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04 Nov 2009 18:49
GoodnessAfter all the Gods and Idols have come and away have passedGoodness will subside forever and forever will last.So long as there is a Wrong, there will be a RightAnd the Fighters for Good will Fight the Good Fight.All Lying Liars will see an end to their LiesAnd Answers will be given to all the WhysAll through eternity we may glimpse the PrizeOf the Goodness which will never die.The empires crumble, the tyrants tumble,Malcontents grumble, the Proud are humbled,Bloodthirsty crowds mumble as fighters get ready to rumble,But Goodness will not end, or falter, or fumble.All the Gods and the Idols will forever Rise and Fall;Goodness for Goodness's sake outlasts them, One and All.---al-Ustadh Husayn Farajullah Zaki Al-Kurdi.November 3, 2009. Dhu al-Qa'dah 15, 1430.
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Obama Turns His Back on Urban Youth
By R.L. Donovan / November 4th, 2009
On DC's green-line train headed to Branch Avenue sits a young girl gone weary by the teenage blues and the 3:15 pm school dismissal. She sits on the last of an eight-car train, slouched and coiled - her legs in a pretzel.
By the circumference of her hooped ear-rings, the length of her braids, and the style of her school uniform, I can tell that she is no older than 14 - a DC Public Schools student who spends her school day playing an eighth-grade lab rat under the sterile watch of Chancellor Michelle Rhee for the costly scientific experiment of "education-reform." If only someone were to ask her what she learns.
Her book-bag is stuffed with materials; a pink ruler veers out of the open zipper. And while a number of large textbooks make their rectangular imprints, she has too much on her mind to take one out for reading.
She munches on a handful of sun-flower seeds, and I can just about predict which of the pending train stations will be her stop. She wears the empty gaze of a girl from Anacostia, with the skin-color of Congress Heights, and the sense of oblivion one can only earn from Southern Avenue.
Surely, one of these stations must be her stop. As if in a forbidden despair, she dissolves her attention into the window, where nothing more than a reflection and the routine of a dark subway-tunnel entertains the moment. She sits motionless, clearly absent of the hope one would expect a young person to have, living in the same city as President Obama.
The train slithers into the Anacostia station; her peers crowd the door with an after-school ruckus. It is their stop. The doors open and they all rush out while she remains entranced. One of her peers yells, "Tanika cmon'!" She lethargically returns from a self-induced hypnosis, and nearly misses her chance at the platform, as the train's doors chime of closure. The train is now empty of young students, and everyone breathes a united sigh of relief.
For one evening it seems that no one would have to bare the onus of having to press the train's emergency button for a teenage dispute gone tragically wrong. But today, one year after the election of President Obama, no one on this train is thanking their Commander-in-Chief for this rare evening where young people train-goers will not become an evening news segment for Channel 8.
We sit in our seats pretending that we understand why the president chooses to pre-occupy himself with a war in Afghanistan, instead of the war happening in the very streets of DC, east of the Anacostia River and south of Pennsylvania Ave-the one between young angry black bodies and 9mm bullets.
And as we keep the casual look of "voting citizen" on our faces, we ponder why political pollsters are too chicken to ask Tanika if she thinks National Security has something to do with a place outside of the boundaries of her neighborhood or the classrooms of her school.
One year later, we pretend not to notice a disenchanted Tanika sitting in a voluntary loneliness on a rush-hour train, in the middle of a city where there is too much diabetes, HIV, and shrapnel in the blood. We also pretend not to notice that our president has a discourse about health care that neglects this fact.
A year ago today, like Alice in Wonderland, Tanika had been willing, like all of us, to follow Obama curiously down his rabbit hole as he hopped away feverishly, lamenting running late (she thought "for change").
And just like Alice, Tanika now finds herself in a long hallway of locked doors, where the very door promising opportunity is too small for her to fit through. But unlike Alice, this place of opportunity behind locked doors is all but déjà vu-a familiar mirage of life growing up in DC's inner-city.
Surely, it's nothing to cry about. But, Tanika never imagined that one year later, her new president would have led her to this wretched place, and that all she would ever see from him was his backside getting farther and farther away.
As my stop approaches, I can't help but notice that the train grows emptier as it gets closer to the end of the line - each passenger having put his or her faith in the ride for as long as they could, until they felt that the train could no longer get them any closer to where they hoped to be.
This emptying train is not all that different from the Obama presidency - a fast moving apparatus on rails once crowded with committed riders believing the destination - now a speeding vessel with too much standing room, with promises of emptiness by the time it reaches the end of the line.
When my stop arrives, another rambunctious group of young students linger eagerly at the edge of the platform. As I head toward the escalator, they board the train; the doors chime and gently close. As I hear the train departing, I begin to worry, for I know that the train will lead them down its rabbit hole - a tunnel of expectations, speeding along as if it were running late, getting farther and farther away from where the young students first started.
No telling how many Tanikas are among them.
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03 Nov 2009 06:32
Taliban Decline US Offer Of 6 Provinces for 8 BasesBy Aamir Latif"US negotiators had offered the Taliban leadership through Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakkil (former Taliban foreign minister) that if they accept the presence of NATO troops in Afghanistan, they would be given the governorship of six provinces in the south and northeast," http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23861.htm===McChrystal Doesn't Get It-Does Obama?By Scott RitterThere is a curious phenomenon taking place in the American media at the moment: the lionization of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23868.htm===House to Vote on Resolution to Reject Goldstone ReportBy Jeremy R. HammondThe U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on a resolution calling on President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the 'Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict' in multilateral fora."http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23864.htm===Rack 'em and Screw 'em, Boys!By Sheila SamplesIs there anything scarier than the New York Times' Halloween treat entitled, "Documents Detail Conditions Found at Secret C.I.A. Jails"? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23865.htm===Bonaparte Blair & CoBy Gilad AtzmonBlair was sure that he had the presidency 'in his pocket'. He was wrong, it is now rather clear that European leaders have woken up. The horrifying dream may be over. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23870.htm===Welcome To The MasqueradeBy Jim KirwanThe government and the constitution has been dead and buried since the 1968 obscenity of the 'Democratic" convention in Chicago-and nothing that has been done since has been able to push back this theft of our FREEDOM to speak or to demand redress for our grievances with the continuing fascist police-state that has existed since those police riots shut down that convention. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23871.htm===Be Prepared for the WorstThe large-scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly.By Ron Paul,A false recovery is under way. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23867.htm===Death of 'Soul of Capitalism': Bogle, Faber, Moore20 reasons America has lost its soul and collapse is inevitableBy Paul B. FarrellJack Bogle published "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" four years ago. The battle's over. The sequel should be titled: "Capitalism Died a Lost Soul." Worse, we've lost "America's Soul." And, worldwide, the consequences will be catastrophic. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23866.htm===Kucinich: Health Reform Legislation 'a Bailout for Insurance Companies'By Stephen C. WebsterAccording to Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), the Democrats' health reform legislation is basically a sham. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23863.htm===Osama bin Laden Responsible for 9/11 Attacks?Is This Belief Based on Evidence?By David Ray GriffinThere is not even any good evidence for the claim that bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Accordingly, insofar as the justification for the continuation of the AfPak war is based on the fact that bin Laden in the region both before and after the 9/11 attacks, that justification would seem to be doubly baseless. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23862.htm==="Assassination of Russia"False flag Government sponsored terrorism Russian style?VideoFrench Documentary Alleges Kremlin Involvement in Russia's 1999 Apartment Bombings. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23869.htm===Life & DebtVideo DocumentaryIf you have ever wondered what the IMF and the New world Order can do to a third world country, this one is for you. Click to viewhttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23860.htm===36 dead in Somalia violence:Scores have been wounded in three days of fighting in central and southern Somalia, and police and soldiers clash in the north's autonomous Puntland region.http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-somalia2-2009nov02,0,5758154.story===Blast kills senior commander in northwest Somalia:A roadside bomb killed a senior military commander and wounded four others on Sunday in the northwestern Somalia region of Somaliland, local media reports said.http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/02/content_12372463.htm===Terrorizing Aid to Somalia:The United States is willfully letting millions of Somalis go hungry in its drive to hunt down terrorists.http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/28/terrorizing_aid_to_somalia===Pakistan: 34 killed in blast near Army General HQ in Rawalpindi:The motorcycle-borne bomber detonated his explosives outside a state-run bank, causing considerable damage to the facade of Shalimar Hotel on Mall Road, less than a kilometre from the army's fortified General Headquarters that was besieged by a group of terrorists nearly a month ago.http://www.deccanherald.com/content/33762/34-killed-blast-near-army.html===Twelve "militants" killed in South Waziristan:Twelve "militants" were killed during the past 24 hours in the South Waziristan operation, Director-General Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Athar Abbas said.http://snipurl.com/t0z1x===British explosives expert killed on final day in Afghanistan:A SENIOR British explosives expert was killed while trying to defuse a bomb on the last day of his tour in Afghanistan, it was revealed today.http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/British-explosives-expert-killed-on.5786895.jp===Karzai claims victory as Afghan runoff cancelled:The cancellation of Saturday's vote came one day after former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah announced he was pulling out of the Nov. 7 vote. "We congratulate President Karzai on his victory in this historic election and look forward to working with him" to support reform and improve security, the U.S. Embassy said in a statement. Britain and the United Nations also issued statements of congratulations.http://snipurl.com/t0z2s===Reform needed after Afghan leader's flawed win:"Karzai has lost his legitimacy, he is a very weak president and he cannot govern without reaching out to Dr Abdullah," said Kabul-based political analyst Haroun Mir. "So the ball is in Dr Abdullah's court right now."http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/VVOS-7XEL84?OpenDocument===Will the war in Afghanistan bring down NATO?:Afghanistan has shown that the alliance has become "a corpse, decomposing," Hillier concludes. "Unless the alliance can snatch victory out of feeble efforts, it's not going to be long in existence in its present form."http://snipurl.com/t0z35===Bicycle bomb kills five in southern Iraq:A bomb attached to a bicycle killed five people and wounded dozens in southern Iraq on Sunday, and at least five others were killed in violence across the country, police said.http://snipurl.com/t0z3l===Three Iraqi civilians killed in seperate attacks:An Iraqi police source told KUNA that a communication company employee was fired at by armed men in Al-Islah Agricultural town in Mosul. He added that the armed men stormed into a lawyers office and killed a lawyer.http://snipurl.com/t0z43===Over 400 killed in Iraq during October:The figures were markedly higher than September, which saw a total of 203 people die as a result of violencehttp://www.albawaba.com/en/news/256358===Iraq restricts movement by TV journalists:The government has banned movement by press vehicles with equipment to broadcast live.http://www.azzaman.com/english/index.asp?fname=news\2009-10-30\kurd.htm===Iran seeks review of nuclear deal:Iran has said it wants the UN's nuclear watchdog to establish a committee to review a deal aimed at easing Western fears over its nuclear programme.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8337192.stm===Manufacturing Consent For Attack On Iran :France warns Iran over stalling tactics:"We are waiting for Iran to formally accept the proposition made by the (UN atomic agency) IAEA. If the Iranian response is to stall, as it seems to be, we will not accept this," he told reporters.http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091102/wl_mideast_afp/irannuclearpoliticsiaeafrance===The shadow behind US-Israeli war games:"We're here for some very specific reasons, some specific threats that the Israelis are interested in, that we're interested in. And that's as far as I want to go down that road."http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8338155.stm===US forces set up radar in Iraq to spy on Iran:According to the sources, the radar is a preparatory measure aimed at providing the United States and its allies advanced control capabilities in event of a US military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110243§ionid=351020104===Netanyahu savours victory after US drops settlement demand:Israel's premier savoured a victory on Sunday after Washington hailed his "unprecedented" stand on settlements and backed his call for peace talks to resume without the construction freeze sought by the Palestinians.http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091101/wl_mideast_afp/mideastdiplomacyus===Palestinians accuse US of killing peace hopes:Pointing an accusing finger at the US, the Palestinians yesterday said Washington's backing for Israeli refusal to halt Jewish settlement expansion had killed any hope of reviving peace negotiations soon.http://snipurl.com/t0z5y==='There are Jewish terrorists still at large in Israel':The official's comments follow the announcement on Sunday that settler Yaakov Teitel was arrested last month for allegedly killing two Palestinians and carrying out a string of bomb attacks.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125288.html===How Israel caught the suspected Jewish terrorist:A sweeping gag order; an armed break-in at the suspect's home; the denial of legal representation to the suspect; and the interrogation of his wife - these are just a few of the measures the Shin Bet took against suspected Jewish terrorist Yaakov Teitel and his family.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125289.html==="Settlements" are fertile ground for Jewish terror:The parade of the self-righteous got underway Sunday night: Yaakov Teitel was described as a "foreign element," "wild thorn" and "rotten apple." Even if he acted alone, spoke and hallucinated in English, even if he was mentally disturbed, as his attorney claimed, it does not change the fact that Jack the Ripper from the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel - contrary to his predecessor in London - acted on ground that was fertile like no other.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125294.html===Palestinians foil attack on Al-Aqsa worshippers:Palestinian security guards have foiled a Jewish gunman's attempt to infiltrate the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a Palestinian official reports.http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110224§ionid=351020202==='Russian who spied on Israel shot near his Moscow home':Shabtai Kalmanovitch, an Israeli immigrant from the former Soviet Union who served time in prison for spying for the KGB, was shot outside his Moscow home, the Russian Interfax news agency reported on Monday. There is no word on the extent of his wounds.http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1125329.html===AP admits: Cheney equivocated to the FBI:On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy.http://rawstory.com/2009/11/ap-admits-cheney-equivocated-fbi/===How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash:In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/v-print/story/77791.html===Goldman takes on new role: taking away people's homes:Unable to identify a lender, the couple could neither capitalize on a mortgage hardship provision that would allow them to defer some payments, nor on a state law enabling them to offset their debt against separate, investment-related claims against Goldman
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77841.html===How States Can Finance Their Own Recovery:Pouring money into the private banking system has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/cut-wallstreet.php
===Let Us Work Towards Peace And JoyTom Feeley>
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29 Oct 2009 00:07
The Shrinking American Empire
Posted Tue, 07/07/2009 - 18:41
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford"Imperialists believe that everything can be made into a weapon with which to bludgeon the rest of humanity into submission."The day before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, back in March of 2003, I wrote a piece called "They Have Reached Too Far" - "they" being U.S. imperialists. I was on that day, as U.S. tanks revved their engines in the sands of Kuwait, preparing to cross into what Washington thought would be a glorious future of global domination, that a crack opened up in time, and it was clear as a desert day that the U.S. empire would be swallowed up in that widening crack - maybe in my lifetime. George Bush and his gang had rolled the dice, betting everything on a land and resource grab designed to save a parasitical system through world-defying theft and awesome - Shock and Awesome - intimidation. But there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that they would fail catastrophically, although no one could predict precisely how the disaster would unfold. It was also clear that the U.S. aggression against Iraq should not be narrowly interpreted as all about Israel or about oil or about further expansion of U.S. spheres of geopolitical dominance or about beating back the challenge of the euro. It was simultaneously about all of those things, and more. Empires seek to dominate the very planet, to set the terms for every human transaction. Nothing is beyond the ambitions of empire. Imperialists believe that everything can be made into a weapon with which to bludgeon the rest of humanity into submission. So I wrote, back in 2003, that the impending Iraq war was "an oil currency war, a preemptive strike against the euro's potential to challenge the U.S. dollar as the sole denominator of petroleum purchases. By seizing the Iraqi oil fields and positioning itself to do the same in Saudi Arabia, Iran and throughout the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea and South Asia, the U.S. can stop the euro cold and rule as its own OPEC, awesomely armed and dreadfully dangerous." The dollar would "remain supreme, backed by the oil reserves of the globe." "The American threat to humanity was so general, and so generally perceived and felt, it achieved the opposite of what Washington had wished." And that was part of the overall Plan: to set the terms of trade in oil and everything else on the planet, extracting wealth from all the world's people while creating nothing but terror and, hopefully, submission. But the American threat to humanity was so general, and so generally perceived and felt, it achieved the opposite of what Washington had wished. Rather than the world acclimating itself to the rule of the "New Rome," as the imperialists were openly calling themselves, much of the planetary community conspired to find ways to break the unequal ties that bound them to the empire. The Iraq invasion greatly accelerated the process of U.S. imperialism's decline, so much so, that only a few years later the American Lords of Capital found themselves turning to a Black man to put a dramatically different face on their imperial enterprise. But Barack Obama cannot save them. The U.S. dollar's days as the world's reserve currency are numbered, and when the dollar is finally dethroned, only the military aspect of the imperial husk will remain. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to http://www.blackagendareport.com/. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Freedom! Lakota Sioux Indians Declare Sovereign Nation StatusMore info: Lakota Freedom DelegationSource: Lakota Freedom Delegation media pageMEDIA ADVISORYImmediate Release: 19 December 2007Washington D.C. – Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government. The withdrawal, hand delivered to Daniel Turner, Deputy Director of Public Liaison at the State Department, immediately and irrevocably ends all agreements between the Lakota Sioux Nation of Indians and the United States Government outlined in the 1851 and 1868 Treaties at Fort Laramie Wyoming.“This is an historic day for our Lakota people,” declared Russell Means, Itacan of Lakota. “United States colonial rule is at its end!”“Today is a historic day and our forefathers speak through us. Our Forefathers made the treaties in good faith with the sacred Canupa and with the knowledge of the Great Spirit,” shared Garry Rowland from Wounded Knee. “They never honored the treaties, that’s the reason we are here today.”The four member Lakota delegation traveled to Washington D.C. culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities. Delegation members included well known activist and actor Russell Means, Women of All Red Nations (WARN) founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin Sr. were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.“In order to stop the continuous taking of our resources – people, land, water and children- we have no choice but to claim our own destiny,” said Phyllis Young, a former Indigenous representative to the United Nations and representative from Standing Rock.Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.
Young added, “The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people”.
Following Monday’s withdrawal at the State Department, the four Lakota Itacan representatives have been meeting with foreign embassy officials in order to hasten their official return to the Family of Nations.
Lakota’s efforts are gaining traction as Bolivia, home to Indigenous President Evo Morales, shared they are “very, very interested in the Lakota case” while Venezuela received the Lakota delegation with “respect and solidarity.”
“Our meetings have been fruitful and we hope to work with these countries for better relations,” explained Garry Rowland. “As a nation, we have equal status within the national community.”
Education, energy and justice now take top priority in emerging Lakota. “Cultural immersion education is crucial as a next step to protect our language, culture and sovereignty,” said Means. “Energy independence using solar, wind, geothermal, and sugar beets enables Lakota to protect our freedom and provide electricity and heating to our people.”
The Lakota reservations are among the most impoverished areas in North America, a shameful legacy of broken treaties and apartheid policies. Lakota has the highest death rate in the United States and Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any nation on earth, excluding AIDS, at approximately 44 years. Lakota infant mortality rate is five times the United States average and teen suicide rates 150% more than national average . 97% of Lakota people live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers near 85%.
“After 150 years of colonial enforcement, when you back people into a corner there is only one alternative,” emphasized Duane Martin Sr. “The only alternative is to bring freedom into its existence by taking it back to the love of freedom, to our lifeway.”
We are the freedom loving Lakota from the Sioux Indian reservations of Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana who have suffered from cultural and physical genocide in the colonial apartheid system we have been forced to live under. We are in Washington DC to withdraw from the constitutionally mandated treaties to become a free and independent country. We are alerting the Family of Nations we have now reassumed our freedom and independence with the backing of Natural, International, and United States law. For more information, please visit our new website at www.lakotafreedom.com. ## -
27 Oct 2009 21:59
Cyber Resistance
Dahr Jamail t r u t h o u t , October 24, 2009
If technology has transformed warfare into a spectacle of shock and awe, its contribution to the cause of dissent has been no less remarkable. It has enabled solidarities across borders and facilitated networks and forums dedicated to impartial communication of ground realities beyond the sanitized projection of mainstream news. True, technological advances have not brought an end to either occupation, but it has certainly helped alternative voices and views to be heard.During the Vietnam War, over 100 underground newspapers, run by soldiers themselves, sprouted across the United States. The modern version of this has taken root within the Internet, largely in the form of blogs.
Many American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been confounded by the wall of censorship they confront, jointly constructed by the military and the corporate media. The Internet offered them a convenient and powerful channel through which to get their stories out to the public. Constrained by slow military mail service from Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention overt attempts by superiors to curtail their interaction with journalists, soldiers have long since taken to blogging, posting photographs and uploading videos online, all related to their experience of the occupations.
"Fight to Survive," one of the first soldier blogs from Iraq, had its origin before the bloggers were deployed to the country. The site's mission statement declares, "The E-4 Mafia was a group of soldiers deployed in Iraq between January of 2004 and March of 2005. The posts from this period are an expression of our raw emotions and thoughts while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom II. Since being honorably discharged in the summer of 2005, we've continued to post additional journal entries, poetry, and reflections from our time served and our current lives as veterans as we continue our fight to survive."
Garett Reppenhagen, Jeff Englehart, Ben Schrader and Joe Hatcher were stationed in Germany, where they happened to attend a concert by a band called Bouncing Souls and befriended its members. Post-deployment they were desperate to process the grief, violence and frustration that they were experiencing in Iraq, so they started pouring their emotions into e-mails to the band members. The Bouncing Souls, impressed with the e-mails - which included powerful poetry - began posting them on their own website. In 2004, Hatcher created "Fight to Survive."
Englehart later told a reporter, "We were opposed to the war before we went. And we got together and said, 'You know what we should do? We should write about this shit.'"
Reppenhagen, the first active-duty soldier to have joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, was pulling a shift at Tower Guard in Fort Collins, Colorado, when Truthout phoned him. Tower Guard is an action designed to spread awareness about the occupation of Iraq. Veterans pull together scaffolding, cover it with camouflage and, donning their desert gear, take shifts atop the tower - this one twelve feet high - to maintain a presence where people can ask them questions, and in response they can provide information.
For him, the motivation for the blog had come from having to participate in an occupation he didn't believe in. "We were already against the war before going, and didn't know why we were going, and it didn't look good. There was no resistance to speak of within the military. But I found a purpose with the writing. I didn't want to let my friends down there by not serving, and nobody knew what would happen if you refused to go out, because nobody had done it yet. So the blogging began. As a high-school dropout I wasn't a strong writer," he explains, but I had all these ideas I just couldn't stop, and writing them down was a huge release.... Having people read them was therapeutic. This then became my mission, to have people read about what we were doing. After a while, Joe Hatcher, whom we met in basic training, created the blog website. This was summer of 2004, and I'd never heard of a blog earlier. The idea caught on and sparked something, and as far as I know, ours was the only antiwar blog from soldiers in Iraq at the time. We used aliases; mine was "heretic" or "soldier X," Jeff Englehart was "hEkLe," Joe was "Joe Public." We used these because we were unsure of the consequences of revealing our identities."
Postings from Iraq on "Fight to Survive" ranged in content from asking people to sign petitions against stop-loss, to expressing disbelief at how persistent the military was in trying to get soldiers to renew their contracts, to posting graffiti and commenting on it. An entry posted in September 2004 by heretic titled "My Struggle For Reason" reads:
"Souls, Friends, and Conspirators,
"The temperature dropped to sixty degrees last night while I huddled in a ditch near Diyala Bridge. The breeze off the river crawled into my heart and the sudden chill reflects my current mood. I found out earlier that night that I had been extended an additional two months on top of my previous stretch. It now appears that I will be in the service until July, while my original date of release is supposed to be next month. All this, and my recent two-week taste of the civilian world on leave, is leaving me empty and detached. It is so much easier to live in slavery if you had willingly accepted your fate. I am not sure if my mental fortitude is prepared for a whole extra year in oppression. And, I still don't have a certain time when I will be finished with this war.
"Three soldiers in our unit have been hurt in the last four days and the true number of Army-wide casualties leaving Iraq is unknown. The figures are much higher than what is reported. We get awards and medals that are supposed to make us feel proud about our wicked assignment. We feel privileged when we are given the smallest perk. Like a dog that is beaten everyday and then thankfully adores it's owner when he skips a day of punishment. I have more trust with some of the Iraqi locals than my own command sometimes. I know that my higher chain of command hates me for my political opinions and my moral views.
"I am called a "faggot pink-o" or a "bleeding heart traitor." It doesn't take a liberal to realize the moral wrongs involved with this or any war. Why should I feel ashamed of caring about all of humanity, even the people that ignorantly hate me? Is wanting a better standard of living for all the world so negative? In a way, deeper than sexuality, I love my friends and brothers and for that I am labeled a deviant of some kind. Does everyone buy into this Arnold ideal of fear that they are not strong enough, so they have to over-compensate and become an asshole? I believe that all weapons should be laid down [by] choice of the individual. It is the same fear I have of my bigot neighbor that causes Americans to support a war against a possible US threat. If we are all responsible enough to handle firearms, is it not sensible to allow countries like Iran and N. Korea nuclear weapons? If we think these countries are less responsible than the drunk-driving redneck or the crack-dealing gangster, I think we need to take a longer look at American society. Sure, a nuke can destroy the world, but an automatic weapon can kill my daughter and she is the world to me. I don't believe that taking away people's rights is the proper step to world peace. However, we overspend on national defense and cut education when we need to be more concerned about raising a generation of problem solvers, instead of mindless warriors.
"So I finally find the drive to get out and try to make a difference in the world, and I am stuck freezing in a Middle Eastern desert. What state will the earth be in if I ever escape this combat zone? What little changes I can make, I do through the networks I have built up with my close friends. The Bouncing Souls have given us soldiers a voice and forum to express the hardships and our feelings on the Iraq occupation. All my friends, some new and some old, listen and support our efforts and they have my deepest respect and thanks. I could not survive this in any sane manner without the backing of all of you. I cannot promise that I will have a positive effect on current issues that plague our planet, but I can promise I will never give up, if you never give up on me."Another moving entry from August 22, 2005, titled "Finding Closure," posted by Jeff Englehardt (hEkLe) after exiting Iraq, reads in part:
"There is nothing that I feel can alleviate the guilt for being directly involved with our illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq. I ask myself from time to time, "Why was I so afraid to resist the order to go to war? Why didn't I object to the whole damned thing?" I have been told many times not to be ashamed for my service to this country, but I can't help a genuine intuition that this war is not designed to promote freedom and our beautiful American way of life, but instead only carried out to proliferate Western imperialism and corporate profits every time a bullet is fired. My guilt is synonymous with the sentiment that I was indeed on the wrong side of the wire."
* * * As the blogging continued, the audience expanded. Radio personality Randi Rhodes, who at the time brought Air America Radio its largest audience to date, began reading their dispatches on air.
As was to be expected, the military began to crack down on the writers. "It was not difficult for them to track what base and unit the writing was coming from and they were able to narrow it down to me," says Reppenhagen. "My sniper section leader walked into my room and asked if I was writing something stupid on the Internet. I admitted I was posting writings, but whether it was stupid depended on the readers' views, and he told me to report to the colonel who wanted to ask me questions about this shit I was writing."
All along, Reppenhagen felt he was leading a dual existence:
"I was living two lives, going outside the wire, but still writing on the blog, all the time looking over my shoulder. I was afraid of our e-mails being monitored, and there was a lot of isolation." He rarely crossed paths with the other members of the E-4 Mafia, and knew that he would have to deal with the colonel alone. From his perch on the tower, he recounted, "I did the whole thing, saluting him, doing the full pivot, and coming to at-ease, and he has a stack of everything we had written, and copies of personal e-mails I had written. He asked me if I had written it and I said yes. He told me I should stop writing, that I was going to be investigated by Military Intelligence and if found to have violated operational security, I would be tried for treason. I was scared."
Undeterred, he kept blogging and was soon summoned by the colonel once again.
"I told him I had a right to continue. They pulled my computers, tried to limit my access, took me off sniper duty, and put me on guard duty of Iraqis on base. The last two months were lonely and difficult for me. I was afraid I would be court-martialed. In the end, it was determined that nothing I wrote had violated operational security and that I had committed no treason and, since there were no rules prohibiting blogging, I had broken no rules either. But I was continually hazed by my superiors as long as I was there.... They were constantly looking for ways to trap me. I was made to fill sandbags and do other menial jobs. However, I was finally awarded an honorable discharge in May 2005, and gained a lot of respect from most of my fellow soldiers. Many would give me the peace sign as they passed me by."
Reppenhagen dove headlong into activism after being discharged. He took a job with Veterans for America, in Washington, DC, and volunteered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Coming full circle, Reppenhagen had one of his poems set to music by the Bouncing Souls. They called it "Letter from Iraq."
In 2007, he moved to Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, and enrolled in a community college to study to become a history teacher.
He shares his plans: "I continue now to work at helping veterans get the mental and physical health care they deserve. And I want to teach history in high school.... One of my dreams is to teach on a Native American reservation. After coming back from Iraq, I traveled around a lot, and saw many reservations, and saw this grinding poverty there similar to what I saw in Iraq, and decided that that is where I can help the most."
On being discharged, the other E-4 Mafia members also moved to Colorado: Schrader to Fort Collins, Hatcher to Cascade and Englehart to Denver. They continue blogging, alongside antiwar activism.
* * * Casey J. Porter, a specialist from Austin, Texas, served one year in Iraq and in fall 2008 was on his second deployment after having been stop-lossed. His contract ended January 21, 2008, but he was redeployed on March 9, although diagnosed with PTSD by a civilian doctor. As he says on a YouTube video, "I am making the best of it by making short films about what really goes on over here."
A post from him on a blog called "Soldier Voices" reads: "Some of you might already know me through my films. I am a Stop-Lossed Soldier currently in Iraq." There is a website for his work: http://www.youtube.com/caseyjporter."
Porter's films feature raw footage coupled with a compelling background score. Scenes include mortar attacks against bases, military personnel running for cover during mortar attacks as explosions echo in the background, gun battles, destroyed Humvees and soldiers talking about their low morale. One film, "Area of Operations," reveals a new weapon of the Iraqi resistance, Lob-Bombs, which are created by cutting open an oxygen tank and packing it with ball bearings, screws and bolts as shrapnel before welding it back together and pressurizing. The film also shows a Lob-Bomb attack that killed two soldiers, which the Associated Press reported as having been caused by small-arms fire. Truthout spoke with Porter by telephone when he was at Forward Operating Base Rustamiyah. He said there were two versions in the military and corporate media reportage of the deaths: "One reported it as small-arms fire and the other as indirect fire. Indirect fire is obviously a very general term, so the Army can say, 'Oh, it is indirect fire, it's not an accurate weapon.' But when the public hears of indirect fire, they think some guy is shooting at you with a machine gun."
There is a clip in the film that has audio recordings from military radios after the attack. It presents a soldier saying, "The K.I.A. [killed in action], I can't tell you who they are, they're in pieces, break ..."
Later in the film, a soldier in Iraq says to the camera, "Would this country be the way it is right now had we done anything close to what we promised before we came over? The Humvees we drive, they are not doing the drive over here as protection ... not even the slightest. The MRAP [mine resistant, ambush protected] still won't stop an EFP [explosively formed penetrator]. But it's a big vehicle and makes a lot of noise and that's what the American people want, apparently." The camera goes on to show Humvees destroyed by roadside bombs, then returns to the soldier who says, "I won't be surprised if they turn this place into a duty station. I mean look at all the nations that we've liberated. Look at Germany, Korea. I'm pretty sure at one time somebody thought, 'Hey, we're only going to be here for a couple of months.'"
Another of Porter's films, "What War Looks Like," shows scenes of destroyed military hardware. Pictures of blown-up tanks and Humvees crushed by roadside bombs are seen flashing across the screen. Other scenes show burnt-out Bradley fighting vehicles atop transport trucks, decomposed bodies of fighters, and then the names and photos of "friends we lost," US soldiers killed in Iraq. After photos of a body being loaded for shipment back to the United States, the screen goes black as the text reads, "It's not politics, it is saving soldiers' lives, bring us home now."
Truthout asked Porter what had made him decide to make the films.
He said, "After coming back from my first tour, I was so against the war that I started speaking out and showing videos I'd made from footage I'd shot during my first deployment. Then when I got stop-lossed, I decided I'm not going to be another American who complains about the situation and then does nothing. Going AWOL wasn't a realistic option for me, so instead of being complacent about something I feel is wrong, I decided to make films to show people what they're not seeing on television, and to show people that I'm not the only soldier that feels this way. Along with very realistic combat footage, I showed real threats facing soldiers, some of the financial traps, and other issues they must deal with during deployment."
Porter talks of the morale in Iraq being poor and more soldiers than ever beginning to question the mission. However, he added, "One thing that disappoints me about American soldiers is the apathy, the 'what can you do?' mentality. But they are more or less speaking their minds by not reenlisting though they are afraid of the consequences of actively speaking up. More of them are doing it, but still not as many as should. The Army seems like such a big giant, and the threat of, well, if you do this we're going to punish you, and we own you, and all this and that. Then this gets into soldiers' heads."
* * * Iraq war veteran and former Marine Adam Kokesh also maintains a blog, "Revolutionary Patriot" where he has written about being assaulted by undercover FBI agents in Washington, DC, about his thoughts on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 2008, and about dealing with PTSD.
Not a shy man, Kokesh did not hesitate to upload onto his blog a video of his speech during a march in DC, where he is seen exhorting a boisterous crowd, "The time is now. The threat is clear. The bands of tyranny are tightening around America. It is our duty to resist!"
Kokesh was part of a team of vets who met with Representative John Conyers in July 2008 to push Conyers to file Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush. In a video of the meeting posted on his blog, Kokesh used his time at the microphone to tell Conyers, who was undecided about filing the articles:
"And I get the feeling that what you're doing and what the Democratic Party is doing is telling this country, as we are being bled dry by tyrants, that we're just going to be OK. That the only promises we get from Democrats are Band-Aids over these far deeper wounds that anyone is willing to admit to publicly. I hear one of the arguments against impeachment, that it would harm the Democrats in the upcoming elections. And I hope that you realize, because you didn't communicate this when I asked you the question, that there are real consequences to not impeaching that are far, far worse than not having Democrats in the Congress or Senate, or a Democrat in the White House. You said you've made thousands of decisions, many of them very respectable, many of them very courageous. But by your own admission, it seems that what is holding you back from this one is your own indecision. You said that I might be surprised by your plans. You haven't put forth any. And frankly, I'm not surprised."
Aside from blogging, testifying to representatives, leading marches and getting arrested, Kokesh has participated in Operation First Casualty (OFC), a tactic of street theater in which vets don their camouflage and take to the streets of US cities to carry out public patrols, realistic mock arrests, home raids and tower watches to raise awareness of the occupation. After an OFC action on March 19, 2007, the fourth anniversary of the invasion, he received an e-mail from the Marine Corps Mobilization Command that oversees the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) to which Kokesh reported.
The e-mail accused him of violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) by wearing his uniform during a political event. "I was like, wait a second, I'm in the IRR, the UCMJ doesn't apply. This is bullshit." The scathing response that Kokesh sent back is posted on his blog. It concludes:
"I fail to see how reminding me of my 'obligations and responsibilities' helps you achieve either of these. It seems that while accomplishing our mission in Iraq, every corner we turn sends us further down the spiral, but there is still much that you can do to bring our fellow Marines home alive.
"So no, I am not replying to your email in order to acknowledge my understanding of my obligations and responsibilities, but rather to ask you to please, kindly, go fuck yourself."
In the chain of events that followed, the military threatened to give him a less than honorable discharge, which would affect his education benefits, but so far the military has not followed through. His case was helped by appearing on several major media programs, including "Good Morning America."
Kokesh thinks the future of GI resistance holds great possibility for social change. He told Truthout, "It's kind of a battle for the hearts and minds of the troops between resistance and obedience. And if the military power structure keeps fucking up and putting people off, then resistance is going to start winning a lot more hearts and minds, you know, and we're doing what we can to further that." Yet he is realistic.
"The forces at play here are far greater than any organization, bigger even than the military itself. It's social, it's cultural ... and I think it is great in terms of what we can do to foster a broader civilian resistance, and develop a culture of questioning authority.... Whether the GI resistance movement is actually going to be enough to end the war, I don't think you can consider it in those absolute terms. We're building pressure. And there are a lot of forces maintaining pressure to keep the war going. If nothing else, we need to be a countervailing force to those and, who knows, maybe that's going to stop the next war."
:: Article nr. 59325 sent on 25-oct-2009 02:26 ECThttp://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=59325:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website. -
23 Oct 2009 16:07
The Movement Against the Banks
By Ruth Conniff
October 22, 2009 "The Progressive" -- A massive rally in Chicago next week aims to express public displeasure with the massive bank bailout outside the American Bank Association annual meeting. Protesters will converge at 11:30 on Monday, October 26, at 301 North Water Street, where the meeting is taking place."The same financial institutions that caused the economic crisis and took billions in taxpayer bailouts are back to earning incredible profits," rally organizers-including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Change to Win-declare. "Meanwhile, Americans face shrinking pensions, rising foreclosures and unemployment, state budget cuts, predatory lending, outrageous overdraft fees, and sky-high credit card interest rates."
Protesters will demand oversight and accountability and reforms that would rein in the banks. It is an important moment, since Congress takes up regulatory legislation, including the idea of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, this month.
The Obama Administration is backing the idea of a consumer protection agency, but shying away from other reforms, including breaking up the "too-big-to-fail" banks and separating commercial banking activities from the investment activities that led to the current financial crisis. Today's New York Times includes a profile of Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman from 1979 to 1987, describing how he has been marginalized by Obama's pro-Wall Street economic advisors for suggesting a return to the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which, before deregulation, mandated that commercial banking and investment activities be separate.
"His disagreement with the Obama people on whether to restore some version of Glass-Steagall appears to have contributed to published reports that his influence in the administration is fading and that he is rarely if ever in the small Washington office assigned to him," the Times reports.
Meanwhile, Bankster, "your go-to site for updates on the financial services re-regulation fight in Congress and for progressive net-roots campaigning against the big boys on Wall Street"-is up and running.
The site, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, aims to be the most comprehensive resource on the web for lay people who want to understand the battle for control over the financial services industry.
The site calls for criminal penalties for the bankers: "On the one-year anniversary of the Banksters blowing a hole in the global economy, no employee of a major American bank or financial institution is behind bars," Bankster points out. "Compare this to what happened after the Savings and Loan heist almost 20 years ago. No less than 1,852 S&L officials were prosecuted and 1,072 were jailed. Over 500 CEOs and top officers were indicted. What is going on here? Don't we believe in holding people accountable anymore? Tell the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI to get cracking!"
Among the other citizens' groups featured on the site are the "10 percent is enough" campaign that brings together leaders from all the major world religions to oppose usurious interest rates on moral grounds.
And just in time for Halloween, the anti-death-bonds campaign focuses on an issue Michael Moore brought to light in his new movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story": employers and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs taking out life insurance policies on working people and naming themselves the beneficiaries, so they can benefit from your death.
All of these issues should galvanize public opposition to the banks' control of their own regulators in Washington. As Bankster puts it, "If you want to rein in the Banksters and if you think America deserves better than a ‘boom and bail' economy, you need to muscle up and weigh in." Only engaged citizens can stop the banks.
Copyright 2009, The Progressive Magazine__________
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20 Oct 2009 16:21
Teaching for a New America
In a number of social spheres we are seeing services long considered the right of the public turned over to private investors. Prisons and schools are prime examples, two of the largest employers in the country. At the same time, large industries long considered the foundation of the private sector are seeing large amounts of government investment that is sometimes called "government ownership" or even "socialism." These issues, that seem to express contradictory motions, have raised questions about what appears to be a crossroads in our history.
We've asked two members of the editorial board of Rally Comrades to discuss with us this crossroads in the light of two articles that recently appeared in their journal (links below): What do fascism and socialism look like in the perspective of 21st century US experience?
Nelson Peery is author of, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary, a memoir of his years in the Army during World War II, and his sequel, Black Radical: The Education of an American Revolutionary. Peery brings the conviction that it is possible for the first time in human history to create a democratic, cooperative, society that is an economic paradise for all. Nelson Peery has over 60 years in the revolutionary movement.
Brooke Heagerty, Ph.D. is co-author ofMoving Onward: From Racial Division to Class Unity.She is working on a new book on Celia, the slave, that will look at how the history of slavery affects us today. She writes and speaks on women, racism, the police state, global repression and the new poverty. She is a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, and editor of it's newspaper, Rally Comrades!
See: "The Changing Form of the State": http://www.lrna.org/2-pt/v16ed4art5.html
"Fascist Movement Gaining Force": http://www.lrna.org/2-pt/v19ed3art5.html
Join us in conversation
Sunday, November 15
1628 N. California (just north of North Ave.)
11 AM to 1 PM
Bagels and Cream Cheese Brunch
hosted by
Chicago Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America
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18 Oct 2009 20:37
Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human GirlBy Glenn W. SmithOctober 18, 2009 "FireDogLake" -- We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings.
This isn't science fiction. Just the other day 30 Republicans voted in the U.S. Senate to deny justice to a human victim of rape in order to protect the so-called sovereign rights of corporations.
I'm not much for slippery slope arguments, but when we're buried in mud at the bottom of a slope, it might be prudent to see what we slipped on. In this case, as Thom Hartmann and others have pointed out, it was a court reporter's memo attached to an obscure 1886 Supreme Court case. The memo summarized the court's alleged opinion that the 14th Amendment applied to corporations. Corporations were people, too.
The rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones was just a logical step forward in the long-standing Republican effort to lock Americans out of the nation's courthouses, an effort undertaken on behalf of corporate supremacy. A woman is gang-raped by her fellow employees at government contractor KBR. The company says her contract prohibits her from seeking justice in court.
Thirty Republican U.S. senators voted to safeguard corporations from lawsuits in rape cases. You read that right the first time. The amendment they voted against, by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minnesota, would withhold government contracts from corporations that block employees from going to court when raped or sexually assaulted on the job.
The case - and the vote - stirred a little outrage, but not enough.
Jones, of Houston, was drugged and gang raped while working in Baghdad for KBR/Halliburton. She was locked in a shipping container by the company and warned to keep quiet. She didn't keep quiet. Franken and Senate Democrats took up her cause.
The crimes of the rapists and their protectors in the Republican Party reveal "tort reform" as one of the great political cons in U.S. history. Tort reform is the not-missing link in the evolution of corporate supremacy and human inferiority.
The decades-long GOP campaign against civil justice was just part of the effort to place corporations above the law and corporatist elected officials out of the reach of voters. Republican voter suppression was another front in the war on popular democracy.
This is the populist issue of our time. Well, it was the populist issue of bygone times, too, but too damn few took up the cause and the GOP ran away with a victory built on fake field goals, double-reverses, stolen signals and rigged referees.
It sickens me that Republicans could generate faux-populist resentment of wealthy lawyers to seal the public out of the public sphere so corporatists could steal, maim and kill with impunity.
Also, too many progressive organizations stood idly by as the values at the core of democracy were attacked. Where were environmentalists, civil rights groups, women's groups, consumer associations, and campaign finance reformers when Republicans campaigned to give corporations greater legal rights than people? They were sealed away in their silos, their consciences eased by their single-mind focus on their particular issues. It didn't seem to matter to them that their ability to actually achieve anything was being undermined by the attack on democratic institutions and core American values.
Now that we have reached the point where Republicans can argue with a straight face that rape should be overlooked in favor of corporate protectionism maybe this will change.
I think American businesses are waking up to the excesses of the extremist assault on democracy. When all the courthouses are closed, they can't get their business-to-business contracts enforced.
I fear, though, that in many places progressives and their allies are stuck in old habits and personal grudge matches. Moderate business Democrats should finally understand that lawyers did not cause any of the policy problems they care most about: the collapse of public education, support for higher education, a safe environment, a predictable regulatory environment. Progressive advocacy groups should wake up, too. When the public is sealed out of courthouses and capitols, all their earnest work for the environment, civil rights and health care will come to nothing.
It is a sign of our moral confusion that we are forced to have a conversation about whether a woman who has been gang-raped can go to court against her assailants. It is altogether disagreeable that we have to have it with inhuman entities that want us to grant them legal superiority in laws meant for humans.
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UK to appeal order demanding publication of US torture docs
AFP
Prisoners on the way to Guantanamo Bay in Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO. Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions. AFP, October 18, 2009 UK to appeal order demanding publication of US torture docsBritain will appeal against a court ruling ordering it to publish secret US intelligence documents related to the alleged torture of a former Guantanamo Bay inmate, it said.Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of links to extremists and spent six-and-a-half years in US custody in Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.His lawyers are seeking the release of information they say will show that Britain knew he was being tortured during his time in US custody in Morocco, a claim which is strongly denied by officials here.Both Britain and the US spoke out against the ruling.Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was "deeply disappointed" and warned the judgment could cause the United States to limit the information it shared with Britain in future."The government is deeply disappointed by the judgment handed down today by the High Court which concludes that a summary of US intelligence material should be put into the public domain against their wishes," Miliband said."We will be appealing in the strongest possible terms."Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: "We are not pleased", adding that Washington kept such information confidential "to protect our own citizens".
Mohamed was taken to the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in 2004 and released in February this year, the first detainee to be freed under US President Barack Obama, who has pledged to close the camp.
He himself says it is of vital importance that the material is released to back up his claims of having suffered "medieval" torture.
"The public needs to know what their government has been up to for the last seven years," Mohamed told the BBC.
"There's information in there, which I'm 99 percent sure, states that the US sub-contracted the UK government to do its dirty work."
Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, a legal rights charity acting for Mohamed, agreed.
"The judges have made clear what we have said all along -- it is irrational to pretend that evidence of torture should be classified as a threat to national security," he said.
"All along, the government has been trying to conflate national security with national embarrassment, nothing more, nothing less."
Mohamed was suspected of attending an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and of plotting to build a radioactive "dirty bomb", but was never charged.
Miliband said the "fundamental question" was not the information itself but the risks its publication posed to intelligence-sharing arrangements.
"I've very happy for the documents to be published -- but not by us, by the Americans," he told Sky News television.
In a statement responding to the court ruling, he added: "The US will not prejudice its own intelligence if it perceives that this intelligence may be disclosed at the order of a foreign court or otherwise.
"It remains my assessment that the consequence of the court's judgment today, if left unchallenged, will be a restriction on what is shared with us."
The US intelligence was contained in seven paragraphs that were edited out of a judgment about Mohamed last year at the British government's request, but judges John Thomas and David Lloyd Jones reversed this decision Friday.
"As the risk to national security, judged objectively on the evidence, is not a serious one, we should restore the redacted paragraphs to our first judgment" in August 2008, they said.
The ruling came the day after the head of Britain's MI5 security service, Jonathan Evans, defended working with foreign agencies while insisting Britain did not collude in torture.
He said his service had faced a "real dilemma" about working with some foreign agencies but "would have been derelict in our duty" if it had not, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Article nr. 59050 sent on 18-oct-2009 16:50 ECT
http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=59050
© 2009 FireDogLake
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17 Oct 2009 19:26
Video: 100 Days of Resistance
AljaeeraEnglish
Article nr. 58979 sent on 16-oct-2009 19:02 ECT Funding Sweatshops Globally
Stephen Lendman
October 16, 2009
In July 2008, SweatFree Communities (SFC) released a report titled, "Subsidizing Sweatshops: How Our Tax Dollars Fund the Race to the Bottom, and What Cities and States Can Do" in which it studied 12 factories in nine countries that produce employee uniforms for nine major companies.
Widespread human and labor rights violations were revealed, including child labor; illegal below-poverty wages; few or no benefits; forced or unpaid overtime; hazardous working conditions; verbal, physical, and sexual abuses; forced pregnancy testing to be hired and while employed; excessive long working hours causing physical ailments, stress, and harm; denial of free expression, association, and collective bargaining rights; and elaborate schemes to commit fraud and deceive corporate auditors.
In April 2009, Subsidizing Sweatshops II followed to provide more evidence of a global problem. It tracked developments in four factories from the first report and four new ones in five countries on three continents producing uniforms for nine major firms in China, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and America.
Two cases relied on investigations by independent factory monitors. Three others used personal worker interviews conducted by "credible local unions and non-governmental organizations with expertise in labor rights." Three more are based on SFC-conducted interviews.
In all cases, the global economic crisis materially increased worker hardships leaving them more vulnerable, in jeopardy, and unable to secure their rights. Most often, the following violations were found:
-- children as young as 14 forced to work the same long hours as adults and under the same onerous conditions;
-- wages so low, they only cover one-fourth to one-half of essential needs;
-- workers in at least two factories not paid overtime;
-- because of excessive production quotas, workers forced to skip breaks, not go to the bathroom, and work sick through grueling 12-hour or longer days;
-- unhealthy work environments in stifling heat and thick fabric dust detrimental to health;
-- numerous sewing machine accidents causing wounds and loss of fingers; and
-- instances of severe repression against union supporters and organizers, including harassment, intimidation, firing, and blacklisting from further employment elsewhere.
The report's findings "are corroborated by scores of academic research and industry investigations." Human and labor rights violations are the norm, not the exception. Monitoring alone won't change them, but perhaps public disclosure can help.
The Honduran Alamode Factory
Employing about 500 workers, it makes public employee uniforms and other apparel for Lion Apparel, Cintas Corporation, and Fechheimer Brothers Company. In 2008, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) reported some of the worst working conditions in the region, but months later corrective measures had been taken, thanks to exposing the situation to public scrutiny.
Alamode agreed to pay minimum wages, provide back pay, enroll all workers in the Honduran social security system to give them access to health care, paid injury leave and other benefits, and establish an injury log as required.
However, other issues remained unresolved, including:
-- further improvement of health and safety issues;
-- ending verbal harassment; and
-- making overtime work voluntary, not mandatory.
Despite improvements, Alamode workers still earn sub-poverty wages, and full compliance with labor rights falls far short.
The Mexican Vaqueros Navarra Factory
The factory produces jeans and uniforms, including the Dickies brand. In May 2007, its workers tried to form a union but faced extreme harassment and intimidation, as reported by a labor rights monitor on the scene. It's investigation:
"found that workers had been psychologically and verbally harassed, dismissed without warning, and forced to sign resignation letters for attempting to form an independent union at the factory and that at least some workers dismissed for union activities have been blacklisted....the official reason given for workers dismissed....was 'lack of work.' "
Two months after voting to affiliate with the Garment Workers Union, employees were told the plant shut down for lack of work. Yet three buyers, Gap, Warnaco, and American Eagle, placed orders with the factory in support of their right to organize.
In July 2008, the Tehuacan Valley Human and Labor Rights Commission filed a complaint with WRC alleging that another Navarra Group factory, Confecciones Mazara, discriminated in its hiring practices. WRC investigated and found "overwhelming evidence that Confecciones Mazara engaged in unlawful discrimination against union supporters in hiring decisions, otherwise known as 'blacklisting.' "
Twenty former Vaqueros Navarra workers applying for jobs were rejected. Another initially hired was fired on her first day after her former union organizing activities were discovered. In response to WRC complaints, the company refused to comply and continues its blacklisting practices.
The Dominican Republic's Suprema Manufacturing, Wholly Owned by Propper International (PI)
It operates three plants and employs about 1,000 workers making uniforms and other apparel items. PI is one of the largest makers of US military clothing. In 2008, Suprema Manufacturing's employees described low wages, high production quotas, unhealthy work conditions, and extreme hardships, all unaddressed by the company.
At the same time, PI distributed a threatening notice to its Puerto Rico workforce accusing the union and workforce of defamation. The same notice said that SweatFree Communities' publications expressed "a defamatory tone toward Propper (alleging) that the Department of Defense is subsidizing companies with terrible work conditions, and safety and human rights violations." The notice concluded saying:
"SAY NO TO THE UNION. DON'T SIGN ANOTHER CARD."
In March 2009, Federation of Workers of Free Trade Zones (FEDOTRAZONAS) workers and volunteers and their counterparts at the National Federation of Free Trade Zone Workers (FENOTRAZONAS) conducted over two dozen interviews on behalf of SweatFree Communities (SFC). They revealed extreme poverty, exhaustion, intense pressure to meet production quotas, an unhealthy work environment, and intimidation-instilled fear against openly supporting union organizing. Even though Suprema has a certified union, only a handful of workers belong. As a result, it's weak, unable to represent workers effectively or organize to recruit more.
Workers said to get by, they need other jobs and loans (at 10% weekly interest) to pay unexpected medical and other expenses. Their work load is so exhausting, it makes "my whole body hurt," according to one employee. "When I leave work, I am tired and exhausted....All I want to do is lie down, but I have my obligations." Another machine operator said:
"The work is hard and the production quota is killing us (and earning minimum pay) isn't enough for anything, for what's needed at home."
Other workers complained of health-related issues related to poor air quality, extreme heat, and fabric dust. According to workers interviewed, they can't act individually or collectively to address issues as important as these or any others. According to one:
"In the event that we complain, normally they don't listen to us but you have to suffer the consequences. One time I complained about the high temperatures in the factory and said it is not good for our health. And the manager said to me, 'If you are not comfortable you can leave."
Another worker said "we discuss problems at work amongst the other workers, but not with management because we are afraid....If you complain too much, they fire you. So we don't complain because we need employment...."
They also fear recrimination over union organizing or joining one. In 2000, 300 union members were fired. After reviewing the case, the Dominican Labor Department ordered 30 leaders reinstated with back pay. When they returned, management ordered workers not to speak to them or be fired. Workers today live in fear, endure harsh conditions, and put up with whatever they're ordered to do.
New Bedford, Massachusetts-based Eagle Industries
Eagle supplies tactical gear to the Pentagon and state governments. In November 2007, it acquired a New Bedford, Massachusetts facility that made headlines in March 2007 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the factory, discovered sweatshop conditions, and arrested hundreds of alleged undocumented workers.
In its 2008 report, SweatFree Communities (SFC) highlighted Eagle's failure to address abusive sweatshop conditions as well as its hostility to an ongoing union organizing campaign at the time.
In February 2009, SFC conducted in-depth interviews with eight union supporters and learned the following:
-- Eagle raised its minimum wage by 50 cents an hour to an average of about $9 an hour;
-- it included a week's vacation in worker benefits bringing the total to two, including an annual July shutdown;
-- a new sick day policy requires a doctor's note, and time off remains unpaid; and
-- workers expressed concerns over low pay, poor benefits, dangerous working conditions, and everyday harassment of union supporters by company managers.
Examples cited:
-- machines need lots of oil; in operation, it "shoots into your eyes," according to workers;
-- excessive heat, lack of circulation, smoke and oppressive smell causes dizziness, head and stomachaches, and for some vomiting;
-- forklifts go everywhere and sometimes hit people, causing injuries;
-- fabrics used are so heavy and stiff, they inflict abrasions, leave fingers bent and stiff, and cause chronic pain;
-- no health insurance is provided;
-- without a doctor's note, no sick days are offered and if taken are unpaid;
-- workers are constantly watched and checked, even when they go to the bathroom;
-- action is taken against anyone suspected of supporting a union; new hires must sign a declaration agreeing not to join one;
-- pressure and harassment are constant "to produce a lot;" and
-- departments are shut down and workers reassigned to divide and separate them from each other.
As a result, workers feel a union is their only hope because it "offers a contract and a negotiating table with the owner of the factory where he will have to realize the suffering we have endured working for him for so long, making money for him so he will have a good future while our future is bleak," according to one worker.
Tijuana, Mexico's Safariland
A division of Armor Holdings, a wholly-owned subsidiary of BAE Systems, Inc., Safariland's 700 employees produce bulletproof vests and accessories, belts and personal accessories, and grenade and pistol holsters.
Workers told researchers that management told them in response to questioning to say everything is fine and not complain. Reality, however, concealed lives of extreme poverty, living at home with:
"No water, no electricity, and no terrace. One room made of garage doors and cardboard. The electricity we have is stolen. We buy water because there is no running water. There is no floor. The roof is made of laminate and cardboard." Workers expressed little hope for future change, even less now in economic crisis hitting Tijuana like most everywhere.
In recent months, thousands lost jobs, and when openings exist, long lines queue up to apply. Women must take pregnancy tests, a violation of Article 3 of Mexico's labor law requiring equal treatment of both genders. Article 26 requires worker contracts with wage guarantees, their amount, how they're paid, working hours, breaks, vacations, and other benefits. Yet Safariland offers only temporary ones, then chooses whether or not to renew them, a violation of Article 37.
Pressure and harassment are constant to meet quotas, arrive on time, and respect supervisors. Failure is punished by suspensions without pay for one to three days.
However, Mexican Labor Law is clear, yet Safariland disobeys it. The Constitution's Article 123 establishes an eight hour work day, including breaks. So does the Labor Law's Article 61 and under its Article 67, double pay is required for overtime. In addition, Article 110 prohibits pay deductions for any reason, but Safariland gets around it by suspending workers.
Articles 177 and 178 let 14 - 16 year old minors work for up to six hours daily, including a one-hour rest after three hours, if they pass a medical examination. Workers said children worked the same hours as adults.
They also reported dangerous and unhealthy conditions, including accidents with sewing and riveting machines and material cutters, resulting in wounds and lost fingers. In addition, hazardous substances are used, including thinners, solvents, and Resistol 5,000 glue, the notorious narcotic used by Latin American street children.
Other complaints included supervisors' indifference to worker concerns, and according to one account: "They do not listen to us, and if we complain they treat us like troublemakers." Anyone caught supporting a union "would be fire(d) or at least consider(ed) troublemakers," said another. "They would put us on the blacklist," a believed widespread practice in Tijuana.
The Dickies de Honduras Factory
Located in Choloma, its 1,000 workers produce apparel under oppressive conditions. Wages are sub-poverty, and at best cover half a family of four's basic necessities. Work days are long, 11 - 12 hour days, four days a week, and constant pressure to produce. According to one worker, illness is no excuse for missing work.
Union organizing is forbidden, and those caught or suspected are fired. One union leader explained how organizers are treated. In 1998, Dickies fired 80 supporters. In 2003, alleged leaders were fired, then in 2005, 280 workers got legal recognition to form a union. A month later, a Mexican Ministry of Labor representative and three union officials attempted to deliver official documents to the company. They were denied entry. The officials and others were fired, and Dickies stonewalled government summonses to answer for the action. Other firings followed, and the company refused to recognize a union, bargain collectively with it, or address employee grievances.
Workers nonetheless persisted until the current economic crisis became challenging. Claiming lack of orders and a need to cut costs, worker dismissals began in December 2008. By March 2009, 58 were gone, in all cases for supporting a union, in violation of Honduran Labor Law's Article 96 that prohibits employers from "firing or persecuting their workers in any way because of their union affiliation."
China's Genford Shoes
Located in Guangdong Province, its 10,000 employees produce work, exercise, casual, and dress shoes, 80% for Ohio-based Rocky Brands. According to the company, Genford is independently audited for social compliance, but SFC research found evidence of widespread labor law violations.
Workers are constantly pressured to produce for low pay under poor conditions:
-- new employees get no income for their first three days; they also must pay $4 for a physical examination, $10 for housing, and another $10 for ten days' meals in the company cafeteria - in total, around a week's wages;
-- wages are sub-poverty;
-- no rest days are allowed for an entire month during peak production periods, in violation of Article 38 of China's Labor Law requiring at least one per week;
-- children as young as 14 work the same hours as adults and are hidden when customers visit the factory; Article 28 of China's Labor Law prohibits employing children under age 16; it also protects 16 - 18 year olds from "over-strenuous, poisonous or harmful labor or any dangerous operation" and requires employers to follow state laws regarding types of jobs, hours worked, and labor intensity for adolescents;
-- excessive over time is mandatory at below the legal double hourly pay rate for daytime work on weekends;
-- by law, workers can cancel their labor contracts by giving 30 days notice, but are penalized by loss of wages when they do;
-- they live 12 to a room in crowded dorms of around 200 square feet with ten cold showers for 264 workers;
-- pollution levels are oppressive; workers describe discharged black, foul smelling effluent into the adjacent river; and
-- at the end of every work day, body searches are conducted, similar to but not full strip searches.
Genford employs a complex system of bonuses and fines to achieve output. Workers get bonuses for meeting quotas that must be maintained hourly, but no one understood how they're calculated. They also complained that they're hard to reach, and they're constantly pressured to work faster for maximum production. In addition, fines are levied for arriving a few minutes late, leaving early, skipping work, or causing trouble.
It's also not easy to quit even though Article 37 of China's Labor Law lets workers do it by giving 30 days advance written notice or three days during their probationary periods. Employers must then fully compensate workers, but they don't.
Frackville, Pennsylvania's City Shirt Company
Its owner, Elbeco Inc., a producer of public employee uniforms, "was the first major uniform company to endorse SweatFree Communities' campaign for worker rights," and it shows in how it treats its employees.According to one, "I am pretty much able to cover my needs. Anybody can always use more money, but I do pretty well, I can say."
The average worker makes about $11 an hour, but some get up to $19 because the company is unionized and was able to bargain collectively for decent wages and benefits. In addition, workers have "a seat at the table with the company....affording them a sense of ownership and respect."
City Shirt's employees are also much older than at other factories studied, a sign of greater stability and a contented workforce staying in place, happy to be there, and for many, hoping to stay for the rest of their working lives.
Yet they worry that their jobs may not last because of factors beyond the plant's control forcing layoffs to cut costs and stay viable. Apparel manufacturing in America is dying. In addition, the current environment is taking its toll closing factories across America, and City Shirt has had to cut one-third of its workforce in the past 18 months.
The alternative is the global sweatshop as oppressive or worse than the ones described above. The company's employees hope to reach retirement age before their operation gets outsourced, but making it won't be easy.
In today's global economy, in good times and bad, worker rights are subordinated to greed and private profit, and future prospects look grim. Job losses are continuing. Wages are stagnating at best. Benefits are eroding, and job security is a thing of the past at a time governments, in alliance with business, are indifferent to protecting them. The result, more and more, is that workers are on their own to endure against very long odds. It's all the more important for harder struggle because it's the only way they have a chance.
Anti-Sweatshop Legislation in Congress
On January 23, 2007, S. 367: The Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act was introduced in the Senate "to amend the Tariff Act of 1930 to prohibit the import, export, and sale of goods made with sweatshop labor, and for other purposes." It was referred to committee but never passed.
On April 23, 2007, HR 1992: The Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act was introduced in the House for the same purpose. It, too, was referred to committee but never passed.
Both bills were introduced in a previous congressional session and failed. They may be re-introduced later in 2009.
Sweatshop labor takes different forms, some far worse than others. On February 14, 2007, Charles Kernaghan, Executive Director of the National Labor Committee in Support of Human and Worker Right, testified about the worst kind at a Senate committee hearing on Overseas Sweatshop Abuses, Their Impact on US Workers, and the Need for Anti-Sweatshop Legislation.
Citing the December 2001 US - Jordan Free Trade Agreement, he gave examples of human trafficking and involuntary servitude abuses that followed:
-- Jordan's 114 garment factories employ over 36,000 foreign guest workers from Bangladesh, China, Sri Lanka and India;
-- Bangladeshi guest workers had to borrow at exorbitant interest rates $1,000 - $3,000 to pay unscrupulous manpower agencies for two-to-three year contracts to obtain work;
-- they were trapped in involuntary servitude at one factory and couldn't leave;
-- they were promised benefits, then reneged on, including free food, housing, medical care, vacations, sick days, and at least one day a week off;
-- on arrival in Jordan, their passports were seized;
-- they were forced to work shifts of "15, 38, 48, and even 72 hours straight, often going two or three days without sleep;"
-- they worked seven days a week for as little as 2 cents an hour, 98 hours a week;
-- those complaining were beaten and abused;
-- 28 workers shared one small 12 x 12-foot dorm with access to running water only every third day;
-- legally owed back wages were never paid nor were factory owners prosecuted for human trafficking, involuntary servitude, or treating their employees abusively;
-- they sewed clothing for Wal-Mart; and
-- other Jordanian, Chinese and other factory workers are treated the same way; some worked under conditions so hazardous that "scores of young people (are) seriously injured, and some maimed for life."
Kernaghan's National Labor Committee (NLC) web site highlights the problem by saying that corporate predators "roam the world to find the cheapest and most vulnerable workers....mostly young women in Central America, Mexico, Bangladesh, China, and other poor nations, many working 12 to 14-hour days for pennies an hour."
Corporate unaccountability is responsible for this moral crisis of our time - a dehumanized, expendable workforce ruthlessly exploited for profit. NLC believes worker rights are as inalienable as human rights and civil liberties and says "now is the time to secure them for (everyone) on the planet."
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.
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10 Oct 2009 13:02
Audacity in Norway
Kim Petersen 
in Honduras, who runs cover for Israeli massacres of Palestinians and Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions (i.e., supporting war crimes), who seeks to proliferate military bases in Columbia, who has ramped up the killing in Afghanistan, and who has overseen the spillover of war into Pakistan.
October 9, 2009
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has seen fit to award a peace prize to a man less than a year into elected presidential office in the United States. So what are Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize credentials?
Obama is a man who has yet to shut down a global gulag, who has yet to end the warring in Iraq, who has yet to oversee the return of the elected president of Haiti (deposed by US, Canadian, and French forces), who stands unflinching on the coup d'etat
Is this the criteria that is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize?
The Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said, "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."
So Nobel Prizes are being handed out for offering hope? Is this an effort to prod Obama along the road toward a peace-making presidency?
Didn't Norway reward Yitzhak Shamir, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat Nobel Peace Prizes for giving the hope of peace in historical Palestine? Since then Israel has carried out many slaughters of the indigenous Palestinians. And yes, Palestinians have resisted with violence - sometimes lethal.
Wasn't US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger co-awarded a 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a cease-fire in the US war on Vietnam? Hope was hung around a ceasefire destined to collapse. At least Vietnam's Le Duc Tho had the integrity to refuse a prize where peace was based on the tokenism of hope.
There are many examples that contradict the notion that Nobel Prizes would spur the US nation toward peace. Yet the leaders of the most warring nation on the planet continue to be rewarded with peace prizes. It defies rationality.
Did Obama offer a mea culpa for US atrocities?
Did Obama seek justice for the perpetrators behind the killing of an estimated 1.3 million Iraqis based upon a concocted casus belli?
To his credit, Obama did something most unusual in acknowledging that the US was behind the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran? Did he offer an apology? Did he offer compensation?
Hoping for peace in a state based on the genocide, dispossession, and marginalization of its Original Peoples, a state whose economy was largely built through slavery, a state built through the expansionism of war with its neighbors, a state built through dominating its hemisphere through self-declared destiny, despite never managing the gumption to apologize for these past grave crimes seems rather dubious.
There are plenty of states deserving of censure. However, when one state with a long history of violence stands supremely powerful and claims itself to be a beacon onto all other states, that is where transformation must first occur in a world whose people long for a just peace.
That will require more than wishful thinking. It will require the audacity to mobilize the masses to a revolution for peace.
Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. He can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.orgRead other articles by Kim, or visit Kim's website
Nobel Committee: War is Peace Mr. Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting just about everything but peace.
Little Alex 
October 9, 2009Friday, the Nobel Committee announced that President Barack Obama is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for"extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" during his first nine months in office. The Washington Post (WaPo) reports the Committee "singled out for special recognition Obama's call for a world free of nuclear weapons".
Leave it to the best manufacturers of consent for war like Glenn Kessler at the WaPo to display the farce of this award. He reports this "is a classic case of an aspirational award" as the Committee's rationale is "an acknowledgement that those efforts have yet to yield results", adding:
Consider the long list of actions that Obama has promised: closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year; achieving Middle East peace; ending the war in Iraq and defeating al Qaeda in Afghanistan; halting Iran's possible drive to a nuclear weapon; convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
Many of these have proven to be very difficult challenges. Obama appears likely to miss the deadline to close Guantanamo. The Middle East peace push is nearly off the rails, with Obama shifting course last month after failing to convince Israel to agree to even a temporary settlement freeze. The North Korea talks have been moribund.
Obama has on his desk a proposal to boost the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 40,000 or more, a decision that could extend the fighting there for many years.
"Barack Obama's campaign may have changed the tone in international diplomacy, and that might have been a good thing," Campaign for Liberty President John Tate said. "However, his actions fail to match his campaign rhetoric. He is ramping up in Afghanistan, expanding the war into Pakistan and his administration is making plans to bomb Iran. At the same time, he has failed to make major troop withdrawals in Iraq, or anywhere else in the world."
The Obama Administration says there is "no option" on the table to end the violent occupation of Afghanistan and no intention of any near-end to the occupation of Iraq with 124,000 U.S. troops there now and the plan to have 50,000 occupying the country after the so-called 'withdrawal' process is 'achieved' in August 2010.
Liaqat Baluch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a conservative religious party, said: "It's a joke. How embarrassing for those who awarded it to him because he's done nothing for peace. What change has he brought in Iraq, the Middle East or Afghanistan?" (Reuters)
In the two wars Mr. Obama has been leading in 2009, 886 civilians were killed in Afghanistan from February to July [.pdf] and 2,629 in Iraq from February to August, Brian Doherty posted at the Reason blog. (h/t: Angela Keaton)
"The Nobel prize for peace? Obama should have won the 'Nobel Prize for escalating violence and killing civilians'," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Reuters-posing as Mr. Pot to the kettle president.
"Obama hasn't even had time to slaughter that many people," Campaign for Liberty editor-in-chief Anthony Gregory posted at The LRC Blog, with tongue-in-cheek. "He has only killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands, though his mass displacement of people in Pakistan is significant, too. But Woodrow Wilson-that man threw the 20th century into a bloody totalitarian tailspin. It cheapens the prize to give it to an amateur like Obama."
As for the Orwellian-named "peace process" in Palestine-Israel, Mr. Obama has done nothing but enable Israel's massacre on Gaza earlier this year and expanded colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Mr. Obama's rhetoric has been nothing different from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush and has not threatened to cut military welfare from the U.S. to Israel-on which Israel is dependent to perform its atrocities.
Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald blogs at Salon: "He uttered not a peep of opposition to the Israeli massacre of Gazan civilians at the beginning of this year (using American weapons), one which a U.N. investigator just found constituted war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity."
"Unless real and deep-rooted change is made in American policy toward recognizing the rights of the Palestinian people I would think such a prize would be useless," Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip, told reporters after Friday prayers.
Professor Noam Chomsky wrote back in June
The plans being executed right now are designed to leave Israel in control of the most valuable land in the West Bank, with Palestinians confined to unviable fragments, all separated from Jerusalem, the traditional center of Palestinian life. The "separation wall" also establishes Israeli control of the West Bank aquifer. Hence Israel will be able to continue to ensure that Palestinians receive one-fourth as much water as Israelis, as the World Bank reported in April, in some cases below minimum recommended levels. In the other part of Palestine, Gaza, regular Israeli bombardment and the cruel siege reduce consumption far below.
Obama continues to support all of these programs, and has even called for substantially increasing military aid to Israel for an unprecedented ten years. It appears, then, that Palestinians may be offered fried chicken, but nothing more. Israel's forced separation of Gaza from the West Bank since 1991, intensified with U.S. support after a free election in January 2006 came out "the wrong way", has also been studiously ignored in Obama's "new initiative", thus further undermining prospects for any viable Palestinian state....
If Obama were serious about opposing settlement expansion, he could easily proceed with concrete measures, for example, by reducing U.S. aid by the amount devoted to this purpose. That would hardly be a radical or courageous move. The Bush I administration did so (reducing loan guarantees), but after the Oslo accord in 1993, President Clinton left calculations to the government of Israel. Unsurprisingly, there was "no change in the expenditures flowing to the settlements". The Israeli press reported: "[Prime Minister] Rabin will continue not to dry out the settlements," the report concludes. "And the Americans? They will understand" (Hadashot, Oct. 8; Yair Fidel, Hadashot Supplement, Oct. 29, 1993)....
Obama administration officials informed the press that the Bush I measures are "not under discussion", and that pressures will be "largely symbolic". In short, Obama "understands".
The probable source, Peace Now, which monitors settlement activities, estimates further that the two largest settlements would double in size-Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim, built mainly during the Oslo years in the salients that subdivide the West Bank into cantons.
Mr. Obama has done nothing more than hypocritically pass a ceremonial resolution at the U.N. Security Council to curb global nuclear proliferation. In fact, the U.S. is expanding its own nuclear production while enabling Israel's covert proliferation of nuclear weapons and the threat to use them-based on manufactured false allegations-against Iran's international agency-safeguarded low-enrichment facilities for its nuclear energy program.
Last week, Eli Lake at The Washington Timesreported, quoting Administration officials: "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obtained President Obama's guarantee that the White House would continue a 4-decade-old secret deal to allow Israel keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections."
Mr. Obama has continued economic warfare against the Iranian people while threatening its expansion and a military strike. These threats are illegal were the U.S. to be compliant with international law-"rules that all nations must follow", as Mr. Obama says.
"Ultimately, he may find on his desk a Pentagon proposal for a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities," Mr. Kessler writes. "Or he may get a call from an Israeli prime minister saying such a strike is imminent.... But is it something a Nobel Peace Prize winner would authorize?"
Mr. Obama has actively covered up the war crimes of the Bush Administration in order to deny setting precedence that would condemn his own crimes. "He's worked tirelessly to protect his country not only from accountability-but also transparency-for the last eight years of war crimes, almost certainly violating America's treaty obligations in the process," Mr. Greenwald writes. "And he is currently presiding over an expansion of the legal black hole at Bagram while aggressively demanding the right to abduct people from around the world, ship them there, and then imprison them indefinitely with no rights of any kind."
"Obama has not proven to be exactly a ray of light on questions of human rights and international law," George Washington University law professor Jonathon Turley writes at his blog. "He is now in violation of various international agreements over torture and United Nations officials have denounced the United States for refusing to carry out its duty to prosecute those responsible for the torture program. Yet, the Nobel Committee has chosen this time to award him with the Peace Prize-undermining the importance of the Geneva Conventions."
Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com writes: "On top of that, you're pushing through Congress a record military spending bill that keeps the U.S. spending more than the top 45 nations on earth combined on weapons and methods of war."
Mr. Obama doesn't deserve to be on a list with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Amnesty International, Carl von Ossietzky, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. He's better fit for one with mass murdering tyrants like Shimon Peres, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Henry Kissinger. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize puts the president on a list with all of them.
__________________________
Obama's Nobel Peace Prize
Thomas DiLorenzo LRC - October 9, 2009 So Obama joins Woodrow Wilson in the pantheon of American presidents who have won the Nobel Peace Prize (Wilson won it in 1919). I learned this morning that nominations for the prize had to be in by Feb. 20, about one month after Obama was inaugurated. That means that the prize went for his rhetoric during the campaign, not anything he could have actually accomplished. As I recall, his two most memorable foreign policy pronouncements during the campaign were 1) advocating that the U.S. bomb Pakistan; and 2) escalating the war in Afghanistan. He did order the murder of some people in Pakistan by bombardment shortly after taking office. I'm still surprised, though, that he won the prize after killing so few people. Usually, one must be a major league murderer like a Wilson or a Teddy Roosevelt to win such a prize.
:: Article nr. 58761 sent on 10-oct-2009 09:36 ECT
http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=58761:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.
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07 Oct 2009 20:53
The Demise of the Dollar
In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading
By Robert Fisk
October 06, 2009 "The Independent" -- -- In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.
Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.
The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.
The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place - although they have not discovered the details - are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."
This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil - yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.
The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power - along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system - which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.
Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.
China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq - blocked by the US until this year - and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.
Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.
Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements - the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system - America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.
The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."
Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.
The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.
"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."
Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.
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