Turkish singer tried over dissent

BBC News
June 18 2008

One of Turkey's best known singers, Bulent Ersoy, has gone on trial charged with attempting to turn the public against military service.

The charges were brought after she suggested it was not worth sacrificing soldiers' lives in Turkey's conflict with the Kurdish separatist PKK group.

read the rest here

The Catholic Voice

Anne Severes
Omaha Catholic Worker
March 2008

The Catholic Worker Movement began roughly in 1933 in this country and was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Today there are 185 Catholic Worker communities remaining in the United States and around the world. Their mission is to serve the poor, the exiled, the hungry, live simply in deliberate poverty, resist war, violence and injustice, pray, celebrate the sacraments, and evangelize the faith. (...)

Most Catholic Worker communities are based on the social mission of the Catholic Church, but some have acquired an ecumenical mantle that more accurately serves its particular circle of need. There is no Catholic Worker headquarters. Each House is independent. Most Catholic Worker communities do not subscribe to the 501-C (3) status for various conscientious reasons, but some do. Some are very small serving as few as two or three guests and some are enormous and complex serving hundreds of guests each month.

In Omaha, we have the privilege of supporting a new Catholic Worker House. It was opened almost a year ago as an alternative to current homeless shelter options.

Forty years ago, Omaha welcomed its first Catholic Worker House, the Dorothy Day House located on 20th and Burt. The purpose of that house has shifted from being a live-in community of those serving the poor, to a community kitchen that offers a breakfast meal and a noon meal to those in need.

The newest Catholic Worker House has space for five homeless men. It is supported by private contributions and the sincere prayers of many Omaha area Catholics.

Omaha Catholic Worker
1104 N. 24th Street
Omaha, NE 68102
www.no-nukes.org/cwomaha
cwomaha@gmail.com

One of the challenges for the Catholic Worker House is its counter-cultural identity. When potential donors learn that the house serves five homeless men and not five hundred, questions are raised about its ability to impact the growing sin of poverty.

In our outcome-based world, where investments of time and money must show a positive result either in the form of profit or a reduction in need, there is no simple answer to "only five men?"

The Catholic Worker House is a place of hospitality where men can feel safe and find some needed stability in their living situation as they look for work, apply for services, or seek treatment for addictions and/or mental health concerns.

The founder and permanent resident of the House, Jerry Ebner, is not a social worker, therapist, nurse, or job coach. He is a deeply faithful man who believes in the mission of the Catholic Worker movement and will humbly "wash the feet" of the few men who find their way to his welcoming door.

But still, why bother? The house is in a "rough" neighborhood. No one really knows how it works or what it does. Dorothy Day was an anarchist who jabbed her fingers in the eye of the American government every chance she got. Why bother maintaining a movement that doesn't stand up to the American ideal of success?

Come to the Catholic Worker House for prayer, celebration, and a meal. Sit with the guests of the House and ask them. "Who are you?" and "Why is it important that you feel welcome here?"

The answers you get may not even come from the guests you spend time with, but the answers will be unmistakably clear. "I was a stranger, and you invited me in." (Mat. 25)

Thanks so much for reading, and we hope that you will write us and ask,

"How can I help"

Retraction

I recieved this e-mail over one of the lists I belong to it is in reference to this post I was unaware that it was inaccurate and took it on good faith that it was. So did many other people in the Vancouver area as I recieved it through more than one list. To be honest, while this particular account of injustices suffered by the homeless in my city is not factual that should not lessen the need for real work to be done to rectify the iniquities suffered by the least amongst our society.

CR

Dear Friends,

I've made a very serious mistake, and apologize to you.

When I forwarded the e-mail re: Street by-law homeless people… to you earlier this week, I had not first confirmed that the information that was sent to me was correct. The information has been disputed, the person who sent the e-mail to me accepts that the version of the story she sent was not factual. (...)

It was my responsibility to confirm the facts, and I failed to do that.

I cannot set this right, except to promise you, I'll never send an e-mail without confirming the information first.

I hope you will forward my apology to anyone you may have forwarded the original e-mail to.

Global Network Conference 2008 (5:26 min)

This video was presented at the Global Network Annual Space Organizing Conference & Protest held April 11-13, 2008 in Omaha, Nebraska. Author: Dave Webb.

Star Wars or Social Progress - You Decide

Bruce Gagnon
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
June 21st 2008

It's all about two things - power and money. Star Wars technology will give the U.S. "control and domination" of space and the Earth below as the Space Command planning document Vision for 2020 has outlined. On the second point the aerospace industry acknowledges that Star Wars will be the largest industrial project in the history of the planet Earth - necessitating near total control of the federal budget by the Pentagon. (...)

Recently Col. Robert Suminsby Jr., commander of Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico told community leaders that social spending is problematic because it is impacting the Air Force's ability to buy new high-tech weapons systems.

"As a military officer, my big concern is fixing Social Security andMedicare," Suminsby said. "If we don't fix [defund] those things, there won't be anything left for a defense budget."

"There needs to be a national debate over what our priorities are," Suminsby said.

On that last point Suminsby is correct - there needs to be a national debate. Except his vision of a national debate is different from ours. His vision is one where the military makes an order and the public and Congress snap to it and hand over the federal treasury to the Pentagon.

Our vision of a national debate is one that involves the grassroots citizens who talk about what real security means. Housing, food, education, energy, retirement, clean environment - these are the things that bring real security to the people. It's like two trains heading for a collision course. One train is called Star Wars and the other is called social progress. Which do you pick?

The global day of fasting to Stop Star Wars on June 22 is one important way for the public to become involved in this debate. All over the world the U.S. is dragging the "allies" into Star Wars and active resistance to the insanity of an arms race in space is growing. But we must do more - and it must be done over and over again.

Please don't think for a minute that after June 22 we can pack up our protest signs and go home. This issue of space warfare will be the defining issue of our time. Will there be money for social progress all over the world or will our corporate dominated governments move our taxes into the hands of the global war machine?

We must call for the conversion of the military industrial complex. This campaign to keep space for peace also must become a campaign to end the madness of war - either on Earth or in the heavens.

Please sign the petition at www.nonviolence.cz

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Blog)

The Misuse of Anti-Terror Legislation to Silence Nonviolent Anti-War Dissent

A 15 minute video on the detention and deportation of Scott Parkin by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In 2004 Scott Parkin a nonviolent anti-war activist organiser from Texas was detained in Australia as a possible national security threat and deported. Video contains interviews with Scott and Australian activists.

For more information visit Scotparkin.org

Charges Dropped Against Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste

Wadner Pierre and Joe Emersberger
HaitiAnalysis
June 19th, 2008

The Court of Appeal of Port-au-Prince has announced the dismissal of all remaining charges against Father Gerard Jean-Juste. The Catholic priest is a prominent supporter of Famni Lavalas, the political party of ousted Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Jean-Juste was arrested by the de facto government of Gerard Latortue in July of 2005, after being illegally arrested on a prior occasion in 2004. His imprisonment was such a flagrant act of political repression that Amnesty International designated the priest a “Prisoner of Conscience”. After getting a vial of Jean-Juste's blood past Latortue's police, Harvard professor and Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer verified that the jailed priest suffered from a form of lymphocytic leukemia that needed immediate treatment.

read the rest here

Study: Moving Virus Research Could Be Costly

Ted Bridis
Associated Press
June 20, 2008

WASHINGTON - An outbreak of one of the most contagious animal diseases from any of five locations the White House is considering for a new high-security research laboratory would be more devastating to the U.S. economy than from the isolated island laboratory where such research is now conducted, says a new report published Friday. (....)

The 1,005-page Homeland Security Department report said chances of such an outbreak - with estimated loses of more than $42.billion - would be “extremely low” if the research lab were designed, constructed and operated according to government safety standards.

Still, it calculated that economic losses in an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease could surpass $4 billion if the lab were built near livestock herds in Kansas or Texas, two options the Bush administration is considering. That would be nearly $1 billion higher than the government’s estimate of losses blamed on a hypothetical outbreak from its existing laboratory on Plum Island, N.Y.

The administration is studying the safest place to move its research on such dangerous pathogens from Plum Island to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak. A final choice is expected by late fall. The foot-and-mouth virus does not infect humans but could devastate herds of cattle, swine, lambs and sheep.

The five locations the U.S. is considering are Athens, Ga.; Manhattan, Kan.; Butner, N.C.; San Antonio; and Flora, Miss. A sixth alternative, considered unlikely, would be construction of a new research lab on Plum Island.

Economic losses in an outbreak would exceed $3.3 billion if the new lab were built in Georgia, North Carolina or Mississippi, the report said.

The new Homeland Security study concludes that risk would be low to nonexistent that an accident or terrorist attack would result in the outbreak of a dangerous pathogen at any of the sites except in case of a fire and explosion, which it said would pose a moderate risk that virus or disease could spread to nearby livestock or wild animals.

The threat from fire and explosion would be diminished for the government’s isolated laboratory on Plum Island “due to the low likelihood of any disease getting off of the island,” the report said.

The new National Bio-and Agro-Defense Facility would replace the existing 840-acre research complex on Plum Island, which is about 100 miles northeast of New York City in the Long Island Sound and accessible only by ferry or helicopter.
Besides foot-and-mouth disease, researchers also would study African swine fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever and the Hendra and Nipah viruses. Construction would begin in 2010 and take four years.

The new study expresses the government’s confidence it could avoid any outbreak. But it also cautioned that, “should a large release occur there is considerable opportunity for the virus to cause infections and become established in the environment beyond the facility boundary.”

A simulated outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease - part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called “Crimson Sky” - ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation’s National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses.

The new study said U.S. economic losses from an outbreak could ultimately be higher than the $5 billion suffered by Britain in 2001, when an epidemic forced the government to slaughter 6 million sheep, cows and pigs.

[Associated Press writer Eileen Sullivan contributed to this story from Washington.]

Meet the New Dr. Strangelove

Tom Hayden
Huffington Post
June 20, 2008

In the depths of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick created a notoriously-mad scientist character, Dr. Strangelove, whose passion was for dropping atomic bombs. Now there is a rising media and Beltway fascination with a new Dr. Strangelove, whose passion is imposing a mad science of counterinsurgency on Iraq. (...)

His name is David Kilcullen, an Australian academic and military veteran whom the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks once described as Gen. David Petraeus' "chief adviser" on the counterinsurgency doctrine underlying the surge in Iraq.

Kilcullen advocated a "global Phoenix program" in an obscure military journal, Small Wars, in 2004. For the ahistorical or uninitiated, Phoenix was a largely off-the-books detention, torture and assassination program aimed at tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who were identified by informants as the Vietcong's "civilian infrastructure." The venture was so discredited that the US Congress denounced and disbanded it after hearings in the 1970s.

But Kilcullen says the Phoenix program was "unfairly maligned" and was actually a success. So inflammatory was his advocacy in some circles that he revised his 2004 paper to rename the Phoenix program one of "revolutionary development."

In addition, he advocates "armed social science", which involves a key role for anthropologists and shrinks of various kinds in order to "exploit the physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees."

The long New Yorker piece by George Packer pictured Kilcullen as a charming, eccentric, and isolated genius of sorts. In the Washington culture of national security think tanks, he appears to be a familiar and friendly figure.

His latest media fan is the Post's David Ignatius, reporting a Kilcullen briefing given "in a private capacity" at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies. It was an argument for appearing to get out of Iraq while staying in, expressed in the Kilkullen formula "Overt De-Escalation, Covert Disruption." Kilcullen argues that the American troop presence is so large that it's counter-productive, only inflaming Iraqi sensibilities. What is required is a combination of US combat troop withdrawals combined with "black" special operations to "hunt terrorists" plus "white" special operations forces training and embedded with the Iraqi security forces, turning tribes against tribes wherever possible. Covert warfare is the future: "over the long run, we need to go cheap, quiet, low-footprint." And, he might have added, off the television screen and front pages.

What Kilcullen means is a kind of deception-based warfare that is contradictory to democracy itself, with its instruments of critical media, congressional oversight, and public disclosure of the cost in blood, taxes and honor. The key militarily is to secure the civilian population from the insurgents, in South Vietnam by "strategic hamlets", in Iraq by the "gated communities" with checkpoints, blast walls, concertina wire, fingerprinting, retinal scans and house-to-house population listings. The insurgents, meanwhile, are to be hunted, killed if necessary, and detained without charges in American-controlled or American-supported prison camps indefinitely, without access to lawyers, journalists, human rights observers, or family members. In most cases, there are no charges against them. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who headed the Abu Ghraib inquiry, has more than once suggested that "a systematic regime of torture" occurs in these camps. That's not including the CIA's secret rendition sites or the secret Baghdad prisons under the US-funded Ministry of the Interior, as reported previously in the New York Times.

Naturally the distinction between civilian and combatant is difficult to draw in counterinsurgency warfare. But aside from those already killed, it is a fair estimate that 100,000 detainees are currently languishing in such facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, few with any charges against them. These facilities are incubators for future insurgencies. Last week, after a long hunger strike, for example, 1,100 detainees escaped an Afghan facility after the Taliban blew up the walls. The Pentagon's plan is to build a permanent $60 million new detention facility on forty acres. The money might be better spent on lawyers for the present defenseless detainees.

These are the realities masked behind the almost-sensual description of a "lighter, smaller, more nimble residual force" in Ignatius' summary of the Kilcullen scenario.

How have the nation's once-great newspapers come to virtually sanctify -- and obfuscate the real meaning of -- these military doctrines, as if there were no alternatives? An explanation is impossible to obtain. But the uncritical acceptance, and even promotion, of counterinsurgency as a rational, realistic alternative to the either the status quo or withdrawal draws the Times and Post closer to the very Pentagon news manipulation operation they have recently exposed. The mainstream media have rarely if ever published anti-war critiques by leaders of protests against US military policy since the 2002 buildup, to the 2003 invasion, to the current turn to counterinsurgency. On the contrary, both the Post and the Times regularly publish the views of unrepentant neo-conservatives with no military experience whatsoever. The only valid "anti-war" voices apparently must be former military men or White House operatives who have turned against their former employers. The spectrum of the "op-ed page" is devolving into center-right insiders. As a result, the wild frontier of the blogosphere has exploded as the only outlet for dissent, with or without the documentation. The two opposing sides of the Iraq debate now inhabit separate worlds, the anti-war voices having been expelled from the mainstream for being prematurely anti-war or not being attendees at places like the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies.

In the era of Dr. Strangelove, the sociologist C. Wright Mills vented against the national security intellectuals as "crackpot realists." Few realized then [or now] that our lives and future are placed at risk by the unbalanced nature of our national dialogue, including the extreme gap between the reportage in America and the rest of the world.

Will a November election of Barack Obama bring an end to the one-note monotony of the national security debate? I fervently hope so. Obama to his credit favors combat troop withdrawals and diplomacy with Iran rather than obliteration. Obama and John McCain would seem to have totally opposing views of Iraq. But at a deeper level, Obama seems to be heading towards the counterinsurgency trap -- planning to leave a "lighter, smaller, more nimble residual force" behind in a wasteland of preventive detention, secret gulags, and advisers like David Kilcullen. For the media and public to fail to recognize, evaluate and debate this likely future during the presidential campaign will mean something beyond tragedy or farce.

[Tom Hayden is a former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His books include The Port Huron Statement [new edition], Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader.]

June issue

We are looking for submissions for our July issue deadline for writing and artwork is the 21st of this month. We are hoping to do a Latin American themed issue we are also interested in articles remembering the South Central Los Angeles Farm, which was demolished by the Police two years ago in June. please send all materials and inquiries to Chris Rooney at the.christian.radical.zine (at) gmail.com

Writers please incluse a short bio of yourself for the back pages.

for now you can download it here

Arrests for War Resistance Increase Again

Bill Quigley
Truthout
June 19 2008

There have been over 15,000 arrests for resistance to war since 2002. There were large numbers right after the runup to and invasion of Iraq. Recently, arrests have begun climbing again. Though arrests are a small part of antiwar organizing, their rise is an indicator of increasing resistance.

The information comes from the Nuclear Resister, a newsletter that has been reporting detailed arrest information on peace activists and other social justice campaigns since 1980. Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa, publishers of the Nuclear Resister, document arrests by name and date, based on information collected from newspapers across the country and from defense lawyers and peace activists.

read the rest here

An open letter in opposition to the 2010 Olympics

Statimc Native Youth Movement Warrior Society
St’at’imc Nation, Tsalalh Territory

Re: 2010 Olympics

To Whom It May Concern;

Please accept this letter as a declaration of opposition to the upcoming 2010 Olympics set to take place within traditional St’at’imc Borders. Many members of our Nation, including children, youth, elders and land users do not support the Olympics taking place in Whistler for many reasons. (...)

First being that Whistler and many other towns, cities and municipalities are illegally occupied by foreigners and run by fraudulent government systems that oppress the original inhabitants, the St’at’imc People. These government systems are built to hold lands illegally and destruct entire ecosystems in order to gain profit for the already wealthy corporations.

In turn, the St’at’imc People are pushed aside while traditional hunting and fishing grounds; once used freely at will, then become Privatized, and or “Crown Land.” Our people depend on migration of animals for basic survival and the teachings we pass onto our next generations. The people visiting our territory are tourists and do not depend on fish and deer for long hard winters. Many people who are impoverished depend solely on these animals to feed their families and the more people who disrupt the delicate balance between the environment, animals and humans, the worse off surrounding tribes will be. This includes major health concerns including Cancer, diabetes, substance abuse and spiritual well-being.

We, as Indian people of this territory need the balance of our Mother Earth in order to maintain strong ties to who we are as Original People.

The second issue at stake with the upcoming Olympics is the misuse of traditional cultural practices such as ceremony and song. Many of these practices by our people are meant to only be shared within the territory, and therefore only be used by the original People of the St’at’imc Nation. Out of respect for all ancestors who carried these songs and ceremonies thus far, we need to keep the traditions strong by teaching them to our younger generations, instead of foreigners first. The knowledge of these traditional ceremonies is a privilege and should not be mocked or commercialized in exchange for money, if not respected, these ceremonies will be useless and meaningless.

The funding of the Olympics before the funding of the suffering, homeless and impoverished people of these Indian territories shows only that the government in B.C. is only interested in economic gain and not the well-being of the people who lived here prior to the Olympics. These groups of people include young mothers, single parents, people of color, and drug dependant people who have nowhere to turn, except the streets or worse off, death. The Indian people of the streets in Vancouver need to return to the traditional ways of living, including feeling pride to be Indian.

Further impoverishment will conclude in complete loss of culture, language and ways of living on our land. More money is sure to cause more problems for our people in the sense that our systems are not based on economic gain, but spiritual, physical, and mental well being, this includes a sense of belonging to where we come from. If our Land is destroyed, there is no hope to regain our knowledge as traditional St’at’imc People, but as a product of foreign rule and fraudulent systematic genocide.

To those who are supportive of the Olympics, there are many reasons for you to reconsider your support including the future of your children and the continuation of our ways as Original People. Selling our land, means selling our rights to the land, this includes hunting, fishing and building traditional homes for food preservation and recreational uses.

Once these agreements are made, they are forever, thus leaving our upcoming generations with no option but to abide by the foreign rule, and not to maintain ownership held for thousands of years by our ancestors. In conclusion, man has no power over the Earth, we must care for this Land as though our lives depend as it, as it does. We depend on our Earth for water, food, homes, and spiritual well-being. There is no one to protect it but us, therefore we must take our proper place in defending the land as Original People. In one way or the other, each of our tribes hold names that represent Original People.

Our tribe, are Ucwalmicw, People of the Land, we will defend our land by all means necessary.

Sincerely,
Tsalalhmec

Denver's Catholic Worker House: 30 years of hospitality and hope

John Gleason
The Denver Catholic Register
Week of June 18, 2008

In an unassuming house a dozen blocks north of downtown Denver, a ministry has been going on for 30 years that offers hospitality to the unemployed and homeless. The Catholic Worker House brings hope to people when it would seem all hope was gone.

Loretto Sister Anna Koop, who has lived at the house since it opened, watches the Light Rail travel past the front window facing Welton Street. She sees the house as a place where people can get started again.

read the rest here

Author on Haiti completes successful speaking tour

Speaking tour to Canada by author Peter Hallward raises awareness and support to Haitian people

By Roger Annis
June 19 2008

Vancouver, Canada--Peter Hallward completed a successful four-city speaking tour to Canada on June 7. He is the author of the newly-published Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment (Verso Books). His tour was organized by local affiliates of the Canada Haiti Action Network and was co-sponsored by many interested groups and institutions. The web publication Rabble.ca was the media sponsor of the tour. (...)

Hallward spoke to public meetings in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. Attendance at each varied from 75 to 100 people. He spoke at two meetings in Montreal—one in French and the other in English. Approximately 90 copies of his book were sold at the meetings, including nearly 40 in Montreal.

His talks gave an overview of the situation in Haiti since the beginning of the modern-day mass movement for a government and society of social justice, dating from the overthrow of the Duvalier family dynasty in 1986. As the title of his book indicates, Hallward's talks analyzed how the United States, and increasingly its imperial allies in France and Canada, have conspired to frustrate and contain the Haitian's people's historic struggle for sovereignty and social justice. The foreign powers' principal target was the Lavalas political movement and party of exiled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Notwithstanding the violence and social destruction that the Haitian people are enduring, Hallward's talks ended on a cautiously optimistic note for the future of the country. Quoting a Haitian political activist in his book, Hallward wrote,

For the time being, I am sure of two things, says PPN (Parti populaire national) activist and broadcaster Prad Jean-Vernet. Any politician who is openly anti-Lavalas will get nowhere with the bulk of the people, and the next election will be won by someone who has remained loyal to (ousted president Jean-Bertrand) Aristide. The people will not forgive the crimes of February 2004 (the coup d'etat against Aristide).

The speaking tour made important progress in getting the Haitian people's cause onto the political and literary map in Canada. Two of the country's large daily newspapers, the Montreal Gazette and the National Post, published reviews. Reviews of the book or interviews with the author appeared in such publications as Rabble.ca and the Montreal print weeklies Hour and The Mirror.

The first substantial review of the book in the French language appears in the June issue of the influential Montreal paper l'Aut' Journal. It is a hard-hitting and comprehensive review of the book from Pierre Dubuc, a well-known and respected editor and activist in the progressive movement in Quebec.

The satirical journal Le Couac publishes an interview with Hallward in its June issue. (Articles and book reviews from the tour can be found on the CHAN website at www.canadahaitiaction.ca.)

Numerous interviews were conducted with community radio stations, and the story of the tour appeared on one CBC outlet—the afternoon radio show in Ottawa. Kreyol-language radio in Montreal and Ottawa publicized the tour and the book. Another accomplishment of the tour is that several of Hallward's talks were filmed and are archived on the internet at `Google video.

Haitian union leader also visit Canada In Montreal and Ottawa,

Hallward was joined by speaker Paul Chery, Secretary-General of the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH). Chery's talks gave powerful, first-hand confirmation of one of the arguments of Damming the Flood and of Hallward's talks, namely that conditions of life for the Haitian people have grown immeasurably worse under the foreign military occupation that is into its fifth year.

Prior to speaking at the events with Hallward, Chery spent one week in Toronto as one of several dozen international guests of the convention of the Canadian Labour Congress, the largest trade union federation in Canada. The invitation has given an important boost to solidarity campaigning in Canada for Haiti's trade unions.

Chery met with many delegates to the convention and leaders of unions in Canada and internationally. He spoke at two events that also featured Manawel Abdul Al of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions—a parallel forum at the CLC convention on May 28 and at the opening session of the Labour For Palestine conference in Toronto on May 30. Participants at these meetings were struck by the similarities of the causes of the calamitous social and economic conditions facing the Haitian and Palestinian peoples.

New openings for Haiti solidarity in Canada

Peter Hallward's speaking tour was an important milestone for the Haiti solidarity movement in Canada. It has created new opportunities and new initiatives for work in support of the Haitian people.

John Dimond-Gibson, an organizer of the tour with Toronto Haiti Action Committee comments, "The book and national tour mark a turning point in our work. We have effectively won the argument of interpretation around the coup and Canada's role in it for anyone who cares to look into the matter with an open mind. Damming the Flood is both a testament to the amount of research that has been done (no small part of it by CHAN) and an invaluable contribution to it."

Niraj Joshi, also of Toronto Haiti Action Committee, reports, "There was a very positive response to Hallward's talk from the diverse audience at the Toronto event (on June 2). This speaking tour has expanded the base for Haiti solidarity in Canada and exposed the destructiveness of Canadian foreign policy. More tours like it are needed. Peter Hallward's brilliant book will serve as an invaluable resource in that effort."

Nik Barry-Shaw of Haiti Action Montreal explains, "For many in the francophone population, accepting Hallward's argument - no matter how logical - is difficult because of a perceived "pro-Aristide" bias on his part. This owes much to the exceptional anti-Lavalas virulence of the French-language media. The importance accorded to Hallward's book by Pierre Dubuc in L'Aut'Journal may be a sign that things will start to change."

Kevin Skerrett of the Ottawa Haiti Action Committee adds, "The interest and desire to support Haiti's trade unions and other popular organizations is definitely on the rise in Canada. That's what we saw throughout the visit of Peter Hallward and Paul Chery. We are encouraged by this and are redoubling our efforts throughout the CHAN network."

Roger Annis was one of the coordinators of Peter Hallward's speaking tour. Damming the Flood is published by Verso Books and distributed in North America by Penguin group. It is available for Can$24 at amazon.ca or it can be ordered for $20 plus $4 shipping from Haiti Solidarity BC at haitsolidaritybc@resist.ca .

Peter Hallward's talks in Toronto and Vancouver can be viewed at Google Video:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=peter+hallward&hl=en&sitesearch=#

Air Force Wobbles on Plan for Cyber 'Dominance'

Noah Shachtman
Wired
June 19, 2008

MARLBOROUGH, MASS. - Is the Air Force trying to rule the internet with its new Cyber Command -- or rearrange the cubicles for its network geeks? Depends on which general you ask.

1,400 Air Force officers and defense contractors are gathered here, in a black-draped conference hall in exurban Boston, for a Cyber Symposium that's supposed to plot out the future of the military's newest "MAJCOM," or Major Command. But with 105 days to go until the force is declared officially operational, the direction of this 50-state, 8,000-man group is very much in question. Some see it as a chance to define -- and rule -- a whole new set of battlefields. Others think it is merely the Air Force's way of highlighting the increasing importance of information in military operations. (...)

Major General William Lord, chief of the still-provisional Cyber Command, gave his new troops a fairly narrow charge: better operation of the Air Force's networks. "It's not about... the defense of the United States. It's not about the entire Department of Defense," he told the crowd. "It's about Air Force's focus on the Air Force's protection and defense of the Air Force's command and control abilities." Then he talked about how many of the service's network plumbers, electronic warfare specialists, and communications gurus would now be placed under a "cyber career field." He even showed off what badges they would wear.

But on the screen behind Maj. Gen. Lord was a Power Point slide that hinted at far larger goals. It read: "Just as [father of the U.S. Air Force] Billy Mitchell endeavored to prove the potential of air power to a skeptical nation, we must now prove the critical importance of cyberspace as a warfighting domain."

In an interview earlier this year with Wired.com, Lord's boss, 8th Air Force commander Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, took things even further. Convincing people of cyberpsace's centrality was only step one. "Our mission is to control cyberspace both for attacks and defense," he said.

That kind of language was reflected on the symposium's exhibition floor, where companies like IBM bragged about "partnering for dominance" with the military in cyberspace. It's a riff on Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne's new mission statement for the service: "As Airmen, it is our calling to dominate Air, Space, and Cyberspace."

Today, Lt. Gen. Elder and Wynne discussed options for strategic deterrence of these electronic attacks. "When we're done, no adversary should be able to engage the United States in cyberspace with any expectation of victory," said outgoing Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne.

And that means more than just keeping networks humming. "Cyberspace today is an inherently offensive domain," said Colonel Ward Heinke, who heads to 608th Air Force Network Operations Center. If the Air Force's new information strike force can get an understanding of an enemy's networks, "we're a keystroke away from executing an action that can have a dramatic effect. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a physical effect, disrupting or taking down a piece of hardware, or causing an application to stop performing properly. It could be at the cognitive level. It could be information operations. Using their systems to convey a message or a thought that results in actions... that are to our best advantage."

It could even be a blast from a ray gun. Because, by cyberspace, the Air Force doesn't just mean computer networks. Everything the electromagnetic spectrum -- from radio to microwaves to x-rays -- is included under the purview of Cyber Command. So Lt. Colonel Tim Sands, head of the 53rd Electronic Warfare Group, is looking at futuristic energy weapons, like the Airborne Laser. It's a modified 747, equipped with a real-life ray gun that's supposed to shoot down missiles, one day. "So you've got that effect. Let's generate it on a bad guy's head," he said. "To me, that's a cyber weapon."

Citizen Resistance in Czech Republic Inspires Us

Bruce Gagnon
The Strength of Nonviolence
Jun 19, 2008

We heard this morning that the Democrats in the U.S. Congress had cut a deal with the Republicans to give Bush another $162 billion for the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of that billions more will be appropriated for Star Wars "research and development" for the 2009 budget. The military industrial complex has taken control of the Congress.

The citizen resistance in the Czech Republic, and now sweeping across Europe and beyond, is a model that should inform and inspire people - particularly those of us living in the belly of the beast, in the good 'ole USA. We should end our illusions that some shining knight on a white horse (a new president) will ride in and rescue us from this military dictatorship that we now live under. In fact our rescue will only come from our own non-violent resistance.

One heartening example is the growing list of people who will be fasting to Stop Star Wars on June 22. We deeply appreciate all those who have committed to join the hunger strike that day. Please remember that we want you to do more than just fast. We need you to sign the Czech citizens petition at http://www.nonviolence.cz/ and to write a letter to your local newspaper explaining the issue. We ask you to share this email with your personal list so that we can spread the message far and wide.

Thanks for your support.

List to date (...)

Beth Adams (Greenfield, Massachusetts)
Bittiandra Muddappa Aiyyappa (Mumbai, India)
Bob Anderson (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Nancy Anderson (Las Cruces, New Mexico)
Dennis Apel (Guadalupe, California)
Pat Arrowsmith (London, England)
Nancy Bartasavich (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Jean Basinger (Des Moines, Iowa)
John Baugher (Cape Elizabeth, Maine)
Patricia Crawford Berg (Staten Island, New York)
Joan Saks Berman (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Pat Birnie (Tucson, Arizona)
Benay Blend (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Rev. Bill Bliss (Bath, Maine)
Amaury Blondet (Mayagüez, Puerto Rico)
Grace Braley (Portland, Maine)
Ivan Braun (New York, New York)
Sally Breen (Windham, Maine)
Kelli Brew (Gainesville, Florida)
Anna Maria Caldara (Bangor, Pennsylvania)
Maxine Caron (Byron Bay, Australia)
Sue Chase (Batesville, Virginia)
Aman Chauhan (India)
David W. Chipman (Harpswell, Maine)
Kathe Chipman (Harpswell, Maine)
Sung-Hee Choi (New York, New York)
Barbara Clancy (Stow, Massachusetts)
Lorna Clark (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Michael Connelly (Rochester, New York)
William Coop (Brunswick, Maine)
Jeremy Corbyn, MP (London, England)
Frank Cordaro (Des Moines, Iowa)
Nacyra Leila Gómez-Cruz (Veradera, Cuba)
Paul Cunningham (South Portland, Maine)
Hugh Curran (Surry, Maine)
Dave S. Cutler (Acton, Massachusetts)
Bob Dale (Brunswick, Maine)
Gail Daneker (St. Paul, Minnesota)
Robert Daniels II (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania)
Larry Dansinger (Monroe, Maine)
Lynn DeFilippo (Nome, Alaska)
Katy Delau (Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada)
Christine DeTroy (Brunswick, Maine)
Mary Donnelly (Peaks Island, Maine)
Mike Donnelly (Peaks Island, Maine)
Chris Dove (Whitby, England)
Rev. Denis J. Dunn (Porter, Maine)
Aurel Duta (Bucharest, Romania)
MacGregor Eddy (Salinas, California)
Marjorie Swann Edwin (Santa Cruz, California)
Dan Ellis (Brunswick, Maine)
Lynn Ellis (Brunswick, Maine)
Corazon Valdez-Fabros (Manila, Philippines)
Dr Mrunalini Fadnavis (Nagpur, India)
Becky Farley (Damariscotta, Maine)
Jackie Fearnley (Goathland, England)
Yoriko Freed (Fairbanks, Alaska)
Sr. Barb Freemyer, RSM (Pueblo, Colorado)
Stacey Fritz (Fairbanks, Alaska)
Bruce Gagnon (Bath, Maine)
Lee Gagnon (Walpole, Massachusetts)
Sudhir Gandotra (India)
Joseph Gerson (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Anne Gibbons (New York, New York)
Sr. Carol Gilbert (Baltimore, Maryland)
Starr Gilmartin (Trenton, Maine)
Arlyne Goodwin (Naples, Florida)
Holly Gwinn Graham (Olympia, Washington)
Matt Gregory (Lincoln, Nebraska)
Regina Hagen (Darmstadt, Germany)
Kevin Hall (Dunedin, Florida)
Maggie Hall (Dunedin, Florida)
Luke Hansen (Chicago, Illinois)
Amy Harlib (New York, New York)
Faith Harmony (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Kate Harris (Belfast, Maine)
Alanna Hartzok (Fayetteville, Pennsylvania)
Dorothy Hassfeld (Brunswick, Maine)
Tom Hastings (Portland, Oregon)
Suzanne Hedrick (Nobleboro, Maine)
Jenny Heinz (New York, New York)
Joann Henderson (Florence Oregon)
Stuart Henderson (Florence Oregon)
Dud Hendrick (Deer Isle, Maine)
Tensie Hernandez (Guadalupe, California)
Nancy Hill (Stonington, Maine) June 19-24
Amanda Hoag (Bath, Maine)
Mair Honan (Portland, Maine)
Jackie Hudson, OP (Bremerton, Washington)
Kate Hudson (London, England)
Connie Jenkins (Orono, Maine)
Molly Johnson (San Miguel, California)
Sally Jones (Staten Island, New York)
Carla Josephson (Rio Rancho, New Mexico)
Sr. Mary Jude Jun, OSU (St. Louis, Missouri)
Egbert Kankeleit (Darmstadt, Germany)
Nona Keel (Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada)
Ian Keith (St. Paul, Minnesota)
Natalie Kempner (Woolwich, Maine)
Bruce Kent (London, England)
Ron King (Penobscot, Maine)
Tom Kircher (Biddeford, Maine)
Judy Kugler (Marietta, Georgia)
Dr. Dharmendra Kumar (India)
Dr. R. C. Kushwaha (India)
Steve Landon (Waldhof, ON, Canada)
Larry Landry (Fairbanks, Alaska)
Joanne Landy (New York, New York)
Steve Larrick (Lincoln, Nebraska)
Isolt Lea (Gainesville, Florida)
Louise Legun (Allentown, Pennsylvania)
Debbie Leighton (West Bath, Maine)
Mary Dennis Lentsch (Oak Ridge, Tennessee)
Dave Lewit (Boston, Massachusetts)
Bob Lezer (Freeport, Maine)
Mary Leonard, Mercy Associate (Pueblo, Colorado)
Suzanne Linton (White Bear Lake, Minnesota)
Gawain Little (Oxford, England)
Marie-Noel Lombard (Paris, France)
Matt Loosigian (Brunswick, Maine)
Tamara Lorincz (Halifax, NS, Canada)
Harry Loumeau (Tucson, Arizona)
Lew Lubka (Fargo, North Dakota)
Carla L. Rael-Luhman (Portales, New Mexico)
Eric Lynn (Walpole, Massachusetts)
Mahila Mahavidyalaya (Nagpur, India)
Deb Marshall (Little Dear Isle, Maine)
Rev. Sergio Samuel Arce-Martínez (Veradera, Cuba)
Helyne May (Windham, Maine)
Natasha Mayers (Whitefield, Maine)
Ed McCartan (Brunswick, Maine)
Geralyn McDowell (Troy, New York)
Laurie McGowan (Mochelle, NS, Canada)
Jane McKears (Birmingham, England)
Gloria McMillan (Tucson, Arizona)
Bernie Meyer (Olympia, Washington)
Karl Meyer (Nashville, Tennessee)
Carol Miller (Ojo Sarco, New Mexico)
John Miller (Blue Hill, Maine)
Peter Mitchell (Rochester, New York)
Damien Moran (Warsaw, Poland)
Ariana Mortello – 13 years old (Cape Elizabeth, Maine)
Ellen Murphy (Bellingham, Washington)
Michael Murphy (Omaha, Nebraska)
Laurie Shade-Neff (Las Cruces, New Mexico)
Doctress Neutopia (Tucson, Arizona)
Agneta Norberg (Stockholm, Sweden)
Nancy O'Byrne (St. Augustine, Florida)
Nancy Oden (Jonesboro, Maine)
Rev. Gerald Oleson (Bangor, Maine)
Jon Olsen (Jefferson, Maine)
Sr. Elaine Lopez Pacheco, RSM (Pueblo, Colorado)
Jeanne Pahls (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Nana Paldi (Fairbanks, Alaska)
James Palmer (Stetson, Maine)
Rosalie Tyler Paul (Georgetown, Maine)
Terrence E. Paupp (San Diego, California)
Vincent Pawlowski (Tucson, Arizona)
Jewel Payne (Davis, California)
Lindis Percy (Harrogate, England)
Ricardo Peres (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Ilze Petersons (Orono, Maine)
Magda Philips (Whitby, England)
Tina Phillips (Brunswick, Maine)
Sr. Ardeth Platte (Baltimore, Maryland)
Peter Pollard (York, England)
Bonnie Preston (Blue Hill, Maine)
Robert Rabin (Vieques, Puerto Rico)
Robert Randall (Brunswick, Georgia)
Susan Ravitz (Easton, Pennsylvania)
Phyllis Reames (Portland, Maine)
Kim Redigan (Dearborn Heights, Michigan)
Dennis Redmond (New York, New York)
Lilly Rendt (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Carla Rensenbrink (Topsham, Maine)
John Rensenbrink (Topsham, Maine)
Megan Rice (Las Vegas, Nevada)
Linda Richards (Corvallis, Oregon)
Emily Ricketts (Tucson, Arizona)
Tim Rinne (Lincoln, Nebraska)
Bill Rixon (Freeport, Maine)
Judy Robbins (Sedgwick, Maine)
Peter Robbins (Sedgwick, Maine)
Chris Rooney (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
Jane Sanford (Belfast, Maine)
Deb Sawyer (Portland, Maine)
Nicole Scott (Shoreline, Washington)
Barbara Calvert Seifred (Vancouver, BC, Canada)
Stan Serafin (Corrales, New Mexico)
Dr. Rajesh Sharma (India)
Robert Shetterly (Brooksville, Maine)
Ymani Simmons (Leicester, North Carolina)
Ms. Samm Simpson (Dunedin, Florida)
Father River Sims (San Francisco, California)
Robert M. Smith (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania)
Gareth Smith (Byron Bay, Australia)
Cathy Stanton (Melbourne, Florida)
Janie Stein (Salina, Kansas)
Melissa D. Stewart (Fairbanks, Alaska)
Dr. Pawan Sudhir (India)
Mary Beth Sullivan (Bath, Maine)
Wayne Sumstine (Tucson, Arizona)
Silvia Swinden (London, England)
Arun Thankur (India)
Don Thompson (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Sally-Alice Thompson (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Cynthia Tiedeman (Omaha, Nebraska)
John Tiedeman (Omaha, Nebraska)
Don Timmerman (Park Falls, Wisconsin)
Fran Truitt (Blue Hill, Maine)
Steve Tumolo (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Meredith Tupper (Springfield, Virginia)
Carol Urner (Portland, Oregon)
Eric Verlo (Colorado Springs, Colorado)
Karen Wainberg (Bath, Maine)
William Watts (San Francisco, California)
Dave Webb (Leeds, England)
Margaret Weitzmann (Potsdam, New York)
Elaine Wells (Omaha, Nebraska)
Mark Welsch (Omaha, Nebraska)
Jeanne Wheeler (Oahu, Hawaii)
Pat Wheeler (Deer Isle, Maine)
Molly Willcox (Westport, Maine)
Keith K. Williams (Windham, Maine)
Lynda Williams (Santa Rosa, California)
Mariah Williams (Liberty, Maine)
Loring Wirbel (Colorado Springs, Colorado)
Michael Wisniewski (Los Angeles, California)
Peter Woodruff (Arrowsic, Maine)
Dr. Yogender Yadav (India)
Jerry Zawada, OFM (Las Vegas, Nevada)
John Zokovitch (Gainesville, Florida)
Laurie Zolas (Bronx, New York)


Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
http://www.space4peace.org
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (Blog)

"Disposable Heroes": Veterans Used to Test Suicide-Linked Drugs

Brian Ross and Vic Walter, ABC News
Truthout
June 17 2008

Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects, an investigation by ABC News and The Washington Times has found.

The report will air on Good Morning America and will also appear in The Washington Times on Tuesday.

read the rest here

Call Conference to plan War Crimes Trial of Bush and Higher Ups

Global Research
June 15, 2008

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

read the rest here

Video: Hundreds of Rivers Are Being Given To Private Corporations

Film by Conrad Schmidt ("Five Ring Circus") with excellent video footage of the Ashlu River. Includes interviews with Gwen Barlee of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, NDP Environment Critic Shane Simpson, Adriane Carr of the Green Party, Elaine Golds of the Burke Mountain Naturalists, and Tom Rankin of Friends of the Ashlu. Tens of billions of public dollars being given to a few private hands to build private renewable energy assets which will never stop making money for the private owners.

War Resisters - your chance to help the campaign

As you know, on June 3, the House of Commons did a pretty important thing. The MPs voted 137-110 for the War Resisters Motion, which would make it possible for the war resisters to apply for permanent residence in Canada, and which would stop the deportation of any of them, including Corey Glass, whose deadline to "leave or be removed" is now July 10.

The CBC and Newsworld, had a 7-minute report the previous Sunday (June 1), with Terry Milewski, a prominent reporter, anchoring the story. It was a great piece, and it mentioned that the vote would take place on the following Tuesday.

Then, on Tuesday, NOTHING -- NADA -- ZERO -- ZILCH! (...)

MEDIA COVERAGE NOW IS SUPER IMPORTANT IF WE ARE TO GET THE CONSERVATIVES TO IMPLEMENT THE WAR RESISTERS MOTION.

PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO DROP A LINE TO THE CBC AT http://www.cbc.ca/contact/ AND LET THEM KNOW YOU WANT MORE COVERAGE OF THE WAR RESISTERS ISSUE!

And by the way -- don't be shy about writing to your local media, or to "national" media like the Globe & Mail, which has ignored the story except for a teensy little paragraph that whispered "don't read this" the day after the vote.

The Tories would love this issue to disappear from view. Don't let them have their way.

PEACE,
LEE ZASLOFSKY

War Resisters Support Campaign
Vancouver

http://ca.geocities.com/vanresisters/

Paul, the Magnificent!

[col. writ. 2/27/08]
(c) '08 Mumia Abu-Jamal

It's amazing that we are marking the 110th anniversary of the birth of Paul Robeson (April 9, 1898 -January 23, 1976).

For many years in my youth, I regarded him as my hero, and one of the greatest men who has ever lived. (Notice that I said "greatest men" -- not "greatest Black men.")

That's because of his extraordinary life, his wealth of talents and abilities, his soaring intellect, but above all, his magnificent heart, which beat for all the oppressed of the world! (...)

It was perhaps in 1973 when I read the book, Here I Stand, his explosive autobiography which hit me like a ton of bricks. Above all of his extraordinary life, what struck me the most was his reply to a Congressman who threatened to hold him in contempt because of his refusal to admit his membership in the Communist Party. Robeson testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on June 12, 1956. When I read his words nearly 20 years later, a chill went through me like a bolt of lightning. He told the committee:

My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it.

If this were the movies, it would've required a clap of thunder to mark this dramatic moment.

As an artist, acting and singing on stages the world over, Robeson's genius could hardly be denied. But, as ever, there was something greater than his immense talent. Again, I think it was his heart, from which poured a deep feeling of commitment to those who didn't have his life options. It is especially meaningful when we consider that, when he spoke these words, he was surely among one of the wealthiest Black men in America - in 1941.

It means so little when a man like me wins some success. Where is the benefit when a small class of Negroes makes money and can live well? It may be encouraging, but it has no deeper significance. I feel this way because I have cousins who can neither read nor write. I have had a chance. They have not. That is the difference.

What would a man such as this think of the bling-bling that has become the core of Black fashion? What would he think of such conspicuous consumption when so many are doing so poorly in this, the richest nation on earth?

Paul was far more than an accomplished scholar, a lawyer, an actor, singer and orator. He was a human being of the first order, who rightly deserved the sobriquet, "The tallest tree in our forest."

His words have a relevance that continues to inspire us, decades after his utterance. Of his art, he described it thus: ".....{It} is a weapon in the struggle for my people's freedom and for the freedom of all people."

The Bay Area Paul Robeson Centennial Committee is to be commended for remembering this great Black world leader.

How much such art as he produced is needed now!

--(c) '08 maj

Last Poets: Whitey on the Moon

Anthropologists At War

New military program that embeds anthropologists with soldiers has academics up in arms.

Bill Stamets
In These Times
June 19, 2008

Not in our name. That could be the battle cry of American anthropologists resisting the recent use of their discipline in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army is sending anthropologists into the field to help soldiers counter insurgents. The program, called Human Terrain System (HTS), responds to combat brigade commanders' 2006 call for "operationally relevant cultural knowledge." (...)

In June, 12 Human Terrain Teams (HTT) -- each made up of three military members and three civilians -- were expected to join combat brigades in either Iraq or Afghanistan. By the end of September, another 12 will deploy.

Training for the six-member teams occurs at the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The teams spend six to nine months in Iraq or Afghanistan and spend anywhere from three days to three weeks in a given locale, according to James K. Greer, deputy program manager of the Human Terrain System.

According to HTT's website: "The role of the HTTs is to help the troops better understand who is NOT their enemy." The teams help the U.S. Army "influence the population through non-lethal means."

At an April 24 hearing at the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities, Col. Martin Schweitzer testified that HTS helped decrease "kinetic operations" by 60 to 70 percent in his brigade's area of operations in Afghanistan.

"We must understand the culture to win," Schweitzer testified.

In 2007, his 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was the first to use a Human Terrain Team. It was also the first to have an HTT fatality. On May 7, 2008, a roadside bomb in the Afghan province of Khowst killed Michael Bhatia, an Oxford doctoral candidate and the brigade's field social scientist. After his year-long contract, Bhatia had planned to finish his dissertation titled "The Mujahideen: A Study of Combatant Motives in Afghanistan, 1978-2005."

Anthropologists outsourced
BAE Systems, a global defense firm, has recruited and trained HTT members since 2006. To date, BAE has placed about 30 field social scientists in HTTs, says Scott Fazekas, a BAE press contact.

Academics at home have been raising a ruckus over the military's use of a mobilized, militarized and weaponized anthropology. In September, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists formed to circulate a Pledge of Non-participation in Counterinsurgency. The pledge has since garnered nearly 1,000 signatures.

Last November, at its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., the executive board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a statement deeming HTS's "application of anthropological expertise" both "problematic" and "unacceptable."

"The impact of anti-HTS activists on program recruitment in universities, especially in anthropology departments, is profound," Zenia Helbig, an academic kicked out of HTS, tells In These Times. Helbig brought BAE Systems -- and its three HTS contracts, estimated at $160 million -- to the attention of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that investigates corruption in the federal government.

Felix Moos, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas who has taught some HTT classes, concedes, "Because we are outsourcing the war, we are giving the title of 'anthropologist' to people who are not really anthropologists."

In a May 6 letter to Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), Roberto J. González, an anthropology professor at San Jose State University and a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, attacked HTS: "The program is dysfunctional, wasteful, and perhaps even fraudulent. As an anthropologist, it is also clear to me that HTS simply cannot work as its proponents claim."

Key players
Counterinsurgency is the specialty of two key players in the Pentagon's post-9/11 turn to culture.

Anthropologist Montgomery McFate is the senior social science adviser to the HTS program. Her 1995 thesis at Yale University was "Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland." David J. Kilcullen is a policy-planning adviser in the State Department. His 2000 thesis at the University of New South Wales–Australian Defense Force Academy was titled "The Political Consequences of Military Operations in Indonesia 1945-99: A Fieldwork Analysis of the Political Power-Diffusion Effects of Guerrilla Conflict." Kilcullen's non-academic credentials include a stint in the Australian Army as a commander of counterinsurgency operations in East Timor.

McFate is credited with jumpstarting a program -- called the Cultural Operational Research Human Terrain System -- at the Department of Defense (DOD) that was the springboard for HTS.

"Cultural ignorance can kill," argued McFate in a 2005 article published in Joint Forces Quarterly. "Cultural knowledge and warfare are inextricably bound. ... The U.S. Armed Forces must adopt an ethnographer's view of the world."

It has begun to do so. A piece in the Jan. 1, 2007, Field Artillery Journal briefed officers on greeting their Iraqi Army counterparts: "If you are especially close, a kiss on the cheek may become commonplace. You will get used to it -- it is a compliment indicating that your status has been raised to 'brother.' " Marines now receive how-to pamphlets, such as "Cultural Considerations in House Occupations," for tips "on the Iraqi human dynamics when coalition forces enter Iraq residences."

"Normality in Kandahar is not the same as in Kansas," Kilcullen wrote in a 2006 memo e-mailed to military officers. "Armed social work" is his pithy take on culturally aware counterinsurgency.

He posts tips from the front: "Stop your people fraternizing with local children. Your troops are homesick; they want to drop their guard with the kids. But children are sharp-eyed, lacking in empathy and willing to commit atrocities their elders would shrink from."

Troops can also acquire "practical cultural knowledge, sensitivity and awareness" by playing "Mission to Iraq." According to its promo materials, this $795 video game has "socially intelligent virutal humans" driven by "cultural puppets." Alelo, the company that makes it, also sells Dari and Pashto versions for Afghan deployments.

Testifying before the 2004 Armed Services Committee, retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales proposed "a cadre of global scouts, well educated, with a penchant for languages and a comfort with strange and distant places."

He continued: "These soldiers should be given time to immerse themselves in a single culture and to establish trust with those willing to trust them," saying that ethnographic embedees ought to "stay for extended periods within the countries, not just a few years but perhaps decades."

Scales, a defense consultant with a doctorate in history from Duke University, has other ideas for anthropologizing the Army. He wrote this in a 2004 article "Culture-Centric Warfare" for the Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine:

The military spends millions to create urban combat sites designed to train soldiers how to kill an enemy in cities. But perhaps equally useful might be urban sites optimized to teach soldiers how to coexist with and cultivate trust and understanding among indigenous peoples inside foreign urban settings. Such centers would immerse young soldiers within a simulated Middle Eastern city, perhaps near a mosque or busy marketplace, where they would be confronted with various crises precipitated by expatriate role players who would seek to agitate and incite a local mob to violence.
"War is a thinking man's game," argues Scales. Gen. David Petraeus, a Princeton Ph.D. and commander of the Multi-National Force, agrees, telling Germany's Der Spiegel magazine in December 2006: "Counterinsurgency operations are war at the graduate level, they're thinking man's warfare."

Contested cultural terrain
Between April 25 and 27, the Human Terrain System came under fire at the Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency conference held at the University of Chicago. Organized by John D. Kelly, chair of U.C.'s Anthropology Department, and three U.C. doctoral candidates, the conference aimed to "pursue the full implications of the connection now being sought by the U.S. military between culture and insurgency."

"HTS is among the largest social science projects in history," argued González, who has sparred in the pages of Anthropology Today with Kilcullen, who was invited but did not attend, and with McFate, who was not invited.

"I would have been delighted to attend," she wrote in an e-mail to In These Times. "It's not everyday that there's a conference on the subject."

"The national security structure in the U.S. needs to be infused with anthropology, a discipline invented to support warfighting in the tribal zone," McFate urged in her 2005 Joint Forces Quarterly article.

Many of McFate's colleagues at the Chicago gathering challenged that spin on their discipline. González told the conference-goers, "In the end, it is by sharing what [anthropologists have] learned with the general public -- not political, military or corporate elites -- that we might spark lasting progressive change in democratic societies."

Another dissenter is David Price, an anthropology professor at Saint Martin's College in Lacey, Wash., who researches the history of American anthropologists colluding with the American government.

Military planners "dream that culture can fix what thousands of tons of munitions broke," Price said at the gathering. "We should use anthropology to keep us out of these invasion fiascos in the first place."

Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School--The School for Torturers

Francis A. Boyle
Public Record
June 16, 2008

Boumediene v Bush, 553 U.S. Supreme Court, June 12, 2008
Versus
Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School--The School for Torturers

Not surprisingly, the January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Imperial Law--otherwise known as the self-styled American Journal of International Law but founded and still operated by U. S. State and War Departments’ apparatchiks and their professorial fellow-travelers-- published an article by Harvard Law School’s recently retired Bemis Professor of International Law Detlev Vagts (who only taught me the required course on Legal Accounting) arguing in favor of the Pentagon’s Kangaroo Courts System on Guantanamo despite the fact that they have been soundly condemned by every human rights organization and every human rights official and leader in the entire world as well as by the United States Supreme Court itself in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). (...)

I am not going to bother to recite here all the grievous deficiencies of the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts under International Law and U.S. Constitutional Law. But suffice it to say that the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts constitute war crimes under the Laws of War, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and even the U. S. Army’s own Field Manual 27-10, The Law of Land Warfare (1956). Field Manual 27-10 was drafted for the Pentagon by my Laws of War teacher the late, great Richard R. Baxter, who was generally recognized as the world’s leading expert on that subject, which is precisely why I voluntarily chose to study International Law with him and his long-time collaborator Louis B. Sohn, and not with the bean-counter Vagts. For the entire post-World War II generation of international law students at Harvard Law School, Louis Sohn shall always be our real Bemis Professor of International Law and never the False Pretender to that Throne known as Detlev Vagts.

Since those student days I have personally appeared pro bono publico in five U.S. military courts-martial proceedings involving warfare that were organized in accordance with the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military Justice (U.C.M.J.)--which still does not apply to the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts despite the ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court in Hamdan that the U.C.M.J. should be applied in Guantanamo--on behalf of five U. S. military personnel who each acted as matters of courage, integrity, principle, and conscience at great risk to their freedom:

U.S. Marine Corps Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first U.S. military resister to President Bush Sr.’s genocidal war against Iraq; Army Captain Doctor Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, the highest ranking U. S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President Bush Sr.’s genocidal war against Iraq; Captain Lawrence Rockwood, who was court-martialed by the U. S. Army for trying to stop torture in Haiti after the Clinton administration had illegally invaded that country in 1994; Army Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the first U. S. military resister to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President Bush Jr.’s war of aggression against Iraq; and Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first U.S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for his refusal to participate in President Bush Jr.’s war of aggression against Iraq.

As I can attest from my direct personal involvement, each and every one of these five courts-martial under the U.C.M.J. were Stalinist show-trials produced and directed by the Pentagon that predictably and readily degenerated into travesties of justice. These five U.C.M.J. courts-martial involving warfare each proved correct the old adage attributed to Groucho Marx that military justice is to justice as military music is to music. By comparison, the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will not even be run in accordance with the U.C.M.J. despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan that they should be.

Whenever they are up and running the Gitmo Courts will constitute Stalinist Show Trials as well as Kangaroo Courts, and their preliminary proceedings have already proven them to be Travesties of Justice. Even worse yet, fully-functioning Stalinist Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will quickly become conveyor-belts of death for alleged and already tortured terrorist suspects along the lines of the Texas execution chamber operated by George Bush Jr. when he was the “governor” of that state and tortured to death 152 victims by means of lethal injection. Gitmo will become America’s Death Camp. But today under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, executing persons detained as a result of armed conflict without a fair trial before a regularly constituted court constitutes a grave war crime. To be sure, under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution Professor Vagts has the freedom to advocate war crimes so long as he does not participate in their commission, or incite them, or aid and abet them. But precisely where is that line to be drawn for law professors?

In this regard, the Harvard Law School Faculty currently has at least five professors who have advocated torture and war crimes:

1. Vagts himself, who supported abusing the then recently captured President of Iraq Saddam Hussein despite his being publicly acknowledged to be a Prisoner of War by the Bush Jr. administration itself and thus absolutely protected by the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Convention against Torture.

2. The infamous Alan Dershowitz, a self-incriminated war criminal in his own right. Dersh publicly acknowledged being a member of a Mossad Committee for approving the murder and assassination of Palestinians, which violates the Geneva Conventions and is thus a grave war crime;

3. The Neo-Con Con Law non-entity known as Richard Parker.

4. Another one of my teachers, Waco Phil Heymann. Previously Waco Phil had been Deputy to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, the Butcheress of Waco. Reno ordered the Waco Massacre, while Heymann orchestrated its cover-up and thus earned his well-deserved sobriquet of Waco Phil. All those incinerated women and children!

5. The war criminal Jack Goldsmith who while working as a lawyer for the Bush Jr. administration at both the Pentagon and later its Department of In-Justice did much of the legal spade-work designing, justifying and approving the hideous human rights atrocities that the Bush Jr. administration has inflicted on everyone after 9/11. Goldsmith and his co-felon legal colleague from the Bush Jr. administration Professor John Yoo--now desecrating Berkeley’s Law School where my friend and colleague the late, great Dean Frank Newman had taught Human Rights--are functionally analogous to Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone.

Despite my best efforts to prevent it, the Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans hired the war criminal Goldsmith right out of the Bush Jr. administration knowing full well that he was up to his eyeballs in the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts, torture, war crimes, enforced disappearances, murder, kidnapping, and crimes against humanity, at a minimum. And when Goldsmith’s proverbial “smoking-gun” Department of In-Justice Memorandum was published by the Washington Post, Harvard Law School’s Dean Elena Kagan contemptuously boasted in response about how “proud” she was to have hired this notorious war criminal. Previously Kagan had also publicly bragged that the future of International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School would be in the “good hands” of their resident war criminal Goldsmith. How tragically true! The Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans deliberately set out to hire this Neo-Nazi legal architect of the Bush Jr. administration’s bogus and nefarious “war against terrorism” because they fully support it together with all its essential accouterments of torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes, murder, kidnapping, enforced disappearances, crimes against humanity, and Nuremburg crimes against peace.

By contrast, after the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in alleged revenge for the Waco Massacre and Cover-up by Janet Reno and Waco Phil Heymann, to the best of my recollection I do not remember that the Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans advocated kangaroo courts, torture, war crimes, and racist profiling for America’s White Judeo-Christian Males. Yet after 9/11 the fundamentally White Racist Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have no problem with inflicting torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes, and racist profiling upon Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color, which is exactly why they hired the war criminal Goldsmith to teach such criminal practices to their own law students and thus someday turn them into racist U. S. governmental war criminals in their own right. This is because for the most part the Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have always been viscerally bigoted and racist against Muslims/Arabs/Asians and other People of Color since at least when I first matriculated there in September of 1971.

The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans are no longer fit to educate Lawyers, Members of the Bar, and Officers of the Court. They are a sick joke and a demented fraud. Groucho Marx would have had a field day with them: Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law. The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans torture the Law. Do not send your children or students to Harvard Law School where they will grow up to become racist war criminals! Harvard Law School is a Neo-Con cesspool.

[Francis A. Boyle holds a J.D. Magna Cum Laude (1976) from Harvard Law School, and an A.M. 1978) and Ph.D. (1983) in Political Science from Harvard University. He taught for two years as a Teaching Fellow in the Harvard College, and as also an Associate at Harvard's Center for International Affairs 1976-78). He practiced tax and international tax with the Boston law firm of Bingham, Dana & Gould (1977-78). He joined the Faculty of the University of Illinois College of Law in 1978, where he currently teaches courses on Public International Law, International Human Rights, the Constitutional Law of U.S. Foreign Affairs, and Jurisprudence, having previously taught courses on Criminal Law, International Organizations, World Politics and International Law, and Latinos and the Law. He is the author of eleven books including his latest "Protesting Power:War, Resistance and Law" (Rowman & Littlefield Inc.:2008) and Breaking All The Rules: Palestine, Iraq, Iran and the Case for Impeachment" (Clarity Press: 2008).]

Decisions made at the White House should be exposed

ACLU Applauds House Judiciary Subcommittee on Continuing Its Examination Into Torture Approval

Liz Rose and Matthew Allee
Common Dreams
June 18 2008

WASHINGTON, DC - June 18 - The American Civil Liberties Union applauds Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties on holding the second in a series of three hearings to determine who authorized or ordered torture and abuse during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and in secret government torture cells around the world. In today’s hearing the subcommittee will hear from three former high-level officials in the Bush administration.

read the rest here

Eamonn McCann speaks at Protest Rally (7min)

Mohawk grandmothers attacked by CBSA guards

one person jailed, another suffers heart attack

June 17, 2008 -- Reported by members of No One Is Illegal-Montreal who attended Katenies' court hearing in Cornwall on June 16, 2008; please post and forward widely.

This past Saturday, June 14, 2008, around 2:30pm, a vehicle with two outspoken Kanion'ke:haka (Mohawk) activists, writers and grandmothers was stopped at Akwesasne while crossing into "Canada" from the "USA". Akwesasne is a Kanion'ke:haka Indigenous community that includes parts of so-called Ontario, Quebec and New York, and community members routinely cross between "states" and "provinces". (...)

Katenies lives in Akwesasne, with her mother and near her daughter and three grandchildren, who reside on both sides of the "border". Kahentinehta, also a grandmother, is from Kahnawake. Katenies and Kahentinehta publish Mohawk Nation News (www.mohawknationnews.com) and were delegates to the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit in San Xavier, Tohono O'odham Nation (Arizona) in November 2007.

Katenies was targeted for arrest by Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) guards on an outstanding warrant for allegedly "running the border" in 2003, and offenses resulting from her refusal to appear in court and validate the colonial justice system. Katenies has maintained since 2003 that border officials and the Canadian colonial courts have no jurisdiction over Kanion'ke:haka people or land.

get the whole story here

Judge to decide on ‘necessity’ of prayer

Two Worcester CWs Scott Shaeffer-Duffy and Michael Beneditti on trial for praying in Fed Building

Lee Hammel
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
June 17, 2008

WORCESTER— Five people arrested after they prayed inside the federal courthouse for an end to the Iraq war said they had no choice but to do so.

But a federal prosecutor said the fact they tired of other anti-war methods does not mean they didn't have alternatives.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Timothy S. Hillman said he will give a decision in writing on whether to allow the five defendants to use a defense of "necessity" during their bench trial scheduled for Sept. 23.

read the rest here

JOEY ONLY OUTLAW BAND @ Williams Lake Stampede-June 28

joey only outlaw band -
info@joeyonly.com

JOEY ONLY OUTLAW BAND
Comer Station Pub, Williams Lake BC
Saturday June 28th, 2008, 9PM,
tix $12 @ Shreds and @ Comer

The Joey Only Outlaw Band is riding in to Williams Lake after hiding from the law for seven long winter months in the eastern Rocky Mountains on suspicion of smuggling.

So be warned, have your guns loaded, watch your damn back! Its the stampede weekend so Little old Williams Lake will be full of travellers and wanderers and rodeo people...that notorious Outlaw Band is about to blow as many of their minds as possible. Their new album 'FIRE ON ANARCHIST MOUNTAIN' is weeks away from being released, nothing can stop this band. Nothing!

www.myspace.com/xjoeyonlyx
www.JOEYONLY.com

The revolution will not be televised

Omaha Catholic Worker Prayer Request

Dear Friends of the Omaha Catholic Worker

This evening at dinner, I got a call from Mercy Hospital in Council Bluffs.

Steven Welch, a dear friend and former guest of ours, drove himself to the hospital with a perforated bowel. The nurse called me and told me of his surgery at 4 am and that he is in Critical Care at Mercy Hospital.

She called me because I am listed as a successor power of attorney for his health care decisions.

I went to the hospital. Steve is in critical condition and cannot talk. He squeezed my hand Once for Yes and Twice for no, just a for a few questions. He was still in a lot of pain.

The doctors after surgery has said to a close significant friend of his, that Steve has about a 50% chance of survival.

I spoke to the Nurse tonight about the details of what a perforated bowel really is. They say that all he needs now is rest and quiet to recover.

I hope that I will be able to see him tomorrow.

Some of you who have visited here at the OCW remember Steve well. Others of you, I ask that you pray for Steve for a good recovery.

He is in Critical Care in Room 111, Mercy Hospital, Council Bluffs, Iowa. He is not able to receive any visitors, except a very small few of us.

I will keep you abreast of his recovery.

Thanks so much,
Jerry Ebner

--
Jerry Ebner and Kay Forsling
Omaha Catholic Worker
1104 N. 24th St. Omaha, NE 68102
www.no-nukes.org/cwomaha
cwomaha@gmail.com

Unfolding Financial Meltdown on Wall Street

What’s The Difference Between Lehman Brothers & Bear Stearns? Lehman’s CEO Sits On the Board Of The NY Fed

Dr. Ellen Brown
Global Research,
June 15, 2008

An earlier article by this author ("The Secret Bailout of JP Morgan") summarized evidence presented by John Olagues, an expert in options trading, suggesting that JPMorgan, far from "rescuing" Bear Stearns, was actually its nemesis.1 The faltering investment bank was brought down, not by "rumors," but by insider trading based on a plan drawn up much earlier. The deal was a lucrative one for JPM, handing the Wall Street megabank $55 billion in loans from the Federal Reserve (meaning ultimately the U.S. taxpayer). So how did JPM get away with it? Olagues notes the highly suspicious fact that JPM’s CEO James Dimon sits on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve.

read the rest here

Warlords Next Door? (5 parts)

Youtube via Information Clearing House

Dispatches reveals how key politicians at the heart of the vicious fighting in Somalia - described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis - enjoy incredibly close links to Britain. They have British or EU passports, their families live here and they commute between Somalia and homes in English cities. British taxpayers are financing them in the name of democracy - yet in Somalia they are linked to allegations of mass murder, torture, extortion and corruption.

Part 1


Part 2 (...)




Part 3


Part 4


Part 5

Air Canada to cut 2,000 jobs in fall

Ross Marowits
The Canadian Press via Yahoo News
June 17 2008

MONTREAL - Air Canada (TSX:AC.B) has joined a global trend by announcing plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs at the end of this year as it sharply reduces capacity to deal with the rising cost of fuel and is warning there are likely more cutbacks to come.

Canada's biggest airline said Tuesday it needs to fly fewer trips as oil prices keep rising to record levels and will cut capacity by seven per cent from its fall and winter schedule.

read the rest here

How Many Innocent People Are Going Out of Their Minds Today?

Guantánamo has proved a useful distraction from the secret detention camps run by the US around the world.

George Monbiot
The Guardian
June 17, 2008

Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from poor to rich, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automatons in orange jumpsuits. It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins, in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable.

read the rest here

The Brain Trauma Vets: An Epidemic of Psychological Wounds

Conn Hallinan
CounterPunch
June 17, 2008

“We are facing a massive mental health problem as a result of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a country, we have not responded adequately to this problem. Unless we act urgently and wisely, we’ll be dealing with an epidemic of service-related psychological wounds for years to come.” --Bobby Muller, President Veterans For America

David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), calls traumatic brain injury (TBI) the “silent epidemic.” It is the most common cause of death for U.S. adults under the age of 45, deadlier than AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, spinal cord injury and breast cancer combined. It strikes down 1.6 million Americans a year. And while TBI may be a quiet wound, its consequences for victims, family, friends and co-workers can be catastrophic.

read the rest here

Blogger arrests hit record high

BBC News
June 16th 2008

Since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog, says the University of Washington annual report.

In 2007 three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006, it revealed.

More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.

read the rest here

Year 5 in Iraq (6:30 min)

Year 5....

After 5 years of what people finally know is an illegal, immoral, unjust war, peace people who new it was wrong all along, are still standing up for the troops, and for the people of Iraq. These people in Des Moines Iowa are bringing attention to the insidious, and untruthful nature of the military recruitments center, while sending young and old alike to fight and kill in this illegal endeavor. People all over the nation are protesting the war in Iraq as well.

Putting the Lies of Military Recruitment on Trial

What: Program "Putting the Lies of Military Recruitment on Trial" Speakers Kirk Brown and Andrew Duffy http://ivaw.org/member/andrew-duffy , Iowa City Chapter President Iraq Veterans against the War (www.ivaw.org)

Date: Sunday June 22nd
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Place: Berrigan CW House, 713 Indiana Ave

Kirk will be the main speaker at a pre-trial program "Putting the Lies of Military Recruitment on Trial" on Sunday night, June 22nd. Joining Kirk will be Andrew Duffy http://ivaw.org/member/andrew-duffy , Iowa City Chapter President of Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.ivaw.org) This program will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Berrigan Catholic Worker House at 713 Indiana Ave. (...)

Kirk's trial takes place the following day, Monday June 23rd at the Polk County Court House in Des Moines scheduled to start at 8 a.m. The morning will be taken up with jury selection, and the trial takes place in the afternoon after 1 p.m. Kirk hopes Andy Duffy will be a witness for him and speak to the issue of military recruitment and the lies that are told to prospective recruits. We are asking friends and supporters to be in court, especially in the afternoon. Kirk is being represented by Drake University law professor Sally Frank, a long-time civil disobedience attorney.
----------------------------

What: Criminal Trespass Jury Trial of Kirk Brown

Date: Monday June 23rd
Time: Begins at 8 a.m. with jury selection, with actual trial to start after 1 p.m.
Place: Polk County Court House, 5th and Mulberry Street, Des Moines IA

Kirk was one of two arrested on March 19th, the 5th Anniversary of the Iraq War as a group of people attempted to shutdown a military recruiting office in Des Moines. The group carried a flag-draped coffin into the foyer of the Armed Forces Career Center on SE 14th Street and blocked the entrance to the four Armed Forces branches that have offices there. Forty minutes into the occupation the Des Moines Police arrived, consulted briefly with recruiting staff, and then a staff member from each branch office emerged from that office and asked the dozen protesters to leave. Most protesters chose to leave at that time with police finally arresting the two had chosen to remain inside, Des Moines Catholic Workers Kirk Brown and Ed Bloomer. Brown and Bloomer were charged with a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass, carrying a maximum of 30 days in jail and a $500 fine. Ed Bloomer pleaded guilty early at their arraignment and was given a fine and probation. (See links to posting of March 19th Occupation below)

For more information contact:
Kirk Brown <kbmw36@yahoo.com>
Phil Berrigan CW House
713 Indiana Avenue, Des Moines, IA 50314
www.DesMoinesCatholicWorker.org

The full story of George Bush's visit to Ireland and Ciaron O'Reily's encounter with the President....

...and that's the last I think I'll ever see of George W Bush.....

Ciaron OReilly
Catholic Worker/Plowshares, Back in Dublin - safe and sound!
June 17, 2008

Ok, the day ended with about 5 PSNI riot cops stacked on top of me playing twister with a variety of my limbs and a obstructed glimpse of what seemed like an enormous disco ball leading the convoy of security vehicles and the Bush limo down Castlereagh Rd. back to Airforce One. (...)

A lefty speaker outside of Stormont sneered that the Bush tour was "merely symbolic". Look mate the entire fuckin Presidency has been symbolic. This was not a 24/7 hands on "sure can guy do" Presidency. This was not Clinton who loved to press the flesh every which way or Daddy Bush well groomed in the CIA and who chose and groomed his son's advisors. This was George W on the last lap. The secular left, with illusions of being oh so scientific, continually misunderstand the significance of symbol and symbolism....but don't get me started that's another story.

I hit Belfast the day before Bush and the word was coming through from others that folks had hit the streets in London. My intention was to form a christian anarchist affinity group, at least a faith based one, to get us through the day with the emperor in Belfast. The idea would be avoid the usual lefty wrestling over who is leading the movement and remain self active and mobile and see what opportunities arose to confront the emperor.

I hooked up with Mark Chapman - no not the guy who shot John Lennon he's still sitting in Attica - my Mark Chapman was living in Liverpool during that unfortunate incident, which wasn't a great address at the time to go with his name. I had orgiinally met Mark in London in the '90's he was involved with MIl Rai ad others in ARROW (Active Resistance to the Roots of War). He is sound, softly spoken, understated and courageous - a local to the north. Mark also has a motorbike so that kept us mobile. We also put the word out to Jon from North Belfast a post evangelical christian anarchist goth punk and Rebecca from L'Arche who was unfortunately sick.

We whipped up a couple of placards Sunday night "The Emperor Has No Clothes, Bush has No Clue, Resist the War!" http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikey_wikey/2585280062/

"and "Raytheon Out of Derry, U.S. Military Out of Shannon, George Bush Out of Control!"

Monday morning we packed Mark's "Justice Not Vengeance" banner and set off early to the city centre. We set up outside the Tesco and I started street speaking, Mark realised he had a dental appointment and pissed off, Jon arrived. We encouraged interested passers by to head to the City Hall for 12.30 where one of the socialist groups and a union were hosting an anti-Bush rally.

At 12.30 we headed there. It was a beautiful day and city workers were availing of the lunch break to make a statement against Bush, fair play to them! I was heartened to see a crew of young anarchist punks a sight that has all but disappeared from the streets of Dublin the last couple of years. The absence of a politicised youth subculture is like a canary karking it in the mine shaft...it's a sign your culture has totally gone shopping and is dying.

Photos from Belfast City Hall Demo
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/88005

All of a sudden a contingent of young Shinners marched up in a disciplined fashion in white t-shirts (Now some of my best friends are Shinners, my Daddy is basically a Shinner and I like my dad!)...but it seemed a little awkward ( I don't know maybe it's always awkward with Shinners and the rest of the left in Belfast) but how can you be hosting AND protesting Bush on the same day? But then again SDLP youth were there and the Greens, so go figure it was a beautiful day, the weather was great but the acoustics from the speaker's platform were shite. So I thought, I'll just go to the fringe of the crowd and start another platform as, trust me, no one could hear a thing from the main stage.

So off I went into street speaking mode. I really think anti-war rallies should be run like this....a period of everyone who wants to - speaking on a soapbox about the war and how to stop it and then conclude with a central platform with a couple of key notes and some music. But the left are deeply ritualistic and trad that you would have Buckleys ever getting this idea up.

Anyways I don't know if it is Eamonn MCCann speaking style (he'd be loud enough unplugged) or the techies but the volume finally went up on the platform and so I shut up. Meanwhile some dudes had managed to fly an Iraqi flag form the top of City Hall...master stroke, really got the crowd going.

Apparently the SP were organizing a manifestation out at Stormont where Bush was due. But Mark was keen on going to Market St. PSNI station and demanding the police arrest George Bush as a war criminal. Now after spending 30 years in and out of police stations and 2 years in out of jail, I have an ethical opposition to calling the cops on anyone...maybe even George W. If he was willing to place himself under voluntary house arrest at the Crawford Ranch in Texas I'd be happy enough. And as I pointed out earlier I don't seem him as that significant in engineering the crimes he has put his name to. I also,as a rule, don't like going voluntarily into police stations. But you know when you're in an affinity group, or a community, you have to go along to get along or you end up on your lonesome with the other guy saying how come we only play the games you want to play etc. So we rounded up a posse of Quakers & such and headed down to Market St. police station.

I decided to play the silent guy in the background as Mark and the others did the talking. It seemed as though they had dome this before, they was pretty good at it. Listening in, it seemed like a reasonable request that this PSNI cop should immediately go up to Stormont and bust Bush. But the detective wasn't going to leave his plexiglass comfort zone...his best response line was:

"I don't think there is any difficulty establishing where the man you are concerned about resides, if local authorities wish to take it up!"

So off to Stormont it was. Mark and the posse went for coffee and I was on foot with a lousy sense of direction and playing catch up. Did you know it's illegal to hail a cab in a 3 mile radius of Belfast city centre neither did I, but I finally got one. There was a good crew at the gates of Stormont..maybe 80, I dunno my maths is about as good as my spelling. It was a good cross section of socialists, the anarcho punks, libertarian hippy types, school kids, young and old and then this guy turned up who really stole the show for a while...check him out http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikey_wikey/2585281100/

The SP did a good job of chairing it and they had speaking equipment that worked this time. They even asked me to speak. I rarely get asked to speak at lefty events in Australia, England or Ireland ..not sure if the lefties think I'm too f'kin crazy or too f'kin good to have speak.. jury still out on that one! This has led to a life of spontaneous street speaking and nodules on my voicebox.. Anyway fair play, a pluralist relatively open platform. We were there for quite a while - but if there was a criticism we packed up too early. I'm not sure if this was because the media had packed up or the younger generation of activists get to anxty about the crowd not being permanently entertained. Retrospect is 20/20 vision but we should have stayed until he left as Bush eventually drove out of those gates.

Photo from Stormont Anti- Bush Rally http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikey_wikey/2584454641/

Mark and I were back on the bike and we were under the misunderstanding the SWP and Dublin bus had headed to the school where Bush was going to gig at 4pm. We drove up Castlereagh Rd. hill into an increasing density of cops. The side street into the school was blocked by cops. We reversed and tried another side street, dead end, as we tried to re-enter Castlreagh Rd. we were stopped by a policewoman and told the road was closed for the Presidential convoy coming soon.

We decided to park the bike and consider our options. And then we suffered some artistic differences. Mark was keen to unfurl a banner "Justice Not Vengeance" (I think?). I remembered we had been given small replica coffins at the city demo. I took them out and scrawled Casey Sheehan on one and Rose Gentle on another.

I had met Casey's mother Cindy Sheehan in both Dublin and my hometown Brisbane. She had pretty much single handedly put the anti-war movement back on the radar by going down to Bush's Crawford Ranch and refusing to move until she met with him. His refusal to meet her was deeply symbolic of his attitude to the cannon fodder he has sent to kill and be killed in Iraq. Casey Sheehan passed through Shannon Airport to his death in Baghdad.

Rose Gentle had stayed with us at the Catholic Worker in Dublin. Her son, Gordon, was recruited by the British military at the dole office in Glasgow. He was sent to his death in Iraq. Long after Bush has retired to his Texas Ranch and Blair is reaping the big bucks on the international lecture circuits young soldiers like Casey and Gordon will be dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. I thought it might be a good idea and symbolism to slide these "coffins" under Bush's limo.

The cops had spotted Mark's unfurled banner and called for backup. A PSNI landrover pulled up and a bunch of Robocop looking guys spilled out of the back. Two approached Mark and one me. He asked me my name, I refused to give it. He then detained me under section 44 of the Terrorism Act.

I said "Are you sure you're not using the Terrorism Act to silence nonviolent anti-war dissent here?"

He said he wasn't, I was unconvinced.

Just at the moment a Quaker, Anne, arrived on the scene cheerfully greeting me "Hi Ciaron!"

The cop without breaking stride "Do you spell that with a "C" or a "K"?

D'oh

My sense that he was trying to keep me busy and blocked until the impending convoy sped by. I just stepped over my bag and held my ground.

When I saw the first vehicle with a strobe like siren, I dropped to my right and flung the replica coffin across the road. Then there were two cops on me. From a weird angle I saw the Presidential limo speed by.

Once we all got up he searched and returned my bag and gave me a receipt for me being detained under the terrorism act. I had recently seen the film "Brazil" now I had a sense I was in it.

We began walking up the road, down the side street toward the school, we were stopped by cops half way up the road. The first bunch seemed happy enough for Mark and Ann to unfurl the banner and stand in silent witness. Then a more senior officer arrived and demanded the banner be folded and started frog marching a young German Quaker down the hill. I began to mosey off in that direction. Thinking I might be able to do an action down on the main road. Mark was putting up some worthy resistance to his civil liberties being crushed and was arrested. The cops weren't going to let us stand at the side of the road and began frog marching me and the two others accross the road. As I reached the other side I attempted to fling the replica coffin back on the road where Bush would pass. These new cops got pretty excited and a whole bunch of them landed on me and went into restraint holds. I tried speaking to them calmly, reassuring them it was a wooden replica wooden coffin not an IED.

From the bottom of the human pile I told them who Casey Sheehan had been and about meeting his mother and of all the other folks American, Britsh and Iraq who had lost loved ones in Bush's war. I saw a glimpse off the Presidential convoy pass. They got off me, detained me, eventually released me and that's the last I think I'll ever see of George W Bush. He never came to Europe before he was President and I can't see him coming again.

Previous Thread - The Emperor Has No Clothes - Off to Belfast to Confront a Butt Naked George Bush http://www.indymedia.ie/article/87990

Photo - I've always thought the best perspective on a Presidential Convoy was from Under a Pile of Cops! http://www.indymedia.ie/article/87990&comment_limit=0&c...30674

Alternative Ulster (2:43 min)

Religious, rights groups applaud Supreme Court in habeas corpus case

Dennis Sadowski
Catholic News Service
June 16, 2008

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Leaders in the human rights and anti-torture movements said the June 12 U.S. Supreme Court decision defending the right of habeas corpus for detainees at the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is a hopeful sign that upholds American values for anyone accused of even the most heinous offenses.

read the rest here

Peaceful protest vs Terrorism Act on Ballygowan Road

Why does Ciraon O'Reily have two PSNI cops on top of him?

Ciaron O'Reily
Indymedia Ireland
June 15/16 2008

Living at the centre of empire - any empire - is generally relatively cosey. Keep ya head down and your mouth shut and you'll generally have a nice day. It can be kind of liberal and tolerant in the centre while on the fringes of empire the reality is fascism pure and simple You can say anything you want in the safety valve soundproof room of the arts in London , New York and Dublin (see the journo hack war cheer leaders and Irish war supporting politicians swaying to Leonard Cohen's denunciation of U.S. warmaking last Friday night for example)...try dissent on the imperial fringe and they even kill artists there ..........and students and church folks and trade unionists and the list is endless.......

read the rest here also the comments section has the full story and more photos of what went down

Catholic Worker Clasifides

Whitefeather Peace Community, named for Larry Cloud Morgan (Whitefeather, a Plowshares resister), is a CW community focused on peace activism with a little resistance and a little hospitality. Contact us if you are interested in discussing possible membership in this small, one-house community. Visit the website for more information (e.g., we are vegetarian and alcohol-free). http://www.whitefeatherpeace.org/

Yours for a nonviolent future,
Tom H. Hastings
Director, PeaceVoice Program, Oregon Peace Institute
http://www.peacevoice.info/
member, Whitefeather Peace Community
3315 N Russet
Portland OR 97217
http://www.whitefeatherpeace.org/

Tasers Getting More Prominent Role in Crime Fighting in City

Al Baker
NY Times
June 15, 2008

After decades languishing in the trunks of squad cars, the Taser, the handgun-shaped device that incapacitates people with a pulsating electrical current, is getting a chance at a higher profile in the New York Police Department. (...)

The Taser’s career in New York has contrasted with its ubiquity around the nation, as police officials from Wisconsin to California have praised its usefulness, particularly in encounters with the emotionally disturbed. According to the device’s manufacturer, Taser International, more than 345,000 Tasers have been sold to 12,750 law enforcement and military agencies in 44 countries, with 4,500 agencies distributing them to their entire forces.

By contrast, about 500 Tasers are deployed in New York.

The weapon has not been fully embraced by the Police Department, the nation’s largest police force, partly because of the difficulties in maintaining the devices and in training officers. But it is also because Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has looked cautiously at Taser technology. Stun guns have a troubled history here: An early model was at the center of a scandal in the early 1980s when it was used to force drug suspects to confess. Mr. Kelly, then a deputy inspector, was assigned to clean up the mess.

The old stun gun looked like an electric razor and worked when applied directly to a person’s body. Today’s Taser fires a dart at its target from a distance.

Last week, a report on a study of police shootings — commissioned in 2007 after a Queens man, Sean Bell, was killed by officers — recommended that the New York police experiment with using Tasers more. In response, Mr. Kelly said that Tasers would move out of the dark trunks of select police vehicles to sergeants’ crowded gun belts. But he remained cautious, saying sergeants would still be the only ones with the authority to handle Tasers. That population of 3,500 supervisors is larger than most other departments.

“This is like turning a battleship around, or an aircraft carrier,” Mr. Kelly said of the challenges of implementing any new law enforcement tool in the Police Department. The New York force, for example, switched later than others from 6-shot revolvers to 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols. And even then the semiautomatics initially carried only 10 shots, not the regular 16.

The shooting report, by the RAND Corporation, suggested that Tasers still required more study in New York, particularly since there was a dearth of reliable data about their use.

Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the concern now is whether officers will use Tasers in situations where they traditionally had used much less force, and whether civilians will be unnecessarily and more frequently subjected to their use.

“Is it actually an alternative that leads to reduced use of firearms by the police?” Mr. Dunn said. “Or does it lead to increased use of force? The concern is we are going up the ladder of force, as opposed to coming down the ladder.”

RAND researchers, in studying the department’s analysis of 455 of its shootings, said that officers might have been able to end confrontations more quickly by using a less lethal device — like a Taser — before those encounters escalated to a point where deadly force was necessary. They did not say that Tasers should supplant handguns.

Mr. Kelly, who wants his top commanders to read the RAND study and give him feedback, said he would probably carry out a variation of the RAND suggestion that the department create a pilot program in selected precincts to expand the availability of Tasers.

He said two precincts would likely be chosen for the program — one with Tasers and one without them, as a control — based on their work volume and demographics. But, he quickly added, “I cannot stress enough that no decision has been made on this.”

Stun guns were introduced in New York in the early 1980s, when officers were confronting a higher number of disturbed people because of the rapid and widespread deinstitutionalization of mental health patients. The devices were not seen as a success.

The technology had not been perfected and the devices were kept mostly in Emergency Service Unit officers’ trucks. Several high-ranking officers and sergeants were transferred from the 106th Precinct in Queens after officers were charged with using stun guns on drug suspects during interrogations. Mr. Kelly was assigned by Commissioner Benjamin Ward to clean things up.

Perhaps spurred by memories of that scandal, Mr. Kelly added a cautionary line to the new rules of engagement for the Taser. The order, published on June 4, said that putting a Taser directly against someone’s body should not be the primary method of use and that such cases of “touch-stun mode” would be investigated.

Currently, the police deploy the Taser about 300 times a year, mainly when responding to some of the 80,000 calls for emotionally disturbed people. Mr. Kelly says that when the Taser has been used, it has worked well. “We have to be careful, we have to be conservative, in our deployment of these devices,” he said.

In 2007, 41 people complained of being struck with a Taser by officers and 9 said they had been confronted by officers brandishing one, according to Andrew Case, a spokesman for the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates allegations of wrongdoing by officers. Of those complaints, one was substantiated, he said.

So far this year, the board has received 17 complaints from people who said they were struck with a Taser by officers and 6 from those who said they were confronted by them, Mr. Case said. None of the 2008 cases have been fully investigated yet; eight have been closed because the victim refused to provide a statement, one has been withdrawn, and the others remain open.

The Taser model being used in New York is the M26, which is not the newest version (that is the X26, which is 60 percent lighter and smaller). The M26 is yellow, looks like a 9-millimeter Glock, weighs about 16 ounces and costs about $400.

The weapon uses a compressed-nitrogen cartridge to launch two probes that travel 15 to 35 feet. At the end of each probe is a wire that attaches to the skin and clothing. The Taser can work through about two cumulative inches of clothing, said Stephen D. Tuttle, a Taser spokesman. The probes deliver 3,000 volts of electrical current to the body, or 0.36 joules per pulse. (There are 19 pulses a second, and each trigger cycle lasts for 5 seconds).

By contrast, a cardiac defibrillator operates with 360 joules per pulse on average, Mr. Tuttle said. The Taser pulses stimulate the motor nerves, impairing communication between the brain and the muscles and essentially incapacitating the person, he said.

Kenneth S. McGuire, a sergeant with the Temple University police in Philadelphia, said his 110-member force does not use the Taser, but he would like to change that. In 2006, he became a certified trainer in the use of the Taser. To help him understand the device, he even took a Taser hit to his back.

“Basically, the only way I can explain it is if you’ve ever gotten a really bad leg cramp in your calf, if you’re swimming, imagine that in your whole body; that’s how it feels,” Sergeant McGuire said. “Your muscles freeze up, they call it the plywood effect.”

He added, “It lasts up to five seconds. And then you’re fine, you’re good to go.”

Tasers came under a new spotlight as the image of a square-jawed Mr. Kelly holding a stun gun was beamed across the media landscape on Monday and Tuesday, and as news spread that the nation’s largest police force was taking a fresh look at the device. At the same time, a sea of controversial Taser headlines seemed to crop up. It was not the first time. A video of a student being subdued with a Taser by campus security at the University of Florida during a John Kerry speech in 2007 — and imploring, “Don’t Tase me, bro!” — became a YouTube sensation.

On Monday, a 26-year-old man died after he was shocked twice with a Taser by an officer on Long Island trying to keep him from swallowing a bag of cocaine, the Suffolk County police said. The man, Tony Curtis Bradway of Brooklyn, spat out a white powder and “remnants of a plastic bag,” the police said, and he died at a hospital nine hours after the episode.

The next day, news broke that a federal jury in California had held Taser International partly responsible in the death of a Salinas, Calif., man and had awarded his family more than $6 million in that civil case. It was the first loss in court for the Arizona company, said Mr. Tuttle, who added that the company had 70 wins or dismissals in civil cases and noted that the jury in the California case had found the company “15 percent” liable for the man’s death.

On Wednesday, Sanford A. Rubenstein, a lawyer, announced the filing of a lawsuit against New York City in the case of a retired police lieutenant’s son who had been hit four times with a Taser after the police responded to a barbecue at his Harlem home last August.

The man, Alexander Lombard III, who was 18 at the time, “has permanent Taser marks and scarring,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “And he is getting counseling and getting physical therapy.”

Also on Wednesday, Amnesty International said it had tracked more than 300 cases since 2001 in which people died after being shocked by a Taser. And although studies have not shown what role the devices might have played in those deaths, “extreme caution” is in order, said Larry R. Cox, the executive director of Amnesty.

“They should be fired in circumstances when the use of deadly force would be the only alternative,” said Mr. Cox. He said that the Taser’s billing as a “safe, nonlethal instrument” was faulty.

Quarter of NHS Trusts Failing Hygiene Tests

· Hospitals at risk of losing licence face deadline
· This is a wake-up call, says government watchdog

The trusts admitting failing on hygiene standards in 2007-08.

John Carvel, social affairs editor
Guardian
June 16, 2008

More than a quarter of NHS trusts in England are at risk of losing their licence to treat patients because of failure to comply with hygiene regulations, the government's health watchdog revealed today. (...)

The Healthcare Commission said 41 hospitals and 62 other NHS organisations have admitted failing to observe one or more parts of the hygiene code, which was introduced in October 2006 amid growing concern about the spread of MRSA, Clostridium difficile and other hospital superbugs. In spite of repeated warnings from the Department of Health and a deep-clean programme ordered by the prime minister, the number of trusts admitting non-compliance increased slightly over the past year.

The commission's chief executive, Anna Walker, said the trusts have only 10 months to clean up their act before a tougher regulatory regime is introduced in April. For the first time NHS trusts will have to pass a hygiene test before they can be registered by a new care quality commission as fit to treat patients.

Walker said she hoped no NHS hospital would be found to be in such flagrant breach of the hygiene code that it was forced to close. But some trusts may get only conditional licences with tight deadlines for improving cleanliness and safety. Patients will be told which hospitals get a conditional licence and they may choose to be treated elsewhere if they are concerned about the risk.

Walker said: "By April 2009, all NHS hospitals will have to abide by all elements of the hygiene code. These self-declarations show trusts don't think they are there yet. They have got 10 months to get there. We will give all the help we can, but this is a wake-up call."

The disclosure of slack performance on hygiene came in the annual self-assessments of 391 NHS organisations, showing whether board members think they comply with government standards. The assessments showed 39.4% of trusts claimed to be meeting all the 44 core standards, covering safety, clinical effectiveness and quality of care, compared with 40.1% last year. Almost 89% of trusts said they met at least 40 standards, compared with 85% last year. Health inspectors will make spot checks on trusts to confirm the accuracy of the self-assessments.

Walker said: "Overall the picture, if confirmed, is encouraging." For example, trusts are getting better at protecting the privacy of patients, learning from mistakes and following national guidelines on treatment and prescribing.

Last year 15 trusts admitted failing on at least 14 core standards. They received an automatic "weak" grading in the annual performance tables. This year the number failing at least 14 standards fell to only four. They were Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals in Kent, where 90 patients died during outbreaks of C difficile infection, and the primary care trusts in North Lincolnshire, Luton and the London borough of Brent.

Walker said 28% of trusts failed to meet at least one of the three core standards on hygiene. The most common problem was failure to keep up with a recent toughening of guidelines on the decontamination of equipment. Many hospitals are still using benchtop sterilisers that cannot give medical instruments a thorough washing. Inspectors found equipment being taken out of sterilisers "with gunge still on them". The commission found 70 trusts failed on decontamination of equipment, 35 on infection control on the wards and 21 on maintaining a hygienic environment.

Walker said: "As we visit trusts, we find most have something more to do before they meet the hygiene code fully ... There are very few that could get a completely clean bill of health at the moment."

Forcing a trust to cease operation by denying it registration next year would be "real failure". The new commission was more likely to give conditional registration. "That would be made public. There would be a timescale attached. The trust would have to visibly improve to meet this requirement," she said. The commission found a stark north-south divide in trusts' performance. In the north, 64% said they complied with all 44 core standards, compared with 38% in the central region, 31% in the south-east and 21% in the south-west. About 72% of foundation trusts declared full compliance, compared with 30% of non-foundation trusts.

The health minister, Ben Bradshaw, welcomed "a dramatic fall" in the number of trusts failing on more than 14 core standards. He said: "We are also pleased that infection control is showing significant improvement."

Non-compliant trusts that did not act quickly to improve would be candidates for closure or takeover under the failure regime outlined by the government earlier this month.

U.S. Abuse of Detainees Was Routine at Afghanistan Bases

Tom Lasseter
McClatchy Newspapers
June 16, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan — American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling. (...)

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

The public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram, north of Kabul, and at a similar U.S. internment camp at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan.

"I was punched and kicked at Bagram. ... At Bagram, when they took a man to interrogation at night, the next morning we would see him brought out on a stretcher looking almost dead," said Aminullah, an Afghan who was held there for a little more than three months. "But at Guantanamo, there were rules, there was law."

Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.

When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.

According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name — who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer.

The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times, which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed.

Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida.

Former detainees at Bagram and Kandahar said they were beaten regularly. Of the 41 former Bagram detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, 28 said that guards or interrogators had assaulted them. Only eight of those men said they were beaten at Guantanamo Bay.

Because President Bush loosened or eliminated the rules governing the treatment of so-called enemy combatants, however, few U.S. troops have been disciplined under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and no serious punishments have been administered, even in the cases of two detainees who died after American guards beat them.

In an effort to assemble as complete a picture as possible of U.S. detention practices, McClatchy reporters interviewed 66 former detainees, double-checked key elements of their accounts, spoke with U.S. soldiers who'd served as detention camp guards and reviewed thousands of pages of records from Army courts-martial and human rights reports.

The Bush administration refuses to release full records of detainee treatment in the war on terrorism, and no senior Bush administration official would agree to an on-the-record interview to discuss McClatchy's findings.

The most violent of the major U.S. detention centers, the McClatchy investigation found, was Bagram, an old Soviet airstrip about 30 miles outside Kabul. The worst period at Bagram was the seven months from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, when interrogators there used techniques that when repeated later at Abu Ghraib led to wholesale abuses.

New detainees were shoved to the floor of a cavernous warehouse, a former Soviet aircraft machine shop that stayed dim all day, and kept in pens where they weren't allowed to speak or look at guards.

The Afghan government initially based a group of intelligence officers at Bagram, but they were pushed out. Mohammed Arif Sarwari, the head of Afghanistan's national security directorate from late 2001 to 2003, said he got a letter from U.S. commanders in mid-2002 telling him to get his men out of Bagram.

Sarwari thought that was a bad sign: The Americans, he thought, were creating an island with no one to watch over them.

"I said I didn't want to be involved with what they were doing at Bagram — who they were arresting or what they were doing with them," he said in an interview in Kabul.

The rate of reported abuse was higher among men who were held at the U.S. camp at Kandahar Airfield. Thirty-two out of 42 men held there whom McClatchy interviewed claimed that they were knocked to the ground or slapped about. But former detainees said the violence at Bagram was much harsher.

The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.

Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation."

After Habibullah died, a legal officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan asked two military police guards at Bagram to demonstrate how they'd chained detainees' wrists above their heads in a small plywood isolation cell.

"Frankly, it didn't look good," Maj. Jeff Bovarnick, the legal adviser for the Bagram detention center from November 2002 to June 2003, said during a military investigation hearing in June 2005.

"This guy is chained up and has a hood on his head," Bovarnick continued. "The two MPs that were demonstrating this took about five minutes to get everything hook(ed) up; and I was thinking to myself, if this was a combative detainee, it must have been a real struggle for them to get him to comply, and the things they must have been doing to make him comply."

The only American officer who's been reprimanded for the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Capt. Christopher Beiring, who commanded the 377th Military Police Company from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003.

Beiring told investigators that he'd received no formal training in leading a military police company, "just the correspondence courses and on-the-job training."

Then-Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, the Army lawyer who investigated Beiring in the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar, argued that: "The government failed to present any evidence of what are 'approved tactics, techniques and procedures in detainee operations.' "

On Berg's recommendation, the charges against Beiring were dropped, and he was given a letter of reprimand.

"It's extremely hard to wage war with so many undefined rules and roles," Beiring said in a phone interview with McClatchy. "It was very crazy."

The commander of the military intelligence section that worked alongside Beiring's military police company at Bagram, Capt. Carolyn Wood, declined to comment.

The soldier who faced the most serious charges, Spc. Willie Brand, admitted that he hit Dilawar about 37 times, including some 30 times in the flesh around the knees during one session in an isolation cell.

Brand, who faced up to 11 years in prison, was reduced in rank to private — his only punishment — after he was found guilty of assaulting and maiming Dilawar.


'EVERYBODY STRUCK A DETAINEE'

U.S. soldiers' testimony in military investigations after the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar suggested that detainee abuse at Bagram occurred from the summer of 2002 to spring of 2003, a period of about seven months.

Soldiers who served at Bagram before that time said detainees were never beaten. Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a Marine Reserves officer who worked there from December 2001 to April 2002, said in an interview that none of the soldiers or American operatives he knew had resorted to abusing detainees.

An Army interrogator who was based at Bagram in the spring of 2002 and later wrote a book under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey for security reasons, said in an e-mail exchange that while soldiers pushed the limits — such as using stress positions and sleep deprivation — he never saw or heard of detainees getting beaten.

Former detainees interviewed by McClatchy and by some human rights groups, however, claimed that the violence was rampant from late 2001 until the summer of 2003 or later, at least 20 months.

Although they were at Bagram at different times and speak different languages, the 28 former detainees who told McClatchy that they'd been abused there told strikingly similar stories:

*Bashir Ahmad, a Pakistani who fought with the Taliban, said that in the late spring or summer of 2003, U.S. troops would chain him to the ceiling by his hands or feet. "Then they would punch me or hit me with a wood rod," he said.

*Brahim Yadel, a French citizen, said he was punched and slapped during interrogations at Bagram in December 2001.

*Moazzem Begg, a British citizen, said he was assaulted regularly at Bagram for most of 2002, until he was transferred to Guantanamo in January 2003.

*Akhtar Mohammed, an Afghan, said that at Bagram during the spring of 2003, "when they moved me to the interrogation room they covered my eyes, and took me up steep stairs. I always fell on the ground. And when I fell down, they punched and kicked me."

*Abdul Haleem, a Pakistani, said that U.S. soldiers threw him to the ground at Bagram in 2003 and kicked him in the head, "like they were playing soccer."

*Adel al Zamel, a Kuwaiti, said guards frequently waved sticks at him and threatened to rape him at Bagram during the spring of 2002. During an interview in Kuwait City, Zamel shook his head and said he remembered hearing detainees being beaten and "the cries from the interrogation room" at Bagram.

He wasn't the only person to report sexual humiliation.

Sgt. Selena Salcedo, a U.S. military intelligence officer, said that sometime between August 2002 and February 2003 she saw another interrogator, Pfc. Damien Corsetti, pull down the pants of a detainee and leave his genitals exposed.

In a 2005 sworn statement in the court-martial of Corsetti, she said she'd left the room and that when she'd returned the detainee was bent over a table and Corsetti was waving a plastic bottle near his buttocks. She said she didn't know whether the detainee had been raped.

Corsetti was acquitted of any wrongdoing. He didn't respond to a request for comment submitted through his attorney. Salcedo pleaded guilty to kicking a detainee — Dilawar — and grabbing his ears during a December 2002 interrogation.

Soldiers who served at Bagram starting in the summer of 2002 confirmed that detainees there were struck routinely.

"Whether they got in trouble or not, everybody struck a detainee at some point," said Brian Cammack, a former specialist with the 377th Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit from Cincinnati. He was sentenced to three months in military confinement and a dishonorable discharge for hitting Habibullah.

Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told military investigators in sworn testimony that he was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally and physically break the detainees." He didn't go into detail.

"I guess you can call it torture," said Callaway, who served in the 377th from August 2002 to January 2003.

Many human rights experts say the U.S. military began cracking down on detainee abuse at Bagram in 2004, in response to the public outcry over pictures of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.


RETRIBUTION FOR 9-11

Asked why someone would abuse a detainee, Callaway told military investigators: "Retribution for September 11, 2001."

When detainees first had their hoods removed on arriving at Bagram, looming behind them was a large American flag and insignia of the New York Police Department, a reminder of Sept. 11.

Almost none of the detainees at Bagram, however, had anything to do with the terrorist attacks.

Bovarnick, the former chief legal officer for operational law in Afghanistan and Bagram legal adviser, said in a sworn statement that of some 500 detainees he knew of who'd passed through Bagram, only about 10 were high-value targets, the military's term for senior terrorist operatives.

That hardly mattered.

Khaled al Asmr, a tall, gaunt Jordanian, was hauled off a U.S. military cargo plane at Bagram in early 2002. Flown in from Pakistan in heavy shackles and with a hood on his head, he was accused of being an al Qaida operative with possible connections to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Standing in an interrogation room, Asmr said, he'd already been punched in the face several times by American guards. Two Americans walked into the room, wearing civilian clothes. They pulled out pistols and held them to either side of his head as a third American man entered and walked up to Asmr, according to his account.

The third man leaned toward Asmr's face and whispered, his breath warm, "I am here to save you from these people, but you must tell me you are al Qaida."

Asmr, who told his story to a McClatchy reporter in Jordan, was declared no longer an enemy combatant after a 2004 U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo. He said he'd known some al Qaida leaders, but that was more than 15 years earlier, during the U.S.-backed Afghan uprising against the Soviets.

Nazar Gul was of even less intelligence value. None of the Afghan security or intelligence officials whom McClatchy interviewed said they'd heard of Gul, making it unlikely that he was the dangerous insurgent the U.S. said he was.

Gul's American attorney, Ruben L. Iniguez, went to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 to check the details of his story of working as a guard for the Afghan government, and later said in sworn court filings — which included videotaped testimony by witnesses — and in an interview with McClatchy that every fact checked out.


A LAWLESS PLACE

The mistreatment of detainees at Bagram, some legal experts said, may have been a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which forbids violence against or humiliating treatment of detainees.

The U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 imposes penalties up to death for such mistreatment.

At Bagram, however, the rules didn't apply. In February 2002, President Bush issued an order denying suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees prisoner-of-war status. He also denied them basic Geneva protections known as Common Article Three, which sets a minimum standard for humane treatment.

Without those parameters, it's difficult to say what acts were or were not war crimes, said Charles Garraway, a former colonel and legal adviser for the British army and a leading international expert on military law.

Bush's order made it hard to prosecute soldiers for breaking such rules under the military's basic law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, in large part because defense attorneys could claim that troops on the ground didn't know what was allowed.

In sweeping aside Common Article Three, the Bush administration created an environment in which abuse such as that at Bagram was more likely, said Garraway, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

"I think it's completely predictable, because you no longer have standards," he said.

In 2006, Bush pushed Congress to narrow the definition of a war crime under the War Crimes Act, making prosecution even more difficult.


UNTRAINED, UNDISCIPLINED

The military police at Bagram had guidelines, Army Regulation 190-47, telling them they couldn't chain prisoners to doors or to the ceiling. They also had Army Regulation 190-8, which said that humiliating detainees wasn't allowed.

Neither was applicable at Bagram, however, said Bovarnick, the former senior legal officer for the installation.

The military police rulebook saying that enemy prisoners of war should be treated humanely didn't apply, he said, because the detainees weren't prisoners of war, according to the Bush administration's decision to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected Taliban and al Qaida detainees.

The military police guide for the Army correctional system, which prohibits "securing a prisoner to a fixed object, except in emergencies," wasn't applicable, either, because Bagram wasn't a correctional facility, Bovarnick told investigators in 2004.

"I do not believe there is a document anywhere which states that ... either regulation applies, and there is clear guidance by the secretary of defense that detainees were not EPWs," enemy prisoners of war, Bovarnick said.

Compounding the problem, military police guards and interrogators lacked proper training and received little instruction from commanders about how to do their jobs, according to sworn testimony taken during military investigations and interviews by McClatchy.

The guards who worked there from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003 were all reservists from the 377th Military Police Company, based in Cincinnati, and many of the military intelligence interrogators serving at the same time were from the Utah Army National Guard.

Good order and discipline had evaporated.

1st Sgt. Betty Jones said during a 2004 interview with investigators that a fellow military police sergeant and his men on several occasions were "drunk to the point that they could not go to duty."

Salcedo, the military intelligence soldier, said in her statement at Corsetti's court-martial that she and others drank alcohol during their time at Bagram, and at one point smoked hashish on the roof of a building.

Cammack told McClatchy that one of his sergeants drove a John Deere Gator, a four-wheel all-terrain vehicle, to a nearby town and traded with locals for bottles of vodka.

"Really, nobody was in charge ... the leadership did nothing to help us. If we had any questions, it was pretty much 'figure it out on your own,' " Cammack said. "When you asked about protocol they said it's a work in progress."


PENTAGON RESPONSE

Senior Pentagon officials refused to be interviewed for this article. In response to a series of questions and interview requests, Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, released this statement:

"The Department of Defense policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely. The United States operates safe, humane and professional detention operations for unlawful enemy combatants at war with this country."

No U.S. military officer above the rank of captain has been called to account for what happened at Bagram.

The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when prisoners were being abused at Bagram, then-Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, declined an interview request. McNeill was later made the commander of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, a post he held until recently.

His predecessor, then-Maj. Gen. Franklin L. "Buster" Hagenbeck, said in an e-mail exchange that from late 2001 to 2002, his attention wasn't on detainee facilities.

"Unfortunately, I have nothing to add to your reporting ... I was focused on battling the Taliban and al Qaida, as well as reconstruction and coordinating with the nascent Afghan government," Hagenbeck wrote. "I do not personally know of any abuses while I was there, and we focused on treating all with dignity and respect — even, and perhaps especially, those persons in our custody."

Hagenbeck is now the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Capt. Carolyn Wood, who led the interrogators at Bagram, was sent to Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003 and assumed control of interrogation operations there that August.

A military investigation that followed the Abu Ghraib scandal — known as the "Fay-Jones Report" for the two generals who authored it — found that from July 2003 to February of 2004, 27 military intelligence personnel there allegedly encouraged or condoned the abuse of detainees, violated established interrogation procedures or participated in abuse themselves.

The abuse resembled what former Bagram detainees described.

A key factor in serious cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the report found, was the construction of isolation areas, a move requested by Wood, who said that "based on her experience" such facilities made it easier to extract information from detainees.

Wood remains an active-duty military intelligence officer.

[Matthew Schofield contributed to this report from Paris and Lyon, France.]

Say No to Torture this November at Ft. Huachuca

Southwest Weekend of Witness

HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE WILL JOIN TOGETHER IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA ON NOVEMBER
15 & 16 TO SAY NO TO TORTURE

Save the dates... plan to join us i!

Date: Saturday, November 15
Place: Tucson, Arizona

Plan for Action: Civil Initiative to Stop the Training and Practice of Torture will be held from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. We will work together on a plan for beyond the weekend that will accomplish this goal, followed by: (...)

Sign making
An evening program
Procession to federal building for a vigil

Date: Sunday, November 16
Place: Sierra Vista, Arizona

An anti-torture rally with music and speakers at Veteran's Memorial Park, ending with a procession to and presence across the street from the main gate of Ft. Huachuca. Ft. Huachuca is the home of USAICS, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, and has a long history of complicity in U.S. crimes of torture. The torture manuals used at the School of the Americas came from Ft. Huachuca. For several years, in solidarity with the annual vigil and action at Fort Benning, Georgia to close the U.S. Army's School of the Americas (now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) there has been a growing grassroots demonstration at the gate of Fort Huachuca to protest our country¹s slipping standards on torture, being practiced in our name and with our tax dollars in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The November 2008 demonstration at Ft. Huachuca will take place the week before the Ft. Benning vigil and action.

The Southwest Witness is being organized entirely by volunteers. Can you help? Working groups include:
* Media
* Hospitality
* Peacekeepers
* Communications (website, email, etc.)
* Sunday rally, procession and vigil (program and logistics)
* Sign making
* Puppets
* Music
* Federal building vigil
* Saturday Plan for Action: Civil Initiative to Stop the Training and Practice of Torture
* Saturday evening program

If you want to volunteer, please contact Ken Kennon at <kkennonaz@cox.net>.

If you have questions, please write to southwestwitness@gmail.com and someone will get back to you as quickly as possible. Updated information will be posted at http://southwestwitness.org

To find out more about the November 21-23 vigil & action at Ft. Benning, visit http://soaw.org/

McCain: it's not important when the troops can come home

Part 1 (8:43 min)


Part 2 (4 min)

The June Issue

We are looking for submissions for our July issue deadline for writing and artwork is the 21st of this month. We are hoping to do a Latin American themed issue we are also interested in articles remembering the South Central Los Angeles Farm, which was demolished by the Police two years ago in June. please send all materials and inquiries to Chris Rooney at the.christian.radical.zine (at) gmail.com

Writers please incluse a short bio of yourself for the back pages.

for now you can download it here

Street By Law Homeless People Lost everything AGAIN!

Concerned Resident
MDPrevost
Vancouver BC

Hello Residents, Friends and Mayor/Councillor (81 People)

As I was cruising down Hastings on my way home from Carnegie I noticed a new sign put up ALL along Hastings. It's a By Law telling the homeless they can not put up tents or bed down on the streets/sidewalk, if caught they will be fined and not only that. (...)

This morning a friend of mine notice a City Garbage truck dumping ALL belongs in a shopping cart in to the truck and behind the garbage truck was another to pick up the empty shopping carts, while residents pleading with the truck drive to please let me get my personal belongs. But it fell on deaf ears and away went people's personal belongs with sleeping bags, ID'S and ALL their life belongings went up and down Hastings, my friend said people were down on the ground crying and begging these City Works for the necessities they needed to sleep either at the park or under the via duct and/or where ever they felt safe.

Now they have nothing, they were striped of so much and left with nothing, NOT even letting our homeless people get the sleeping bag and the little food they had. Isn't it bad enough for the homeless who have NO where to go, because of a By Law that has been post ALL along Hastings and probably at the parks. So where are they suppose to go, sleeping in the alley, is only putting them at risk of being beating up and/or for our women to be raped and beaten, all because they are homeless.

Sam and Council don't think about the consequences that comes with these STUPID By Laws, I have to be honest and say you ALL have NO heart and flicking care about what happens to the homeless people when you take away their personal belongs.

The only true Politician that took on living here in the Downtown Eastside and learned so much while living on very little money was Emery Barnes, the other people said they lived at Crab Park for the weekend. However NO one saw them there and they had sleeping bag where most of the homeless don't even have that.

Get real Mayor and Council, if this happened to one of your own, there would have been at least 5 police cars and maybe 8 officers. If the homeless had put up a fight today rest assured they would have been charged and jailed also given a fine for breaking this By Law that was just put up recently. SO Mayor and Council where was the fairness on this day Friday the 13th, 2008?

If this upsets you as much as it does me please consider writing to Vancouver's City Council and telling them how you feel you can reach them at mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

Umberto Eco
Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15. Excerpted in Utne Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57-59.
The Modern World

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

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Act Quickly, Act Together

Leonardo Boff
Theologian
Earthcharter Commission
June 6 2008

The Churches are finally also mobilizing to face global warming. In March, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visited the World Council of Churches, in Geneva, and said: «a global problem demands a global answer: we need the help of the Churches.» And they immediately answered, summoning the millions of Christians dispersed throughout the world with the words: «act quickly, act together, because we do not have time to waste.» They emphasized that God gave us the Earth as an inheritance to be administered, because that is the Hebraic meaning of «dominate the Earth,» which has nothing to do with what we call domination. They assume the two imperatives proposed by the Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel, (IPCC, from its name in Spanish): mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation requires identifying the causes of global warming, namely, our squandering style of production and unlimited and individualistic consumption. Adaptation considers its perverse effects, especially in the most vulnerable countries of the Southern hemisphere, that ask for solidarity, because if they do not adapt, we will witness, terrified, as many human lives are extinguished. (...)

The Churches assume a didactic function: evangelizing, they must propose the ideal of a voluntary sobriety and of a jovial austerity; and teach respect for all beings, because all sprang from God's heart. Being gifts from the Creator, we must share them in solidarity with others, starting with those who are in most need.

The Catholic Church officially still has not proposed anything significant. But Brazil's National Conference of Bishops (CNBB) in its Campaigns of Fraternity regarding water and the Amazon helped an awakening to ecology. The Canadian bishops recently published a beautiful pastoral letter with the title: «The Need for a Conversion.» They attribute to conversion a meaning that transcends its strictly religious meaning: it implies «to find the meaning of limits, because, a limited planet cannot respond to unlimited demands.» We need, they say, to liberate ourselves from the obsession to consume. «Egotism is not only immoral, it is suicidal; this time we do not have any other choice except a new solidarity and new forms of sharing.»

We have reached this point --they recognize-- because for centuries we have not respected the laws of life, forgetting the ancient wisdom that taught: «we do not direct nature, but obey her.» It is easier to send people to the moon and bring them back than to make humans respect the rhythms of nature. We are now gathering the poisoned fruits of the de-consecration of life provoked by the power of techno-science in the service of accumulation by the few.

Judeo-Christianity possesses its own reasons on which to base an ecologically responsible and savior behavior. This religious tradition starts from the belief -similar to the vision of contemporary cosmology- that God took creation from chaos to cosmos, this is, from a universe marked by disorder to one where order and beauty reign. And God said: «This is good.» He put the human being in the Garden of Eden «to cultivate and to watch over it.» To «cultivate» is to care and to favor growth and to «watch over» is to protect and to assure the continuity of the resources; or as we would say today, to guarantee «sustainable development.»

It is important to re-make the broken connection with nature, so that we may once again enjoy her beauty and «grandeur.» This faith is the foundation of hope for a good future for all creation, so well expressed in the Book of Wisdom: «Lord, You love all beings and You protect all because they belong to You, oh Sovereign lover of life.» (11, 24 y 26).

Free translation from the Spanish by
contacto@servicioskoinonia.org,
sent by Melina Alfaro, done at
REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas

From Water Torture to "Waterboarding"

Media rehabilitate torture as aquatic sport.

Isabel Macdonald
Extra!
May-June 2008

On May 13, 2004, a novel euphemism was delivered into the public lexicon by anonymous “counterintelligence official” sources cited in a New York Times article. The piece reported the CIA had been using “a technique known as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.” The technique was described by the Times as one of several “methods [that] simulate torture.” (...)

Before long, Alan Dershowitz (Boston Globe, 5/15/04)—the Harvard law professor who advocates for a system of “torture warrants" (San Francisco Chonicle, 1/22/04)--had coined a brand new catchphrase by stringing the two words together into one: “waterboarding.” As Dershowitz himself acknowledged to Times columnist William Safire (3/9/08), “When I first used the word, nobody knew what it meant.”

Indeed, a search of newspaper archives reveals that until May 2004, the term had actually meant an aquatic sport similar to surfing. Meanwhile, the technique now known as “waterboarding”—in which the person being tortured is actually drowning, aspirating fluid to the point of being unable to breathe—had previously been called “water torture,” or simply “torture,” by the media.

Water torture had cropped up in media reports on several occasions prior to the New York Times’ revelations about CIA “water boarding.” During the insurrection against the U.S. occupation of the Philippines (1899–1902), the U.S. military tortured suspected members of the Filipino resistance with a similar technique that they referred to as the “water cure.”

A Washington Post (9/23/1902) news article on this practice, which referred to it as “the form of torture known as the water cure,” was typical of newspaper reporting of the time—which used the term “water cure” more or less interchangeably with the word “torture.” When a U.S. Army major was court-martialed and then found not guilty after being accused of administering the “water cure” to Filipinos, the Post reported on the verdict (6/7/1902) under the headline “Torture Is Upheld.” Similarly, a Chicago Daily Tribune headline (1/9/1903) referred to “torture orders” in an article about another army major accused of having authorized the use of the “water cure.” Newspaper reports about the use of the “water cure” by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti similarly identified it as “torture” (New York Times, 5/4/1907, 5/9/1921).

Following World War II, when U.S. military tribunals tried Japanese military officials for war crimes for torturing prisoners of war, graphic accounts surfaced about the practice called “the water treatment,” which, as federal judge and laws of war scholar Evan Wallach observed (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 2007), “differ[ed] very little” from the “descriptions of waterboarding as it is currently applied.” One of the common practices of the Japanese military was described as follows in the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East: “The victim was tied or held down on his back and cloth placed over his nose and mouth. Water was then poured on the cloth.”

This practice, first defined in the New York Times (7/27/42) as “forced drownings,” was referred to by the Washington Post (10/7/46) as “water torture” and by the New York Times (9/6/45) as “the Oriental ‘water torture.’” Other newspaper accounts (New York Times, 8/16/42, 8/31/42, 12/25/45, 7/26/47; Washington Post, 9/6/42; Chicago Tribune, 6/9/46) unequivocally defined the “water treatment” as a form of torture. Meanwhile, reports of the use of identical practices against American POWs in the Korean War were covered in the New York Times (8/9/53) as “stories of planned and deliberate torture.”

Over a decade later, “water torture” was mentioned in the headline of a Washington Post article (3/15/68) about the Australian army’s admission that a soldier had administered the “water treatment” to a Vietnamese woman suspected of being a guerilla. Six months later, the Post (8/12/68) published a front-page photographic expose of U.S. soldiers administering this same “water treatment” to a Vietnamese prisoner. A follow-up report in the Post (10/29/70) referred to this practice, which resulted in charges against the commander of the U.S. Army troops in South Vietnam, as “an ancient Oriental torture called ‘the water treatment.’”

Media reports commonly used the term “water torture” to describe the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s practice of tying prisoners to a board and pouring water over their noses and mouths. In a feature article about the late Cambodian artist Vann Nath, who painted pictures of the Pol Pot regime’s various torture devices (including perhaps the clearest visual precursor of today’s “water board”), the L.A. Times (8/8/97) described the artist’s “contributions to history as a witness to the systematic torture and execution of Pol Pot’s victims. He painted images of acts he witnessed or heard described while in prison: electric shock treatment, water torture.” The San Diego Union-Tribune (12/16/89) also referred to the Khmer Rouge’s methods of interrogating through “water torture.”

In 1983, media reports on the trial of a Texas sheriff who had used a technique remarkably similar to today’s “waterboarding” also used the term “water torture” (UPI, 8/31/83, 9/1/83, 9/7/83). One article published in the New York Times (9/2/83) about the case began, “Two convicted burglars testified today that they had watched in fear as a former East Texas sheriff and his deputies used a water torture.” In another New York Times article (9/1/83), the news that “another former deputy testified that they had handcuffed prisoners to chairs, placed towels over their faces and poured water on the cloth until the prisoners gave what the officers considered confessions” was summarized with the headline: “Ex-Deputy Tells Jury of Jail Water Torture.”

Media also referred to the practice as torture when it was used by the U.S. to train intelligence agents and military personnel who were at risk of being captured by enemy forces. In a column tracing the origins of the word “waterboarding,” New York Times columnist William Safire (3/9/08) noted that a 1976 article had referred to U.S. Navy trainees being

"strapped down and water poured into their mouths and noses until they lost consciousness. . . . A Navy spokesman admitted use of the 'water board' torture . . . to 'convince each trainee that he won’t be able to physically resist what an enemy would do to him.' "

Outside of newspaper editorial pages and commentary programs, the phrase “water torture”—used in the media to refer to nearly identical interrogation practices in the past—has been strikingly absent from the news coverage of the CIA and military interrogations of U.S. detainees. Prior to the publication of the Times article that substituted the term “water boarding,” the new term had only ever been used in the newspaper of record to refer to the sport. A search of the terms “waterboarding” and “interrogation” in the Nexis database prior to the date of the article’s publication yields not a single newspaper or newswire article.

In contrast, in the four years since the New York Times first mentioned “water boarding,” the term has cropped up in 1,000 stories in U.S. newspapers and wires, frequently being mentioned in the contracted single word form first introduced by Dershowitz, and without quotation marks.

While in the past the practice had been referred to as “forced drownings” (e.g., New York Times, 7/27/42), “waterboarding” has been almost universally referred to as “a type of simulated drowning” (Washington Post, 4/2/08) or as a “simulated drowning technique” (New York Times, 4/2/08), which, on occasion, some media organizations will go so far as to point out is “considered torture by many rights advocates” (Knight Ridder, 4/4/08). In short, as Dershowitz recently observed (New York Times, 3/9/08), “Waterboarding has in the last few years taken on the generic meaning ‘simulated drowning.’”

Yet this meaning is incorrect: As Wallach has pointed out in an op-ed (Washington Post, 11/4/07), “To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death.” He elaborated that the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted.

Malcolm Nance, a former instructor at the U.S. Navy’s Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival program who has taught American service members what to expect under torture, concurred with this assessment of “waterboarding” in an interview with Extra!: “There is nothing simulated about it.”

U.S. Justice Department legal counsel John Yoo’s 2003 memo, which provided a legal justification for the use of “waterboarding,” has deservedly been rebuked by the media for having “redefined torture to justify repugnant, clearly illegal acts,” as one New York Times editorial (4/4/08) put it. Unfortunately, the same can be said of much of the news reporting on “waterboarding.”

[Isabel Macdonald is the communications director at FAIR. Before she started working at FAIR in June 2007, she was involved with social justice, labor and media activism in Toronto, Canada. Her work has been published on ZNet, This Magazine, Upping the Anti, The Dominion, and the Haiti Information Project website. She is currently working on a book based on her M.A. thesis (from York University, Toronto) on the international press' complicity in the 2004 coup d'etat in Haiti. FAIR publishes Extra!, the award-winning magazine of media criticism, and produces the weekly radio program CounterSpin, the show that brings you the news behind the headlines.]

Britain's child victims of the chemical cosh

Brian Brady and Nina Lakhani
Independent on Sunday
June 15, 2008

The number of powerful psychiatric drugs prescribed to England's children has risen by more than half in four years, government figures have revealed.

GPs in England are handing out prescriptions for anti-psychotic drugs for children as young as seven at the rate of 250 a day, according to figures obtained by The Independent on Sunday.

read the rest here

Thomas Merton on the dangers of activism and overwork

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist …most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

-- Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Doubleday, 1966, p 73

Army's $100 Million Housing from Hell: Alaska's Taku

Responsibility Evaded for Uninhabitable Base Family Housing atop Weapons Dump

Carol Goldberg
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
June 12, 2008

WASHINGTON, DC - June 12 -For more then three years, the U.S. Army has hemorrhaged money into an Alaskan housing complex that will likely never be occupied, according to agency documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). After a damning internal investigation, the Army ordered a new review which excused any misconduct as a failure to communicate, conceding only that “this was not an organization optimally aligned for success.” (...)

Under intense pressure to provide housing at booming Fort Wainwright, in 2005 base officials authorized building 128 units on a 54-acre site, called Taku Gardens but with only cursory environmental assessment. Unfortunately, that site was an old weapons and equipment dump, profoundly contaminated with munitions (some holding chemical agent), dioxin, PCBs, tons of drums and equipment (including an entire locomotive and a forklift). By the time construction was halted, 79 units had been built but will likely have to be torn down.

An internal Army review completed on April 21, 2006 was scathing in faulting, among other lapses –

* Skewed decision-making in failing to halt construction when problems were first discovered: “Who is in charge? Lines of responsibility, accountability and authority are muddled…”;

* Failure to secure the contaminated construction site from nearby playgrounds and housing: “Construction sites and equipment are child magnets…Extensive guidance exists regarding this but none of it was adhered to…” and

* Spreading contamination “via vehicles, wind and probably footraffic [sic]” by not properly covering or monitoring profoundly dangerous soils.

“Taku Gardens is such a monumental screw-up the Army cannot countenance culpability because the reins of responsibility run very high up the chain-of-command,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, who obtained the internal reports under the Freedom of Information Act. “This command found it far easier to commission a new review than dealing with the indictments of the original investigation.”

Completed on July 3, 2007, this new review pledged to dispel the “witch hunt atmosphere” existing at the base. In contrast to the original investigation, this review found that “Any potential violations of Federal or State law or regulations by Government personnel would be minor and attributable to difference of interpretation” – a sentence repeated verbatim a numbing 15 times in the 21-page report.

This new review did admit an extreme emphasis on rapid completion of construction to expand the Army, especially base housing: “In one case [application processing] for a ‘Grow the Force Project’ was recently done at Fort Wainwright in 40 minutes with generic sites due to pressure from Washington level HQ.”

In April 2008, the Army said it would begin yet another round of hazardous waste investigation and clean-up at Taku Gardens, where last year more than 1,800 tons of PCB-tainted soils were removed. The Army hopes to be done with this next phase by the end of 2010.

“The Army still has no idea what else it will uncover at this housing-from-hell sinkhole,” added Ruch, pointing to the growing realization that radioactive material may also be buried among the many, many tons of debris layered throughout the site. “Before it is done, the Army will spend well more than $1 million for each planned unit, meaning that it would have been far cheaper to buy each family a mansion than trying to house them in Taku Gardens.”

PEER is asking the Department of Defense Inspector General to step into the case in order to review both the underlying environmental breakdowns as well as the subsequent failure of command accountability.

Little Timmys: The Violent Crazies Gear Up For Obama

Dave Niewert
firedoglake
June 13 2008

If there is a President Obama come next Jan. 20, normal folks better brace for what the right-wing crazies have in mind. Because it's becoming clear that they are winding themselves up now for a fresh spate of violence if Obama wins.

You can find the signs in the things they're saying now, both on Internet forums and in the things they say when they think no one is listening. For instance, read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

read the rest here