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September 15: A showdown march from the White House to Congress in Washington DC
North/Central California "End the War Now" March
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 11am, San Francisco Civic Center Plaza
I encourage anyone who can devote some time to contact the ANSWER office and sign up for one of the Oct.27 Coalition committees to build for a massive, united march and rally in San Francisco Oct. 27 to End the War NOW.
This action is sponsored by a broad coalition of groups in the Bay Area. A list will be forthcoming.
Funds are urgently needed for all the material—posters, flyers, stickers and buttons, etc.—to get the word out! Make your tax-deductible donation to:
Progress Unity Fund/Oct. 27
and mail to:
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-821-6545
Please sign up to pass out flyers TONIGHT and to volunteer your time and energy to making this one of the truest expressions of the sentiment of we, the people this October 27.
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
To get more information on meeting times or distribution dates call or drop into the ANSWER office at the above address.
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
415-821-6545
(Call to check meeting and event schedules.)
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Oxfam Reports Growing Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
By DAMIEN CAVE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/world/middleeast/31oxfam.html
2) States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill
By SOLOMON MOORE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31prisons.html?ref=us
3) Gang Members Targeted in Calif. Sweep
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:02 p.m. ET
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Calif-Gang-Busts.html
4) Nicotine Addiction Is Quick in Youths, Research Finds
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/31toba.html?ref=health
5) A Little Easier to Occupy from the Air
Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily*
Dahr Jamail's dispatches
dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
6) A Nail in Maliki Government’s Coffin?
By Ali al-Fadhily
August 3, 2007
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail's dispatches dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
7) Baghdad, Iraq:
6 million people, 117 degrees and no water
By Richard Becker, Western Regional Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition
Friday, August 3, 2007
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-821-6545
ANSWERcoalition.org
www.Sept15.org
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 323-464-1636
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
Seattle: 206-568-1661
8) Spying Measure Advances in Congress
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/washington/04nsa.html?hp
9) U.S. Airstrike on 2 Taliban Commanders in South Wounds at Least 18 Civilians, Afghans Say
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and TAIMOOR SHAH
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/asia/04afghan.html?ref=world
10) Chávez Takes ‘Crazy Battalion’ of Supporters on the Road
By SIMON ROMERO
“As for the United States, Mr. Chávez predicted that widening budget and trade deficits portend a financial crisis that could cause it to ‘explode from within.’
‘There could be a revolution in the United States,’ Mr. Chávez said. ‘We’ll help them.’”
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/americas/04venez.html
11) A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many
The Return of the Robber Barons
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html
12) A Bridge Collapses
New York Times Editorial
August 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/opinion/05sun1.html?hp
13) House Approves $460B Pentagon Budget
By Andrew Taylor
The Associated Press
Sunday 05 August 2007
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070805/D8QQSL2G0.html
14) G.I. Gets 110 Years for Rape and Killing in Iraq
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
August 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/us/05abuse.html?hp
15) Fate of 5 in U.S. Prisons Weighs on Cubans’ Minds
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
August 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05cuba.html
National Committee to Free the Cuban Five: Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerreor, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez.
http://www.freethefive.org/
16) On the DREAM Act
An Open Letter to Latino and Latina students and all leaders of immigrant rights organizations
By Fernando Suárez Del Solar
August 5, 2007
Sent by: SIUHIN@aol.com
17) Britain Seeks Release of 5 Guantánamo Detainees
By RAYMOND BONNER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/world/europe/07cnd-gitmo.html
18) Benchmark Boogie: A Guide to the Struggle Over Iraq's Oil
By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet
Posted on July 14, 2007, Printed on August 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/56672/
19) Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?
By ANTONIA JUHASZ
March 13, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00B10F73B550C708DDDAA0894DF404482#
20) Secrets of the Police
NYT Editorial
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/opinion/08wed2.html?hp
21) For an Iraq Contractor, Duty, and Then Death
By ALAN FEUER
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/us/08contractor.html?ref=us
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1) Oxfam Reports Growing Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
By DAMIEN CAVE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/world/middleeast/31oxfam.html
AMMAN, Jordan, July 30 — Poverty, hunger and public health continue to worsen in Iraq, according to a report released Monday by Oxfam International, which says that more aid is needed from abroad and calls on the Iraqi government to decentralize the distribution of food and medical supplies.
The report, based on a compendium of research from the United Nations, the Iraqi government and nonprofit organizations Oxfam works with or finances, offers little original data. But it provides one of the most comprehensive pictures to date of the human crisis within Iraq and what it describes as a slow-motion response from Iraq’s government, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union.
The report states that roughly four million Iraqis, many of them children, are in dire need of food aid; that 70 percent of the country lacks access to adequate water supplies, up from 50 percent in 2003; and that 90 percent of the country’s hospitals lack basic medical and surgical supplies.
One survey cited in the report, completed in May by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, found that 43 percent of Iraqis live in “absolute poverty,” earning less than $1 a day.
Unemployment and hunger are particularly acute among the estimated two million people displaced internally from their homes by violence, many of whom are jobless, homeless and largely left on their own.
“The government of Iraq, international donors and the United Nations system have been focused on reconstruction, development and building political institutions, and have overlooked the harsh daily struggle for survival now faced by many,” the report says.
The solutions proposed by Oxfam, an international aid organization that opposed the 2003 American invasion and helps groups in Iraq from an office in Amman, focus on both Iraqi policy and international financing.
The report — which also includes contributions from the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, a network of Iraqi and international aid agencies — calls on Iraq to expand and decentralize its distribution of food rations and emergency cash payments to widows. NGO refers to nongovernmental organizations.
Medical and other aid supplies kept in seven Baghdad warehouses should be distributed to the provinces and managed by local authorities rather than the inefficient central government, the report said.
Citing the policies of aid organizations that will not accept money from countries involved in Iraq’s conflict, Oxfam also called on countries without troops in Iraq to send more money for aid. According to the report, cuts in financing and the challenge of providing assistance in an insecure environment have limited what both the United Nations and its partners can do for Iraqis. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, for example, used to work with 20 partners in Iraq; it now has only 11, the report says.
Oxfam’s analysis offers no suggestions on how to root out the corruption that has hobbled the Iraqi government and international aid efforts in the past, nor does it address the links between criminal militias and Iraqi government agencies, like the Ministry of Health, which is run by the political party loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
It also presents its statistics as hard facts, without acknowledging the wide margin of error that typically accompanies social research in a war zone. Rather, the report focuses almost exclusively on the need for more money and better distributed aid.
Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, an organization of experts on conflicts, said that at this point in Iraq, the focus is justified. Corruption, he said, is beyond the purview of groups like Oxfam and the lack of organized aid needs to be immediately addressed.
“The priority,” he said, “is to get aid going regardless of such problems.”
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2) States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill
By SOLOMON MOORE
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31prisons.html?ref=us
ELOY, Ariz. — For Bob Weier, a Hawaiian convicted of armed robbery, incarceration at the Red Rock Correctional Center on the outskirts of this dusty town is the latest stop in a far-flung and nomadic exile.
Since his imprisonment 12 years ago on Maui, Mr. Weier, 53, has served his sentence in prisons in Minnesota, Oklahoma and Arizona. He last saw his daughter 11 years ago and has five grandchildren he has never met.
“To them, I’m just a voice who talks to them on the phone for a while,” said Mr. Weier, a heavyset man who expects to be released next year.
Chronic prison overcrowding has corrections officials in Hawaii and at least seven other states looking increasingly across state lines for scarce prison beds, usually in prisons run by private companies. Facing a court mandate, California last week transferred 40 inmates to Mississippi and has plans for at least 8,000 to be sent out of state.
The long-distance arrangements account for a small fraction of the country’s total prison population — about 10,000 inmates, federal officials estimate — but corrections officials in states with the most crowded prisons say the numbers are growing.
One private prison company that houses inmates both in-state and out of state, the Corrections Corporation of America, announced last year that it would spend $213 million on construction and renovation projects for 5,000 prisoners by next year.
“They find that their prison populations are at or beyond capacity and they have to relieve that capacity,” Tony Grande, the company’s president for state relations, said of states turning to private prisons. “They quickly turn to us and we have open prison capacity where we can accommodate growth.”
About one-third of Hawaii’s 6,000 state inmates are held in private in Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. Alabama has 1,300 prisoners in Louisiana. About 360 inmates from California, which has one of the nation’s most crowded prison systems, are in Arizona and Tennessee.
But while the out-of-state transfers are helping states that have been unwilling, or too slow, to build enough prisons of their own, they have also raised concerns among some corrections officials about excessive prisoner churn, consistency among the private vendors and safety in some prisons.
Moving inmates from prison to prison disrupts training and rehabilitation programs and puts stress on tenuous family bonds, corrections officials say, making it more difficult to break the cycle of inmates committing new crimes after their release.
Several recidivism studies have found that convicts who keep in touch with family members through visits and phone privileges are less likely to violate their parole or commit new offenses. There have been no studies that focused specifically on out-of-state placements.
Paige M. Harrison, a researcher for the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the out-of-state inmates faced problems familiar to the large number of in-state prisoners incarcerated hundreds of miles from their homes. A study in 1997 found that more than 60 percent of state inmates were held more than 100 miles from their last place of residence.
“If you’re being held on the other side of Texas or California, you better believe that for many inmates, they’re beyond visitation,” Ms. Harrison said.
The frequent moves can also have a disruptive effect on prisons, whether the transfers occur within a state or not, corrections officials said. In California, a federal court official overseeing a revamping of the prison medical system reported more than 170,000 prisoner moves within the state in the first three months of this year. The moves were found to be inhibiting the ability of inmates to receive health care and draining resources.
In Arizona, where more than 2,000 inmates have been exported to prisons in Oklahoma and Indiana, corrections officials are struggling to provide consistent and effective programming for them, said Dora B. Schriro, the director of the Arizona Department of Corrections.
“Having a long-term impact on public safety and recidivism is that much more challenging,” Ms. Schriro said of the arrangements.
The number of inmates shipped out of Arizona would be even larger, but plans for additional transfers to Indiana had to be called off in April after 500 inmates from Arizona rioted at a privately run prison in New Castle, Ind., in part because of complaints about the long distance. Two correctional officers and five inmates were injured in the two-hour incident. Officials there assigned blame to poorly trained guards, many of whom were hired just days before the transfers.
Ms. Schriro said the riot showed how desperate the situation had become. The state’s overcrowding worsened, she said, after two private prisons in Texas now run by the GEO Group, canceled Arizona’s contract and instead signed more lucrative deals with federal corrections agencies.
“We started to add provisional beds in-state through double-bunking, converting several kitchens to bed space and making preparations to bring additional tents online,” Ms. Schriro said.
Eli Coates, a 26-year-old inmate from Arizona serving 10 years for armed robbery, did time at six Arizona prisons and one in Oklahoma before arriving at the New Castle prison early this year. New Castle is managed by the GEO Group.
Mr. Coates said his frequent moves had made it hard to complete educational programs that he hoped would help him get a steady job upon release.
“I was on my way to being able to finish a college program and vocational programs to get a trade,” Mr. Coates said. “But they snatched me up from those opportunities, and here I have to start all over again.”
Mr. Weier, the Hawaiian prisoner here in Arizona, said that each time he moved, he had to reapply for phone privileges, a process that can take six months. Even when he was allowed to call home, he said, he could not always afford the long-distance bills.
“You lose your family identity,” said Mr. Weier. “And that’s not good, because when we go back into society — and more than 95 percent of us will — the only ones who are going to take care of you are your family.”
Without big construction plans or radical sentencing reforms in the offing, Arizona will continue to rely on out-of-state alternatives. The state has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country and an inmate population exceeding 37,000, or 127 percent of the state’s official prison capacity. Several public prisons are already surrounded by tent cities to accommodate the overflow.
Adam Ramirez, 35, an inmate from Tucson serving six years for a parole violation, sat sweating recently in a 16-man tent at the 100-year-old Florence State Prison, about 15 miles northeast of Eloy in Florence, Ariz.
“It’s always crowded in here,” said Mr. Ramirez, pointing to an empty bed next to his. “They sent that guy out to Oklahoma today and there will be somebody else here today or tomorrow.”
Overcrowding has been a problem in prisons for decades, and the country’s prison and jail population has never been higher, rising 2.8 percent from July 2005 to July 2006 to reach 2,245,189, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin. A report by the Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that the prison population will grow by another 192,000 in the next five years.
State corrections officials and prison industry executives say that prison companies are an attractive alternative when cash-strapped state governments need additional prison space faster than they can build it. Private prisons can also provide political cover to elected officials seeking to avoid charges of coddling criminals and spending large sums on prison construction.
Alabama officials turned to the Corrections Corporation of American for space after a judge threatened to hold the overloaded state corrections department in contempt for failing to pick up inmates from county jails, said Mr. Grande, the company official. The company found out-of-state space for 1,500 inmates within 30 days. When hurricanes beset Florida in 2003, Mr. Grande said, the company found alternative prison space within 72 hours.
But state governments often pay a premium for those spaces. The riot in Indiana in April came after Ms. Schriro, the Arizona corrections director, agreed to pay about $14 million a year to house 610 prisoners there. That is about $3 million more than the state would have paid for inmates at in-state public prisons, said a spokeswoman for Arizona corrections, Robin Wilkins.
Ms. Schriro is moving forward with plans to expand prison space for Arizona prisoners locally and in private prisons in Oklahoma. But she expects the state prison population to exceed capacity by the time those expansion projects are complete.
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3) Gang Members Targeted in Calif. Sweep
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:02 p.m. ET
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Calif-Gang-Busts.html
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) -- Federal agents and police fanned out across the city early Tuesday in a huge sweep of gang members aimed at taking down violent offenders.
More than 400 officers took part in the campaign that started at around 4 a.m., said Mike Campbell, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
He said the daylong operation was one of the largest he had seen.
The effort was part of a wider crackdown, spearheaded by the U.S. Justice Department in cities nationwide and aimed at gang members suspected of dealing drugs and committing violent crimes.
Tuesday's operation followed a six-month investigation and focused on a neighborhood near Long Beach known locally as ''Ghost Town.''
Authorities were looking for at least 25 leaders of a street gang called the East Side Pain, said police Lt. Ruben Delatorre.
''It's an effort to retake a violent neighborhood, and it's long overdue,'' he said.
Authorities blocked off an entire street in the neighborhood, as agents charged through front doors setting off ''flash-bang'' grenades to stun suspects inside.
Several residents were detained and a large number of guns and drugs were seized, Delatorre said, although he did not immediately have any figures.
Officials didn't immediately report any injuries.
A neighborhood resident for 34 years, Rigoberto Martinez, said three of his grandchildren, ages 18 to 20, were injured in a drive-by shooting in January.
''You get accustomed to the violence,'' said Martinez, 71. ''You just live with it.''
According to FBI statistics, there are some 30,000 street gangs in the U.S. with about 800,000 members. In Los Angeles and Chicago, more than half of the combined 1,000 or so homicides reported in 2004 were blamed on gangs.
Los Angeles saw a 15 percent increase in gang-related crimes in 2006 at the same time general crime declined citywide.
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4) Nicotine Addiction Is Quick in Youths, Research Finds
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/31toba.html?ref=health
A young cigarette smoker can begin to feel powerful desires for nicotine within two days of first inhaling, a new study has found, and about half of children who become addicted report symptoms of dependence by the time they are smoking only seven cigarettes a month.
“The importance of this study is that it contradicts what has been the accepted wisdom for many decades,” said Dr. Joseph R. DiFranza, the lead author, “which is that people had to smoke at least five cigarettes a day over a long period of time to risk becoming addicted to nicotine. Now, we know that children can be addicted very quickly.” Dr. DiFranza is a professor of family medicine at the University of Massachusetts.
The researchers recruited 1,246 sixth-grade volunteers in public schools in Massachusetts, interviewing them 11 times over a four-year period. They also took saliva samples to determine blood levels of nicotine and link them to addictive behavior. At some time during the four years almost a third of the children puffed on a cigarette, more than 17 percent inhaled, and about 7.5 percent used tobacco daily.
Since inhaling is required for sufficient drug delivery to cause dependence, the researchers limited their analysis, published in the July issue of The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, to the 217 inhalers in the group. Their average age when they first inhaled was 12.8 years. Of these, almost 60 percent had lost some control over their smoking, and 38 percent developed tobacco dependence as defined by the widely used diagnostic manual published by the World Health Organization.
In the 10 percent of children who were most susceptible, cravings began within two days of the first inhalation, and saliva analysis showed that being dependent did not require high blood levels of nicotine throughout the day. In some cases dependence could be diagnosed as early as 13 days after the first smoking episode.
For most inhalers, daily smoking was not required to cause withdrawal symptoms. More than 70 percent had cravings that were difficult to control before they were smoking every day. The biochemical analyses confirmed this: the symptoms of dependence began mostly at the lowest levels of nicotine intake.
“We know very little about the natural history of dependence,” said Denise B. Kandel, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia and a widely published addiction researcher who was not involved in the study. “This is really the first study that addresses the issue. Its strength is that DiFranza has followed a community sample of adolescents and interviewed them every three months, which is very difficult to do.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “his definition of dependence is based on single symptoms, which may be open to question.”
The definition of tobacco addiction is controversial, but the scientists used widely accepted criteria to diagnose dependence and a well-validated questionnaire to determine the extent to which smokers had allowed the habit to dictate their behavior.
The researchers write that it may seem implausible that intermittent smoking could provide relief from withdrawal symptoms. But in fact a single dose of nicotine has effects on the brain that can last as long as a month, and the nicotine obtained from just one or two puffs on a cigarette will occupy half of the brain’s nicotinic receptors, the molecules specifically sought by nicotine in tobacco addiction.
The authors acknowledge that some of their data is retrospective and comes from self-reports, which can be unreliable, and that it is not possible to draw conclusions about other populations from their sample. In addition, they did not consider the roles of puberty, alcohol and other drug use. But the study has considerable strengths in measuring frequency and duration of smoking and in collecting exposure data by biochemical analysis as well as by repeated interviews.
“People used to think that long-term heavy use caused addiction,” Dr. DiFranza said. “Now, we know it’s the other way around: addiction is what causes long-term heavy use.”
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5) A Little Easier to Occupy from the Air
Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily*
Dahr Jamail's dispatches
dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
BAGHDAD, Jul 31 (IPS) - Many Iraqis believe the dramatic escalation in U.S. military use of air power is a sign of defeat for the occupation forces on the ground.
U.S. Air Force and Navy aircraft dropped five times as many bombs in Iraq during the first six months of this year as over the first half of 2006, according to official information.
They dropped 437 bombs and missiles in Iraq in the first half of 2007, compared to 86 in the first half of 2006. This is also three times more than in the second half of 2006, according to Air Force data.
The Air Force has also been expanding its air bases in Iraq and adding entire squadrons. It is now preparing to use a new robotic fighter known as the Reaper. The Reaper is a hunter-killer drone that can be operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.
"We find it strange that the big strategists of the U.S. military have actually failed in finding solutions on the ground and are now back to air raids that kill more civilians than militants," former Iraqi army brigadier-general Ahmed Issa told IPS.
"On the other hand, they are giving away the land to local forces that they know are incapable of facing the militants, who will grab the first chance of U.S. withdrawal to bases to hit back and hold the ground again."
"Going back to air raids is an alarming sign of defeat," Salim Rahman, an Iraqi political analyst from Baghdad told IPS. "To bombard an area only means that it is in the hands of the enemy."
"Our area is under threat of air raids all the time," Mahmmod Taha from the Arab Jboor area southwest of Baghdad told IPS. "Each time they bombed our area, civilians were killed by the dozens, and civilians' houses were destroyed. They could not fight the resistance face to face, and so they take revenge from the air."
May 2007 was the most violent month for U.S. forces in Iraq in nearly three years, according to the U.S. Department of Defence.
There were 6,039 attacks on U.S. and Iraqi government forces, 1,348 roadside bombs detonated under their vehicles, 286 "complex ambushes" involving roadside bombs and coordinated teams of attackers were carried out, 102 car bombs exploded, 126 U.S. soldiers were killed and 652 were wounded.
The U.S. forces have been hitting back at predominantly Sunni areas such as those around Fallujah. But the forces have also targeted Shia pilgrims around Najaf in the south.
"Air raids are back even in Shia areas like Sadr City in Baghdad and many southern cities like Diwaniya, Samawa, and Kut where the al-Mehdi militia (of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr) controls the ground," Abbas Abdul-Mehdi from Diwaniya told IPS while on a visit to Baghdad. "Their bombs fall on our heads, while the militiamen know how to hide and escape."
The U.S. forces are looking to do more of all this. "There are times when the Army wishes we had more jets," F-16 pilot Lt. Col. Steve Williams, commander of the 13th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron told reporters.
"What the U.S. forces are doing now is increasing their air force potential in a last attempt to crush the fighters with the minimum casualties possible," retired Iraqi Army colonel Mustafa Abbood from Baghdad told IPS. "It is a desperate attempt to make Iraqis turn against their fellow-fighters. It failed in Fallujah, and I do not see how it will work elsewhere."
Iraqis around Baghdad say they have noticed more air traffic in recent months. "There is a notable increase in the number of airplanes flying in the Iraqi skies," Amjad Fadhil, a farmer from Latifiya, south of Baghdad, told IPS. "F-16s and helicopters are roaring like monsters everywhere." There are more than 100 U.S. aircraft crisscrossing Iraqi air space at any one time.
Air Force engineers are working long hours to upgrade Balad air base, just north of Baghdad, which already supports 10,000 air operations per week. One of the two 11,000-foot runways has been reinforced to withstand five to seven years more of hard use.
Ten-year-old Salli Hussein lost both her legs when her home was bombed by a U.S. jet fighter near the Abu Ghraib area of Baghdad in November 2006. Her 11-year-old brother, Akram, and cousin Tabarak were torn to pieces in that missile attack.
"I want to have legs again so that I can play with my friends and make Mama happy," she told this IPS correspondent.
(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
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6) A Nail in Maliki Government’s Coffin?
By Ali al-Fadhily
August 3, 2007
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail's dispatches dahr_jamail_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com
The recent resignations of Iraq’s Army Chief of Staff and several of his council military leaders underscore a continuing decomposition of Iraq’s U.S.-backed government.
Everybody in Iraq—politicians, political analysts, poets, scientists, porters—seems to agree that the U.S.-backed Iraqi government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is a total failure.
Security, basic services, and all measurable levels of Iraq’s infrastructure are worse now than under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, the U.S., Britain and Iran all continue to support this government.
“Politicians in this country are the best at serving their personal interests, and that is what has kept al-Maliki in power,” Amjad Hussein, an Iraqi journalist in Baghdad told IPS. “Wherever I go in Iraq, people complain of the very bad living conditions caused by the wrong policies of this government. Even those who voted for the (Shia) Iraqi coalition bite their fingers in regret for the support they gave to this group of people who have led the country into darkness.”
Withdrawals from the government by individual ministers and by political groups was the first sign of the end of al-Maliki’s political life, but the U.S. government has remained insistent on keeping al-Maliki at the top of Iraq’s leadership.
“I strongly believe that it was American pressure on the (Sunni) al-Tawafuq Sunni group that stopped them from withdrawal from the government,” a senior member of al-Tawafuq told IPS on condition of anonymity. “I preferred to clear my conscience and so I have decided to end my political activities. I am looking for a way to take my family across the border for their safety. It is a sin to be a politician in Iraq nowadays.”
On August 1 Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political bloc, the Accordance Front, announced its withdrawal from the splintering government, dealing another huge blow to al-Maliki’s hopes of maintaining a unity government.
The Front has 44 of parliament’s 275 seats, and its withdrawal from the 14-month-old government is the second such action by a faction. Five ministers loyal to Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr quit the government in April to protest al-Maliki’s reluctance to announce a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.
One of the biggest blows to al-Maliki has come from the Iraqi army after Major General Babaker Zebari, a Kurd who was army chief of staff, resigned on Jul. 31 to leave for Kurdish controlled northern Iraq. The resignation of Maj. Gen Zebari was followed by the resignation of nine other generals in protest against “al-Maliki’s interference with their professional work, and the weakness of the defense minister.”
According to some reports al-Maliki rejected Zebari’s resignation. The regional president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, will address the issue with al-Maliki during an upcoming meeting in Baghdad.
“Only those who have strong ties with Iran will stay with al-Maliki,” one of the nine officers told a source close to IPS. “We would rather be assassinated by death squads than be part of this government that insists on being sectarian and Iranian by all measures.”
Prime Minister Maliki is secretary general of the al-Dawa Party, and was in exile in Iran after leading insurgent groups against former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Relations between Maliki and U.S. officials have also collapsed. Last weekend the Daily Telegraph in London reported that relations between the top U.S. general in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and al-Maliki are so bad that the Iraqi leader made a direct appeal U.S. President to George Bush for removal of Petraeus.
An Iraqi source said Maliki made the appeal to Bush through a videoconference for Petraeus’s military strategy of arming Sunni tribal fighters to battle al-Qaeda to be abandoned.
“He told Bush that if Petraeus continues, he would arm Shia militias,” the official said. “Bush told Maliki to calm down.”
Petraeus’s spokesman Col. Steve Boylan denied these reports, but evidence suggests that Maliki has been allowing Shia militias to arm themselves and control vast areas of Iraq for some time now.
A member of al-Maliki’s al-Dawa Party, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS that al-Maliki’s opponent, former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is leading a revolt against him and that al-Maliki is no longer the party’s favorite.
“This American and Iranian made government in Baghdad was brought to power for known reasons,” Sheikh Ali Mansoor, a member of the Sunni anti-occupation group the Association of Muslim Scholars told IPS. “They brought in al-Maliki in order to pass laws that serve American interests, and to guarantee their long-term stay in Iraq. Now he is working for Iran, and Americans are losing Iraq once and for all.”
Maliki came to be Prime Minister after political pressure from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former British foreign secretary Jack Straw forced former al-Jaafari to resign.
“They must change the faces again, but who could the replacement be,” Dr. Lukman Salim, a physician from Baghdad told IPS. “Americans and Iranians will definitely employ someone who is worse for Iraqis and better for them.”
(Ali al-Fadhily, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
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7) Baghdad, Iraq:
6 million people, 117 degrees and no water
By Richard Becker, Western Regional Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition
Friday, August 3, 2007
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-821-6545
ANSWERcoalition.org
www.Sept15.org
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 323-464-1636
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
Seattle: 206-568-1661
A crime against humanity committed by the occupying power
For the past 24 hours, Baghdad has had virtually no running water.
Major parts of the city of six million people have lacked running water for six days, while daily high temperatures have ranged from 115 to 120 degrees. The tiny amount of water dripping through the pipes is causing many of those who must drink it to suffer acute intestinal illness.
According to reports, not enough electricity is available to run Baghdad’s water pumps. This in a country with vast energy resources.
Corporate media outlets—to the extent they have reported this horrific and mind-boggling story at all—have treated it as a failure on the part of Iraqis.
In reality, it is an appalling war crime committed by the occupying power, the U.S. military. It threatens the lives of tens of thousands of people in the short term and unthinkable numbers of people unless it is rectified immediately.
According to Article 55 of Geneva Conventions (1949) to which the U.S. government is a signatory: "To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate."
Article 59 states: "If the whole or part of the population of an occupied territory is inadequately supplied, the Occupying Power shall agree to relief schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate them by all the means at its disposal."
To say that a huge city deprived of running water is "inadequately supplied" would rank as one of the great understatements of human history.
Of course, the shortage of water—the most vital of all necessities—does not extend to the U.S. personnel and contractors occupying Iraq.
The U.S. government tries to relieve itself of its obligations by pretending that Iraq’s "sovereignty" was restored in June 2004. But that is just another hoax.
Since its illegal invasion and conquest of Iraq in the spring of 2003, the real state power in the country has been the U.S. military.
This latest catastrophe to afflict the Iraqi people is another poisonous fruit of imperialist occupation. Not even in the worst times during the U.S. blockade of Iraq from 1990-2003, did such a disaster occur.
The U.S. regime in Iraq must provide the people of Baghdad with relief in the short-term to avert unprecedented disaster. The U.S. occupation must come to an immediate end. The officials responsible for the terrible crimes committed against the Iraqi people must be held accountable. The U.S. government owes Iraq vast reparations for the death and destruction imposed on that society by an illegal war of aggression.
All Out for the September 15 Mass March!
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8) Spying Measure Advances in Congress
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK MAZZETTI
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/washington/04nsa.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 —A furious push by the White House to broaden its wiretapping authority appeared on the verge of victory on Friday night after the Senate approved a measure that would temporarily give the administration more latitude to eavesdrop without court warrants on foreign communications that it suspects may be tied to terrorism.
The House is expected to take up the White House-backed measure on Saturday morning before going into its summer recess.
Democratic leaders acknowledged that the bill would probably pass.
Democrats in both the House and the Senate failed to pass competing measures on Friday that would have included tougher judicial checks and oversight on the eavesdropping powers.
The White House and Congressional Republicans hailed the Senate vote as critical to plugging what they saw as dangerous gaps in the intelligence agencies’ ability to detect terrorist threats.
“I can sleep a little safer tonight,” Senator Christopher S. Bond, the Missouri Republican who co-sponsored the measure, declared after the Senate vote.
The measure approved by the Senate expires in six months and would have to be re-authorized. The White House’s grudging agreement to make it temporary helped to attract the votes of some moderate Democrats who said they thought it was important for Congress to approve some version of the wiretapping bill before its recess.
The White House and Republican leaders pressed the point throughout the day that a vote against the measure would put the nation at greater risk of attack.
Some Democrats and civil rights advocates accused the Senate of capitulating to White House demands by broadening the ability to eavesdrop without warrants on communications that are primarily “foreign” in nature, even if they may touch on Americans’ phone calls and e-mail.
The measure “goes far, far beyond” the National Security Agency program that the president secretly approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.
Caroline Frederickson, head of the American Civil Liberties Union office here, said: “The Democrats caved in to the politics of fear we’re seeing from this administration. They didn’t want to be depicted as soft on terrorism. But this measure removes any court oversight from surveillance on Americans in a large number of cases.”
The White House lobbying took on new urgency because of a still-classified ruling by the intelligence court this year that placed new restrictions on monitoring without warrants purely foreign communications that are routed through the United States.
Such communications were once considered outside the reach of the court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the FISA court.
“Time is short,” Mr. Bush warned in an appearance at the F.B.I. headquarters. “I’m going to ask Congress to stay in session until they pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States.”
In an unusual maneuver, Senator Bond pressed the case for new legislative authority by reading on the Senate floor, apparently to the surprise of some administration officials, an e-mail message that the office of the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, sent to Congressional leaders on the urgency of amending the wiretapping law.
“We understand that the FISA court judges urgently support a more appropriate alignment of the court’s caseload and jurisdiction away from the focus on non-U.S. persons operating outside of the United States,” the message said. “The judges have clearly expressed frustration with the fact that so much of their docket is consumed by applications that focus on foreign targets and involve minimal privacy interests of Americans.”
Court officials and Mr. McConnell’s office refused to comment on the message. The concerns from his office appeared to reflect, at least in part, the recent restrictions imposed by the court on intercepting what is known as “foreign-to-foreign transit traffic,” in which both parties are outside the United States but the phone calls or e-mail messages are routed through telecommunications centers in the United States.
For years, judges on the court have debated whether and under what circumstances communications that happened to pass through United States “switches” should be governed by American intelligence laws.
The FISA court ruling was alluded to by the House minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, on Tuesday on the Fox News Channel. The Los Angeles Times published the details on Thursday.
Conflicting accounts emerged on Friday about the nature of the restrictions and what effects they have had on current intelligence operations. The ruling remains classified.
On Fox News, Mr. Boehner, said, “There’s been a ruling over the last four or five months that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States.”
A spokesman for Mr. Boehner said Friday that he was not discussing any classified rulings by the court, but was referring to a plan the administration announced in January to put under the court’s jurisdiction the National Security Agency wiretapping program.
Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.
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9) U.S. Airstrike on 2 Taliban Commanders in South Wounds at Least 18 Civilians, Afghans Say
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA and TAIMOOR SHAH
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/asia/04afghan.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 3 — The United States military said Friday that it had carried out an airstrike on two Taliban commanders during “a sizable meeting” of insurgents in a remote region of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, but that it could not be sure the men had been killed.
Local officials said that at least 18 Afghans were wounded in the attack.
A large number of the Taliban had gathered for a public execution near a shrine in the Baghran district and that members of the public were also present at the time of the bombing, 4 p.m. on Thursday, they said.
“The people say there were many people there,” the provincial police chief, Muhammad Hussain Andiwal, said in a telephone interview. “The Taliban were also in great numbers; some 16 to 17 vehicles belonging to the Taliban were present at the scene. There must be heavy casualties to the Taliban.”
“We have information from the wounded people who were brought to Bost Hospital in Lashkar Gah that the Taliban brought two men accused of spying and they were going to execute them publicly, and they forced the people to come and watch them,” the police chief said. “I don’t know the exact number of civilian casualties.”
The doctor on duty at the hospital in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, said at least 18 wounded civilians were being treated there, including an 8-year old boy.
The United States military released a statement from Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, saying that it had information that two “notorious” Taliban commanders were at the gathering, and that it had monitored their movements in the village of Qaleh Chah, in the Baghran district.
“During a sizable meeting of senior Taliban commanders, coalition forces employed precision-guided munitions on their location after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area,” the statement said.
“This operation shows that there is no safe haven for the insurgents,” said Maj. Chris Belcher, a spokesman for United States forces in Afghanistan. “It will take some time to determine if both targets were killed.”
The planes bombed a shrine known as Ibrahim Shah Baba, in the Baghran district, the police chief said. Baghran, one of the most remote and mountainous parts of Helmand, is a known Taliban stronghold where United States and NATO ground troops have not ventured recently. The area is so lawless that even local journalists cannot travel to the area to conduct independent reporting.
A tribal elder from the region, Hajji Zahir, speaking from Lashkar Gah, said that he had contacted people in the region and been told that hundreds were present at the Taliban execution of the men, who were charged with spying or working for the government. Taliban fighters and civilians were among the dead and wounded, he said.
“We have received 18 people, all wounded severely,” Dr. Rahmatullah, the duty officer at the provincial hospital in Lashkar Gah, said by telephone. “They are all men, there is only one 8-year-boy among them.
“One of the men, who had a serious trauma, died at the hospital,” he said.
The wounded had talked of very high casualties and said they had been near a shrine when the bombing occurred, the doctor said.
Carlotta Gall contributed from Islamabad, Pakistan.
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10) Chávez Takes ‘Crazy Battalion’ of Supporters on the Road
By SIMON ROMERO
“As for the United States, Mr. Chávez predicted that widening budget and trade deficits portend a financial crisis that could cause it to ‘explode from within.’
‘There could be a revolution in the United States,’ Mr. Chávez said. ‘We’ll help them.’”
August 4, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/04/world/americas/04venez.html
LA FRIA, Venezuela, Aug. 3 — “Surely they will take photos of us by satellite,” said President Hugo Chávez, referring to intelligence agencies from the United States, as his Airbus touched down Friday in this Andean city with the actor Sean Penn, a clutch of cabinet ministers and visiting dignitaries from half a dozen countries in tow.
“They’ll say, ‘There goes Chávez with a crazy battalion containing Africans, Canadians, Cubans,’ ” the president continued as he broke into a meandering riff on political relations between the United States and Venezuela. “Even gringos!”
Mr. Penn’s visit to write about Mr. Chávez follows others by Hollywood luminaries like Danny Glover, public intellectuals like Tariq Ali and film directors like Argentina’s Fernando Solanas, all of whom have recently traveled to this country to take in the transformation of Venezuelan society that Mr. Chávez calls a “Bolivarian revolution.”
But rarely has the reception of foreign actors and writers been as warm as it was this week for Mr. Penn, whom Mr. Chávez, perhaps smarting from international condemnation over his government’s treatment of critics in the local news media, hailed as “valiant” for his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq and other policies of the Bush administration.
After sending Mr. Penn on guided tours of Villa del Cine, the state movie studio near Caracas created to weaken Hollywood’s grip on the film industry, and the Afro-Venezuelan city of Barlovento, the president dined privately with the actor on Thursday before whisking him away Friday for a jaunt into western Venezuela.
What followed, for a handful of journalists given the rare opportunity of accompanying Mr. Chávez on such a trip, was a glimpse into his government’s use of imagery and pomp to court public opinion both at home and abroad.
During the flight, Mr. Chávez regaled Mr. Penn with lectures on Venezuelan history and tales of his own past as a soldier, between talking politics with other travelers on the spacious Airbus with leather seats.
The border region in Táchira State where the plane landed, Mr. Chávez warned, “was very close to where the C.I.A. is,” a not-so-subtle dig at the close political relationship between Colombia’s government and the Bush administration.
As for the United States, Mr. Chávez predicted that widening budget and trade deficits portend a financial crisis that could cause it to “explode from within.”
“There could be a revolution in the United States,” Mr. Chávez said. “We’ll help them.”
Mr. Penn took in most of Mr. Chávez’s comments with a warm smile, some nods and few intelligible utterances. “He’s a quiet man,” Mr. Chávez reassured other passengers, gesturing to Mr. Penn. “But he has fire within him.”
Mr. Chávez, it can be guaranteed, likes to be in the driver’s seat in such forays — literally. On the tarmac of the airport in La Fria, he climbed behind the wheel of a Tiuna, a Humvee-esque military vehicle assembled in Venezuela, put Mr. Penn in the back seat and proceeded to drive through picturesque Andean villages.
A trip that normally takes 90 minutes to Pueblo Encima, a small farming community where Mr. Chávez was scheduled to celebrate the opening of a fertilizer facility and the arrival of dairy cows from Argentina and Uruguay, took more than four hours as the president stopped the Tiuna dozens of times to greet supporters on the side of the road.
A truck carrying journalists traveled in front, lurching ahead as desperate news cameramen and photographers yelled at the driver to start or stop. At times they cheered, as when they got shots of Mr. Penn urinating on the side of the road.
Chaperoned by Andrés Izarra, the president of Telesur, the regional news network backed by Venezuela’s government, Mr. Penn looked somewhat pained when asked about his impressions of the country.
In a brief interview at one of the motorcade’s many stops, Mr. Penn declined to discuss any similarities that might exist between the president in the driver’s seat of the Tiuna and the Southern populist, loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey Long, that Mr. Penn played in the recent film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men.”
Instead, Mr. Penn produced a business card from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which he said he was representing during his Venezuela trip.
“I’m going to write about this experience, so I’m a little hesitant to talk about it,” Mr. Penn said, dressed in a T-shirt and wearing dark aviator sunglasses. (Mr. Penn has written similar dispatches following trips to countries like Iran and Iraq.) “It’s been extraordinary so far.”
Then, with the same quiet intensity Mr. Chávez had referred to earlier, the actor proceeded to try to find someone with a match for a Marlboro Light.
Undaunted by criticism from some Venezuelan actors and directors who deride the warm ties between some of their foreign counterparts and Mr. Chávez, the president hailed Mr. Penn’s presence at each stop of the trip.
At a speech in Pueblo Encima, before hundreds of followers clad, like Mr. Chávez and much of his entourage, in the red of his political party, a cold mountain rain caused the entourage from tropical Caracas to shiver as Mr. Chávez broke into song in praise of dairy cows.
He celebrated Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba in the presence of Ricardo Alarcón, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly. He welcomed dignitaries from Burkina Faso, Canada and Belgium who spoke in favor of his policies.
And with the acumen of a politician who knows how to celebrate friends where he can find them, Mr. Chávez switched into English with a few words for Mr. Penn: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
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11) A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many
The Return of the Robber Barons
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html
The US economy continues its 21st century decline, even as the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster “bunker buster” bombs for its coming attack on Iran. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin.
The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management.
Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay.
Law firms, such as Cohen & Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen & Grisby, explained in the law firm’s marketing video, “our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”
Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens.
Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services reports each month, essentially all of the new jobs are in low-paid domestic services that do not require a college education.
The category, “Leisure and hospitality,” accounts for 30 per cent of the new jobs, of which 387,000 are bartenders and waitresses, 38,000 are workers in motels and hotels, and 50,000 are employed in entertainment and recreation.
The category, “Education and health services,” accounts for 35 per cent of the gain in employment, of which 100,000 are in educational services and 456,000 are in health care and social assistance, principally ambulatory health care services and hospitals.
“Professional and technical services” accounts for 268,000 of the new jobs. “Finance and insurance” added 93,000 new jobs, of which about one quarter are in real estate and about one half are in insurance. “Transportation and warehousing” added 65,000 jobs, and wholesale and retail trade added 185,000.
Over the entire year, the US economy created merely 51,000 jobs in architectural and engineering services, less than the 76,000 jobs created in management and technical consulting (essentially laid-off white collar professionals).
Except for a well-connected few graduates, who find their way into Wall Street investment banks, top law firms, and private medical practice, American universities today consist of detention centers to delay for four or five years the entry of American youth into unskilled domestic services.
Meanwhile the rich are getting much richer and luxuriating in the most fantastic conspicuous consumption since the Gilded Age. Robert Frank has dubbed the new American world of the super-rich “Richistan.”
In Richistan there is a two-year waiting list for $50 million 200-foot yachts. In Richistan Rolex watches are considered Wal-Mart junk. Richistanians sport $736,000 Franck Muller timepieces, sign their names with $700,000 Mont Blanc jewel-encrusted pens. Their valets, butlers (with $100,000 salaries), and bodyguards carry the $42,000 Louis Vuitton handbags of wives and mistresses.
Richistanians join clubs open only to those with $100 million, pay $650,000 for golf club memberships, eat $50 hamburgers and $1,000 omelettes, drink $90 a bottle of Bling mineral water and down $10,000 “martinis on a rock” (gin or vodka poured over a diamond) at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.
Who are the Richistanians? They are CEOs who have moved their companies abroad and converted the wages they formerly paid Americans into $100 million compensation packages for themselves. They are investment bankers and hedge fund managers, who created the subprime mortgage derivatives that currently threaten to collapse the economy. One of them was paid $1.7 billion last year. The $575 million that each of 25 other top earners were paid is paltry by comparison, but unimaginable wealth to everyone else.
Some of the super rich, such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, have benefited society along with themselves. Both Buffet and Gates are concerned about the rapidly rising income inequality in the US. They are aware that America is becoming a feudal society in which the super-rich competes in conspicuous consumption, while the serfs struggle merely to survive.
With the real wages and salaries of American civilian workers lower than 5 years ago, with their debts at all time highs, with the prices of their main asset--their homes--under pressure from overbuilding and fraudulent finance, and with scant opportunities to rise for the children they struggled to educate, Americans face a dim future.
Indeed, their plight is worse than the official statistics indicate. During the Clinton administration, the Boskin Commission rigged the inflation measures in order to hold down indexed Social Security payments to retirees.
Another deceit is the measure called “core inflation.” This measure of inflation excludes food and energy, two large components of the average family’s budget. Wall Street and corporations and, therefore, the media emphasize core inflation, because it holds down cost of living increases and interest rates. In the second quarter of this year, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a more complete measure of inflation, increased at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent for core inflation.
An examination of how inflation is measured quickly reveals the games played to deceive the American people. Housing prices are not in the index. Instead, the rental rate of housing is used as a proxy for housing prices.
More games are played with the goods and services whose prices comprise the weighted market basket used to estimate inflation. If beef prices rise, for example, the index shifts toward lower priced chicken. Inflation is thus held down by substituting lower priced products for those whose prices are rising faster. As the weights of the goods in the basket change, the inflation measure does not reflect a constant pattern of expenditures. Some economists compare the substitution used to minimize the measured rate of inflation to substituting sweaters for fuel oil.
Other deceptions, not all intentional, abound in official US statistics. Business Week’s June 18 cover story used the recent important work by Susan N. Houseman to explain that much of the hyped gains in US productivity and GDP are “phantom gains” that are not really there.
Other phantom productivity gains are produced by corporations that shift business costs to consumers by, for example, having callers listen to advertisements while they wait for a customer service representative, and by pricing items in the inflation basket according to the low prices of stores that offer customers no service. The longer callers can be made to wait, the fewer the customer representatives the company needs to employ. The loss of service is not considered in the inflation measure. It shows up instead as a gain in productivity.
In American today the greatest rewards go to investment bankers, who collect fees for creating financing packages for debt. These packages include the tottering subprime mortgage derivatives. Recently, a top official of the Bank of France acknowledged that the real values of repackaged debt instruments are unknown to both buyers and sellers. Many of the derivatives have never been priced by the market.
Think of derivatives as a mutual fund of debt, a combination of good mortgages, subprime mortgages, credit card debt, auto loans, and who knows what. Not even institutional buyers know what they are buying or how to evaluate it. Arcane pricing models are used to produce values, and pay incentives bias the assigned values upward.
Richistan wealth may prove artificial and crash, bringing an end to the new Gilded Age. But the plight of the rich in distress will never compare to the decimation of America’s middle class. The offshoring of American jobs has destroyed opportunities for generations of Americans.
Never before in our history has the elite had such control over the government. To run for national office requires many millions of dollars, the raising of which puts “our” elected representatives and “our” president himself at the beck and call of the few moneyed interests that financed the campaigns.
America as the land of opportunity has passed into history.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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12) A Bridge Collapses
New York Times Editorial
August 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/opinion/05sun1.html?hp
The nation’s physical foundations seem to be crumbling beneath us. Last week, a 40-year-old interstate highway bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, plunging rush-hour traffic into the Mississippi River 60 feet below. Two weeks earlier, an 83-year-old steam pipe under the streets of Manhattan exploded in a volcano-like blast, showering asbestos-laden debris. And two years before that, substandard levees gave way in New Orleans, opening the way for the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.
These are some of the most dramatic signs of the nation’s failure to maintain and enhance its aging physical structures at a time when demands on roads, transit systems, sewage treatment plants and other vital facilities are rising. In the event of a catastrophic failure, many lives can be lost. But even the slower deterioration undermines our quality of life and retards economic growth. Traffic jams waste gasoline, pollute the air and exhaust drivers’ patience. Disabled trains and subways strand commuters. Gridlocked airports disrupt travel plans. And power failures plunge millions into darkness.
At a time of ballooning deficits, and in the midst of a hugely expensive war, most politicians will be tempted by the quick and inexpensive fix. But that is exactly how the country got into this problem.
How large a challenge the country is facing can be seen in a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers, grading the nation’s infrastructure. The latest report, issued in 2005, assigned a cumulative grade of D, down from D+ four years earlier. Near-failing grades of D- applied to drinking water, sewage treatment and navigable waterways. The highest grade, C+, went for landfills and the recycling of solid waste.
In between were unsafe dams, whose number was rising faster than they could be repaired; overstressed power lines, whose maintenance budgets had decreased for a decade; public parks and beaches that were falling into disrepair; and deteriorating schools that seemed unlikely to accommodate rising enrollments or allow smaller classes.
Bridges actually scored relatively well, earning a straight C, mostly because the percentage of the nation’s 590,000 bridges that were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete had dropped slightly, to 27 percent. The deficiency rating does not mean a bridge is in danger of collapse, but it does reflect the need for repairs, close monitoring and perhaps weight restrictions.
No one yet knows what caused the Minneapolis bridge, one of those deemed structurally deficient, to fall apart. Theories include undetected cracks or metal fatigue, vibrations from a resurfacing project on the roadway, or possibly soil erosion around the underwater supports.
The design of the structure was almost certainly an element. The 1,900-foot span lacked much redundancy for its critical supports, which could allow a single failure of a crucial structural part to bring down the whole edifice. The notion that critical parts ought to have backup systems seems so basic to current engineering practice that it is shocking to learn that some 756 bridges of similar design around the country also lack redundancy. They will need to be inspected and monitored with great care.
Unfortunately, the adequacy of current inspections is also in question. It is disturbing that the pipe that burst in Manhattan had just been inspected and declared sound by a utility crew, that the levees in New Orleans had been regularly inspected by the Army Corps of Engineers, and that the Minneapolis bridge had been inspected annually.
In these and other failures it will be important to establish whether the inspectors failed to do a diligent job or whether the real problem is that inspections are inherently limited in what they can detect. Perhaps inspectors need to be given much better sensing equipment to detect hidden flaws.
The larger problem of crumbling roads, bridges and levees and crashing electrical grids can almost always be traced to a lack of investment. When budgets are tight, elected officials find it convenient to cut back on maintenance and leave some future administration to deal with the consequences. When Congress appropriates money for public works, the legislators typically prefer shiny new projects that will enhance their reputations, not mere maintenance on a bridge named after someone else. The federal government has particularly lagged in paying for infrastructure projects, leaving state and local governments to assume the dominant role.
Congress is now scrambling to provide extra money to help Minnesota replace its stricken bridge and is planning hearings on broader infrastructure needs. One sensible bill that ought to be quickly passed would set up a commission to assess the state of the nation’s infrastructure, set priorities, and recommend financing approaches. Another bill is proposing a new national bank to leverage both public and private investment for repair and new construction projects. Each time there is one of these tragedies, politicians briefly declaim the need for a major and sustained investment in the nation’s aging infrastructure. But that enthusiasm quickly flags. The collapse of Minneapolis’s Bridge No. 9340 is a reminder that such long-postponed investments can no longer be neglected.
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13) House Approves $460B Pentagon Budget
By Andrew Taylor
The Associated Press
Sunday 05 August 2007
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070805/D8QQSL2G0.html
Washington - The House approved modest changes to President Bush's record Pentagon budget proposal early Sunday, but Democrats signaled plans to resume a more contentious debate over the Iraq war after the August recess.
The House's $459.6 billion version of the defense budget, approved on a 395-13 vote, would add money for equipment for the National Guard and Reserve, provide for 12,000 additional soldiers and Marines, and increase spending for defense health care and military housing.
The adjourned until after Labor Day minutes after the vote a little over an hour past midnight.
The White House criticized Democrats for cutting Bush's request and effectively transfering $3.5 billion of the money to domestic spending programs. It is likely the cuts will be restored this fall when Congress passes another wartime supplemental spending bill.
The administration has not threatened to veto the measure.
The measure does not include Bush's 2008 funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats say they want to consider that money in separate legislation in September. This approach would set the stage for a major clash over the war; Democrats are likely to try to impose conditions on the money.
Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a point man on military matters for Democrats, told reporters this past week that he backs only short- term extensions of war spending.
The massive military measure represents a nearly $40 billion increase over current levels. The Pentagon would get another several-billion- dollar budget increase through a companion measure covering military base construction and a recent round of base closures.
The defense legislation largely endorses Bush's plans for major weapons systems such as the next generation Joint Strike Fighter and the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, which has been beset by cost overruns.
The Democratic military budget would provide $8.5 billion for missile defense, about 4 percent less than requested by Bush but $1 billion more than current spending.
The Army's Future Combat System, a computerized system designed to transform the service's warfighting abilities, would absorb an 11 percent cut from Bush's request. It, too, has been plagued by cost overruns.
Those huge procurement costs are driving the Pentagon budget ever upward. Once war costs are added in, the total defense budget will be significantly higher than during the typical Cold War year, even after adjusting for inflation.
The measure would eliminate the $468 million requested to procure the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, whose per-unit cost has more than doubled. The helicopter recently crashed during test flights.
The bill would provide $2.2 billion to cover a 3.5 percent pay raise for service members. The administration objects and says its recommended 3 percent pay increase is sufficient.
The bill would boost substantially the money spent to oversee military contractors, including $24 million for the inspector general.
The measure provides money to build five ships - with a total cost of $3.7 billion - in addition to the seven requested by the Pentagon.
Murtha had prepared amendments to close the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and require troops be fully trained and equipped before going to fight in Iraq. But facing the prospects of losing votes and inflaming partisan tensions, he withdrew them.
The bill contains a provision barring the establishment of permanent bases in Iraq.
The roll call for the defense spending bill will be posted at: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2007/index.asp
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14) G.I. Gets 110 Years for Rape and Killing in Iraq
By PAUL von ZIELBAUER
August 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/us/05abuse.html?hp
A 23-year-old Army private was sentenced last night to 110 years in prison, a day after a military jury convicted him of rape and four counts of murder for his role in the attack last year on an Iraqi family in Mahmudiya, a hostile Sunni Arab town south of Baghdad.
The private, Jesse Spielman, was also found guilty of conspiracy to commit rape and housebreaking with the intent to commit rape, said a spokesman at Fort Campbell, Ky., where the hearing was held. The jury consisted mostly of Army officers from the fort.
Private Spielman is the third soldier from Company B, First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division to be convicted of murder and rape in the case, in which soldiers sexually forced themselves on a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then killed her and her family.
In February, Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, 24, was sentenced to 90 years in prison; last November, an Army judge sentenced Specialist James P. Barker to 100 years in prison. Sergeant Cortez and Specialist Barker will each be eligible for parole after 10 years in prison, according to Dan Christensen, one of Private Spielman’s civilian lawyers.
Prosecutors said the three soldiers and another private in their unit, Steven D. Green, who was discharged on psychiatric ground apparently before the Army learned of the episode, had barged into the family’s home, where three of them raped Abeer Qassim al-Janabi while her parents and 7-year-old sister were kept in a back room.
Unlike Sergeant Cortez and Specialist Barker, who each pleaded guilty to rape and murder in exchange for a term of years, Private Spielman sought acquittal at court-martial because, according to his lawyers and the other soldiers convicted in the case, he did not physically participate in the rape or murders.
“He didn’t rape anybody, and he didn’t kill anybody,” Mr. Christensen, said in a telephone interview yesterday.
The next phase of the government’s prosecution in the Mahmudiya rape and murder will be the trial of Mr. Green, in a federal court in Kentucky.
Prosecutors have said he was the ringleader and enthusiastically urged the other soldiers to join in the attack on the family. It was Mr. Green, prosecutors say, who after raping Abeer killed her and her family with an AK-47 that the family was legally allowed to keep in the house.
Mr. Green is to be tried on murder and rape charges in the coming months. He has pleaded not guilty, but he faces a mounting set of witnesses and punishments.
As part of their plea arrangements, Specialist Barker and Sergeant Cortez, now in the Army’s main prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., have promised to testify against him. A few weeks ago, the Justice Department said it would seek the death penalty if he was convicted.
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15) Fate of 5 in U.S. Prisons Weighs on Cubans’ Minds
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
August 5, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/americas/05cuba.html
National Committee to Free the Cuban Five: Gerardo Hernandez, Antonio Guerreor, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez, Rene Gonzalez.
http://www.freethefive.org/
HAVANA, July 29 — In Cuba, they call them “the five.” Their faces are plastered on walls and billboards everywhere. Merely being a relative of the five grants celebrity status. Even children know them by their first names — Gerardo, René, Ramón, Fernando and Antonio.
They are not a boy band.
They are middle-aged men who have been sentenced to long prison terms for spying, Cuban officials maintain, not on the United States government, but on right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami who are considered terrorists by the government here.
“The whole country knows their story by heart,” said Elena Portala, a 50-year-old bookbinder, as she walked by a blocklong wall with the men’s names and inspirational quotations from each of them. “The radio and the press talk constantly about them. They should be let out of prison. They haven’t done anything wrong.”
These days, many Cubans are pinning their hopes on a hearing set for Aug. 20, before the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, where federal judges will decide on whether the evidence was insufficient to support the convictions.
The five men were among 10 Cuban immigrants arrested in September 1998 and accused of being part of a spy ring called the Wasp Network. Four others were indicted but never apprehended. Prosecutors presented evidence that the network had infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and other militant exile groups in Miami. Some were also accused of seeking United States military intelligence.
Half of the arrested men pleaded guilty, but the famed remainder stood trial in Miami after a Federal District judge, Joan A. Lenard, denied a motion to move the proceedings to another venue. In June 2001, a federal jury in Miami convicted them. No Cuban-Americans were on the jury.
All five — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, René González and Fernando González — were convicted of acting as unregistered foreign agents and conspiracy to commit crimes against the United States. Three were also convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, on the strength of evidence that they had gathered information on military activity at a naval air station in Key West. In addition, Mr. Hernández was convicted of conspiracy to murder in connection with the deaths of four Cuban exiles whose two light aircraft were shot down by the Cuban Air Force over the Straits of Florida in 1996.
Judge Lenard threw the book at them. Mr. Guerrero and Mr. Labañino were sentenced to life in prison. Fernando González was sentenced to 19 years, and René González to 15 years. (They are not related.) Mr. Hernández was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Since their convictions, the five have been on a legal roller coaster. In August 2005, a three-judge federal appellate panel in Atlanta threw out the verdicts, saying the defendants could not receive a fair jury trial in Miami because of anti-Castro bias among the exiles. Two months later, a majority of the 11th Circuit reinstated the convictions but agreed to hear an appeal on the sufficiency of the evidence, among other issues.
Meanwhile, the “five heroes” have become the biggest propaganda tool that the one-party, Communist government of Cuba has come up with since Che Guevara. Their names and faces appear on walls and signs all over Cuba, with the word “volverán,” meaning “they will return.” Cuban officials never fail to mention them as heroes in official speeches and ceremonies.
One reason for their popularity is the government’s simplified version of their ordeal: brave men who tried to ferret out right-wing terrorists determined to hurt Cuba while sheltered in the United States.
That approach carries the message that Washington is hypocritical in its “war on terror,” jailing the five for the equivalent of trying to find Osama bin Laden in his presumed haven of Pakistan.
That argument has become even more persuasive to Cubans since May, when Luis Posada Carriles was released from jail in the United States. The Cuban government has long accused Mr. Posada Carriles, now 79, of plotting to assassinate Mr. Castro and says he masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed 73 people, and a string of bombings of Havana hotels and nightclubs in 1997. Efforts to extradite him to Venezuela, where he is also wanted in the jetliner bombing, have failed.
“I am convinced they are real heroes,” said an accountant who, like many Cubans, preferred to remain anonymous to avoid possible harassment from the police. “Any person who is against terrorism has to be for them. And the government of the United States is very unjust to have them locked up while Posada Carriles is free.”
Even 13-year-olds here follow the government’s argument. “They are like brothers to us,” said Lizbet Martin, a schoolgirl. “They shouldn’t be jailed.”
In a recent interview with the BBC, Mr. Hernández acknowledged he was gathering information about what he described as paramilitary groups determined to topple the Cuban government. He maintained that the Cuban government informed the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the groups.
“They are people who’ve got training camps there in paramilitary organizations and they go to Cuba and commit sabotage, bombs and all kinds of aggressions,” he told the BBC. “And they had impunity, so at a certain point Cuba decided to send some people to gather information on those groups and send it back to Cuba to prevent those actions.”
But Mr. Hernández denies vehemently that he helped the Cuban Air Force shoot down the two exile planes. “They needed to blame somebody, and they chose me,” he said.
Alicia Valle, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney’s office in Miami, declined to comment on the case. According to court documents, the United States government agreed that the five had spied on anti-Castro groups like Brothers to the Rescue and Movimiento Democratico.
But the United States government maintained that they were well-trained spies, not amateurs, involved in a range of espionage, and that none of them informed the government of their presence, as federal law requires, court documents show.
The case of the Cuban five has spawned some strange commentary. High-ranking officials in the Cuban government, which regularly jails people without public trial for speaking out against Communism, talk at length and in detail about the lack of evidence in the case, and they rail about the lack of “due process” in American courts.
In a recent interview, Ricardo Alarcón, the president of Cuba’s National Assembly, said the men’s sentences were excessive in comparison with other spy convictions and insisted they were not seeking information about the United States government. He noted that in July a former F.B.I. analyst, Leandro Aragoncillo, had received only 10 years for passing top secret documents to the Philippine government.
The families, too, have become celebrities, if to a lesser degree. They are asked to appear at all sorts of state affairs. In one week in July, family members attended a graduation of Cuban doctors and the annual National Rebellion Day celebration. Speakers at each event tipped their hats to the families, calling the jailed men heroes.
But after the hoopla, back at home, some said, they must face the task of raising children without fathers and living without husbands.
“It has turned my life upside down,” said Olga Salanueva, the wife of René González, who was a pilot at an airport where one of the exile groups kept airplanes. “No one is prepared to live so separated from her husband. And to see a person so humane, so noble, suffer again and again.”
She added: “We don’t have much confidence in the justice system of North America. We know it is very difficult, because it has become a political matter.”
Ms. Salanueva said that the United States had repeatedly denied her a visa to visit her husband on the grounds that she was deported in 2000 and under current rules can never apply for a visa again.
Adriana Pérez, the wife of Gerardo González, has also been turned down every year for a visa to visit him. State Department officials declined to comment on the women’s visa applications. Elizabeth Palmeiro, the wife of Mr. Labañino, said she feels pained every time she looks at their two daughters, now 15 and 10, and realizes how much of their lives he has missed. One girl was an infant and the other was 5 when he was imprisoned.
“I feel a mixture of pain, of sadness, of fury, and pride,” she said.
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16) On the DREAM Act
An Open Letter to Latino and Latina students and all leaders of immigrant rights organizations
By Fernando Suárez Del Solar
August 5, 2007
Sent by:
Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son Jesus, was one of the first U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq, become an outspoken peace activist, and Founder/Director Guerrero Azteca Project: http://www.guerreroazteca.org/
In the wake of the failed immigration reform, passionate discussions have arisen among various organizations both for and against the DREAM Act.
It give me great joy to see students taking non-violent action to find a solution to the immigration question. Many of them came to the United States as children and have finished their high school education. Now, because they lack legal documents, they face an uncertain future that may deny them the opportunity to attend college or find a decent job. The DREAM Act offers them a light at the end of an otherwise dark and uncertain road.
I see students on fasts, in marches, lobbying elected officials, all in the name of the DREAM Act's passage. But BEWARE. Be very careful. Because our honorable youth with their dreams and wishes to serve their new country are being tricked and manipulated in an immoral and criminal way.
Why do I say this? Simply put, the DREAM Act proposes two years of college as a pathway to permanent residency but it also includes a second option linked to the so-called war on terror-"two years of military service." Our young people may not see that this is a covert draft in which thousands of youth from Latino families will be sent to Iraq or some other war torn nation where they will have to surrender their moral values and become a war criminal or perhaps return home in black bags on their way to a tomb drenched with their parents' tears.
How many of our youth can afford college? How many will be able to take the educational option? Unfortunately very few because the existing system locks out the children of working families with high tuition and inflated admissions criteria. Most will be forced to take the military option to get their green card. But what good is a green card to a dead person? What good is a green card to a young person severely wounded in mind and body?
I ask our undocumented youth to read the following passages regarding the plans of the Pentagon and the Bush administration:
In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on July 10, 2006, Under Secretary of Defense David Chu said: "According to an April 2006 study from the National Immigration Law Center, there are an estimated 50,000 to 65,000 undocumented alien young adults who entered the U.S. at an early age and graduate from high school each year, many of whom are bright, energetic and potentially interested in military service...Provisions of S. 2611, such as the DREAM Act, would provide these young people the opportunity of serving the United States in uniform."
More recently, Lt. Col. Margaret Stock of the U.S. Army Reserve and a faculty member at West Point told a reporter that the DREAM Act could help recruiters meet their goals by providing a "highly qualified cohort of young people" without the unknown personal details that would accompany foreign recruits. "They are already going to come vetted by Homeland Security. They will already have graduated from high school," she said. "They are prime candidates."
(Citations from research by Prof. Jorge Mariscal, UC San Diego)
As you can see, our undocumented youth are being targeted by military recruiters. And equally important is something that few people have mentioned-there is no such thing as a two year military contract. Every enlistment is a total of eight years.
Given these facts, I invite all young people who are filled with hope and dreams and energy to fight for human rights and for a fair pathway to legalization. But they must also demand that the military option of the DREAM Act be replaced by a community service option (as appeared in earlier drafts of the legislation) so that community service or college become the two pathways to permanent residency. Only then will they avoid becoming victimized by a criminal war as my son Jesús Alberto did when he died on March 27, 2003 after stepping on an illegal U.S. cluster bomb. Through education or community service our undocumented youth can contribute to their communities and their future will be filled with peace and justice.
Fernando Suarez del Solar
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17) Britain Seeks Release of 5 Guantánamo Detainees
By RAYMOND BONNER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/world/europe/07cnd-gitmo.html
LONDON, Aug. 6 — In a major reversal of policy, the British government today
asked the Bush administration to release five British residents that are
being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Under former Prime Minister Tony Blair, the government insisted that it had
no obligation to assist the men because they are not British citizens, even
though all had legal residence status in Britain.
The request is almost certain to be welcomed by the Bush administration,
which has been working to reduce the number of Guantánamo detainees.
The administration has in the past been critical of the British government,
and other governments, which have called for the closure of Guantánamo but
then have been unwilling to take back some detainees.
One of the five men on the list that Britain submitted today, Jamil
el-Banna, has already been cleared for release by the American military
authorities, but was still being held because the British would not accept
him.
Clive Stafford Smith, who represents the five men, said the policy shift was
“a sign that the new Brown administration recognizes that human rights are
important in the battle against terrorism.”
Gordon Brown replaced Mr. Blair as prime minister in June.
Four of the men on the list have not been cleared for release, and the
Foreign Office said today that discussions between the two governments “may
take some time.”
One sticking point in the past has been the conditions that the United
States has sought to have imposed on any returned detainees.
The United States has wanted control orders and close monitoring, which the
British government said were onerous and in violation of the country’s laws.
The Bush administration was not pleased when several British citizens who
were released from Guantánamo more than two years ago became near
celebrities upon their return to Britain.
In an announcement today, the British Foreign Office said that “the same
security considerations and actions will apply to them as would apply to any
other foreign national in this country,” referring to any of the men that
could be eventually returned now.
Mr. Stafford Smith said that the British government was not imposing any
restrictions on the men. He quickly added, “But we are prepared to give the
British people two assurances. One, these men are not terrorists. And two,
if anyone still has any concerns, we’d be willing to submit to any
reasonable restrictions.”
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18) Benchmark Boogie: A Guide to the Struggle Over Iraq's Oil
By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet
Posted on July 14, 2007, Printed on August 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/56672/
What does a war for oil look like? American troops going into battle with tanks waving "Exxon Mobil" and "Chevron" flags right behind? Are the flags then planted squarely in the ground and the oil beneath officially declared war bounty? Well, some members of the Bush administration and U.S. oil companies may have favored such an approach. But the device ultimately chosen to win this war for oil is only slightly more subtle: a law, to be passed by the Iraqis themselves, which would turn Iraq's oil over to foreign oil companies.
The president's benchmark
The U.S. State Department Iraq Study Group began laying the foundations for the new law prior to the invasion of Iraq. Its recommendations, released only after the invasion, were quickly enshrined in a draft oil law introduced to the interim Iraqi government by the U.S.-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq, Ayad Allawi (a former CIA operative).
The Bush administration has spent four years trying to force successive Iraqi governments to pass the law, referred to as either the "hydrocarbons" or "oil" law. While it has gone through several permutations, the basics have remained the same and have followed the original prescriptions set out by the State Department.
The law would change Iraq's oil system from a nationalized model -- all but closed to U.S. oil companies -- to a privatized model open to foreign corporate control. At least two-thirds of Iraq's oil would be open to foreign oil companies under terms that they usually only dream about, including 30-year-long contracts. (For details of the law, see my March 2007 New York Times Op-Ed, "Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?"
In January, after four years of trying to get the law passed in Iraq, President Bush went public with this demand when he made his "speech to the nation" announcing the "surge" of 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.
The president explained that the surge would be successful where other U.S. efforts had failed in Iraq because the Iraqi government would be held to a set of specific "benchmarks." Those benchmarks were laid out in a White House Fact Sheet released the same day that explained that the Iraq government had committed to several economic and political measures, including to "enact [a] hydrocarbons law to promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation."
After the speech, the administration increased public pressure on the Iraqi government to pass the law. However, that speech was just about the only time that the president or anyone in the administration would use the word "investment" to describe the law. Instead, the adminstration would refer generally to the law's capacity to bring "national unity and reconciliation" by establishing a mechanism to evenly distribute Iraq's oil revenues among Iraqis on a per capita basis.
With few exceptions, the American press has adopted the adminstration's language and continually and virtually exclusively refers to the oil law as a revenue sharing measure -- ignoring completely the fact that Iraqis would only be able to share the revenues left over after the foreign oil companies received their very sizeable cut.
The pressure worked. In February, the oil law passed what seemed to be the most important hurdle, Iraq's cabinet. The cabinet signed off on the law and agreed to send it to the parliament. However, resistance in the parliament was too great, and the law was not introduced.
The Kurdistan Regional Government posted the February draft of the oil law on its website (PDF). The law has almost nothing to say about oil revenues. In fact, just three sentences of the law addressed this issue, stating that an additional law -- the "federal revenue law" -- would be required to ensure a "fair distribution" of oil revenues.
Congress adopts the president's benchmark
By the time the Congress took up the issue of funding the war in May, public awareness of and opposition to the oil law both in Iraq and the United States had grown substantially. Congress passed and the president signed the Iraq Supplemental War Spending Bill (PDF) to fund the Iraq war through the end of September.
In the Supplemental, Congress deliberately adopted the president's benchmarks, specifically and continually referencing his January 10, 2007, speech. Congress made clear its desire to hold both Bush and the Iraqi government to the commitment to meet the benchmarks. But, the words "hydrocarbon law" were never used. Instead, Congress referenced the president's benchmarks but described only the revenue-sharing component.
The Supplemental finds that "it is essential that the sovereign government of Iraq set out measurable and achievable benchmarks and President Bush said, on January 10, 2007, that 'America will change our approach to help the Iraqi government as it works to meet these benchmarks.'" And, "The president's January 10, 2007, address had three components: political, military, and economic … The United States strategy in Iraq, hereafter, shall be conditioned on the Iraqi government meeting benchmarks … including: (iii) Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources of the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner."
Congress stipulated that if the benchmarks were not met by September, it would cut off funds being made available to Iraq under the "Economic Support Fund." These are funds used for, among other things, U.S. reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
Congress required the Bush administration to report back on the status of the benchmarks by July 15. Thus, a flurry of effort erupted between the Bush administration and the Al-Maliki government in recent weeks to try to finally pass the law. Negotiations were rekindled and a new draft of the oil law was agreed to by the Iraqi cabinet on July 3 (only Arabic translations of the law have been released publicly to date).
Four days later, on July 7, Usama al-Nujeyfi, a member of Iraq's parliamentary energy committee, quit in protest over the oil law, saying that it would cede too much control to global companies and "ruin the country's future." He vowed to work to defeat the draft in parliament. His response has been typical of the mood of the parliament. Thus, while the law has been officially presented to the parliament, because of the extreme level of opposition, the parliament has not yet taken the measure up for consideration.
The federal revenue law
At the same time as the new oil law was moving to the parliament, negotiations were also moving forward on the federal revenue law (referred by the Bush administration as the "revenue management law"). Although, the revenue law received far more press attention then the oil law. A limited agreement was reached on the revenue law, but it has yet to approved by the Iraqi cabinet.
As opposed to the conditions set out by Congress in the Supplemental, the draft revenue law does differentiate between Iraqis by sect, while it does not ensure an equitable distribution of revenues to the rest of Iraq's citizens.
In fact, the current draft of the revenue law (PDF) seems more concerned with overcoming the resistance of the Kurdistan Regional Government to the oil law and to demonstrating movement towards its passage than to actually achieving the goal of equitable and fair distribution of oil revenues.
The draft guarantees that after Iraq's federal government's expenses and "strategic projects of benefit to all" are paid for, the Kurdistan Regional Government will receive a set 17 percent of all oil revenues "until a population census is held by the state." There is no mention of how the rest of the country will fare other than that a newly established commission will "confirm the accuracy and fairness of distribution of revenues …" There is no standard establish for what a "fair" distribution means.
None of these incongruities has dulled the interest of the Bush administration in the revenue law. To the contrary, in its "Initial Benchmark Assessment Report" submitted to Congress on July 12, the Bush administration explains, "The United States has provided technical advice to the Iraqi government and is actively engaged in encouraging both sides to expeditiously approve the draft [revenue] law."
The revenue and oil laws are two of a package of four laws generally (and confusingly) also referred to as "the oil law" because of the centrality of the law that rewrites Iraq's entire oil system. The revenue law and two others detailing the roles of the Iraq National Oil Co. and the Ministry of Oil are three small pieces of this larger transformation.
According to the July 12 "Initial Benchmark Assessment Report," "Prime Minister Maliki intends to submit the revenue management law to the [Iraqi cabinet] soon, for subsequent consideration by the [Iraqi parliament] along with the framework hydrocarbon law."
As I write, the future of the "framework hydrocarbon law" (the oil law) is very unclear. As U.S. pressure intensifies to pass the law before September 2007, the deadline established by the Supplemental, Iraqi resistance grows.
What must be done
On June 19, five Nobel Peace Prize recipients released a statement publicly denouncing not only the Iraq oil law, but also the pressure being applied by the U.S. Congress and the Bush adminstration on the Iraqi government to pass it.
The laureates' statement, which has been circulated by Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., to every member of the U.S. Congress, declares that "the U.S. government should leave the matter of how Iraq will address the future of its oil system to the Iraqi people to be dealt with at a time when they are free from occupation and more able to engage in truly democratic decision making. It is immoral and illegal to use war and invasion as mechanisms for robbing a people of their vital natural resources." (You too can sign on to this statement. See below for details).
The debate in the U.S. Congress has finally shifted from "whether" to "how" to end the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But the devil may yet be in the details. We must be vigilant and demand not only that the occupation end, but as the details of withdrawal are worked out, that the requirement that Iraqis change their oil system is taken off of the table.
Reflecting the widespread opposition to the oil law among not only Iraq's people in general, but Iraq's oil workers in particular, Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, explained, "We reject this kind of agreement absolutely. The law will rob Iraq of its main resource -- its oil. It will undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and our people."
For more information on the Iraq oil law and for activist steps you can take, visit http://www.PriceOfOil.org and http://www.HandsOffIraqiOil.org.
To sign the Nobel Laureate Statement, please send your name, country of residence, and organizational affiliation (if any) to Kelek Stevenson with Oil Change International at kkelekk@gmail.com. You can also sign an online petition signed by several prominent Iraqi and American activists at http://www.petitiononline.com/iraqoil/petition.html.
Antonia Juhasz, Tarbell Fellow, Oil Change International, is author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time, now available in paperback, updated with a new afterword. http://www.TheBushAgenda.net.
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19) Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?
By ANTONIA JUHASZ
March 13, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00B10F73B550C708DDDAA0894DF404482#
TODAY more than three-quarters of the world's oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn't always this way.
Until about 35 years ago, the world's oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world's largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.
Iraq's oil reserves -- thought to be the second largest in the world -- have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, ''Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas -- reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to.''
A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq's oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.
In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force), which included executives of America's largest energy companies, recommended that the United States government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries ''to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.'' One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve. It does so to the benefit of the companies, but to the great detriment of Iraq's economy, democracy and sovereignty.
Since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has been aggressive in shepherding the oil law toward passage. It is one of the president's benchmarks for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a fact that Mr. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gen. William Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and other administration officials are publicly emphasizing with increasing urgency.
The administration has highlighted the law's revenue sharing plan, under which the central government would distribute oil revenues throughout the nation on a per capita basis. But the benefits of this excellent proposal are radically undercut by the law's many other provisions -- these allow much (if not most) of Iraq's oil revenues to flow out of the country and into the pockets of international oil companies.
The law would transform Iraq's oil industry from a nationalized model closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry, all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil companies.
The Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17 of Iraq's 80 known oil fields, leaving two-thirds of known -- and all of its as yet undiscovered -- fields open to foreign control.
The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq's current ''instability'' by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country. The vast majority of Iraq's oil would then be left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the country's economic development.
The international oil companies could also be offered some of the most corporate-friendly contracts in the world, including what are called production sharing agreements. These agreements are the oil industry's preferred model, but are roundly rejected by all the top oil producing countries in the Middle East because they grant long-term contracts (20 to 35 years in the case of Iraq's draft law) and greater control, ownership and profits to the companies than other models. In fact, they are used for only approximately 12 percent of the world's oil.
Iraq's neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia maintain nationalized oil systems and have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced.
Iraqis may very well choose to use the expertise and experience of international oil companies. They are most likely to do so in a manner that best serves their own needs if they are freed from the tremendous external pressure being exercised by the Bush administration, the oil corporations -- and the presence of 140,000 members of the American military.
Iraq's five trade union federations, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, released a statement opposing the law and rejecting ''the handing of control over oil to foreign companies, which would undermine the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the Iraqi people.'' They ask for more time, less pressure and a chance at the democracy they have been promised.
Antonia Juhasz, an analyst with Oil Change International, a watchdog group, is the author of ''The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.''
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20) Secrets of the Police
NYT Editorial
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/opinion/08wed2.html?hp
The city of New York is waging a losing and ill-conceived battle for overzealous secrecy surrounding nearly 2,000 arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Yesterday, for the second time in three months, a federal judge ordered the release of hundreds of pages of documents that detail the Police Department’s covert surveillance leading to the convention. People who were detained, some for days and without explanation, may finally begin to get some answers.
If the decision by Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV stands, the documents may figure in scores of lawsuits challenging police tactics that included the heavy-handed: rounding up suspects on the streets, fingerprinting them and putting them in holding pens until the convention was all but over. That such a police action happened in New York, and during the large, democratic show of a political nominating convention, was troubling.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly seemed to cast an awfully wide and indiscriminate net in seeking out potential troublemakers. For more than a year before the convention, members of a police spy unit headed by a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency infiltrated a wide range of groups. As Jim Dwyer has reported in The Times, many of the targets — including environmental and church groups and even a satirical troupe called Billionaires for Bush — posed no danger or credible threat. Tracking them was, at the least, a waste of resources that could have been better used elsewhere.
The Police Department surely has good reasons for needing to keep parts of their covert activities under wraps, particularly where operations against potential terrorism are concerned. The judge — and even the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs — correctly acknowledged a need for limited nondisclosure. The names of undercover agents and other potentially compromising information in the documents have been redacted. We hope that’s enough to let them see daylight. (The Times was a party to the lawsuit that released more than 600 pages of documents in May.)
New Yorkers have been tremendously patient with the demands of living in a city scarred from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and now made secure in ways, large and small, that can often interrupt their lives. They accept that the police have a job to do in keeping everyone safe, and they are overwhelmingly cooperative. But the overarching police strategy that culminated in the arrests three years ago this month did not feel like it was done with just safety in mind.
Along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s denial of permits for protests on Central Park’s Great Lawn, the police action helped to all but eliminate dissent from New York City during the Republican delegates’ visit. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. And civil rights denied.
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21) For an Iraq Contractor, Duty, and Then Death
By ALAN FEUER
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/us/08contractor.html?ref=us
SOUTHERN PINES, N.C., Aug. 5 — Brenton Thomas Gray was no longer a soldier when he died a soldier’s death last August on a northern Baghdad road. There were an armored car, a curbside bomb, a sizzling explosion. The sky went black with smoke and melting tar.
Mr. Gray, 34, was a private security expert, a navigator for the Baghdad team of Cochise Consultancy, and one of the thousands of men who earn their paychecks in Iraq, living on their wits and carrying a gun.
Military officials estimate that 125,000 contractors are working in the country, nearly the number of American troops. The figures on those who carry guns vary widely, depending on the source, but seem to settle on about 20,000. As of June 30, government figures show, 1,001 contractors had died in Iraq since the start of the war.
A eulogy is spoken by tradition at the burial, but the story of a life is just as likely to be spoken in a bar. Mr. Gray’s family took that path last week, marking their year of grief by visiting his grave, then visiting a pub.
Dying in a country far from home is a contractor’s lot, but so is being branded a mercenary, a cowboy, a soldier of fortune, said some of the men who attended the gathering on Saturday in this humid town of horse farms 40 miles northwest of Fayetteville.
The pay is good, they said, though there are reasons beyond the monthly check to work, as they call it, downrange in danger’s way.
“Yeah, you can make a buck,” said Wayne Colombo, a white-haired warrant officer who, well before he worked with Mr. Gray, served with a Special Forces A-team in Vietnam. “But you’re also back with guys you know, doing what you can — and doing what you know.”
Brenton Gray, by all accounts, did what he knew. He was born into the service, the son of an Army colonel, a base brat raised on installations in Kentucky, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho and Germany. After high school, he joined the Rangers, serving with the First Battalion, 75th Regiment at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, Ga. He was then assigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., and the 51st Infantry, Long Range Reconnaissance/Surveillance Unit, before he earned the Green Beret of the Special Forces.
It would be easy to tell his life through military honors, like his cherished “triple canopy” — the Army’s term for Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces tabs worn stacked atop one another on a soldier’s left sleeve. In the contract world, where tales of prowess are often tossed like poker chips, he was a consummate professional, his colleagues said, quiet, tactically proficient, focused.
“I didn’t even know he was S.F.” — Special Forces — “until someone else told me,” said a husky former Ranger who worked with him at Cochise. “All he talked about was his family life at first.”
Early in the day on Saturday, that family — his mother, Marsha; his sister, Randi; and his wife, Courtnay — raised a toast to him at the Old Bethesda Cemetery, where his headstone read U.S. Army, loving husband, father, hero — in that order. Champagne was served from the tailgate of a minivan. It was sipped by bearded bikers and equestrian girls in gingham. The mourners raised their glasses to a rich summer sun, and military contract workers in New Zealand, Israel, Kuwait, South Africa and Britain had been told to set their watches for a drink at 4 p.m.
No one goes dry on the anniversary of a contractor’s death. The party moved from the graveyard to a tavern near the railroad tracks. Your money wasn’t good there. Mr. Gray’s favorite drink, a gin and tonic, was placed beside his portrait on the bar.
Although the monthly pay can reach $18,000, the contractor’s life was not for Doug Jenkins or Bill Strausburg, two active-duty Special Forces soldiers who did not know Mr. Gray but were drawn to the bar out of respect.
“It’s a trust issue; I trust the guys I work with now,” said Mr. Jenkins, a warrant officer and medic. “You can make good money, but you got to be around, you got to be alive, to spend it.”
Besides, he said, private contracts are really only good as short-term work. The health-care benefits are limited; there are no pensions.
The room seemed physically to stiffen as Mr. Gray’s teammates from Iraq walked in, a tight-knit group that installed itself at the bar. One of them set out the portrait of Mr. Gray with the smoky circle of an ammunition detonation rising in a halo at his head.
“How long did you know my son?” Mr. Gray’s mother asked.
The team leader said about two years.
Mrs. Gray touched another picture of her son, in a photo album lying on the bar.
“That’s my fair-haired boy,” she said. And both of them walked away.
The rest of the night went by with churning stories — of Mr. Gray on his skateboard; of Mr. Gray sleepwalking; how he used to jump from airplanes at 30,000 feet, at night, falling through the clouds. The officer’s son who never wanted to ride his father’s coattails; the young boy back from basic training who, literally, married the girl next door.
Then, as he himself might have wanted, the evening slipped away from Brenton Gray and toward the living — toward talk of wives and colleagues, stateside jobs and daughters dating boys with spiky hair. The everyday mixed with the unprintable. Another round was bought: beers with Scotch-and-coke.
It was getting on toward dusk when the two Special Forces soldiers walked outside, and headed toward their Harleys and the pair of flags that flew on wooden dowels behind the seats. Were they leaving? No, but it was sunset.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Army Expected to Meet Recruiting Goal
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
After failing to meet its recruiting goal for two consecutive months, the Army is expected to announce that it met its target for July. Officials are offering a new $20,000 bonus to recruits who sign up by the end of September. A preliminary tally shows that the Army most likely met its goal of 9,750 recruits for last month, a military official said on the condition of anonymity because the numbers will not be announced for several more days. The Army expects to meet its recruiting goal of 80,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, the official said.
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/washington/08brfs-ARMYEXPECTED_BRF.html
Beach Closings and Advisories
By REUTERS
The number of United States beaches declared unsafe for swimming reached a record last year, with more than 25,000 cases where shorelines were closed or health advisories issued, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported, using data from the Environmental Protection Agency. The group said the likely culprit was sewage and contaminated runoff from water treatment systems. “Aging and poorly designed sewage and storm water systems hold much of the blame for beach water pollution,” it said. The number of no-swim days at 3,500 beaches along the oceans, bays and Great Lakes doubled from 2005. The report is online at www.nrdc.org/water/oceans/ttw/titinx.asp.
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/science/earth/08brfs-BEACHCLOSING_BRF.html
Finland: 780-Year-Old Pine Tree Found
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Scientists have discovered a 780-year-old Scots pine, the oldest living forest pine known in Finland, the Finnish Forest Research Institute said. The tree was found last year in Lapland during a study mission on forest fires, the institute said, and scientists analyzed a section of the trunk to determine its age. “The pine is living, but it is not in the best shape,” said Tuomo Wallenius, a researcher. “It’s quite difficult to say how long it will survive.” The tree is inside the strip of land on the eastern border with Russia where access is strictly prohibited.
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/world/europe/08briefs-tree.html
The Bloody Failure of ‘The Surge’: A Special Report
by Patrick Cockburn
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/07/3029/
Sean Penn applauds as Venezuela's Chavez rails against Bush
The Associated Press
August 2, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/03/arts/LA-A-E-CEL-Venezuela-Sean-Penn.php
California: Gore’s Son Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Al Gore III, son of the former vice president, pleaded guilty to possessing marijuana and other drugs, but a judge said the plea could be withdrawn and the charges dropped if Mr. Gore, left, completed a drug program. The authorities have said they found drugs in Mr. Gore’s car after he was pulled over on July 4 for driving 100 miles an hour. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of drug possession, two misdemeanor counts of drug possession without a prescription and one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Gore, 24, has been at a live-in treatment center since his arrest, said Allan Stokke, his lawyer.
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31brfs-gore.html
United Parcel Service Agrees to Benefits in Civil Unions
By KAREEM FAHIM
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/nyregion/31civil.html?ref=nyregion
John Stewart demands the Bay View retract the truth, Editorial by Willie Ratcliff, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=14
Minister to Supervisors: Stop Lennar, assess the people’s health by Minister Christopher Muhammad, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=306&Itemid=18
OPD shoots unarmed 15-year-old in the back in East Oakland by Minister of Information JR, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=18
California: Raids on Marijuana Clinics
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided 10 medical marijuana clinics in Los Angles County just as Los Angeles city leaders backed a measure calling for an end to the federal government’s crackdown on the dispensaries. Federal officials made five arrests and seized large quantities of marijuana and cash after serving clinics with search warrants, said a spokeswoman, Sarah Pullen. Ms. Pullen refused to disclose other details. The raid, the agency’s second largest on marijuana dispensaries, came the same day the Los Angeles City Council introduced an interim ordinance calling on federal authorities to stop singling out marijuana clinics allowed under state law.
July 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/us/26brfs-RAIDSONMARIJ_BRF.html
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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USLAW Endorses September 15 Antiwar Demonstration in Washington, DC
USLAW Leadership Urges Labor Turnout
to Demand End to Occupation in Iraq, Hands Off Iraqi Oil
By a referendum ballot of members of the Steering Committee of U.S. Labor Against the War, USLAW is now officially on record endorsing and encouraging participation in the antiwar demonstration called by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in Washington, DC on September 15. The demonstration is timed to coincide with a Congressional vote scheduled in late September on a new Defense Department appropriation that will fund the Iraq War through the end of Bush's term in office.
U.S. Labor Against the War
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/
Stop the Iraq Oil Law
http://www.petitiononline.com/iraqoil/petition.html
2007 Iraq Labor Solidarity Tour
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?list=type&type=103
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FREE THE JENA SIX
http://www.mmmhouston.net/loc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114&Itemid=66
This is a modern day lynching"--Marcus Jones, father of Mychal Bell
WRITE LETTERS TO:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
FAX: (318) 992-8701
WE NEED 400 LETTERS SENT BEFORE MYCHAL BELL'S SENTENCING DATE ON JULY 31ST. THEY ARE ALL INNOCENT!
Sign the NAACP's Online Petition to the Governor of Louisiana and Attorney General
http://www.naacp.org/get-involved/activism/petitions/jena-6/index.php
JOIN THE MASS PROTEST IN SUPPORT OF
MYCHAL BELL & THE JENA 6
WHERE: JENA COURTHOUSE in Louisiana
WHEN: TUESDAY, JULY 31ST
TIME: 9:00AM
THE HOUSTON MMM MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IS ORGANIZING A CARAVAN TO JOIN FORCES WITH THE JENA 6 FAMILIES, THE COLOR OF CHANGE, LOCs, AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS ON THE STEPS OF THE COURTHOUSE THAT DAY TO DEMAND JUSTICE!
ALL INTERESTED IN GOING TO THE RALLY CALL:
HOUSTON RESIDENTS: 832.258.2480
ministryofjustice@mmmhouston.net
BATON ROUGE RESIDENTS: 225.806.3326
MONROE RESIDENTS: 318.801.0513
JENA RESIDENTS: 318.419.6441
Send Donations to the Jena 6 Defense Fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
P.O. Box 2798
Jena, Louisiana 71342
BACKGROUND TO THE JENA SIX:
Young Black males the target of small-town racism
By Jesse Muhammad
Staff Writer
"JENA, La. (FinalCall.com) - Marcus Jones, the father of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell, pulls out a box full of letters from countless major colleges and universities in America who are trying to recruit his son. Mr. Jones, with hurt in his voice, says, “He had so much going for him. My son is innocent and they have done him wrong.”
An all-White jury convicted Mr. Bell of two felonies—aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery—and faces up to 22 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 31. Five other young Black males are also awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight: Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15. Together, this group has come to be known as the “Jena 6.”
Updated Jul 22, 2007
FOR FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3753.shtml
My Letter to Judge Mauffray:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
RE: THE JENA SIX
Dear Judge Mauffray,
I am appalled to learn of the conviction of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell and the arrest of five other young Black men who are awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight. These young men, Mychal Bell, 16; Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15, who have come to be known as the “Jena 6” have the support of thousands of people around the country who want to see them free and back in school.
Clearly, two different standards are in place in Jena—one standard for white students who go free even though they did, indeed, make a death threat against Black students—the hanging of nooses from a tree that only white students are allowed to sit under—and another set of rules for those that defended themselves against these threats. The nooses were hung after Black students dared to sit in the shade of that “white only” tree!
If the court is sincerely interested in justice, it will drop the charges against all of these six students, reinstate them back into school and insist that the school teach the white students how wrong they were and still are for their racist attitudes and violent threats! It is the duty of the schools to uphold the constitution and the bill of rights. A hanging noose or burning cross is just like a punch in the face or worse so says the Supreme Court! Further, it is an act of vigilantism and has no place in a “democracy”.
The criminal here is white racism, not a few young men involved in a fistfight!
I am a 62-year-old white woman who grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Fistfights among teenagers—as you certainly must know yourself—are a right of passage. Please don’t tell me you have never gotten into one. Even I picked a few fights with a few girls outside of school for no good reason. (We soon, in fact, became fast friends.) Children are not just smaller sized adults. They are children and go through this. The fistfight is normal and expected behavior that adults can use to educate children about the negative effect of the use of violence to solve disputes. That is what adults are supposed to do.
Hanging nooses in a tree because you hate Black people is not normal at all! It is a deep sickness that our schools and courts are responsible for unless they educate and act against it. This means you must overturn the conviction of Mychal Bell and drop the cases against Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, and Jesse Beard.
It also means you must take responsibility to educate white teachers, administrators, students and their families against racism and order them to refrain from their racist behavior from here on out—and make sure it is carried out!
You are supposed to defend the students who want to share the shade of a leafy green tree not persecute them—that is the real crime that has been committed here!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War
www.bauaw.org
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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Youtube interview with the DuPage County Activists Who Were Arrested for Bannering
You can watch an interview with the two DuPage County antiwar activists
who arrested after bannering over the expressway online at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DuPageFight4Freedom
Please help spread the word about this interview, and if you haven't
already done so, please contact the DuPage County State's attorney, Joe
Birkett, to demand that the charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah
Heartfield be dropped. The contact information for Birkett is:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Please forward this information far and wide.
My Letter:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Dear State's Attorney Birkett,
The news of the arrest of Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield is getting out far and wide. Their arrest is outrageous! Not only should all charges be dropped against Jeff and Sarah, but a clear directive should be given to Police Departments everywhere that this kind of harassment of those who wish to practice free speech will not be tolerated.
The arrest of Jeff and Sarah was the crime. The display of their message was an act of heroism!
We demand you drop all charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield NOW!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, www.bauaw.org, San Francisco, California
415-824-8730
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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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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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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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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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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