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MISSION & FILLMORE DISTRICT GANG INJUNCTIONS THREATEN TO CRIMINALIZE SF YOUTH
City Attorney Dennis Herrera is holding the first preliminary hearing to initiate the process for new gang injunctions in the Fillmore and Mission Districts. On Thursday, July 12th at 9:30am, a coalition of community organizations will hold a press conference at 400 McAllister Street (at Polk) to oppose the San Francisco gang injunctions in the Bay View, Mission and Fillmore Districts. Community activists view gang injunctions as a reactionary policy that will railroad hundreds of youth into incarceration instead of addressing root causes of violence such as poverty. For more information, call Ana Maria Loya at La Raza Centro Legal at (415) 575-3500.
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DATE CHANGE FOR ANTIWAR PLANNING MEETING:
PLANNING MEETING CHANGED TO: TUESDAY, JULY 17, 7 P.M.
San Francisco Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. (btwn. Valencia & Guerrero)
Let's unite to build the broadest, most diverse and effective anti-war movement!
September 15 — Turn Up the Heat in Washington DC!
Calendar of upcoming anti-war events
North/Central California "End the War Now" March:
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 11am, San Francisco Civic Center Plaza
We want to thank the thousands of people and many organizations that have responded to ANSWER's May 31 Proposal to the Anti-War Movement. The essence of the proposal is for all the anti-war coalitions and organizations to come together to mobilize the largest single mass march on Washington DC under the demand End the War Now!
Most anti-war activists support this idea. At the national level some organizations support the call for building a united mass mobilization. Others are opposing it. The ANSWER Coalition will continue to promote and organize for a united action where organizations and coalitions can come together and organize a march of a million people to show the breadth and support of the anti-war sentiment in this country. March 2008 will mark the start of the sixth year of the Iraq war. If the anti-war organizations desire to unite, it would be an important moment to organize a huge show of force demanding an immediate end to the war. In unity there is great strength—it is that simple.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
(Call to check meeting schedules.)
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Mysteries, Legal and Sartorial, at Padilla Trial
"Several times now, the five women and seven men [the Padilla Jury...bw] have shown up in color-coordinated outfits. One day, the men dressed in blue and the women in pink. On July 3, the first row wore red, the second white and the third blue, leading bloggers to wonder whether they were worrisomely frivolous or unified — or so patriotic as to condemn all accused terrorists."
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
July 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/us/nationalspecial3/08padilla.html?ref=us
2) Rescue Plan:
Single-Payer System Is the Answer to Health Insurance Woes
by Andrew D. Coates
July 7, 2007
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/coates070707.html
3) Health Care Terror
By PAUL KRUGMAN
July 9, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/opinion/09krugman.html?hp
4) New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown
By CARA BUCKLEY
July 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/nyregion/09ring.html?ref=nyregion
5) Delphi Drops Financing Deal
By NICK BUNKLEY
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/09cnd-delphi.html?ref=business
6) Abusing Iraqi Civilians
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
July 10, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/opinion/10herbert.html?hp
7) With Pressure Put on Hamas, Gaza Is Cut Off
By STEVEN ERLANGER and ISABEL KERSHNER
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/world/middleeast/10mideast.html?ref=world
8) Hamas Denies Al Qaeda Has Infiltrated Gaza
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:33 a.m. ET
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Gaza-al-Qaida.html
9) As War Enters Classrooms, Fear Grips Afghans
By BARRY BEARAK
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/world/asia/10afghan.html?ref=world
10) From: RobertRBryan@aol.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 4:19 AM
Subject: Mumia Abu-Jamal - Legal Update (federal and state procedings) [Please circulate]
11) Overprivileged Executive
NYT Editorial
July 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/opinion/11wed1.html?hp
12) Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised
By GARDINER HARRIS
July 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/washington/11surgeon.html?hp
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1) Mysteries, Legal and Sartorial, at Padilla Trial
"Several times now, the five women and seven men [the Padilla Jury...bw] have shown up in color-coordinated outfits. One day, the men dressed in blue and the women in pink. On July 3, the first row wore red, the second white and the third blue, leading bloggers to wonder whether they were worrisomely frivolous or unified — or so patriotic as to condemn all accused terrorists."
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
July 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/us/nationalspecial3/08padilla.html?ref=us
MIAMI, July 5 — Nine weeks into his federal terrorism trial, Jose Padilla remains almost as mysterious as when he was hidden away in a naval brig for three years and eight months.
Mr. Padilla looks relaxed most days, only seldom betraying tension when his jaw muscles twitch or his shoulders hunch in his business suit. He laughs softly when his lawyers joke, and he smiles at his mother when she comes to court on Fridays. He seems to follow the tortuous proceedings closely, but what he is thinking is anyone’s guess.
Mr. Padilla, an American convert to Islam, was initially charged with plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States and placed in military custody. But the government changed his status from “enemy combatant” to criminal defendant in the face of a legal challenge, and he now stands accused of attending a terrorist training camp run by Al Qaeda.
He was added to the case of two Arab men charged with supporting terrorist activities abroad, and the proceedings often focus wholly on them.
Prosecutors have tried to prove Mr. Padilla’s guilt with a training camp application they say he filled out and wiretapped phone conversations in which he took part or was discussed. But they have no witnesses who saw Mr. Padilla fill out the form, and the phone recordings make him sound more troubled than malign. They suggest Mr. Padilla, a former gang member in Chicago and fast-food worker in South Florida, struggled to fit in and learn Arabic in Egypt, where he moved in 1998.
“Basically, he is a slow learner,” one of Mr. Padilla’s associates told another in 1999, five months after he arrived in Cairo. “Basically, he doesn’t want to speak. I mean, the man doesn’t ... doesn’t move.”
Mr. Padilla could be heard speaking on seven wiretapped calls, mostly monosyllabically. Adham Hassoun, the co-defendant charged with recruiting him, repeatedly scolded Mr. Padilla for not calling enough, urged him to study Arabic harder and offered to send money whenever he needed it.
Mr. Padilla and Mr. Hassoun, a Palestinian whom he met at a mosque in Broward County, sit a few feet apart in court but rarely interact. A phalanx of marshals returns them to the adjacent federal prison every night, but the third defendant, Kifah Jayyousi, goes home with his family. Mr. Jayyousi, a Jordanian-American who is free on bail, sometimes walks with his family to a McDonald’s for lunch.
Where Mr. Padilla eats lunch is one mystery of the trial, but a far larger question looms: What must the jurors be thinking? Not yet halfway through, they are awash in dozens of transcribed calls, lessons on Muslim conflicts in places like Chechnya and Somalia and assorted definitions of jihad.
They have heard about a dizzying cast of characters in the radical Islamist world, from Osama bin Laden to a man nicknamed Fish-Fish, and listened to opposing views of whether Mr. Hassoun spoke in code on wiretapped calls. (One can imagine the jurors in deliberations, arguing over whether “eating cheese” means waging jihad or enjoying a chunk of Gruyère.)
The government has not linked any of the defendants to specific violent acts. So unless a bombshell is pending, the jurors will have to decide whether the government’s interpretation of the intercepted calls is credible or, as the defense maintains, Mr. Padilla was training to become an imam and his co-defendants were trying to help persecuted Muslims in war-torn regions. They do not appear perplexed, nor particularly interested or bored.
Since the trial began on May 14, their own lives have sometimes proved more dramatic than the case. One juror’s sister died of cancer last week; she wept during a break the next day, prompting Judge Marcia Cooke to dismiss court early. Another was injured trying to stop a car thief; he was excused.
Several times now, the five women and seven men have shown up in color-coordinated outfits. One day, the men dressed in blue and the women in pink. On July 3, the first row wore red, the second white and the third blue, leading bloggers to wonder whether they were worrisomely frivolous or unified — or so patriotic as to condemn all accused terrorists.
The most interesting things almost always happen when the jurors are not around. That is when the lawyers complain to Judge Cooke, often bitterly, about each other’s conduct and plans. Once in a while they even fix each other with death stares, as if summoning a voodoo curse.
Tensions erupt so often that some days it seems the jurors are filing out to their break room every few minutes. The lawyers have fought over whether the government could use the term “violent jihad” (no), whether it could show jurors a CNN interview with Osama bin Laden (yes) and whether the cross-examination of a witness could last longer than direct questioning.
They complain of insufficient warning about exhibits and accuse each other of prejudicing the jury.
“Your honor, this is insanity,” John Shipley, an assistant attorney general, said last week, complaining about a late-night e-mail message he received from one of Mr. Hassoun’s lawyers.
Defense lawyers have asked repeatedly for a mistrial, most recently when jurors glimpsed Mr. Hassoun in shackles while leaving court. This week, they were angered when the government’s expert witness on terrorism refused to answer their questions on confidentiality grounds and when, one morning before his testimony, he appeared on CNN to discuss the attempted attacks in London and Glasgow.
Judge Cooke usually listens patiently while the jurors do who-knows-what — coordinate their outfits, perhaps — in the break room. But last week she blew up at Jeanne Baker, a lawyer for Mr. Hassoun, calling her “disrespectful” after Ms. Baker talked over a government objection.
“Tell the jurors to take 10 minutes,” Judge Cooke said, adding, “I’m taking 10 minutes.”
She adjourned court early that day. There are still weeks to go.
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2) Rescue Plan:
Single-Payer System Is the Answer to Health Insurance Woes
by Andrew D. Coates
July 7, 2007
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/coates070707.html
Michael Moore's documentary Sicko indicts private health insurance and calls for its abolition. Sicko joins an American tradition that includes Lewis Hine's photographs of child laborers (1908) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), two examples among many. But can Moore's theme change our nation in 2007?
Private health insurance, usually obtained if our employers offer it, has dominated access to American medical care for three generations.
Two generations ago, when employer-based private health insurance definitively failed to provide for the elderly and the poor, Medicare and Medicaid were enacted.
As the most recent generation of Americans has grown up, the failures of private health insurance have come to touch each of us in some personal way.
Private health insurance has failed to:
* Remain affordable. Premiums, co-pays, and deductibles mushroom, and employers pass their costs on to employees. Health care benefits present a sticking point in nearly every union contract.
* Cover those who have it. Health care costs related to illness are the main cause of bankruptcies in America, according to a 2005 study by Harvard professors. Astonishingly, of those who were bankrupt because of medical bills, three out of four had health insurance at the outset of their illness.
* Protect the patient-physician relationship. Insurance company interference in decisions that should be made between doctor and patient has become routine. Insurance rules delay and deny payment for diagnostic tests as well as treatments and very often control where a patient may seek care.
* Contain spending. Health costs soar, both per capita and as a percent of gross domestic product.
* Improve quality. The United States lags far behind all other developed nations on a broad index of health outcomes.
* Reverse health disparities. Consider appalling data from the Centers for Disease Control that the ratio of black to white mortality among newborn babies has worsened in recent decades. A study by former Surgeon General David Satcher showed not only that blacks continue to die sooner than whites but that the overall ratio of black to white mortality changed very little between 1960 and 2000.
* Cover the uninsured. Census Bureau data show that more than one in five Americans lack insurance for part of the year and about one in six have no health insurance for 12 consecutive months or more.
A few years ago, the Journal of the American Medical Association ran a memorable article about the personal suffering and death of victims of our hodgepodge arrangement of access to medical care. The author, a Texas physician, lamented "the system of no system."
Michael Moore calls it "Sicko."
But mainstream politicians recoil from the suggestion that private health insurance has no legitimate role in society, though they repeat the word "universal" as if in a delirium. Recent state legislation, with the exception of California's single-payer bill, has aimed to rescue private health insurance from a crisis of its own making (instead of the people hurt by the crisis.)
Look at Massachusetts, which this year required individuals to purchase private health insurance. With confusing, expensive and limited-coverage plans, bloated bureaucracy, thousands remaining uninsured and costs continually rising, the bipartisan-supported "Massachusetts miracle" already stumbles toward failure.
Americans know from personal experience that private health insurance ties up an enormous amount of resources in administrative costs and profits -- at least $350 billion annually, according to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. American and Canadian Medicare both have proven for decades that very low overhead costs are feasible in a public health program.
The resources wasted by private health insurance on administration and profit could be used instead to cover all necessary medical care, for everyone -- primary care, specialty care, hospital care, dental care, mental health care, home care, rehabilitation, nursing home care and prescription drugs.
Earlier this year, in a New York Times/CBS News poll, 64 percent of those asked agreed that "the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American."
To share risks, to control costs, to protect the doctor-patient relationship, and to reverse shameful disparities, a single-payer system of public health insurance, with everybody in and nobody out, presents the only proposal that is both practical and just.
This is the idea behind a bill in Congress, H.R. 676: "The United States National Health Insurance Act." Among its 78 co-sponsors are Reps. Michael McNulty of Green Island and Maurice Hinchey of Saugerties.
Michael Moore hopes to convince America that our sick-o system of no system, based upon private health insurance, is a disgrace. Can a film move us to embrace a national health program?
See you at the theater!
Andrew D. Coates, MD, secretary of the Capital District (NY) chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (at www.pnhp.org/), practices medicine in Albany, NY. Please also see the PNHP-sponsored website www.SickoCure.org/. This article was first published in the Times Union (Albany, New York) on 1 July 2007
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3) Health Care Terror
By PAUL KRUGMAN
July 9, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/opinion/09krugman.html?hp
These days terrorism is the first refuge of scoundrels. So when British authorities announced that a ring of Muslim doctors working for the National Health Service was behind the recent failed bomb plot, we should have known what was coming.
“National healthcare: Breeding ground for terror?” read the on-screen headline, as the Fox News host Neil Cavuto and the commentator Jerry Bowyer solemnly discussed how universal health care promotes terrorism.
While this was crass even by the standards of Bush-era political discourse, Fox was following in a long tradition. For more than 60 years, the medical-industrial complex and its political allies have used scare tactics to prevent America from following its conscience and making access to health care a right for all its citizens.
I say conscience, because the health care issue is, most of all, about morality.
That’s what we learn from the overwhelming response to Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Health care reformers should, by all means, address the anxieties of middle-class Americans, their growing and justified fear of finding themselves uninsured or having their insurers deny coverage when they need it most. But reformers shouldn’t focus only on self-interest. They should also appeal to Americans’ sense of decency and humanity.
What outrages people who see “Sicko” is the sheer cruelty and injustice of the American health care system — sick people who can’t pay their hospital bills literally dumped on the sidewalk, a child who dies because an emergency room that isn’t a participant in her mother’s health plan won’t treat her, hard-working Americans driven into humiliating poverty by medical bills.
“Sicko” is a powerful call to action — but don’t count the defenders of the status quo out. History shows that they’re very good at fending off reform by finding new ways to scare us.
These scare tactics have often included over-the-top claims about the dangers of government insurance. “Sicko” plays part of a recording Ronald Reagan once made for the American Medical Association, warning that a proposed program of health insurance for the elderly — the program now known as Medicare — would lead to totalitarianism.
Right now, by the way, Medicare — which did enormous good, without leading to a dictatorship — is being undermined by privatization.
Mainly, though, the big-money interests with a stake in the present system want you to believe that universal health care would lead to a crushing tax burden and lousy medical care.
Now, every wealthy country except the United States already has some form of universal care. Citizens of these countries pay extra taxes as a result — but they make up for that through savings on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs. The overall cost of health care in countries with universal coverage is much lower than it is here.
Meanwhile, every available indicator says that in terms of quality, access to needed care and health outcomes, the U.S. health care system does worse, not better, than other advanced countries — even Britain, which spends only about 40 percent as much per person as we do.
Yes, Canadians wait longer than insured Americans for elective surgery. But over all, the average Canadian’s access to health care is as good as that of the average insured American — and much better than that of uninsured Americans, many of whom never receive needed care at all.
And the French manage to provide arguably the best health care in the world, without significant waiting lists of any kind. There’s a scene in “Sicko” in which expatriate Americans in Paris praise the French system. According to the hard data they’re not romanticizing. It really is that good.
All of which raises the question Mr. Moore asks at the beginning of “Sicko”: who are we?
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.” So declared F.D.R. in 1937, in words that apply perfectly to health care today. This isn’t one of those cases where we face painful tradeoffs — here, doing the right thing is also cost-efficient. Universal health care would save thousands of American lives each year, while actually saving money.
So this is a test. The only things standing in the way of universal health care are the fear-mongering and influence-buying of interest groups. If we can’t overcome those forces here, there’s not much hope for America’s future.
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4) New York Plans Surveillance Veil for Downtown
By CARA BUCKLEY
July 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/nyregion/09ring.html?ref=nyregion
By the end of this year, police officials say, more than 100 cameras will have begun monitoring cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the first in the United States.
The Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, as the plan is called, will resemble London’s so-called Ring of Steel, an extensive web of cameras and roadblocks designed to detect, track and deter terrorists. British officials said images captured by the cameras helped track suspects after the London subway bombings in 2005 and the car bomb plots last month.
If the program is fully financed, it will include not only license plate readers but also 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security officers, and movable roadblocks.
“This area is very critical to the economic lifeblood of this nation,” New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said in an interview last week. “We want to make it less vulnerable.”
But critics question the plan’s efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city.
For a while, it appeared that New York could not even afford such a system. Last summer, Mr. Kelly said that the program was in peril after the city’s share of Homeland Security urban grant money was cut by nearly 40 percent.
But Mr. Kelly said last week that the department had since obtained $25 million toward the estimated $90 million cost of the plan. Fifteen million dollars came from Homeland Security grants, he said, while another $10 million came from the city, more than enough to install 116 license plate readers in fixed and mobile locations, including cars and helicopters, in the coming months.
The readers have been ordered, and Mr. Kelly said he hoped the rest of the money would come from additional federal grants.
The license plate readers would check the plates’ numbers and send out alerts if suspect vehicles were detected. The city is already seeking state approval to charge drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, which would require the use of license plate readers. If the plan is approved, the police will most likely collect information from those readers too, Mr. Kelly said.
But the downtown security plan involves much more than keeping track of license plates. Three thousand surveillance cameras would be installed below Canal Street by the end of 2008, about two-thirds of them owned by downtown companies. Some of those are already in place. Pivoting gates would be installed at critical intersections; they would swing out to block traffic or a suspect car at the push of a button.
Unlike the 250 or so cameras the police have already placed in high-crime areas throughout the city, which capture moving images that have to be downloaded, the security initiative cameras would transmit live information instantly.
The operation will cost an estimated $8 million to run the first year, Mr. Kelly said. Its headquarters will be in Lower Manhattan, he said, though the police were still negotiating where exactly it will be. The police and corporate security agents will work together in the center, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police. The plan does not need City Council approval, he said.
The Police Department is still considering whether to use face-recognition technology, an inexact science that matches images against those in an electronic database, or biohazard detectors in its Lower Manhattan network, Mr. Browne said.
The entire operation is forecast to be in place and running by 2010, in time for the projected completion of several new buildings in the financial district, including the new Goldman Sachs world headquarters.
Civil liberties advocates said they were worried about misuse of technology that tracks the movement of thousands of cars and people,
Would this mean that every Wall Street broker, every tourist munching a hot dog near the United States Court House and every sightseer at ground zero would constantly be under surveillance?
“This program marks a whole new level of police monitoring of New Yorkers and is being done without any public input, outside oversight, or privacy protections for the hundreds of thousands of people who will end up in N.Y.P.D. computers," Christopher Dunn, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in an e-mail message.
He said he worried about what would happen to the images once they were archived, how they would be used by the police and who else would have access to them.
Already, according to a report last year by the civil liberties group, there are nearly 4,200 public and private surveillance cameras below 14th Street, a fivefold increase since 1998, with virtually no oversight over what becomes of the recordings.
Mr. Browne said that the Police Department would have control over how the material is used. He said that the cameras would be recording in “areas where there’s no expectation of privacy” and that law-abiding citizens had nothing to fear.
“It would be used to intercept a threat coming our way, but not to collect data indiscriminately on individuals,” he said.
Mr. Browne said software tracking the cameras’ images would be designed to pick up suspicious behavior. If, for example, a bag is left unattended for a certain length of time, or a suspicious car is detected repeatedly circling the same block, the system will send out an alert, he said.
Still, there are questions about whether such surveillance devices indeed serve their purpose.
There is little evidence to suggest that security cameras deter crime or terrorists, said James J. Carafano, a senior fellow for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington.
For all its comprehensiveness, London’s Ring of Steel, which was built in the early 1990s to deter Irish Republican Army attacks, did not prevent the July 7, 2005, subway bombings or the attempted car bombings in London last month. But the British authorities said the cameras did prove useful in retracing the paths of the suspects’ cars last month, leading to several arrests.
While having 3,000 cameras whirring at the same time means loads of information will be captured, it also means there will be a lot of useless data to sift through.
“The more hay you have, the harder it is to find the needle,” said Mr. Carafano.
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5) Delphi Drops Financing Deal
By NICK BUNKLEY
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/business/09cnd-delphi.html?ref=business
DETROIT, July 9 — The Delphi Corporation, the large auto supplier, said today that it had terminated a $3.4 billion financing plan to bring the company out of bankruptcy protection but that it expects to sign a new deal this month.
The company said it still planned to emerge from Chapter 11 by the end of the year. Its board is scheduled to meet July 16 to consider a new financing agreement.
“We would anticipate that some of the same plan investors would be involved with the transaction going forward,” said a Delphi spokesman, Lindsey Williams.
Delphi had said before that the lead investor in the deal, the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, was likely to withdraw after it was unable to reach a labor agreement with the United Automobile Workers and its former parent, General Motors. The three parties signed a deal last month after nearly two years of negotiations; it allows Delphi to significantly cut longtime workers’ wages and close or sell all but four plants in the United States.
Delphi said today that it planned to file the labor deal as part of its reorganization plan rather than seek separate approval for it from the bankruptcy court.
Cerberus and other equity firms, including Appaloosa Management and Harbinger Capital, had agreed in December to buy Delphi for $3.4 billion. Delphi picked the Cerberus-led bid over a competing offer of $4.7 billion made by Highland Capital Management.
Delphi, which filed for bankruptcy protection in October 2005, recently agreed to share confidential financial information with Highland, according to a regulatory filing, suggesting that Highland could be involved in a new agreement.
Mr. Williams said all of the parties in the original agreement had the right to end it at any time. He did not confirm that its dissolution was precipitated by Cerberus’ withdrawal.
A Cerberus spokesman, Peter Duda, was not available for comment this morning.
As talks with between Delphi and the U.A.W. dragged on, Cerberus turned its focus to a buyout of the Chrysler Group from DaimlerChrysler. Cerberus is expected to close on its $7.4 purchase of Chrysler later this month.
Cerberus’s growing empire in the auto industry also includes a majority stake in G.M.’s financing arm, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation.
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6) Abusing Iraqi Civilians
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
July 10, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/opinion/10herbert.html?hp
With no end yet in sight for the long dark night of the Iraq war, The Nation magazine is coming out this week with an article that goes into great and disturbing detail about the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians by some U.S. soldiers and marines.
The article does not focus on the handful of atrocities that have gotten substantial press coverage, like the massacre in Haditha in November 2005. Instead, based on interviews conducted on the record with dozens of American combat veterans of the war, the authors address what they describe as frequent acts of violence in which U.S. forces have abused or killed Iraqi civilians — men, women and children — with impunity.
The combination of recklessness, wantonly destructive behavior born of panic and deliberate acts of cold-blooded violence by G.I.’s are believed to have cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis, the article says. The soldiers interviewed said they believed that only a minority of U.S. troops engaged in objectionable behavior, but the toll of their actions has been huge.
The article describes soldiers and marines frustrated and fearful in an alien environment in which the enemy hides among civilians and uses acts of terror as the primary tactic. “The mounting frustration of fighting an elusive enemy and the devastating effects of roadside bombs, with their steady toll of American dead and wounded, led many troops to declare an open war on all Iraqis,” said the authors, Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, and Laila al-Arian.
Jeff Englehart, a 26-year-old Army specialist from Grand Junction, Colo., said in the article: “I guess while I was there, the general attitude was a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi. You know, so what?”
For a lot of troops, he said, that attitude tended to morph into a debilitating sense of guilt after their return home.
Kelly Dougherty of Cañon City, Colo., who served in Iraq as a sergeant with a National Guard military police unit, remembered investigating an incident in which a military convoy ran over a boy, about 10 years old, and his three donkeys. When she and others from her unit arrived at the scene, the boy was lying dead by the side of the road. The donkeys had also been killed.
“We saw him there,” she said, “and, you know, we were upset because the convoy didn’t even stop. They really, judging by the skid marks, they hardly even slowed down.”
Accidents, even those caused by recklessness, are bad enough. More disturbing are the incidents described in the article in which G.I.’s routinely abused civilians. Among the worst abuses have been the shootings of innocent civilians and the improper arrests that have occurred in the course of raids carried out by soldiers and marines looking for insurgents.
There have been thousands of such raids. An extraordinary number of them — the vast majority, according to the interviews for article — were exercises in futility, yielding nothing but grief and terror for the innocent families whose homes were invaded.
“So you have all these troops, and they’re all wound up,” said Army Sgt. John Bruhns of Philadelphia, who participated in many raids while serving in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib. “And a lot of them think once they kick down the door there’s going to be people on the inside waiting for them with weapons to start shooting at them.”
In most cases, there is nothing more than a terrified family on the other side of the door. In instances in which unarmed civilians are shot and killed in raids, which happens frequently, it’s not unusual for G.I.’s to plant weapons by their bodies and to arrest survivors on false charges of participating in the insurgency, the article says.
“Every good cop carries a throwaway,” said Joe Hatcher, who served with the Army’s Fourth Cavalry Regiment in Iraq. “If you kill someone and they’re unarmed, you just drop one on ’em.”
The article emphasizes the extreme stress that G.I.’s are operating under in Iraq. A byproduct of that stress is the tendency to stereotype and dehumanize all Iraqis. What the soldiers find out, after they get home, is that in dehumanizing the people they supposedly were fighting for, they often end up dehumanizing themselves.
There is no upside to this war. It has been a plague since the beginning. But it’s one thing to lose a war. It’s much worse for a nation to lose its soul.
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7) With Pressure Put on Hamas, Gaza Is Cut Off
By STEVEN ERLANGER and ISABEL KERSHNER
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/world/middleeast/10mideast.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM, July 9 — In the month since Hamas took over Gaza, the 1.5 million Palestinians there have become more cut off than ever, supplies and jobs slipping away as its rival, Fatah, backed by Israel and the West, presses Hamas.
The situation from the continued closure of the main commercial crossing in and out at Karni has gotten so bad that on Monday, the United Nations agency that cares for the majority of Gazans — refugees and their descendants — announced a halt to all its building projects there because it has run out of construction supplies, like cement.
The halt will affect about $93 million of projects employing 121,000 people, including schools, water works, health centers and sewage-treatment plants, said the agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA.
Agency officials say they are rapidly running down their reserves of food and other supplies.
The anti-Hamas camp of Fatah, Israel and the West is grappling with a problem: While opening Karni and another crossing at Rafah could help revive the expiring economy of Gaza, it could also help strengthen Hamas, which Western governments consider a terrorist group, and its chances of success.
“We need to differentiate between punishing the people of Gaza and weakening Hamas,” said Nimr Hamad, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, of Fatah. “We don’t want the people to suffer.”
But when it comes to practical solutions for reopening Karni, Mr. Hamad refers the problem back to Israel. “The moment Israel is ready to discuss the issue we will see what solutions are possible,” he says.
In a statement on Monday about the crossings, Hamas accused its opponents of indifference. “The leadership of the Palestinian Authority tries to take advantage of the people’s suffering to achieve political goals,” the statement said.
There are people in Israel who oppose reopening Karni, says Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civil affairs. “We are now discussing what constitutes humanitarian assistance,” he says. “Some people feel we should be allowing in water, electricity, and that’s it.”
As for the mood of the United States Congress, which had been asked to provide millions to help Mr. Abbas’s elite Presidential Guard with training and to rebuild the Palestinian side of Karni, Representative Steven Israel, Democrat of New York, said on a visit here, “There is no appetite to fund Karni, no interest there.”
Gaza factories and businesses, already hit hard by intra-Palestinian violence, are running out of materials they need to operate — and to provide jobs. A report last week by Gisha — the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, an Israeli advocacy group — said that up to 75 percent of the 3,900 factories operating in Gaza on the eve of Karni’s closure have had to cease production, according to the Palestinian Federation of Industry.
Unable to import raw materials or export finished products, the factories are closing, forcing as many as 30,000 more families to rely on aid to survive.
Some Israeli officials and Western diplomats say they believe Fatah is keeping Karni shut to squeeze Hamas — just as Egypt has agreed with Israel to keep closed the Rafah crossing, used for people, to limit movement of individuals and money.
Mr. Abbas has ordered his forces in Gaza, including the police, to stay at home and many believe he would rather see Karni stay shut for now. “That is my understanding,” said Mr. Israel, who recently spent time with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah.
Ali al-Hayak, the director of the Palestinian Federation of Industry, said, “Israel is not punishing the government; instead it is punishing the people.”
Everyone says they do not want ordinary Gazans to be punished for their leaders, but only Hamas seems eager to reopen Karni.
Israel says it will work with the Palestinians once they organize themselves and come up with an internal solution. But there are those in Israel and in Fatah who prefer to see Hamas try to cope with the pressures of its victory without helping a group that sees itself at war with both of them.
At the height of the fighting, Israel closed down Karni, the main cargo crossing on the Gaza-Israel border and the only one equipped for commercial imports and exports. Members of the Palestinian Authority’s elite Presidential Guard, which had previously secured the Palestinian side of the crossing and which is loyal to Fatah, fled their posts.
With them vanished the Israeli-Palestinian agreements for running the crossing, which had been designed to address Israel’s deep-seated security concerns.
“We woke up one morning and found Hamas gunmen in ski masks on the other side,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Both John Ging, the director of UNRWA operations in Gaza, and Mr. Regev say they are waiting for the Palestinians to come up with some kind of internal agreement on how to administer the Palestinian side of the crossings in a way that will meet Israel’s security requirements. “There has been no decision in Israel to keep the crossings closed on political grounds,” Mr. Regev said.
Yet when it comes to Karni, there seems to be a general ambivalence and little sense of urgency in either Jerusalem or Ramallah, the administrative capital of the West Bank, where Mr. Abbas has appointed an emergency government with no Hamas ministers.
Israel’s military moved quickly to allow the passage of medicines and staples into Gaza, mostly through smaller, secondary crossings like Sufa and Kerem Shalom, in order to stave off a looming crisis of hunger and public health.
A United Nations report covering the week of June 25 - July 1 found that the emergency imports into Gaza had met 70 percent of the minimum food needs of the population there.
Mr. Ging warns that at current levels, the assistance is a stopgap solution. Since Karni is the only crossing equipped to handle containers, the process of bringing in tons of products through smaller crossings, where everything has to be transferred from Israeli trucks to Palestinian trucks, is slow and expensive. So far, Mr. Ging’s organization has been drawing on its large reserves in Gaza to supplement the assistance. But in less than six weeks, he says, “the stocks will be running out and we will start getting into big trouble.”
Mr. Dror insists that his office is doing what it can. A huge conveyor belt has been adapted at Karni to send wheat into Gaza, without the need for elaborate security measures because it passes straight through a hole in a wall from the Israeli side into Gaza.
Spokesmen for Hamas in Gaza have said that they are willing to consider all options to get the crossings reopened, including the return of the Presidential Guard. Mr. Dror says that if the Presidential Guard returns under Hamas command, Israel “won’t work with them.”
Hamas has made its own demands, especially over the issue of the Rafah passenger crossing. About 6,000 Palestinians are stranded on the Egyptian side of the crossing, which has been closed since June 9, many of them without shelter in the sweltering heat. Israel, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and Egypt agreed to allow those stranded people to enter Gaza through Kerem Shalom, as a one-time solution to alleviate the human suffering. But Hamas officials rejected the idea, calling it an attack on Palestinian “symbolic sovereignty” at Rafah. To reinforce the message, militants fired mortars on Monday at Kerem Shalom, inside Israel, one of which hit the crossing.
While “waiting for the Palestinians to get their act together,” as Mr. Regev puts it, the Israeli Foreign Ministry is also looking into what he calls “creative solutions” involving a possible third-party presence at the crossings.
So far, however, there are few signs that foreigners want to get involved. On the contrary, the European Union monitoring mission which supervised the Rafah passenger crossing has temporarily suspended its operation and scaled down the number of personnel on standby.
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8) Hamas Denies Al Qaeda Has Infiltrated Gaza
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:33 a.m. ET
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Gaza-al-Qaida.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Gaza's Hamas rulers on Tuesday hotly denied letting al-Qaida infiltrate the coastal strip, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has alleged.
In an interview Monday with Italy's RAI TV, Abbas charged that ''thanks to the support of Hamas, al-Qaida is entering Gaza.''
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri accused Abbas of trying to whip up sentiment against Hamas, which vanquished the president's forces in Gaza last month and unseated his political party in 2006 parliamentary elections.
''Hamas has no link to al-Qaida,'' Abu Zuhri said. Abbas ''is trying to mislead international opinion to win support for his demand to deploy international forces in Gaza.''
Abbas, who is to meet with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Tuesday, offered no evidence to back up his allegations.
Al-Qaida's presence in the Palestinian territories has been a subject of intense speculation since the 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
Al-Qaida's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, recently issued a call for supporting Hamas. But Hamas leaders, fearful of deepening the group's international isolation, have suggested they would steer clear of al-Qaida, in line with the movement's long-standing position to stay focused on the conflict with Israel.
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Dear Readers,
The articles directly above and below these comments—one on Gaza and the other on Afghanistan—most clearly illustrate the purpose of imperialist war, i.e., a war to conquer either land or resources or both. Certainly in Palestine it is about the land—about the Palestinians being kicked off their land and herded into the most desolate land, cut off from the world and natural resources, surrounded by the most well financed army U.S. dollars can buy. That was the whole purpose of setting up a separate Zionist state in the first place. It has nothing to do with religion—that's just the tool they use to divide one from the other.
As Jesse Helms, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated in the Middle East Quarterly in March of 1995, about giving funds to Israel, “I have long believed that if the United States is going to give money to Israel, it should be paid out of the Department of Defense budget. My question is this: If Israel did not exist, what would U.S. defense costs in the Middle East be? Israel is at least the equivalent of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Without Israel promoting its and America’s common interests, we would be badly off indeed.”
Well Israel, with its nuclear arsenal is worth quite a bit more than just one aircraft carrier.
Without Israel to do its bidding—to have U.S. Imperialism's back in the whole territory drenched in the precious oil coveted by U.S. corporate interests—U.S. corporations would not be able to carry out its conquest.
This brings us to the reason for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, how they make war work for them. There is no such thing as a kind and gentle war—war is about death. War is designed to tare down the infrastructure, terrorize the population and, most importantly, to divide neighbor against neighbor—essentially to make it impossible for normal, healthy life to continue on any level. (This is what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. This is what is meant by the saying, "driving them back into the dark ages.") This is the purpose of war.
It was the purpose of the Dresden Bombings and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War is not foreign relations it is the harbinger of death and destruction of all that is good and healthy and normal in the enemy's world—that's how the conquerer is able to collect his spoils. It is costly, though. To keep his spoils he must continue, broaden and escalate his wars. After all, the one with the pot of gold must protect it. Not with his life—that would defeat the purpose of having the gold in the first place—but with the lives of others.
For that the conquerer depends upon convincing its own citizens that they are doing this for them. It promises them a better life after. In that way they can reason that the people should make sacrifices—take a cut in pay; give up some benefits—so the conquerers can continue the disruption of worlds wherever there is something of material value to gain.
To the conquerer, people are either useful—like the cannon fodder of their factories and their military—or in the way—like the people of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Or like the Native Americans who were slaughtered wholesale and herded into reservations located on desolate land and left to accept the handouts the conquerer scrapes off his plate after he is done feasting.
This is a sick and inhuman system that will kill us all if we don't stop them.
We must come together, unite, embrace our common interests for therein lies our power to disarm these warmongers both militarily and financially.
First we must stop them from continuing their killing by taking their weapons from them—we can render their army useless if we convince our children not to join and fight; secondly, we must take their blood money from them so that through freedom democracy and cooperation we can rebuild the damage they have done making our priority fulfilling human needs instead of financing even more blood baths for the profit and power of the tiny few.
We must demand an immediate and unconditional end to this war! It will take more than just another demonstration—which is absolutely necessary to make our voices heard loud and clear. We must organize others to join us.
I urge all to attend the meeting on Thursday, July 12 at 7:00 P.M. at the Women's Building, at 3543 18th St. (btwn. Valencia & Guerrero)
Let's unite to build the broadest, most diverse and effective anti-war movement!
September 15 — Turn Up the Heat in Washington DC!
Calendar of upcoming anti-war events
North/Central California "End the War Now" March:
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 11am, San Francisco Civic Center Plaza
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, www.bauaw.org
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9) As War Enters Classrooms, Fear Grips Afghans
By BARRY BEARAK
July 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/world/asia/10afghan.html?ref=world
QALAI SAYEDAN, Afghanistan, July 9 — With their teacher absent, 10 students were allowed to leave school early. These were the girls the gunmen saw first, 10 easy targets walking hand-in-hand through the blue metal gate and on to the winding dirt road.
The staccato of machine-gun fire pelted through the stillness. A 13-year-old named Shukria was hit in the arm and the back, and then teetered into the soft brown of an adjacent wheat field. Zarmina, her 12-year-old sister, ran to her side, listening to the wounded girl’s precious breath and trying to help her stand.
But Shukria was too heavy to lift, and the two gunmen, sitting astride a single motorbike, sped closer.
As Zarmina scurried away, the men took a more studied aim at those they already had shot, killing Shukria with bullets to her stomach and heart. Then the attackers seemed to succumb to the frenzy they had begun, forsaking the motorbike and fleeing on foot in a panic, two bobbing heads — one tucked into a helmet, the other swaddled by a handkerchief — vanishing amid the earthen color of the wheat.
Six students were shot here on the afternoon of June 12, two of them fatally. The Qalai Sayedan School — considered among the very best in the central Afghan province of Logar — reopened only last weekend, but even with Kalashnikov-toting guards at the gate, only a quarter of the 1,600 students have dared to return.
Shootings, beheadings, burnings and bombings: these are all tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of Afghanistan’s public schools. To take aim at education is to make war on the government.
Parents are left with peculiar choices. “It is better for my children to be alive even if it means they must be illiterate,” said Sayed Rasul, a father who had decided to keep his two daughters at home for a day.
Afghanistan surely has made some progress toward development, but most often the nation seems astride some pitiable rocking horse, with each lurch forward inevitably reversed by the backward spring of harsh reality.
The schools are one vivid example. The Ministry of Education claims that 6.2 million children are now enrolled, or about half the school-age population. And while statistics in Afghanistan can be unreliably confected, there is no doubt that attendance has multiplied far beyond that of any earlier time, with uniformed children now teeming through the streets each day, flooding classrooms in two and three shifts.
A third of these students are girls, a marvel itself. Historically, girls’ education has been undervalued in Afghan culture. Girls and women were forbidden from school altogether during the Taliban rule.
But after 30 years of war, this is a country without normal times to reclaim; in so many ways, Afghanistan must start from scratch. The accelerating demand for education is mocked by the limited supply. More than half the schools have no buildings, according to the Ministry of Education; classes are commonly held in tents or beneath trees or in the brutal, sun-soaked openness.
Only 20 percent of the teachers are even minimally qualified. Texts are outdated; hundreds of titles need to be written, and millions of books need to be printed. And then there is the violence. In the southern provinces where the Taliban are most aggressively combating American and NATO troops, education has virtually come to a halt in large swaths of the contested regions. In other areas, attacks against schools are sporadic, unpredictable and perplexing.
By the ministry’s estimate, there have been 444 attacks since last August. Some of these were simple thefts. Some were instances of tents put to the torch. Some were audacious murders under the noon sun.
“By attacking schools, the terrorists want to make the point of their own existence,” said Mohammad Hanif Atmar, the minister of education.
Western-educated and notably energetic, Mr. Atmar is the nation’s fifth education minister in five and a half years, but only the first to command the solid enthusiasm of international donors. Much of the government is awash in corruption and cronyism. But Mr. Atmar comes to the job after a much-praised showing as the minister of rural redevelopment.
He has laid out an ambitious five-year plan for school construction, teacher training and a modernized curriculum. He is also championing a parallel track of madrasas, or religious schools; students would focus on Islamic studies while also pursuing science, math and the arts. “This society needs faith-based education, and we will be happy to provide it without teaching violence and the abuse of human rights,” Mr. Atmar said.
To succeed, the minister must prove a magnet for foreign cash. And donors have not been unusually generous when it comes to schools. Since the fall of the Taliban, the United States Agency for International Development has devoted only 5 percent of its Afghanistan budget to education, compared with 30 percent for roads and 14 percent for power.
Virtually every Afghan school is a sketchbook of extraordinary destitution. “I have 68 girls sitting in this tent,” said Nafisa Wardak, a first-grade teacher at the Deh Araban Qaragha School in Kabul. “We’re hot. The tent is full of flies. The wind blows sand and garbage everywhere. If a child gets sick, where can I send her?”
The nation’s overwhelming need for walled classrooms makes the killings in Qalai Sayedan all the more tragic. The school welcomed boys through grade 6 and girls through grade 12. It was terribly overcrowded, with the 1,600 students, attending in two shifts, stuffed into 12 classrooms and a corridor.
But the building itself was exactly that: two stories of concrete with a roof of galvanized steel, and not a collection of weather-molested tents. Two years ago, Qalai Sayedan was named the top school in the province. Its principal, Bibi Gul, was saluted for excellence and rewarded with a trip to America.
But last month’s attack on the school caused parents to wonder if the school’s stalwart reputation had not itself become a source of provocation. Qalai Sayedan is 40 miles south of Kabul, and while a dozen other schools in Logar Province have been attacked, none has been as regularly, or malignly, singled out. Three years ago, Qalai Sayedan was struck by rockets during the night. A year ago, explosives tore off a corner of the building.
In the embassies of the West, and even within the Education Ministry in Kabul, the Taliban are commonly discussed as a monolithic adversary. But to the villagers here, with the lives of their children at risk, it is too simplistic to assume the attacks were merely part of some broad campaign of terror.
People see the government’s enemies as a varied lot with assorted grievances, assorted tribal connections and assorted masters. Villagers ask, has anyone at the school provided great offense? Is the school believed to be un-Islamic?
At the village mosque, many men blame Ms. Gul, the principal. “She should not have gone to America without the consultation of the community,” said Sayed Abdul Sami, the uncle of Saadia, the other slain student. “And she went to America without a mahram, a male relative to accompany her, and this is considered improper in Islam.”
Sayed Enayatullah Hashimi, a white-bearded elder, said the school had flaunted its success too openly. “The governor paid it a visit,” he said disparagingly. “He brought with him 20 bodyguards, and these men went all over the school — even among the older girls.”
Education is the fast track to modernity. And modernity is held with suspicion.
Off the main highway, 100 yards up the winding dirt road and through the blue metal gate, sits the school. It was built four years ago by the German government.
On Monday, Ms. Gul greeted hundreds of children as they fidgeted in the morning light: “Dear boys and brave girls, thank you for coming. The enemy has done its evil deeds, but we will never allow the doors of this school to close again.”
These would be among her final moments as their principal. She had already resigned. “My heart is crying,” she said privately. “But I must leave because of everything that people say. They say I received letters warning about the attacks. But that isn’t so. And people say I am a foreigner because I went to the United States without a mahram. We were 12 people. I’m 42 years old. I don’t need to travel with a mahram.”
In the village, she wears a burqa, enveloped head to toe in lavender fabric. This is a conservative place. For some, the very idea of girls attending school into their teens is a breach of tradition.
Shukria, the slain 13-year-old, was considered a polite girl who reverently studied the Koran. Saadia, the other student killed, was remarkable in that she was married and 25. She had refused to let age discourage her from finishing an education interrupted by the Taliban years. She was about to graduate.
A new sign now sits atop the steel roof. The Qalai Sayedan School has been renamed the Martyred Saadia School. Another place will be called Martyred Shukria.
For three days now, students have been asked to return to class. Each morning, more of them appear. Older girls and women are quite clearly the most reluctant to return.
Shukria’s home is only a short walk from the school. Nafiza, the girl’s mother, was still too scalded with grief to mutter more than a few words. Shukria’s uncle, Shir Agha, took on the role of family spokesman.
“We have a saying that if you go to school, you can find yourself, and if you can find yourself, you can find God,” he said proudly. “But for a child to attend school, there must be security. Who supplies that security?”
Zarmina, the 12-year-old who had seen her sister killed, was called into the room. She was not ready to return to school, she said. Even the sound of a motorbike now made her hide. But surely the fear would subside, her uncle reassured her. She must remember that she loves school, that she loves to read, that she loves to scribble words on paper.
Someday, she would surely resume her studies, he told her.
But the heartbroken girl could not yet imagine this. “Never,” she said.
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10) From: RobertRBryan@aol.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 4:19 AM
Subject: Mumia Abu-Jamal - Legal Update (federal and state procedings) [Please circulate]
Dear Friends:
On May 17, 2007, we presented oral argument in the U.S. Court of Appeal of the Third Circuit, Philadelphia, on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal v. Horn, U.S. Court of Appeals Nos. 01-9014, 02-9001 (death penalty). It was an extraordinary day in my experience of three decades of death penalty litigation. This was certainly the most promising legal proceeding since the arrest of my client over 25 years ago. At last there is light at the end of the tunnel. Even though there is no way to know when or how the federal court will rule, the three-judge panel’s numerous questions certainly reflected their concern about what the prosecution had done wrong. A decision could be forthcoming anytime from mid-July to the fall.
It was encouraging to see the courtroom packed with supporters for my client. A large crowd also waited outside during the hearing. There were international observers from various countries including France, and a prominent human rights lawyer from Berlin who is also a member of the German parliament.
The focus of the federal court was on issues concerning the death penalty, misrepresentations by the prosecutor in his argument to the jury, and his racism in jury selection. The atmosphere was far different than previously experienced in this case, as reflected by the judges' overriding concern regarding misconduct by the prosecution. Early on one judge asked opposing counsel in reference to the prosecutor’s misrepresentations to the jury during the 1982 trial: “Isn't that a denial of one of the rights secured by the Bill of Rights?” I therefore concluded the hearing by pointing out that even though it is judicially recognized that the Philadelphia District Attorney employed racism in cases both before and after that of Mr. Abu-Jamal, can anyone seriously believe that racism was not at work in this case involving an outspoken journalist who was a former member of the Black Panther Party and a supporter of MOVE's right to exist.
Even though Mr. Abu-Jamal began writing me in 1986, it was not until 2003 that I was finally able to agree to take over as lead counsel. Since then my focus has been on raising his level of credibility, convincing courts to give serious consideration to the many constitutional violations what have occurred in this complex case, and overcoming the errors of the past case lawyers. To date we have been largely successful. Interestingly, every motion I have filed since briefing was ordered federally has been granted.
Oral argument aimed to calmly and candidly dealing with the questions and concerns of the judges. It was not a time for political speeches or emotional-type arguments which I have successfully made before juries in countless murder cases. All possible arguments with supporting legal authority were previously made in our extensive written briefs. Supporting us with excellent briefs and argument was the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, and the National Lawyers Guild, both of whom I brought into the case some years ago.
People frequently ask what can happen now. The federal court's choices involve various scenarios. These include remanding the case back to the U.S. District Court for further hearings, or granting an entirely new trial, or ordering a new jury trial limited to the penalty issue of life or death, or denying all relief with the case headed towards an execution. Our objective is a reversal of the conviction and death sentence, and the granting of a new trial.
The primary problem we have experienced in Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case, in additional to prosecution misconduct and racism, has been mistakes made by prior counsel ranging from not pursing an adequate investigation to failing to raise certain fundamental issues, e.g., judicial bias at trial. This has been evident in the federal appeal, accentuated by some of the judges’ questions on May 17. We have taken all possible steps to overcome these shortcomings.
The issues in the case of Mr. Abu-Jamal concern the right to a fair trial, the struggle against the death penalty, and the political repression of an outspoken journalist. Racism and politics are threads that have run through this case since his 1981 arrest. The issues under consideration, all of great constitutional significance, are:
Whether Mr. Abu-Jamal was denied the right to due process of law and a fair trial under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution because of the prosecutor’s “appeal-after-appeal” argument which encouraged the jury to disregard the presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt, and err on the side of guilt.
Whether the prosecution’s use of peremptory challenges to exclude African Americans from sitting on the jury violated Mr. Abu-Jamal’s rights to due process and equal protection of the law under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments, and contravened Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986).
Whether the jury instructions and verdict form that resulted in the death penalty deprived Mr. Abu-Jamal of rights guaranteed by the Eight and Fourteenth Amendments to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and violated Mills v. Maryland, 486 U.S. 367 (1988), since the judge precluded the jurors from considering any mitigating evidence unless they all agreed on the existence of a particular circumstance.
Whether Mr. Abu-Jamal was denied due process and equal protection of the law under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments during post-conviction hearings as the result of the bias and racism of Judge Albert F. Sabo which included the comment that he was “going to help'em fry the nigger.”
It is a pleasure to announce that we are once more engaged in briefing before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. On June 1, 2007, we filed on behalf of Mr. Abu-Jamal the opening Brief for Appellant. Commonwealth v. Abu-Jamal, Pa. Sup. Ct. No. 485, Capital Appeals Div. (death penalty). The issues presented include the prosecution falsely manipulating eyewitness testimony, and its use of fabricated evidence. There are procedural problems which occurred before I entered the case, these are issues of such constitutional importance that they must be aggressively pursued. A copy of our brief is attached.
I am in this case to win a new and fair trial for Mr. Abu-Jamal. That is his and my wish. The goal is for his freedom following a retrial. Nevertheless, Mr. Abu-Jamal remains in great danger. If all is lost, he will be executed.
Your interest in this struggle for human rights and against the death penalty is appreciated.
Yours very truly,
Robert R. Bryan
London
[Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117]
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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11) Overprivileged Executive
NYT Editorial
July 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/opinion/11wed1.html?hp
It is hardly news that top officials in the current Justice Department flout the law and make false statements to Congress, but the latest instance may be the most egregious. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wanted the USA Patriot Act renewed in the spring of 2005, he told the Senate, “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.” But The Washington Post reported yesterday that just six days earlier, the F.B.I. had sent Mr. Gonzales a report saying that it had obtained personal information it should not have.
This is hardly the first time Mr. Gonzales has played so free and loose with the facts in his public statements and Congressional testimony. In the United States attorneys scandal — the controversy over the political purge of nine top prosecutors — Mr. Gonzales and his aides have twisted and mutilated the truth beyond recognition.
Congress and the American public need to know all that has gone on at the Justice Department. But instead of aiding that search for the truth, President Bush is blocking it, invoking executive privilege this week to prevent Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Sara Taylor, a former top aide to Karl Rove, from telling Congress what they know about the purge of federal prosecutors.
Mr. Bush’s claim is baseless. Executive privilege, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is a judge-made right of limited scope, intended to create a sphere of privacy around the president so that he can have honest discussions with his advisers. The White House has insisted throughout the scandal that Mr. Bush — and even Mr. Gonzales — was not in the loop about the firings. If that is the case, the privilege should not apply.
Even if Mr. Bush was directly involved, Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor would have no right to withhold their testimony. The Supreme Court made clear in the Watergate tapes case, its major pronouncement on the subject, that the privilege does not apply if a president’s privacy interests are outweighed by the need to investigate possible criminal activity. Congress has already identified many acts relating to the scandal that may have been illegal, including possible obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.
The White House argues that its insistence on the privilege is larger than this one case, that it is protecting the presidency from inappropriate demands from Congress. But the reverse is true. This White House has repeatedly made clear that it does not respect Congress’s constitutional role. If Congress backs down, it would not only be compromising an important investigation of Justice Department malfeasance. It would be doing serious damage to the balance of powers.
Ms. Taylor is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and Ms. Miers before the House committee tomorrow. They are expected to claim executive privilege. If they do, Congress should use the powers at its disposal, including holding them in contempt, to compel their testimony.
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12) Surgeon General Sees 4-Year Term as Compromised
By GARDINER HARRIS
July 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/washington/11surgeon.html?hp
WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.
The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.
Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.
And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.
“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.
The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.
When asked after the hearing if that “prominent family” was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, “You said it. I didn’t.”
In response to lawmakers’ questions, Dr. Carmona refused to name specific people in the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones. He said, however, that they included assistant secretaries of health and human services as well as top political appointees outside the department of health.
Dr. Carmona did offer to provide the names to the committee in a private meeting.
Bill Hall, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the administration disagreed with Dr. Carmona’s statements. “It has always been this administration’s position that public health policy should be rooted in sound science,” Mr. Hall said.
Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, said the surgeon general “is the leading voice for the health of all Americans.”
“It’s disappointing to us,” Ms. Lawrimore said, “if he failed to use this position to the fullest extent in advocating for policies he thought were in the best interests of the nation.”
Dr. Carmona is one of a growing list of present and former administration officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan government health and scientific agencies.
Dr. Carmona, 57, served as surgeon general for one four-year term, from 2002 to 2006, but was not asked to serve a second. Before being nominated, he was in the Army Special Forces, earned two purple hearts in the Vietnam War and was a trauma surgeon and leader of the Pima County, Ariz., SWAT team. He received a bachelor’s degree, in biology and chemistry, in 1976 and his M.D. in 1979, both from the University of California, San Francisco. He is now vice chairman of Canyon Ranch, a resort and residential development company.
His testimony comes two days before the Senate confirmation hearings of his designated successor, Dr. James W. Holsinger Jr. Two members of the Senate health committee have already declared their opposition to Dr. Holsinger’s nomination because of a 1991 report he wrote that concluded that homosexual sex was unnatural and unhealthy. Dr. Carmona’s testimony may further complicate Dr. Holsinger’s nomination.
In his testimony, Dr. Carmona said that at first he was so politically naïve that he had little idea how inappropriate the administration’s actions were. He eventually consulted six previous surgeons general, Republican and Democratic, and all agreed, he said, that he faced more political interference than they had.
On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona said, the administration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on political considerations, not scientific ones.
“I was told to stay away from those because we’ve already decided which way we want to go,” Dr. Carmona said.
He described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said.
“And I said to myself, ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science,’ ” he said. “I was never invited back.”
Dr. Carmona testified under oath at a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee headed by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California. The topic was strengthening the office of the surgeon general. Dr. C. Everett Koop, surgeon general in the Reagan administration, and Dr. David Satcher, surgeon general during the Clinton administration and the first year of the administration of George W. Bush, also testified.
Each complained about political interference and the declining status of the office. Dr. Satcher said that the Clinton administration discouraged him from issuing a report showing that needle-exchange programs were effective in reducing disease. He released the report anyway.
Dr. Koop, said he had been discouraged by top officials in the Reagan administration from discussing the AIDS crisis. He did so anyway.
All three men urged major changes in the way the surgeon general is chosen and the way the office is financed.
Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government’s nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. Dr. Carmona testified anyway.
Sharon Y. Eubanks, director of the Justice Department’s tobacco litigation team, was in the audience during Dr. Carmona’s testimony.
“What he said is all correct,” she said. “He was one of the most powerful witnesses. His testimony was very important.”
Dr. Carmona said that he felt that the duty of the surgeon general, often called the “nation’s doctor,” was to tackle many of the nation’s most controversial health topics and to issue balanced reports about the studies underlying them.
When stem cells became a focus of debate, Dr. Carmona said he proposed that his office offer guidance “so that we can have, if you will, informed consent.”
“I was told to stand down and not speak about it,” he said. “It was removed from my speeches.”
The Bush administration rejected the advice of many top scientists on this subject, including that of the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elias Zerhouni.
Similarly, Dr. Carmona wanted to address the controversial topic of sexual education, he said. Scientific studies suggest that the most effective approach includes a discussion of contraceptives.
“However there was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to preach abstinence only, but I felt that was scientifically incorrect,” he said.
Dr. Carmona said drafts of surgeon general reports on global health and prison health were still being debated by the administration. The global health report was never approved, Dr. Carmona said, because he refused to sprinkle the report with glowing references to the efforts of the Bush administration.
“The correctional health care report is pointing out the inadequacies of health care within our correctional health care system,” he said. “It would force the government on a course of action to improve that.”
Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said.
“For us, the science was pretty easy,” he said. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them.” He added, “This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Bush Denies Congress Access to Aides
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
July 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/washington/09cnd-prexy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
California: No Jail for Marijuana Advocate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A marijuana advocate will not spend time in prison despite a conviction for growing and distributing hundreds of marijuana plants, a federal judge ruled. The man, Ed Rosenthal, 63, was convicted in May on three cultivation and conspiracy charges. But the judge, Charles Breyer of Federal District Court, said a one-day prison sentence was punishment enough for Mr. Rosenthal, who said he planned to appeal his conviction. “I should not remain a felon,” he said. Mr. Rosenthal was convicted on the same charges four years ago. Judge Breyer sentenced him to one day in prison because Mr. Rosenthal reasonably believed he was immune from prosecution because he was acting on behalf of Oakland city officials. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned that 2003 conviction and ordered a retrial because of juror misconduct.
July 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/us/07brfs-advocate.html
Patterns: In Studies, Surprise Findings on Obesity and Heart Attacks
By ERIC NAGOURNEY
Two new studies shed light on the role obesity may play in causing heart attacks and, surprisingly, keeping them from being fatal.
In one study, published by the European Heart Journal, researchers followed more than 1,600 patients who were given angioplasty and, usually, stents after a type of heart attack known as unstable angina/non-ST-segment elevation. They found that the obese and very obese patients were only half as likely as those of normal weight to die in the three years after the attack.
Part of the explanation may be that obese people are more likely to have their heart problems detected by doctors and treated with medications that later help them recover from heart attacks.
Heart attack patients who are obese also tend to be younger. And other changes in the body that often occur with obesity may also help, the study said. (Of course, as the researchers noted, obesity is not desirable when it comes to heart disease; it causes medical problems that can lead to heart attacks in the first place.)
In the second study, presented at a recent meeting of the American Society of Echocardiography, researchers reported that excess weight was associated with a thickening of muscle in the left ventricle, the part of the heart that acts as a pump. The study was led by researchers from the University of Arizona Sarver Heart Center.
July 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/health/03patt.html
New Scheme Preys on Desperate Homeowners
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and VIKAS BAJAJ
July 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/business/03home.html?ref=us
Keeping Patients’ Details Private, Even From Kin
By JANE GROSS
July 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/health/policy/03hipaa.html?ref=us
Lessons from Katrina
How to Destroy an African American City in 33 Steps
By BILL QUIGLEY
June 28, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/quigley06282007.html
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/health/03docs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
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