the developing world -- offered backing to the new Iraqi government led by Jalal Talabani in its struggle to rebuild the country and defeat insurgents.
Leaders also said the Middle East would only achieve peace and South America would only cut widespread poverty if developing nations resisted the supremacy and hegemony of rich countries and traded among one another.
``It's a declaration that points out the path we must follow if the relation between South America and Arab countries is to be changed forever,'' said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has led the gathering of 34 nations representing more than 600 million people.
Full:nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:31 PM CST [
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Afghanistan Sees Worst Anti-U.S. Protests Since Fall of Taliban
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 11 - Four Afghan protesters were killed and more than 60 were injured today in the eastern city of Jalalabad in the worst anti-American demonstrations Afghanistan has seen in the three years since the fall of the Taliban. At least a dozen buildings were ransacked and burned, including the governor's office, several government buildings, the United Nations mission compound, and a number of offices belonging to aid groups.
Afghan police and army troops, along with American forces, were deployed in the town and eventually quelled the riots, but not before running clashes with protesters. Foreign nationals were evacuated from the city as their offices came under attack and the air filled with smoke and gunfire. Government officials said the violence appeared to be planned and that religious hardliners and armed men had usurped what started as a student protest.
It was the second day of demonstrations by students in Jalalabad who were angered at a report in Newsweek magazine that United States interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention center had desecrated the Holy Koran by placing it on toilets, and even in one case, flushing a Koran down the toilet. The students carried banners condemning the action, chanted anti-American slogans and burned effigies of President Bush. The protest passed peacefully Tuesday, but violence erupted today with hundreds of stone-throwing and stick-wielding demonstrators spreading across town. They broke into compounds, smashed cars and set fire to offices of the government and of foreign organizations.
The governor's office and the office of the Central Statistics Office were set afire, destroying all the census records, said a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Lutfullah Mashal. The Pakistani consulate, the city library and the regional television and radio station were also attacked, he said. The United Nations' main office and two guesthouses were attacked, forcing the staff to evacuate, a United Nations spokeswoman said. Such aid organizations as the Red Cross; Acbar, an umbrella group of nongovernmental organizations; and a French medical agency, Aide Médicale Internationale, were attacked, along with offices of the Women's Affairs Ministry and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, residents said.
Demonstrations were also reported in several other towns in eastern and southern Afghanistan. High school students in Wardak province blocked the main road south from Kabul for an hour but were persuaded to disperse peacefully, said the local police chief, Basir Salangi.
"The students were peaceful and were shouting," said Mr. Mashal, the Interior Ministry spokesman. "But there were some specific, hard-line religious groups involved. From their activities it looks like it was pre-planned." He added that the violence may have been influenced by religious or extreme elements across the border in Pakistan, whether Taliban influence or Pakistani groups.
President Hamid Karzai, on a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels, said that while protests were a sign of democracy, the violence and destruction were an indication of how much Afghanistan still needed foreign assistance.
"Afghanistan's institutions, the police, the army, are not ready to handle protest and demos," he said.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:27 PM CST [
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Army Recruiting Halts for a Day in May
The Army will halt its recruiting efforts for one day this month to allow commanders to emphasize proper conduct following apparent excesses, Army officials said Wednesday.
The stand-down will take place May 20, said Douglas Smith, an Army spokesman. Army officials said it would affect almost all 7,500 recruiters at 1,700 stations around the United States.
In at least two instances, recruiters are facing disciplinary action for their dealings with potential recruits.
In Houston, a recruiter allegedly threatened to have a wavering would-be recruit arrested if he backed out, according to Army officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. The recruiter has no such authority.
Officials confirmed a second inquiry in Colorado, pointing to news reports about recruiters who allegedly offered information on fake diplomas and ways to get around drug tests and physical fitness requirements.
Full: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:24 PM CST [
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Errant Flight Prompts Capitol Evacuations
WASHINGTON (AP) - A small plane strayed within three miles of the White House on Wednesday, leading to frantic evacuation of the executive mansion and the Capitol with military jets scrambling to intercept the aircraft and firing flares to steer it away.
A pilot and student pilot, en route from Pennsylvania to an air show in North Carolina, were taken into custody after their flight sparked a frenzy of activity that tested the capital's post-Sept. 11 response system.
The government decided not to press charges after interviewing the men and determining the incident was an accident. "They were navigating by sight and were lost," said Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden.
Officials had been concerned because the plane appeared to be "on a straight-in shot toward the center of the Washington area," said Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer.
The White House raised its threat level to red - the highest - for eight minutes, said spokesman Scott McClellan. Vice President Dick Cheney, first lady Laura Bush and former first lady Nancy Reagan, overnighting at the White House for a special event, were moved to secure locations.
President Bush, biking with a high school friend at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Md., was unaware of the midday, 15-minute scare as it was occurring.
At the Capitol, lawmakers, tourists and reporters raced out of the building, dodging the speeding motorcades of Latin American leaders who had been meeting with members of Congress. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., was hustled to a secure location. Police, rushing to get House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi out of the building, lifted her out of her shoes.
Full:apnews.comWell they're terrifying the crap out of the rest of the world, so it's not surprising that they regularly scare the pants (or the shoes) off themselves.
rootsie on 05.11.05 @ 07:21 PM CST [
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Tuesday, May 10th
Another Look at Daneil Ortega and the Sandinista Struggle
by Joe DeRaymond
"This movement is national and anti-imperialist. We fly the flag of freedom for Nicaragua and for all Latin America. And on the social level it's a people's movement, we stand for the advancement of social aspirations."
Augusto C. Sandino
In 1911, Nicaragua was occupied by a force of United States Marines that invaded to protect United States interests. This was just the next of a series of US "interventions" and invasions of Nicaragua. The marines remained till 1925, then returned again in 1926, to quell a rebellion organized by a Nicaraguan, Augusto C. Sandino, who grew up under this US occupation. His guerrilla forces were never defeated, despite the deployment of 12,000 troops and the use of aerial bombardment. The Marines left Nicaragua in 1933, after the US had trained a Nicaraguan security force, The National Guard. In 1934, Sandino was assassinated by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a United States-trained officer who was the head of the National Guard, in a treacherous act of betrayal after a negotiated disarmament of Sandino's forces. Hundreds of disarmed Sandinista fighters were slaughtered at this time by the forces of Somoza. This massacre ushered in the brutal 45-year reign of the Somoza dictatorship. Anastasio ruled till 1956, when poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez ended his life with four bullets delivered as the ruler was drinking the night away at a party. His elder son, Luis Somoza Debayle ruled till 1967, when his heart gave out - his brother Anastasio Somoza Debayle took the reins. When he was forced from power in 1979, he owned one fifth of the farmland of Nicaragua, two meat packing plants licensed for export, three of the six sugar mills, 168 factories comprising one quarter of the national output of the nation, the national airlines, a radio and television station, and the Mercedes Benz dealership. He financed his enterprises with his own banks and the national treasury. He had bankrupted a nation for his personal benefit. During the rule of the Somozas, the National Guard quelled dissent with assassination, torture and imprisonment. The United States took the position that this family dictatorship was acceptable because the Somozas were ever-staunch defenders of US interests. "He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch", as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described Anastasio, the father of the dynasty. The Nicaraguan people paid with their lives.
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.10.05 @ 06:43 PM CST [
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Monday, May 9th
The Occupation, Year Two: Mission Accomplished
by Robert Fisk
Two years after "Mission Accomplished", whatever moral stature the United States could claim at the end of its invasion of Iraq has long ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib. That the symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality should have been turned by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraq adventure. We have all been contaminated by the cruelty of the interrogators and the guards and prison commanders.
But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at the Americans' Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Curiously, General Janis Karpinski, the only senior US officer facing charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited the prison that she had been at Guantanamo Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib she was not permitted to attend interrogations - which seems very odd.
A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram - by Americans, not by Afghans.
Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo - the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little clothing (or, in one case, pretended to smear menstrual blood on a prisoner's face) - are increasingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.
At the American camp outside Fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full plastic water bottles which break, cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib, prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.
Full:counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 10:16 PM CST [
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Jared Diamond, Greenwasher: Shilling for Chevron
by Louis Proyect
Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" is best understood as the environmentalist cousin to recent books and articles by Joseph Stiglitz, George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs that warn about the dangers of globalization. For the economists, the present world economic system is a ticking time-bomb that might destroy rich and poor alike. For Diamond the environmentalist, the refusal to husband resources such as forests, fish and clean water will lead to the collapse of modern-day societies just as surely as they led to Mayan or Easter Island collapse. Since Diamond and the economists all believe in the inviolability of the capitalist system, there is a certain cognitive dissonance at work in their writings. They harp on the symptoms, but stop short at identifying the root cause. It is what psychologists call denial.
But hope for the future arrives like a man on horseback in the concluding section of "Collapse." Our survival depends on corporations like Chevron who have proved that capitalism and sustainable development can co-exist. During an ornithological expedition in Papua New Guinea, Diamond discovered that the corporation had created a "bird-watcher's dream." Descending toward the local airport, he saw virginal rain-forest and scant evidence of the devastation typical of oil exploration and drilling.
What is more, Chevron demonstrated that it really cared about *him*. After stepping several feet onto a company road shortly after his arrival to inspect local birds, he was chastised by company officials that this was a hazard not only to himself but to the environment. A truck could smack into him or a pipeline next to the road, causing a spill of blood or oil. So his conversion took place on a road just like Paul's on the way to Damascus. The chastened ornithologist and prophet of doom promised company officials that henceforth he would wear a hardhat and stay on the side of the road.
Full:counterpunch.orgIt's called psychological warfare. I dutifully read Guns, Germs, and Steel and got a really queasy feeling. Diamond wrote a book about conquest without mentioning imperialism and the capitalist pillage of the past 500 years! His analysis of the confrontation between the Incas and the Spanish was nauseating. I haven't read Collapse because I don't want to give old boy any money but I read reviews: he chalks up the catastrophes in Haiti and Rwanda to poor land management! Not only a greenwasher but a whitewasher too. In effect, an apologist for empire.
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 10:11 PM CST [
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US Totalitarian Tendencies exposed
by Tafataona P. Mahoso
Those who grew up during the peak years of the Cold War are struck by an emerging pattern in US foreign policy. The pattern suggests that throughout those Cold War years, the US projected on the Soviet Union its own intentions and inclinations, accusing the latter of seeking to set up a world government, seeking to spread the Soviet version of communism to every corner of the globe, when in fact it was the US which sought to impose its form of corporate cannibalism on the whole world.
Now that the US and its allies succeeded in subverting and causing the collapse of the Soviet Union itself instead, they now boast of having achieved what they once accused the Soviet Union of trying to achieve. And it seems clear to historians of the Cold War that it was the US and its allies who sought world domination after tasting it during the fight against Hitler.
A re-reading of the book called Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy by Carl Friedrich and Zbgniew Brzezinski is telling in this regard.
However, we start with recent stories in the Press which provide immediate indicators of this historical reality.
l The top of the list should be John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man which was summarised in the interview which the US "economic consultant" had with a US radio station called Democracynow which The Sunday Mail reprinted under the title "Economic ‘hitman’ bares all" on May 1 2005.
Essentially, Perkins is saying that as a US economic "consultant" for the last 50 years, his real function was that of an economic saboteur and manipulator on behalf of the US transterritorial empire. Perkins says in the interview:
"Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring — to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country (the US), to our corporations, and our government and, in fact, we’ve been very successful . . . This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through economic hitmen."
But the most revealing part of Perkins’ interview is about the ladder of escalation of subversion methods used by this empire. At the lowest level it looks benign and friendly. It uses "civil society" means such as missionaries, NGOs, volunteers and other apparent do-gooders to soften up the society ideologically.
globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:34 PM CST [
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Middle East issues tread on Latin American stage
BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - The Israeli-Palestinian conflict took to the Latin American stage on Monday on the eve of an unprecedented summit in Brazil between Arab and South American nations.
But Arab nations were also looking for solidarity over the Palestinian cause, terrorism and other political issues.
``We should not have two-faced policies in areas where we see crises cropping up. Topping this list is the need of the Palestinian people,'' said Algerian presidential adviser Abdel Aziz Bel Khadem, speaking for the Arab nations.
``There is a lack of respect for the international rights of people to determine their own fate and there's a need for us to continue to reject occupation.''
The summit brings together leaders from 12 South American and 22 Arab nations, the first time that such an event has been held.
It was proposed by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva after his visit to the Middle East in 2003 and forms part of Brazil's drive to forge a role as a regional diplomatic power and leader of the developing world.
US, ISRAELI CONCERNS
The inevitable political aspects have already caused Israel and the United States concern. A draft of the final declaration contained passages supporting the right of people to resist occupation, a sign of support for the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel.
And while condemning terrorism, it also calls for a global conference to define the meaning of terrorist. Washington and the Israelis believe this could offer support to anti-Israeli militant groups such as Hezbollah, whom they deem terrorists.
The final declaration was unlikely to be changed, a Brazilian diplomat told Reuters.
The pre-summit politicking was also marked by Brazil turning down an informal request by the United States to send an observer. Amorim said they could watch it on television.
Full:nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:28 PM CST [
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Venezuela Seeks Taxes From Oil Companies
CARACAS, Venezuela, May 8 (AP) - President Hugo Chávez said Sunday that foreign oil companies working in the country must pay taxes he insists that they owe, or else leave.
During his Sunday television and radio show, Mr. Chávez said that many private companies had been evading taxes for years. Tax officials have said that many declare losses to avoid paying income tax.
The announcement appeared to be the latest move by Venezuela to put more pressure on foreign oil companies. Last month, the oil minister, Rafael Ramírez, announced that private oil companies operating in the country would have to convert to joint ventures with the government within six months, potentially bringing a substantial amount of new revenue to Venezuela. Mr. Ramírez also announced that the country's tax collection agency was investigating possible tax evasion by the companies, estimating that they may owe $2 billion in unpaid taxes since 2000.
Venezuela opened its oil industry to foreign oil companies in the 1990's. During that time, 32 operating agreements were signed with companies like ChevronTexaco, British Petroleum, Total, Petrobras, Repsol YPF, Royal Dutch/Shell and the China National Petroleum Corporation.
According to Venezuelan law, oil companies usually must pay a 30 percent royalty on what they produce in the country. But companies producing heavy crude, which is expensive to produce, were allowed to pay a 1 percent royalty until last year, when the government raised it to 16 percent.
Full:nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:25 PM CST [
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Algeria Asks France to Admit Violence
ALGIERS, May 8 (Reuters) - President Abdelaziz Bouteflika asked France in a speech published Sunday to admit its part in what he called the massacres of 45,000 Algerians who took to the streets to demand independence on May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated victory over Nazi Germany.
Algeria is commemorating the 60th anniversary of the repression of pro-independence demonstrators under French colonial rule as Europeans are celebrating the end of World War II in Europe.
"The paradox of the massacres of May 8, 1945, is that when the heroic Algerian combatants returned from the fronts in Europe, Africa and elsewhere where they defended France's honor and interests," Mr. Bouteflika said in the speech, "the French administration fired on peaceful demonstrators." The speech, given in the city of Sétif on Saturday, was published by Algeria's state media.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:22 PM CST [
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Cuban Exile Could Test U.S. Definition of Terrorist
MIAMI, May 5 - From the United States through Latin America and the Caribbean, Luis Posada Carriles has spent 45 years fighting a violent, losing battle to overthrow Fidel Castro. Now he may have nowhere to hide but here.
Mr. Posada, a Cuban exile, has long been a symbol for the armed anti-Castro movement in the United States. He remains a prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. He has admitted to plotting attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997. He was convicted in Panama in a 2000 bomb plot against Mr. Castro. He is no longer welcome in his old Latin America haunts.
Mr. Posada, 77, sneaked back into Florida six weeks ago in an effort to seek political asylum for having served as a cold war soldier on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960's, his lawyer, Eduardo Soto, said at a news conference last month.
But the government of Venezuela wants to extradite and retry him for the Cuban airline bombing. Mr. Posada was involved "up to his eyeballs" in planning the attack, said Carter Cornick, a retired counterterrorism specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation who investigated Mr. Posada's role in that case. A newly declassified 1976 F.B.I. document places Mr. Posada, who had been a senior Venezuelan intelligence officer, at two meetings where the bombing was planned.
As "the author or accomplice of homicide," Venezuela's Supreme Court said Tuesday, "he must be extradited and judged."
The United States government has no plan yet in place for handling the extradition request, according to spokesmen for several agencies. Roger F. Noriega, the top State Department official for Western Hemisphere affairs, said he did not even know whether Mr. Posada was in the country. In fact, Mr. Posada has not been seen in public, and his lawyer did not return repeated telephone calls seeking to confirm his presence.
Mr. Posada's case could create tension between the politics of the global war on terrorism and the ghosts of the cold war on communism. If Mr. Posada has indeed illegally entered the United States, the Bush administration has three choices: granting him asylum; jailing him for illegal entry; or granting Venezuela's request for extradition.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:19 PM CST [
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Aceh reconstruction comes to a near halt
Indonesia's post-tsunami recovery is at a near standstill and millions of people will be relying on aid from non-governmental organisations and international agencies for months, the head of the country's reconstruction body said yesterday.
Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, appointed last week to run the rehabilitation and reconstruction agency for Aceh and Nias, said there was "no sense of [government] urgency" in Aceh and that "close to zero" of promised government funds had been disbursed.
"It's shocking. Very limited things have been done for the poor people," Mr Kuntoro, a former energy minister, said. "There are no roads being built, there are no bridges being built, there are no harbours being built. When it comes to reconstruction, zero."
Reports of aid arriving late, or not at all, have become common in Aceh, the province in northern Sumatra worst hit by the Boxing Day tsunami.
Full:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:15 PM CST [
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States Propose Sweeping Changes to Trim Medicaid by Billions
WASHINGTON, May 8 - Governors and state legislators have devised proposals for sweeping changes in Medicaid to curb its rapid growth and save billions of dollars.
Under the proposals, some beneficiaries would have to pay more for care, and states would have more latitude to limit the scope of services.
The proposals, drafted by separate working groups of governors and state legislators, provide guidance to Congress, which 10 days ago endorsed a budget blueprint that would cut projected Medicaid spending by $10 billion over the next five years.
Many of the proposals resemble ideas advanced by President Bush as part of his 2006 budget. In some cases, the governors embrace Mr. Bush's proposals but go further. At the same time, they also reject some of the president's recommendations that they believe would shift costs to the states.
John Adams Hurson, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates who is president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said: "I am a Democrat, a liberal Democrat, but we can't sustain the current Medicaid program. It's fiscal madness. It doesn't guarantee good care, and it's a budget buster. We need to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility so people understand that this care is not free."
A coalition of beneficiary advocates, labor unions and health care providers is already gearing up to fight any significant cutbacks in Medicaid. The coalition includes AARP, Families USA, pediatricians, hospitals and nursing homes.
State officials say their goal is not just to save money, but also to avoid wholesale cuts in coverage like those in Tennessee, which is dropping more than 300,000 people from its Medicaid rolls, and in Missouri, which is dropping 90,000.
Full:nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:15 PM CST [
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Bush offers support to Putin's critics
George Bush risked a further deterioration in relations with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, yesterday when he met critics of the Kremlin's human rights record and told them he supported their work to build a "civil society" and democracy.
The US president held a 35-minute meeting with some of Mr Putin's more vocal critics in his hotel minutes before he attended a Victory Day parade in Red Square at the invitation of Mr Putin.
The meeting, described by one of those who attended as an "important sign to Mr Putin that America is interested in the development of independent society in Russia", let Mr Bush hear from organisations working in the fields of human rights, media freedom and environmental issues in Russia.
Manana Aslamazyan, from the media support group Internews Russia, said Mr Bush told them the US was ready to support their work. "He said that we need to work for more democracy in Russia," she said.
Full:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:15 PM CST [
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Military: Blues, But Not Green
May 16 issue - In case anyone still doesn't understand that recruiting is now the toughest job in the Army, the service missed its April goal by 42 percent. It was the third month in a row that the active-duty recruiting mission was not accomplished. Worse, the Pentagon was counting on absorbing a decent share of some 27,000 service members that the Air Force and Navy are letting go this year as part of Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld's grand realignment plan. Operation Blue to Green—trading blue service uniforms for Army green—this year was expected to turn 3,500 airmen and sailors into soldiers and help the military adjust to quick-deployment, land-based warfare.
Full:msn.com
rootsie on 05.09.05 @ 09:11 PM CST [
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Sunday, May 8th
'Bin Laden's nightmare' seeks Islamic reformation
A Muslim woman author, once described as Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare, is to call for the setting up of an Islamic reform movement to press for a change in the faith's attitudes towards human rights, women and pluralist societies at a public meeting this week.
Irshad Manji, a Canadian-based writer and broadcaster, is to launch her campaign for Ijtihad (independent thinking) with a claim for Islamic pluralism and the aim of setting up a foundation for young, reform-minded Muslims to explore and challenge their faith.
"No community, no ethnicity, no culture and no religion ought to be immune from respecting the universality of human rights," she said.
"This, of course, is a controversial message in an age of cultural relativism. I truly believe we can become pluralists without becoming relativists.
"Through our screaming self-pity and conspicuous silences, we Muslims are conspiring against ourselves. We're in crisis and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it is now."
Ms Manji is the author of the bestselling book The Trouble with Islam: A Call for Honesty and Change, which as well as being read in the west has been published in Pakistan and is to appear this year in Turkey, Iraq and India.
Full: guardian.co.ukWell, good luck with this. I'd say the three religions of Abraham aren't worth saving. I'm sure Ms. Manji is the darling of the right wing, even if she doesn't want to be.
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 08:35 PM CST [
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Spain grants amnesty for 700,000 migrants
Spain declared an amnesty yesterday for about 700,000 illegal immigrants - bucking a Europe-wide trend of cracking down on economic migrants, while striking at exploitation of those working secretly and fearfully in the black economy.
The Socialist government claimed that a three-month qualification period that ended at the weekend - during which illegal workers and their employers could apply for residency and work permits - had attracted most of the country's illegal workers.
"We can feel very satisfied," said the labour minister, Jesús Caldera. "Almost 700,000 jobs brought out of the black economy - that represents 80% to 90% of all such jobs held by immigrants in Spain."
Officials said that, with workers' families included, more than a million people would no longer have to hide from police or labour inspectors.
Long queues had built up outside government offices as the deadline for the amnesty drew near. Ecuadorians, Romanians, Moroccans and Colombians made up most of the applications. "If you get the papers, you go from being nobody to being somebody ... you exist," one Ecuadorian, Alvaro Salgado, 30, told Reuters news agency as he queued to apply on Saturday.
Full:guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 08:25 PM CST [
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Excuses, Excuses:How the Right Rationalizes Racial Inequality in America
by Tim Wise
Whenever I write an article about racism, or give a speech concerning the ongoing reality of discrimination in the labor market, I am assailed by those who refuse to believe what virtually any study done in the past two decades confirms: namely, that people of color are not seeing things, nor crazy when they suggest that racial bias is very much a modern-day phenomenon.
These assaults typically arrive in my e-mail inbox, within hours of an article going out over the web, as if pre-prepared long before, and as if their authors were simply waiting for an opportunity to pick an electronic fight.
Sometimes their retorts are little more than racist rants about how blacks and Latinos are lazy, or how American Indians are all drunk. But oftentimes the denial comes wrapped in far more sophisticated garb than that, occasionally bordering on the scholarly, in fact.
While some of the conservatives who regale me with their rationalizations for racial inequality manage to quote a gaggle of right wing "experts" to help make their case, the claims they forward are hardly the stronger for it.
Full: blackcommentator.com
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 08:08 PM CST [
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Peru's Catholics Brace for Fissures in Their Church
LIMA, Peru - This is the country where a radical, left-leaning "theology of liberation" first emerged 35 years ago. But it is also the place where, four years ago, a member of the Roman Catholic Church's profoundly conservative Opus Dei movement was for the first time elevated to cardinal.
Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the archbishop of Lima, has accused some bishops of engaging in a campaign to undermine him.
Now, with the ascension of Pope Benedict XVI, the longstanding divide between conservatives, emboldened by the choice of a kindred spirit, and liberal clergy here and throughout Latin America could intensify. If Peru's recent past is any measure, such a competition, even if the two sides are not evenly matched, is certain to be fierce.
Today, the priest who coined the term "liberation theology," the Rev. Gustavo Gutiérrez, spends much of his time teaching in the United States, in what some of his admirers describe as a kind of exile. The bishop who was elevated to cardinal, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, now archbishop of Lima, has accused fellow bishops of a smear campaign of forged letters to undermine him.
How the tensions between those camps play out could affect not only issues of theology, but also how the church addresses related matters like the centralization of authority, the role of lay people, the decline in priestly vocations and the mounting challenge of evangelical Protestant groups in a region where nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics live.
Full: nytimes
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 08:02 PM CST [
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South American, Arab Leaders Hold Summit
BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) -- Ministers from 34 South American and Middle Eastern nations on Sunday began preparing the groundwork for the first-ever summit of leaders from the two regions.
Their talks could lead to a commitment to negotiations for a South American-Arab free trade zone -- part of an effort to counter U.S. political and economic influence.
Brazilian media stressed Sunday that the leaders of key U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be absent. But Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is scheduled to attend. The United States' request to observe the event was denied.
While the stated goal of the gathering is to boost economic ties, the summit will bring together leaders from countries that resent America's forceful hand in everything from regime changes to globalization that critics say benefits only large multinational corporations.
''It's important for these countries to not be seen as being bullied by the West,'' said Amany Jamal, a Middle East political development expert at Princeton University. ''What better way to do that than re-establish dominance on another front?''
Full:aponlineThey'll nuke 'em all before they allow this...
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 07:58 PM CST [
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Pope Calls on Media to Report Responsibly
VATICAN CITY (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that the media can spread peace but also foment violence, and he called on journalists to exercise responsibility to ensure objective reports that respect human dignity and the common good.
Benedict made the comments during a brief appearance at his studio window to bless thousands of people in St. Peter's Square below, following in the beloved Sunday tradition of Pope John Paul II.
Draped underneath the window for the first time was the red tapestry bearing Benedict's papal coat of arms, which includes traditional elements from his native Bavaria and a nod to St. Augustine.
Noting that Sunday was the world day of social communications, the pope praised the media for what he called the ''extraordinary'' coverage of the death and funeral of John Paul.
''But everything depends on the way it (the media) is used,'' he said.
''These important tools of communication can favor reciprocal knowledge and dialogue, or on the contrary, they can fuel prejudice and disdain between individuals and peoples; they can contribute to spreading peace or fomenting violence.''
As a result, Benedict called for members of the media to exercise ''personal responsibility'' to ensure objective reports that respect human dignity and pay attention to the common good.
Full:nytimes.comYeah, objective like the Jesuit journalist he sacked for giving both sides of issues declared by the Holy See to be verboten.
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 06:10 PM CST [
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Hitler Won
by Rootsie
Having come through Holocaust Remembrance week sufficiently chastened and guilt-ridden, we are now treated to the pomp and pageantry of the 60th anniversary celebration of V-E Day.
The one piece of European history that every schoolchild in the West is admonished from the earliest age to ‘never forget’ is the Holocaust. He or she is taught to view the Nazis’ mass extermination of the Jews as a ghastly and fascinating anomaly. The suggestion is made that a sudden eruption of ‘pagan’ notions of blood purity forms the ideological basis for Germany’s brief bout with insanity. Today, the Germans are in church, while the rest of us are patting each other on the back for banding together to defeat the evil of Hitler.
I was one of those children thus indoctrinated and thus believing. I remember the first time I came across some of those lurid photos from the camps in Readers Digest. I looked at them again, and then again. I could not stop looking.
I also ‘never forgot’ the history that gave rise to Hitler; I was never taught it
Ah, but when we become grown, we are admonished to put away childish things.
Anybody who has sufficiently informed herself knows that Hitler was no odd man out in European history. Like the centuries of European imperial bandits before him, he sought ‘breathing room’ for his cramped country. By the time he came along, the more exotic places like Africa and South America were taken, so he looked East. The idea of ‘racial purity’ was the one-note song of the previous centuries of European thought and action. Hitler neither invented the notions of Aryan supremacy nor of world conquest and the mass extermination of groups of human beings: 8 million in Leopold’s Congo, 50 million in South America and the Caribbean, 50 million in the years of the slave trade. Hitler had centuries of European science and philosophy to back him up. He didn’t have to dream up a thing.
The queer-eye guys who script the ‘look’ for all these pageants we’ve been treated to lately, from the red, white, and blue Reagan funeral to the bling bling and the acres of pricey fabric of the ‘Pope dies/Pope is elected’ party, to this weekend’s more explicitly martial themes (lots of leather and steel, with flowers strewn about for contrast), do however, owe a lot to the Nazi aesthetic. Nobody since Napolean could put together an imperial pageant like them Nazis.
Until now. It can’t be lost on the rest of the world that the V-E festivities bear an unmistakable message about power. They scream,
“Don’t fuck with me.” The heavy nostalgia of the proceedings owe a lot to Hitler too. They emotionally enjoin us to remember our past greatness and perseverance, to ‘stay the course,’ to spread the light of freedom hither and yon.
Whether Hitler died in that bunker in Berlin or lives on Mars with Elvis, the values he embodied have galloped across the planet untrammeled since V-E day. A bunch of little Hitlers, Nazis smuggled out of Europe with the help of the OSS and the Pople, were unleashed on Latin America and turned it into one giant torture chamber. European and American colonialism are directly accountable for a million slaughtered in two years in Cambodia, a million in 8 weeks in Rwanda, a million a year for the past three years in DR Congo. The techniques of and cracked rationales for mechanized mass murder have been embraced and perfected all over the place. ‘Paramilitaries,’ ‘death squads’, ‘gulags’ and ‘special forces’ stalk the planet. And the perpetrators of this hideous suffering were and are the victors partying hearty in Europe today. Bush says evil like Hitler’s still exists in the world. About that he is right. The bad guys are definitely on the march. And they are winning.
Today is Mother’s Day, but I don’t believe there has been a day for 2000 years that has reflected the interests of mothers. That muscular and distant male Sky God seems to hold all the cards, and brother do we suffer for him. “Fascism” is virtually hardwired into the European psyche, with its “anti-sexual religious morality,”* and its perverse twisting of our ancestral ideas of blood purity. Fascism is not a throwback to more “barbarous” times. It is a pure product of “Western Civilization” itself. Repression, sadism, greed, violent competition: these are not “human nature.” These are what happens when people have forgotten their humanity.
All those Holocaust museums and memorials have “Never Forget” engraved on a rock somewhere. This should set off alarm bells for anybody who has noticed that fostering forgetfulness is the primary tool of empire.
From
The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (Harper Collins, 1987)
rootsie on 05.08.05 @ 11:57 AM CST [
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Saturday, May 7th
How to End the War
By Naomi Klein
In These Times
The central question we need to answer is this: What were the real reasons for the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq?
When we identify why we really went to war - not the cover reasons or the rebranded reasons, freedom and democracy, but the real reasons - then we can become more effective anti-war activists. The most effective and strategic way to stop this occupation and prevent future wars is to deny the people who wage these wars their spoils - to make war unprofitable. And we can't do that unless we effectively identify the goals of war.
When I was in Iraq a year ago trying to answer that question, one of the most effective ways I found to do that was to follow the bulldozers and construction machinery. I was in Iraq to research the so-called reconstruction. And what struck me most was the absence of reconstruction machinery, of cranes and bulldozers, in downtown Baghdad. I expected to see reconstruction all over the place.
I saw bulldozers in military bases. I saw bulldozers in the Green Zone, where a huge amount of construction was going on, building up Bechtel's headquarters and getting the new US embassy ready. There was also a ton of construction going on at all of the US military bases. But, on the streets of Baghdad, the former ministry buildings are absolutely untouched. They hadn't even cleared away the rubble, let alone started the reconstruction process.
The one crane I saw in the streets of Baghdad was hoisting an advertising billboard. One of the surreal things about Baghdad is that the old city lies in ruins, yet there are these shiny new billboards advertising the glories of the global economy. And the message is: "Everything you were before isn't worth rebuilding." We're going to import a brand-new country. It is the Iraq version of the "Extreme Makeover."
It's not a coincidence that Americans were at home watching this explosion of extreme reality television shows where people's bodies were being surgically remade and their homes were being bulldozed and reconstituted. The message of these shows is: Everything you are now, everything you own, everything you do sucks. We're going to completely erase it and rebuild it with a team of experts. You just go limp and let the experts take over. That is exactly what "Extreme Makover:Iraq" is.
There was no role for Iraqis in this process. It was all foreign companies modernizing the country. Iraqis with engineering Ph.D.s who built their electricity system and who built their telephone system had no place in the reconstruction process.
If we want to know what the goals of the war are, we have to look at what Paul Bremer did when he first arrived in Iraq. He laid off 500,000 people, 400,000 of whom were soldiers. And he shredded Iraq's constitution and wrote a series of economic laws that the The Economist described as "the wish list of foreign investors."
Full: truthout.org
rootsie on 05.07.05 @ 10:20 PM CST [
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Zimbabwe's Fight For Justice
by Gregory Elich
Twenty-five years ago, Zimbabwe’s liberation movement came to power after years of struggle. Hopes soared that independence would bring an end to the legacy of colonial rule and apartheid power and give birth to a more equitable and just social order. But in many ways, those expectations had to be put on hold due to British and U.S. pressure, and for years Zimbabwe was compelled to maintain the inequitable land ownership patterns inherited from apartheid Rhodesia. The process of land reform is at root a struggle for justice and a challenge to the Western neoliberal model. The refusal to serve Western interests is what motivates U.S. and British hostility.
It is impossible to understand the nature of land reform in Zimbabwe without first examining the history of land allocation in Rhodesia. In 1893, invading British troops and volunteers conquered Matabeleland. Under terms of the Victoria Agreement, every British soldier and volunteer was allowed 6,000 acres of land, and within a year 10,000 square miles of the most fertile land was seized. White settlers confiscated cattle and dragooned the Ndebele people into serving as forced laborers on the land they once owned. Colonial Administrator Starr Jameson felt that by depriving the Ndebele of their cattle, he could secure their "submission and future tranquility." The Shona people also saw their cattle taken by settlers and in 1896, resentments had accumulated to the point where an uprising resulted. It took more than a year, but the British crushed the rebellion at the cost of 8,000 African lives.
In 1899, Rhodesia established reserves on the most arid land onto which the indigenous inhabitants were to be herded, where in just six years half of the indigenous population was confined. Passage of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 forbade Africans from owning land outside of the barren reserves. During a twenty-year period beginning in 1935, the Rhodesian regime expelled a further 67,000 African families from their homes and transported them to the reserves. Dispossessed Africans were beaten and herded onto trucks at gunpoint, while bulldozers levelled their homes. As more and more people were forced from their homes, the reserves became increasingly overcrowded with people and cattle. To "solve" that problem, in 1944 the colonial government decreed that many of the reserves were overstocked and would have to be thinned out. Over the course of the next thirty-some years, more than a million cattle were either killed or confiscated by white settlers. In the ten years following the Second World War, another 100,000 people were expelled from their homes and dumped onto the reserves.
The liberation movement’s successes eventually brought it to the verge of taking power and it was clear that the apartheid government of Rhodesia would not survive much longer. Although Rhodesia had declared its independence from the colonial system in 1965, Great Britain intervened to protect white privilege. Under British tutelage, the Lancaster House Conference was convened in 1979. The core issue for the liberation struggle was land, but British and American negotiators made the granting of independence to the liberation movement conditional. The agreement that resulted from the conference imposed a number of limitations on the new government. One provision stipulated that for a period of ten years, land ownership in Zimbabwe could only be transferred on a "willing seller, willing buyer" basis, a formula that effectively stymied any meaningful attempt at land reform. Whites were also allotted a quota of 20 out of 100 seats in Parliament, far exceeding their actual percentage in the population, and the measure had the effect of making constitutional change nearly impossible.
Passage of the Land Acquisition Act in 1992 finally established a more flexible approach to land reform, but the process continued to be constrained by outside pressures. Progress was slow and by the time fast track land reform was launched in 2002, 70 percent of the richest and most productive land still remained in the hands of just 4,500 white commercial farm owners. At the same time, six million African peasants eked out a precarious existence on small farms in the "communal areas," the land encompassing the former native reserves. Because of historically imposed overcrowding in the communal areas, the already barren land was depleted long before by deforestation and over-grazing, thus making it even more unsuitable for agriculture. More than a million landless blacks were engaged as hired labor on white commercial farms, laboring for abysmally low wages to make the few commercial landowners even wealthier. A team sent by the United Nations Development Program in 2001 reported, "Given the rapidly rising population growth rates and the decreasing opportunities for non-farm employment over the years, many rural dwellers were thrown into increasing poverty as a result of inadequate and poor-quality land for subsistence farming and unemployment. These inequities, the team said, were "the motivation for the Government’s determination to correct the past injustices caused by dispossessing the indigenous people of their land."
Full:globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 05.07.05 @ 09:28 AM CST [
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India's Bloody Water Wars
P. Saineth
Water, its status as a public resource as against a private asset, is one of the most explosive issues facing India in the coming years, even as the neoliberal model comes under increasing fire as a catastrophic failure for the vast majority of India's populationt. across the last decade. Privatization of water will destroy countless small farmers. It will hand over agriculture to the rich and corporations. Undeterred, the World Bank is pressing forward with its local accomplices in India's government and corporate sectors.A few weeeks ago we described the battle in northern Kerala over Coca Cola's bottling plant at Plachimada. Here P. Sainath reports on the water pirates and their raids in Maharashtra. AC/JSC
It has been happening for some time. Maharashtra is not the first State. It won't be the last. The drive towards privatisation of water in this country was planned by the World Bank in the 1990s. The just-passed Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority Bill reeks of Bank edicts already promulgated in 1998. In that year, the "The Irrigation Sector" report of the Bank (teamed up with the Indian Government) laid down the line. [Maharashtra (in western India) is a state of close to 100 million people. Mumbai with 17 million people is its capital. A lot of wealth is concentrated in this state particularly in Mumbai. Editors' note.]
It listed things that "need to be urgently put into practice." Among them: "drastically increasing and rationalising the current water rates." The rest of its "urgent needs" were the standard Bank rules for the capture of a country's farming by corporations. In pushing brutal hikes, the Bank was frank. Its report opposed gradual hikes. "The more recent experience is that `a big bang' approach may be better." Laughably, it cites Andhra Pradesh and Mexico as among the success stories of that approach.
The Latin American experience
Latin America is strewn with the corpses of economies and governments that went for the `big bang' approach. Water, especially, has been a giant factor in the rage of peoples there against regimes. This year, The New York Times ran a front-page piece on the collapse of privatised water services across Latin America. Being the Times, it coyly sidestepped any criticism of corporations. Or even of the basic concepts themselves. But it did measure the Big Bang. In Andhra Pradesh, the voters threw in a bang of their own last May . You'd think we'd learn something from all this. [Editors' note: Andhra Pradesh is a southern Indian state close to 80 million people, which the NYT correctly described (at that time) as the darling of western governments and corporations. A year ago the voters there threw out the World Bank's posterboy chief minister, Naidu, entirely against the fervent predictions of Naidu's innumerable choristers in the Indian and US press.]
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.07.05 @ 12:12 AM CST [
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Colombia Hands Over to U.S. Two G.I.'s Accused of Smuggling
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 5 - Two American soldiers arrested by Colombian police in an arms smuggling case were handed over to the United States Embassy today, angering both authorities and ordinary Colombians who believe the servicemen should face charges here.
Under treaty obligations, Allan Tanquary and Jesus Hernandez, stationed here as part of the American effort to fight drugs and Marxist rebels, will be investigated by American officials and, if charged, face trial in the United States. The two men, along with four Colombians, were arrested Tuesday in a posh gated community in Melgar, where the police found 32,000 rounds of ammunition they say was bound for right-wing paramilitary groups.
The case has deeply embarrassed the United States, which denied today that the Bush administration is secretly helping Colombia's brutal paramilitary organization, the United Self-Defense Forces, in its fight against Marxist rebels.
"There is absolutely no U.S. policy and U.S. support or U.S. inclination or U.S. military operations involved in arming paramilitaries," Richard Boucher, a State Department spokesman, told reporters in Washington. "We have declared these groups to be terrorist groups."
Full:nytimes.comWhatever. These are 'our' terrorists, and under Plan Colombia they have total immunity. What is 'deeply embarassing' is the simple fact that these two were actually caught. They absolutely were under orders, just dutifully doing what the US wants done.
rootsie on 05.07.05 @ 12:05 AM CST [
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Thursday, May 5th
The “Salvador Option” in Action
Hard to believe, but there’s been very little notice (even among my fellow crazed, leftist bloggers) concerning Peter Maas’ cover story for this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine, “The Way of the Commandos.” (The honorable exception is Lenin’s Tomb; scroll down to the post, “Language Fatigue,” then scroll back up to read his fascinating history of Britain’s Labour Party.) This is particularly strange because there was a considerable dust-up in January after Newsweek ran a story about how Pentagon officials were considering employing the “Salvador Option” against insurgents in Iraq. According to Maas, they’ve now endorsed it wholeheartedly:
"The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high-more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million."
The template entails the hiring of ex-Baathists to work alongside U.S. advisers like James Steele, who cut his teeth training paramilitaries in El Salvador in the ’80s. Together, they’ve come up with a thrilling new reality TV show, “Terrorism in the Grip of Justice,” where bruised and beaten terror suspects (who have not yet been charged with a crime) “confess” their sins (such as having homosexual sex in a mosque) to a shell-shocked Iraqi audience. (And as Direland reported in March, it’s all funded by your tax dollars.) Is this show similar to the “hate-sessions” broadcast in Orwell’s 1984? No. This is an exact replica of those hate-sessions, yet another example of our bringing dystopacy to Iraq.
As always, it gets worse. Maas reports what happens on a late night raid when one of the Iraqi commanders believes they’ve been led on a wild-goose chase by a detainee (and keep in mind this occurs while a journalist is standing right there):
"One of [Major] Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainees pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging."
The mugging took place in front of American soldiers, who looked away from it in shame. As their captain explains his decision to do nothing: “You only get so many interventions, and I’ve got to save my butting in for when there is a danger it could go over the line.” It must be a fairly large line, however, because, “In terms of kicking a guy, they do that all the time, punches and stuff like that.”
Such outsourcing of our “dirty work” (a.k.a. “stuff like that”) is something to keep in mind the next time you come across cheery headlines like this.
Full: inthesetimes.com
rootsie on 05.05.05 @ 09:38 PM CST [
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Wednesday, May 4th
Deadly Hypocrisy is Business as Usual
by Chris Floyd
An occupational hazard of dissidence in the Age of Bush is the unavoidable necessity of belaboring the obvious. Again and again, you must ring the same bell; over and over, you must repeat the same, blatant irrefutable fact: that George W. Bush and his ghastly minions are lying hypocrites with blood on their hands.
But what can you do? Each week--each day--brings fresh confirmation of this damning truth. And until the American people redeem their lost national honor by rising up in their millions--taking to the streets with the patriotic cry, "These murderous jackals no longer represent us!"--the Bush crimes will go on, and must be documented. So grab the bell-rope: here we go again.
Last week saw a bumper crop of death-dealing hypocrisy, as the freedom-lovin', terrorist-fightin' he-men of the Bush Regime were caught in flagrante delicto with some rough trade indeed: genocidal rape-fiends, diabolical flesh-boilers and tyrannical peddlers of violent, ignorant religious extremism. (And no, it wasn't a meeting of the Republican National Committee.)
First the Bushists rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden's former partners, Sudan's intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gosh was Osama's designated minder in the 1990s, when the ex-CIA ally was comfortably ensconced in Sudan. Gosh is also accused--by members of his own government of directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan's Darfur region, where the Janjaweed militia is carrying out a government-backed "ethnic cleansing" program of rape, pillage and murder against the region's black Muslims. At least 400,000 people have died in the carnage, with 2 million more driven into exile.
Last year, the Bush Regime itself officially declared the Darfur despoliation a "genocide," and called Gosh's gang of terrorist-coddling goons "an extraordinary threat" to America's national security. But that was before the 2004 election, when Bush had to drag his "compassionate conservative" crapola out of mothballs for a few months to mollify soccer moms distressed at the pictures they saw on CNN of those poor little Ewoks dying in--where was it? Biafra? Burundi? Rwanda? Rangoon? Once Bush had his teeny-tiny mandate in hand, it was back to business.
That's oil business, of course. Sudan has become one of the chess pieces in the "Great Game" of petropolitics, as the "full spectrum dominators" of the Bush Regime plant their "military footprints" all over the globe in a relentless crusade to stem the inexorable rise of China and India as rivals to "the world's only superpower." It just so happens that China has become the leading player in Sudan's burgeoning oil industry, securing fat concessions in choice fields. Gosh and his goon squads gorge on these oil profits to fuel their mass terrorism in Darfur. Now Bush wants a piece of that action; and if he has to abet the murder of a few hundred thousand desert darkies to get it, who cares? (Certainly not those soccer moms, now fretting about high gas prices for their SUVs: "Get us more cheap oil, Georgie, pronto!")
And so Bush has bedded down with Gosh, who for his part is happy to swap a minor league privateer like Osama for a big-time state terrorist with unlimited resources. Gosh was flown to Washington for high-level "consultations" with his new partners in the CIA--just as the Sudanese government was announcing that "abundant" oil reserves have been found in Darfur, the Sudan Tribune reports. At the very same time, Bush moved--secretly--to gut legislation that would freeze financial assets of the genocidists and increase international protection for Darfur's people, the New York Times reports. Happy coincidences all around!
Meanwhile, the killing in Sudan goes on. Just days before Gosh's extra-special visit, the Janjaweed launched a "senseless and premeditated attack" in Darfur, "burning everything in their paths and leaving in their wake total destruction," Amnesty International reports. What's more, Bush's new allies in Khartoum knew the attack was coming and deliberately blocked African Union peacekeepers from intervening. But the cries of the raped and dying never reached Washington, where Gosh and the Bushists were happily plotting "joint security operations"--and no doubt divvying up the new Darfur oilfields.
How is such two-faced cynicism possible? It's easy: the Bushists don't regard the people of Darfur as human beings, unique individuals of infinite worth and intrinsic value. They're just counters in the game of greed and power, to be shifted or discarded as the need arises.
The same holds true for the people of Uzbekistan, now being abducted, tortured and boiled alive by Bush buddy Islam Karimov. Last week, Bush's "strategic relationship" with the Uzbek Boiler was laid bare in rich detail by the New York Times. Bush has lavished more than $500 million on Karimov's marauding security services, In return, he tortures Bush's own abducted, uncharged, "rendered" prisoners, while providing the Pentagon with a big ole "footprint" for dominating Central Asian oil. Again, the individuals being served up for Tashkent gumbo don't matter; only the game is important.
Bush capped Hypocrisy Week by strolling hand-in-hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: de facto ruler of the fiercest religious tyranny on earth; mentor to the Taliban; global propagator of the vicious Wahhabi distortion of Islam; fount of corruption, bribery and baksheesh; longtime Bush Family business partner. With his warm embrace of the hereditary despot, Bush gave the lie to months of high-flown jive about lighting "fires of freedom" in the Middle East. As always, Bush's real message to those longing for liberty, at home and abroad, was clear as a bell:
"Tough luck, suckers."
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.04.05 @ 09:00 PM CST [
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Pentagon Analyst Accused of Disclosing Secrets
WASHINGTON, May 4 - Federal agents arrested a Pentagon analyst today, accusing him of illegally disclosing a highly classified document about possible attacks on American forces in Iraq to two employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group.
The military analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, turned himself in to authorities this morning and was scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Va., later in the afternoon. If convicted, he could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison.
The investigation into a midlevel career employee at the Pentagon has stirred anxious debate in some political circles in the capital. The investigation has cast a cloud over Aipac, which has close ties to senior policymakers in the Bush administration, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is expected to appear later this month at the group's annual meeting.
Moreover, the case has proven awkward for a group of conservative Republicans in civilian jobs at the Pentagon who were also close to Aipac. They were led by Paul D. Wolfowitz, formerly the deputy defense secretary, who is soon to become president of the World Bank. Mr. Franklin once worked in the office of one of Mr. Wolfowitz's allies, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy at the Pentagon, who is also expected to be leaving soon.
According to a 10-page F.B.I. affidavit accompanying the complaint, Mr. Franklin divulged the secret information about attacks on American forces in Iraq at a lunch on June 26, 2003, attended by two senior staff members at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Four days later, F.B.I. agents who searched Mr. Franklin's office found the top-secret document that contained the classified information.
The two Aipac employees were not identified in the complaint, but officials said the men were Steven Rosen, formerly the group's policy director, and Keith Weissman, formerly its deputy director for foreign policy issues, who have long been under scrutiny in the case.
Aipac has denied any wrongdoing in the matter and a person who has been briefed on legal deliberations in the case said the group was not a target of the inquiry. The organization had recently taken action to distance itself from the two men. Two weeks ago the group said it had dismissed Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman after months of defending them.
Mr. Franklin was suspended last year, along with his security clearance, but he had been rehired in recent months in a nonsensitive job. He has been employed by the Defense Department since 1979 and is a colonel in the Air Force reserve.
Associates of the civilian group at the Pentagon said they had been unfairly attacked by critics from inside the country's intelligence agencies with whom they have clashed since before the war in Iraq. They believe there have been other attempts to embarrass them, including last year when American officials said that Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress and longtime ally of Pentagon conservatives, had told Iranian intelligence officials that the United States had broken its communications codes.
The government said today that the investigation into the disclosure of classified documents was continuing, and officials said that Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman remained under scrutiny, although their lawyers have said that they have done nothing wrong.
Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman had regular discussions with Israeli officials about the Middle East and investigators have long said that they believed the Aipac employees turned over classified information to Israeli intelligence, although the government documents disclosed today made no mention of it.
During the June 2003 lunch at a restaurant in Arlington, Va., which was apparently held under F.B.I. surveillance, Mr. Franklin disclosed the information related to the potential attack on American forces in Iraq, according to the affidavit. It said that Mr. Franklin told the two men "that the information was 'highly classified' and asked them not to 'use' it."
The affidavit, signed by Catherine M. Hanna, an F.B.I. agent, said Mr. Franklin had engaged in other illegal acts. The complaint said he had disclosed government information to an unidentified foreign official and to journalists. In addition, investigators found 83 classified documents in his home in West Virginia. The documents had dates that spanned more than three decades.
Full:nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.04.05 @ 08:39 PM CST [link]
Lacking $2 Bus Fare to Shelter, Homeless Get a Free Ride, to Jail
The M35 bus at night is a place of weary faces and empty pockets. It runs from Spanish Harlem to the largest men's homeless shelter in the city. Every night, men file on to get to a place to sleep. Sometimes they pay the $2 fare; sometimes they pay just a penny.
In recent years, other riders have appeared, just as scruffy but with a different goal. These are undercover police officers, aboard to arrest fare-beaters.
The arrests are part of a policy that began in the 1990's, when the New York Police Department took aim at minor crimes, like unlicensed street peddling and fare-beating. Since then, violent crime has fallen sharply, but arrests for minor crimes remain high. Misdemeanor arrests are up by 60 percent from 1990.
Arrests for minor crimes, the city says, lead to people the police are already looking for and deter more serious crimes.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.04.05 @ 08:33 PM CST [
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Texas Lawmakers OK Cheerleading Ban
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - After an alternately comic and fiery debate - punctuated by several lawmakers waving pompons - the state House on Tuesday approved a bill to restrict "overtly sexually suggestive" cheerleading to more ladylike performances.
The bill would give the state education commissioner authority to request that school districts review high school performances.
"Girls can get out and do all of these overly sexually performances and we applaud them and that's not right," said Democratic Rep. Al Edwards, who filed the legislation.
Edwards argued bawdy performances are a distraction for students resulting in pregnancies, dropouts and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
Full: apnews.myway.com
Wow. That's some powerful cheerleading.
rootsie on 05.04.05 @ 08:27 PM CST [link]
Judge Throws Out England's Guilty Plea
FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) - A military judge on Wednesday threw out Pfc. Lynndie England's guilty plea to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, saying he was not convinced that she knew her actions were wrong at the time.
Col. James Pohl entered a plea of not guilty for England to a charge of conspiring with Pvt. Charles Graner Jr. to maltreat detainees at the Baghdad-area prison.
The mistrial for the 22-year-old reservist, who appeared in some of the most notorious photographs from the 2003 abuse scandal, kicks the case back to the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding.
The action came after Graner, the reputed ringleader of the abuse, testified as a defense witness at England's sentencing hearing that pictures he took of England holding a naked prisoner on a leash at Abu Ghraib were meant to be used as a legitimate training aid for other guards.
Full: apnews.myway.com
a real testament to the calibre of the American soldier
rootsie on 05.04.05 @ 08:23 PM CST [link]
Italian website banned over 'Nazi' pope picture
An Italian website that published a photo montage of Pope Benedict XVI dressed in a Nazi uniform was told to suspend its activities on Wednesday for offending the Roman Catholic religion, court officials said.
Rome prosecutors accuse the Indymedia Italia site, which is part of a network of alternative media websites, of causing offense to the Catholic religion by publishing the photo montage alongside the caption "Nazi pope".
Under Italian law, the offense is punishable by up to one year in jail.
The website, which is registered under the name of a Brazilian-based company, Indipendent Media Center, was still online Wednesday evening and showing the controversial image despite the court ruling.
Italy's largest press union, FNSI, slammed the decision as an "unacceptable attack on critical and satirical freedom".
"Indymedia publishes without any form of censorship any kind of electronic message -- that is the basis of its editorial policy," said the FNSI's secretary general, Paolo Serventi Longhi.
Full: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 05.04.05 @ 08:16 PM CST [
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Tuesday, May 3rd
How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers
On Dec. 14, 2004, in the predawn hours, a large convoy of U.N. troops entered the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil. They began firing. Esterlin Marie Carmelle was in bed with her 2-year-old son, Herlens. Her husband got out of bed to get ready for work. The shooting intensified, and she remained in bed beside her child. According to a Harvard Law School report the following occurred:
"Ms. Carmelle recalled, she `felt something warm' on her arm and said to her husband, 'I feel like I got hit with a bullet.' She told us that she realized that 'it wasn't me who had been shot,' as her boy lay limp and lifeless beside her, his 'blood and brain matter were sliding down my arm.' Though Ms. Carmelle said that she then passed out, her husband told us that a stray bullet had entered their shack with such force that it had removed part of their child's head, leaving Herlens to die in his mother's arms.''
When U.N. troops are not engaged in these kinds of incursions, they can usually be found providing support for the Haitian National Police as they execute peaceful demonstrators demanding the return of their democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Just last week, five Haitians were killed by the Haitian National Police while U.N. troops stood by watching. The Haitians' crime was that they were peacefully demonstrating for the release of political prisoners in Haiti.
On Feb. 28, 2005, demonstrators met the same fate and were executed by the Haitian National Police while peacefully protesting. Amnesty International has also reported ''incidents in which individuals dressed in black . . . and traveling in cars with Haitian National Police markings have cost the lives of at least 11 people.''.''
Just this week, Amnesty condemned the Haitian police for their ''use of lethal and indiscriminate violence'' to ``disperse and repress demonstrators.''
The Bush administration's response has been to place more weapons in the hands of these police. During Haiti's democratic administrations, the U.S. government imposed a full-scale arms embargo on nonlethal as well as lethal weapons to the Haitian Police. They could not even buy bullet-proof vests or tear gas to disperse crowds.
In November 2004, however, John Bolton, as under secretary for arms control in the Department of State, signed off on providing the current police, under a nondemocratic government, more than 3,635 M14 rifles, 1,100 Mini Galils, several thousand assorted 0.38-caliber pistols, 3,700 MP5s and approximately one million rounds of ammunition, according to the Small Arms Survey, an authoritative resource published by the Graduate Institute of International Studies, located in Geneva.
It is no surprise that Bolton is at the center of this controversy as well. He has been one of the hard-liners in the State Department who sought the overthrow of Aristide and who bullied intelligence analysts on Haiti who were trying to provide a more-balanced picture. Even his cohort in overthrowing Aristide, Otto Reich, was quoted as stating that they both rightfully went after an intelligence analyst who gave the ''benefit of the doubt'' to Aristide as the democratically elected president.
Full: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 05.03.05 @ 09:19 PM CST [
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A New Plan for Colombia
Albert Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." If he were alive today, he would consider US policy toward Colombia insane.
Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Colombia, the region's largest recipient of US aid, where she praised Plan Colombia as "very successful." In 2000, Congress passed "Plan Colombia" with the stated purpose of reducing the supply of cocaine to the US. Five years and $4 billion later (80 percent, or $3.2 billion, of which went to Colombian military), Plan Colombia is set to expire. But the Bush Administration has already requested $600 million in the budget to continue funding it. As Rice said on her visit to Colombia, "You don't stop in midstream on something that has been very effective."
But exactly how "effective" has Plan Colombia been? Before the American people are asked to continue spending $2 million a day on aid to Colombia, they should take a closer at the Plan.
If Plan Colombia was intended to reduce the supply of cocaine, raise its cost, and therefore, cut the numbers of users, then the program has been a costly failure. After five years, the price of cocaine is lower, and the number of cocaine users is growing. According to a recent unclassified report from the National Drug Intelligence Center, "key indicators of domestic cocaine availability show stable or slightly increased availability in drug markets throughout the country."
Plan Colombia's failure to reduce the supply of cocaine to the US should not be surprising. We have years of experience and mountains of studies that should lead us to not expect otherwise. Since 1980, the US has spent nearly $45 billion on stemming the flow of illicit drugs into the country. Illicit drug prices have dropped dramatically over that period.
...the US has funded war in Colombia, exacerbating the human rights and humanitarian crisis there. In February, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights reported that, "the human rights situation continued to be critical. There was an increase in reports of extrajudicial executions attributed to members of the security forces and other public officials. High levels of torture and forced disappearances continued."
After years of US training and military build up, last year, the Colombian army launched the largest military operation in modern Colombian history, which, according to the New York Times, was designed "to make potentially oil-rich regions safe for exploration by private companies and the government-run oil company." Civilians bore the brunt of that operation as evidenced by a startling 38 percent increase in the number of Colombians forcibly displaced, from 207,607 in 2003 to 287,581 in 2004, according to the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement.
Full:zmag.org
rootsie on 05.03.05 @ 09:12 PM CST [
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Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift
Parents would certainly deny it, but Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones.
Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.
The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents' attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child's physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.
The findings, not yet published, were presented at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.
When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition - in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.
Full: nytimes.comSeems when I least expect it I am just struck by the sickness of Western 'culture.' I don't even know what an 'ugly' child is! In fact, human beings in general are beautiful to me. Somebody actually paid for this 'study'. Amazing.
rootsie on 05.03.05 @ 09:07 PM CST [
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Defense: England Oxygen Deprived at Birth
FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) - Defense lawyers sought leniency for Pfc. Lynndie England at a hearing Tuesday to determine her punishment in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, with a psychologist testifying that the reservist was oxygen-deprived at birth, speech impaired and had trouble learning to read.
West Virginia school psychologist Dr. Thomas Denne - the first defense witness - said England's learning disabilities were identified when she was a kindergartner - and though she made progress in school, she continued needing special help.
Full: apnews.myway.comHow did she get into the military then? You have to have a diploma and pass the ASVAB test. Of course, I had a kid come to me and tell me the recruiter sat down next to him and did the test for him. He also is 'learning impaired.' Anyway, people like this make the ideal soldier, and when the sh** hits the fan, they can take the fall too. Perfect.
rootsie on 05.03.05 @ 08:58 PM CST [
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Scientists Say Everyone Can Read Minds
Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science.
Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say.
The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting.
Mirror neurons
In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The cells responded the same way whether the monkey reached out to grasp a peanut, or merely watched in envy as another monkey or a human did.
Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them "mirror neurons."
Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.
"Mirror neurons suggest that we pretend to be in another person's mental shoes," says Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine. "In fact, with mirror neurons we do not have to pretend, we practically are in another person's mind."
Full:livescience.com
rootsie on 05.03.05 @ 08:47 PM CST [
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Poor health linked to subtle racism?
WASHINGTON — When Sandi Stokes waits for lunch at the sandwich shop near her office in downtown Washington, she notices the counter worker often assumes the white person next to her was there first.
Brenda Person frequently finds that when she goes shopping near her home in Silver Spring, Md., clerks seem to ignore her and instead help a white customer.
Peggy Geigher, a District of Columbia resident, says restaurant hostesses often seem to seat her near the bathroom, even when better tables are available.
Many African Americans tell stories like these — seemingly minor examples of subtle discrimination they experience routinely.
"It happens all the time," said Person, 56, a mother of two daughters. "It's part of day-to-day experiences, unfortunately. But you are never prepared for it — it makes you feel like you're out of rhythm with the rest of the world, and like there's no justice."
Some medical researchers have begun to suspect that such incidents take a physical toll and may play a role in why black people tend to have poorer health than white people. Chronic, low-level stress from such incidents may increase the risk for a host of ills, including heart disease and cancer, according to the theory.
The hypothesis remains far from proven and is highly controversial. Skeptics say it is difficult to rule out other factors, such as diet, lifestyle, personal perceptions and cultural differences. But support for the theory has been accumulating slowly, including a new study released yesterday linking such experiences to the early stages of heart disease. Some researchers say it is among the strongest pieces of evidence so far.
Full: seattletimes.nwsourceThis is sort of a no-brainer. What about the epidemic of chronic asthma in inner-city children? There are very real environmental factors as well, but the metaphor of not being able to breathe here...
rootsie on 05.03.05 @ 08:40 PM CST [
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Sunday, May 1st
Global Eye Buried Treasure
t seemed, at first, like nothing more than a novelty item in the news briefs, the kind of odd, meaningless side-fact thrown off by most major stories: "New Pope, President's Brother Had Link in Swiss Group." But a look beneath the surface of this innocuous connection reveals a vast web of sinister alliances -- and moral corruption on a world-shaking scale.
The network links a bewildering line-up of players -- the Bushes, the Vatican, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and China's Communist overlords, among others -- in a staggering array of crime and turpitude: prostitution, pedophilia, mass death and war profiteering. Yet this is not some grand "conspiracy theory," a serpent's egg hatched in Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove. It's simply the way the Bush boys do business, trawling the globe for sweetheart deals and gushers of blood money from the war and terror they foment.
At the center of this particular nexus is the unlikely figure of Neil Bush, the feckless, fraudulent brother of the current president. Neilsy, as he's known in the family, is most famous for costing American taxpayers $1 billion to bail out a savings-and-loan he had ruined with secret insider loans to his own business partners. For this massive fraud, he was fined -- by his father's administration -- the princely sum of $50,000, which was actually paid by one of his dad's political bagmen, of course.
You see, the Bushes are robber barons, not capitalists: They never risk any of their own money in the competition of the marketplace. Nor do they ever pay the price when their deals go belly-up. Just ask George W., whose first business was jump-started with secret cash from the bin Ladens, laundered through their U.S. frontman, James Bath -- who was also hired by W.'s dad, then-CIA director George Bush Sr., to set up offshore companies for shifting CIA money and aircraft between Texas and Saudi Arabia, the Texas Observer reported.
Full:axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 12:10 PM CST [
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The deeper significance of our fight against Zionism
The Palestine/Israel Conflict as a Means of Control
The NYT is not only biased in a "Jews are good and their lives are important, Palestinians are bad and their lives are unimportant" kind of way.
It is also biased because of its very wrong subtext, which is: "The Palestine/Israel conflict is an ethnic war, not a war fomented by elites to control ordinary people, both Jews and Arabs." The way elites foment ethnic war is by portraying one ethnic group as the innocent victim of the other ethnic group's evil. The NYT and the pro-Zionist forces are engaged in fomenting ethnic war between "Jews and we Americans who should of course identify with them" against "Palestinians and Arabs in general who are, well, Arabs."
It is becoming increasingly evident that the elites running the U.S. and Israel and the Middle East dictatorships intentionally foment ethnic/national war as a means of social control. Sharon and Hamas use each other. The pattern is very similar to the way elites fomented ethnic war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s to control a working class population there who were not pre-occupied with who was a Croat and who was a Serb (intermarriage rates were very high) and whose strikes and massive military draft refusals were threatening elite power. The strategy consists of elites of a particular ethnic group (and often of the "opposing" group as well, in a symmetrical fashion) carrying out vicious violent attacks on the other ethnic group in the name of one's own, followed by attacks, verbal and sometimes violent, on members of "one's own" ethnic group who don't go along with the ethnic war attacks. In Yugoslavia the Serb and Croat elites worked together to pit their respective populations against each other.
The Same Strategy used in WWII
This same pattern was carried out by the rulers of the U.S., Germany and Japan to control working people in each of those nations who, in the 1930's and early 40's, were mounting sharp struggles that the rulers feared were about to turn into revolutions. The rulers instigated World War II to regain control over their own populations. (See my book, The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II, for a full treatment of this story.) We've seen the same use of deliberately fomented ethnic war used as a social control strategy in Ireland. And the current war in Iraq and the larger War on Terror are similarly about social control, practically lifted from the pages of Orwell's 1984.
The Importance of Fighting Zionism
The significance and the importance of our effort to expose Zionism and build opposition to it, is not only the immediate but modest changes that we might win and might lose again, as so often is the case. It is also significant and important in that it enables us to discuss with our friends and neighbors and colleagues the most important facts about the world in which we live - Facts which, when fully appreciated by millions of people, make it possible to really change the world in fundamental ways:
Full: axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 12:07 PM CST [
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This is our Guernica
Robert Zoellick is the archetypal US government insider, a man with a brilliant technical mind but zero experience of any coalface or war front. Sliding effortlessly between ivy league academia, the US treasury and corporate boardrooms (including an advisory post with the scandalous Enron), his latest position is the number-two slot at the state department.
Yet this ultimate "man of the suites" did something earlier this month that put the prime minister and the foreign secretary to shame. On their numerous visits to Iraq, neither has ever dared to go outside the heavily fortified green zones of Baghdad and Basra to see life as Iraqis have to live it. They come home after photo opportunities, briefings and pep talks with British troops and claim to know what is going on in the country they invaded, when in fact they have seen almost nothing.
...Daud Salman, an Iraqi journalist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, on a visit to Falluja two weeks ago, found that only a quarter of the city's residents had gone back. Thousands remain in tents on the outskirts. The Iraqi Red Crescent finds it hard to go in to help the sick because of the US cordon around the city.
Burhan Fasa'a, a cameraman for the Lebanese Broadcasting Company, reported during the siege that dead family members were buried in their gardens because people could not leave their homes. Refugees told one of us that civilians carrying white flags were gunned down by American soldiers. Corpses were tied to US tanks and paraded around like trophies.
Justin Alexander, a volunteer for Christian Peacemaker Teams, recently found hundreds living in tents in the grounds of their homes, or in a single patched-up room. A strict system of identity cards blocks access to anyone whose papers give a birthplace outside Falluja, so long-term residents born elsewhere cannot go home. "Fallujans feel the remnants of their city have been turned into a giant prison," he reports.
Many complain that soldiers of the Iraqi national guard, the fledgling new army, loot shops during the night-time curfew and detain people in order to take a bribe for their release. They are suspected of being members of the Badr Brigade, a Shia militia that wants revenge against Sunnis.
One thing is certain: the attack on Falluja has done nothing to still the insurgency against the US-British occupation nor produced the death of al-Zarqawi - any more than the invasion of Afghanistan achieved the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Thousands of bereaved and homeless Falluja families have a new reason to hate the US and its allies.
At least Zoellick went to see. He gave no hint of the impression that the trip left him with, but is too smart not to have understood something of the reality. The lesson ought not to be lost on Blair and Straw. Every time the prime minister claims it is time to "move on" from the issue of the war's legality and rejoice at Iraq's transformation since Saddam Hussein was toppled, the answer must be: "Remember Falluja." When the foreign secretary next visits Iraq, he should put on a flak jacket and tour the city that Britain had a share in destroying.
...In the 1930s the Spanish city of Guernica became a symbol of wanton murder and destruction. In the 1990s Grozny was cruelly flattened by the Russians; it still lies in ruins. This decade's unforgettable monument to brutality and overkill is Falluja, a text-book case of how not to handle an insurgency, and a reminder that unpopular occupations will always degenerate into desperation and atrocity.
Full: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 12:03 PM CST [
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Venezuelan President Says He Will Not Return to U.S. Until Americans "liberate" Their Nation
HAVANA - Declaring that U.S. citizens are oppressed by their own government, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised Friday that he would not visit the United States again until Americans "liberate" their nation.
Chavez, in Havana for trade talks, told an international gathering of activists here that before an earlier trip to Cuba, a U.S. State Department undersecretary he did not identify warned him not to go because he would no longer be received in Washington.
He said he went ahead with that trip anyway, and later traveled to the United States to visit U.S. President George W. Bush, who he said greeted him with a Coca-Cola in his hand.
"I have not returned, nor do I think about returning again, until the people of the United States liberate that nation," said Chavez, saying that Americans are "oppressed" by their government and U.S. media.
Full: commondreams.org
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 11:56 AM CST [
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Lawyer Who Told of US Abuses at Afghan Bases Loses UN Post
UNITED NATIONS - A United Nations human rights monitor who accused American military forces and civilian contractors last week of abusing and torturing prisoners in Afghanistan has been told his job is over.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago who was the human rights commission's independent expert for Afghanistan, said Friday that he had received an e-mail message from a commission official in Geneva a week ago telling him his mandate had expired.
The day before, he had released a 21-page report saying that Americans running prisons in Afghanistan had acted above the law "by engaging in arbitrary arrests and detentions and committing abusive practices, including torture."
In an interview from his Chicago office, he said that he had been expecting a routine two-year renewal but that the United States had lobbied against him because of his persistent efforts to examine American-supervised prisons and his disclosure that prisoners were being detained in remote "fire bases" constructed for combat operations.
Full: commondreams.org
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 11:52 AM CST [
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At These Prices, the Poor Get Poorer, the Rich Get College
For the college-bound, today is generally the last day to decide which college. No more second thoughts, no more waffling. It's time for a decision already!
Then reality hits. No longer do colleges pull out all the stops to woo accepted students - "Please, please, come here. We're the best school ever. We promise you ideal roommates, the ultimate fitness center, the career of your dreams!" Now the mailings from the chosen college carry more mundane messages, like, say, when exactly you should take every cent you have and mail it in.
Pondering those staggering costs, one can't help wondering who, exactly, can afford this most necessary of luxuries. The answer, increasingly, is the rich. Roughly half of American families make less than $50,000 a year, but according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, just 30 percent of current college freshmen come from that group.
A decade ago, just 14 percent of freshmen had parents who made more than $100,000; that has shot up to 32 percent. And only part of that can be attributed to inflation.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 11:48 AM CST [
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Behind the Exodus of Executive Women: Boredom
WOMEN now outnumber men in managerial and professional positions, and most companies have installed policies that aim to help their leaders balance the demands of job and family.
Yet three decades after a woman first became chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, fewer than 2 percent of the biggest corporations are run by women. Executive recruiters and corporate boards could be forgiven for asking themselves why.
The answer, experts are beginning to conclude, has less to do with discrimination in the corporate suite or pressures at home than with frustration and boredom on the job. "Men will grit their teeth and bear everything, while women will say: 'Is this all there is? I need more than this!' " said Mabel M. Miguel, a professor of management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 05.01.05 @ 11:46 AM CST [
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