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Bay Area United Against War Presents a Benefit Performance of:
Howard Zinn's MARX IN SOHO
Author of “A People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn, humanizes the man behind the ideas in his one-man play. The premise of the play is that Marx dies in 1883 but is able to see what happens on Earth for the next 100 years and then comes back to talk about it. Imagine what Karl Marx would have to say after 100 years of just being able to watch...
Starring Veteran Actor: Jerry Levy
Charged with a mighty talent and a bottomless love of the play, Levy has been teaching sociology at Marlboro College and has been acting with the Actors’ Theater of Brattleboro since he moved there from Chicago in 1975.
Saturday, August 30, 2:00 P.M.
Brava Studio Theater
2781 24th Street (at York Street)
San Francisco, CA 94110
Advance Tickets: $10.00
Door: $20.00
For Advance tickets call ahead to:
415-824-8730
or email: giobon@comcast.net
(Please use the words Marx in Soho in the subject.)
Your name will be placed on a list at the door and you can pick up your advance tickets at the reduced price the day of the performance.
A SPECIAL BENEFIT FOR BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR's MILITARY COUNTER-RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGN
P.O. Box 318021
S.F., CA 94131-8021
www.bauaw.org
LABOR DONATED
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Excellent YouTube video on recruiting youth to the military including from JROTC:
Financial incentives boost US Army enlistment - 23 Mar 08
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6ix4rMfL1E
NEXT Meeting to defeat pro-JROTC referendum set for November Ballot in SF
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 7:15-9:00 pm
Friends Meeting House
65 9th St, San Francisco (between Mission and Market Sts)
To RSVP or for additional information, please contact Alan Lessik at AFSC at 565.0201, x11 or alessik@afsc.org.
Ten Reasons to Vote NO
on the JROTC Ballot Initiative!
1) JROTC is one of the Pentagon's primary military recruitment programs. That is why it was created, that is what it has always been, and that is what it will always be.
2) The military openly brags that 40-50% of JROTC cadets go on to join the military at some point after graduating. The San Francisco school district has stated, in writing, that they do not have any statistics about JROTC cadets and enlistment rates. Only the Pentagon knows how many San Francisco JROTC cadets enlist. No one else can honestly claim to know.
3) The military is a homophobic institution. JROTC is a program of the military and must uphold its rules. While local JROTC claims it is gay-friendly, the reality is that once students leave the confines of the local program and go on to a military career, they must remain closeted or face discharge under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." JROTC instructors are either active or retired military officers, who also can not be openly lesbian or gay while in the service. JROTC instructors are selected by the military, not by the school district.
4) The school district pays almost $1 million per year to support the program, over and above the military subsidy. It is NOT free. We can find better ways to spend our school-district tax dollars.
5 ) International law says that children should be not be recruited by the military. JROTC recruits students as young as 14. Most JROTC cadets are high school freshmen or sophomores.
6) The military targets working-class kids and youth of color. People of color are dying disproportionately in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military recruiters go into working-class and non-white neighborhoods and schools and put pressure on youth to join, including calling them at home and sending them information in the mail.
7) One of the primary backers of this measure is the San Francisco Republican Party, along with the Chamber of Commerce and the Association of Realtors.
8) Proponents talk about JROTC teaching leadership skills, but there are alternative leadership programs that are not connected to the military. The school district already has a "Service Learning" program that has been piloted in several schools. Next year Lincoln and Balboa will be piloting a ninth grade "Ethnic Studies and Leadership Development" course. Instead of teaching military protocol, students need to learn about real leadership.
9) There is a precedent at the school board for ousting programs of institutions that discriminate against LGBT folks. Ten years ago, the school board denied the Boy Scouts the right to use school property for free, based on that organization's stated discriminatory policy against gays and atheists. The local Boy Scouts also claimed that it did not adhere to its national organization's policies.
10) Listen to the testimony of JROTC youth such as Denisha Williams who told the City Paper in Philadelphia that in her senior year in high school, "I have received phone calls, e-mail, three letters and a 15-minute videotape," she says. "I even received a phone call from a female recruiter asking if I was still interested in the Navy. I told her I wasn't and hung up. A week later, I received another letter and the tape. I threw them in the trash." Pressuring youth to join the military is wrong. You better bet the recruiters have the names of the cadets who were in JROTC.
VOTE NO on the JROTC BALLOT INITIATIVE!
No Military Recruitment in Our Schools
65 Ninth Street, Sun Francisco, CA 94103
415-565-0201, Extension 14
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Labor Beat: National Assembly to End the War in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Highlights from the June 28-29, 2008 meeting in Cleveland, OH. In this 26-minute video, Labor Beat presents a sampling of the speeches and floor discussions from this important conference. Attended by over 400 people, the Assembly's main objective was to urge united and massive mobilizations in the spring to “Bring the Troops Home Now,” as well as supporting actions that build towards that date. To read the final action proposal and to learn other details, visit www.natassembly.org. Produced by Labor Beat. Labor Beat is a CAN TV Community Partner. Labor Beat is affiliated with IBEW 1220. Views expressed are those of the producer, not necessarily of IBEW. For info: mail@laborbeat.org,www.laborbeat.org. 312-226-3330. For other Labor Beat videos, visit Google Video or YouTube and search "Labor Beat".
http://blip.tv/file/1149437/
Open Letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement
The following “Open letter to the U.S. Antiwar Movement” was adopted by the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations on July 13, 2008. We urge antiwar organizations around the country to endorse the letter. Please send notice of endorsements to natassembly@aol.com
Dear Sisters and Brothers:
In the coming months, there will be a number of major actions mobilizing opponents of U.S. wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan to demand “Bring the Troops Home Now!” These will include demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican Party conventions, pre-election mobilizations like those on October 11 in a number of cities and states, and the December 9-14 protest activities. All of these can and should be springboards for very large bi-coastal demonstrations in the spring.
Our movement faces this challenge: Will the spring actions be unified with all sections of the movement joining together to mobilize the largest possible outpouring on a given date? Or will different antiwar coalitions set different dates for actions that would be inherently competitive, the result being smaller and less powerful expressions of support for the movement’s “Out Now!” demand?
We appeal to all sections of the movement to speak up now and be heard on this critical question. We must not replicate the experience of recent years during which the divisions in the movement severely weakened it to the benefit of the warmakers and the detriment of the millions of victims of U.S. aggressions, interventions and occupations.
Send a message. Urge – the times demand it! – united action in the spring to ensure a turnout which will reflect the majority’s sentiments for peace. Ideally, all major forces in the antiwar movement would announce jointly, or at least on the same day, an agreed upon date for the spring demonstrations.
The National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations will be glad to participate in the process of selecting a date for spring actions that the entire movement can unite around. One way or another, let us make sure that comes spring we will march in the streets together, demanding that the occupations be ended, that all the troops and contractors be withdrawn immediately, and that all U.S. military bases be closed.
In solidarity and peace,
National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
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A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition Film Series
Banished:
American Ethnic Cleansings
Thurs. Aug. 14, 7:30pm
ATA, 992 Valencia St. at 21st, SF $6 donation
Between 1860 and 1920 the Black residents of hundreds of U.S. cities, towns and entire counties were expelled from their homes. “Banished” vividly recovers the too-quickly forgotten history of racist “ethnic cleansing,” when thousands of African Americans were driven from their communities by violent, racist mobs.
“Banished” raises the larger question: Will the United States ever make meaningful reparations for the human rights abuses suffered, then and now, against its African American citizens? Can the long and terrible history of racism and national oppression be overcome without them? 2007, 84 min.
Sponsored by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, 415-821-6545.
Volunteers Needed!
Upcoming Outreach Worksessions
Help with postering, flyering and making alert phone calls for upcoming events. You can also pick up flyers and posters for upcoming events anytime at the SF office. Call for East Bay Office hours.
East Bay
Thurs. Aug. 7, 6pm and Sat. Aug. 9, 1pm
meet at 636 9th St. at MLK, Oakland. (near 12th St. BART)
Call 510-435-0844 for more info.
San Francisco
Tues. Aug. 12, 5-8pm
meet at 2489 Mission St. #24, at 21st St., SF (near 24th St. BART/#14, #49 MUNI)
Call 415-821-6545 for more info.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Make a tax-deductible donation to A.N.S.W.E.R. by credit card over a secure server, learn how to donate by check.
Unsubscribe from this list - if you experience a problem please email answer@actionsf.org
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Thursday, August 14 - 7:30 pm
David Rovics Concert
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists
1924 Cedar St. at Bonita, a block east of MLK Jr. Way, Berkeley 948709
The "musical version of Democracy Now" per Amy Goodman! "The peace
poet and troubador for our time" per Cindy Sheehan!
Rovics is a radical and progressive singer and songwriter.
$15
co-sponsored by BFUU's Social Justice Committee
wheelchair accessible
510 528 4941
www.bfuu.org
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Iraq Moratorium Aug. 15 -- new website and links
The Iraq Moratorium will mark its 12th month of locally-based, grassroots actions on August 15, the Third Friday of the month, with events across the country. There have been more than 1,200 events in 41 states and 240 communities, and the list keeps growing. Rice Lake, Wisconsin just announced yesterday that it would begin monthly vigils in August.
We have a new website address, www.IraqMoratorium.com We hope you'll like the new look and new logo. Please check it out, and while you're, there make sure that if you are planning an August event,it is on the list. If it's not listed, please email the details to moratoriumiraq@gmail.com and we'll get it posted for you.
We'd also ask that you change any links from your website, bookmark the new site, and feel free to use the new logo, which is attached as a jpg file.
Your comments, suggestions and reactions to the changes are most welcome. We'd like to hear from you.
Thank you for all that you do.
The Iraq Moratorium Committee
www.IraqMoratorium.com
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OCTOBER 11, 2008 End the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
http://oct11.org/
Dear Readers,
The date of October 11, 2008 was designated as a day of localized national actions against the war at the National Assembly to End the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this past June. Demonstrations are already being planned. Here is the call from the Greater Boston area--hopefully we can pull something together for October ll here in San Francisco.
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War
Hi all,
Below is an outreach letter that will be going out to various organizational lists
and individuals all over the Greater Boston area. Please feel free to circulate
this letter as an example of what is happening in Boston as you seek support
for October 11 in your various localities.
Adelante (forward),
John Harris
Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition
Dear Friends,
March, 2008 ushered in the sixth year of war and occu pati on “without end” on Iraq . In an act of arrogance and impunity, Congress in a bipartisan vote approved another
$162 billion in funding for the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan . Stepped up threats against Iran and the increased likelihood of a U.S. troop “surge” into Afghanistan point to an imperative for action and an independent voice from the peace and justice movement.
In light of these developments, grass roots forces from around the country gathered together at the end of June for the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation in Cleveland, Ohio. At the conference an action plan for the months ahead was discussed and approved in a democratic vote. As part of this plan, over 95 percent voted in favor of supporting pre-election protests being organized in cities and localities around the country on October 11, 2008.
It was on October 11, 2002 that Congress approved the “ Iraq War Resolution” granting the Bush administration authorization to invade Iraq . The weeks ahead promise to be filled with debate as the election campaigns gear up. Instead of being spectators who watch the media pundits put their spin on the political pronouncements of the candidates, the October 11 protests present us with an opportunity to be engaged in injecting our agenda, the antiwar agenda, into the intensifying debate.
Please join us in an initial planning meeting as we prepare a Boston protest demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupation forces from Iraq and the closing of all military bases. All are invited. Looking forward to seeing you there.
Saturday, August 9, 3:00 PM
Encuentro 5
33 Harrison Avenue, 5th Floor
Boston (in Chinatown )
In Peace and Solidarity,
Marilyn Levin
*Arlington/Lexington United for Justice with Peace, New England United
Liam Madden
*IVAW – Boston Chapter
Suren Moodliar
Mass Global Action
Ann Glick
Newton Dialogues for Peace
Nate Goldshlag
Smedley D. Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 Veterans for Peace
Paul Shannon
American Friends Service Committee
John Harris
Greater Boston Stop the Wars Coalition
* Organization for identification purposes only
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SAN FRANCISCO IS A SANCTUARY CITY! STOP THE MIGRA-ICE RAIDS!
Despite calling itself a "sanctuary city", S.F. politicians are permitting the harrassment of undocumented immigrants and allowing the MIGRA-ICE police to enter the jail facilities.
We will picket any store that cooperates with the MIGRA or reports undocumented brothers and sisters. We demand AMNESTY without conditions!
BRIGADES AGAINST THE RAIDS
project of BARRIO UNIDO
(415)431-9925
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Iraq War resister Robin Long jailed, facing three years in Army stockade
Free Robin Long now!
Support GI resistance!
* Donate to Robin's defense
* Write to Robin in jail
By Courage to Resist
August 7, 2008
Last month 25-year-old U.S. Army PFC Robin Long became the first war resister since the Vietnam War to be forcefully deported from Canadian soil and handed over to military authorities. Robin is currently being held in the El Paso County Jail, near Colorado Springs, Colorado, awaiting a military court martial for resisting the unjust and illegal war against and occupation of Iraq. Robin will be court martialed for desertion “with intent to remain away permanently”—Article 85 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—in early September. The maximum allowable penalty for a guilty verdict on this charge is three years confinement, forfeiture of pay, and a dishonorable discharge from the Army.
In order to expedite Robin’s trial, it appears that his unit command, the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, Fourth Infantry Division is opting to not charge Robin with speech-related violations of military discipline; opting to try and convict Robin as fast as possible.
Jennifer Johnson, Ryan Johnson, and Dale Landry rally for Robin Long in Toronto, Canada
Robin went absent without leave (AWOL) from the Army in 2005, realizing that he had significant moral opposition to the war and the lies he had been told regarding the reason for invasion and occupation of Iraq. After being transferred to an Iraq bound combat unit, Robin went to Boise, Id. (his home town) where he stayed for several months, before traveling to Canada.
Robin recently talked to Courage to Resist about why he enlisted. “When the U.S. first attacked Iraq, I was told by my president that it was because of direct ties to Al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction.” Robin explained that while he was uneasy about his personal role in fighting, the Iraq War seemed justified. So when his recruiter promised him a non-combat position within the U.S., he took it. Regarding his decision to resist later, Robin explained, “I made the best decision. Regardless of what hardships I go through, I could have put Iraqi families through more hardships. I have no regrets.” When asked by the Boise Weekly, in May of 2006, if he was prepared to go to jail, Robin replied, “Yeah if it came down to that, I'd be willing to go to prison because I know I did the right thing and I can sleep at night and my conscience is still good.”
Garrett Reppenhagen of IVAW speaks to a reporter about Robin Long, Pioneer Park, Colorado Springs 7/27/08
On July 27th, 2008 Garrett Reppenhagen of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign (Canada), members of the Springs Action Alliance and more joined James Branum, Robin Long’s civilian lawyer in Pioneer Park to demand Robin Long’s freedom. Garrett praised Robin, declaring “I support Robin Long because he is a Soldier of Conscience. There is a huge propaganda campaign in this country to get young men to join the military. He bought the hype. He signed up for a promised [non-combat] job, but it turned out not to be so. He decided to go to Canada and follow his conscience instead.”
As Robin awaits trial by military tribunal, a general court martial, he sits in the El Paso County Jail – surrounded by other military inmates, as well as civilians serving time on convictions or awaiting criminal prosecution. In the past Robin would have been held in pretrial confinement in an Army stockade, but with rising troop level needs, the Army has chosen to shut down many stockades and outsource confinement of soldiers to civilian authorities. With the exception of Robin’s Lawyer, James Branum, all of Robin’s visitors must communicate with him via a camera and real time video screen. Robin is allowed out of doors for only one hour a day, and even then cannot see anything but a thin strip of sky, directly overhead.
Robin's lawyer James Branum (right) rallies for his client., Pioneer Park, Colorado Springs. 7/27/08
Despite the deprivations of the El Paso county jail, Mr. Branum reports that Robin is “…in considerably good spirits, especially considering all that he is going through.” In a recent phone interview with Courage to Resist Robin reported that he was very happy with Mr. Branum calling him “awesome” as well as his military assigned defense lawyer “a smart cookie” in Robin’s words. He has received many visitors – pastors and members of local congregations, members of the IVAW among them. He wants everyone to know that the cards and the letters of support he receives are most welcome and give him of true sense of the support that is swelling for him, outside the confines of his cell. Lee Zaslofsky, of the Canadian WRSC reports that Robin is “..aware of what he might have to face, and is prepared to face it with courage and without bitterness.”
The fact remains, however, that the Iraq War is unjust and illegal. The U.N. Charter, the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg principles all bar wars of aggression. The U.S. Constitution makes such treaties part of American law as well. Robin Long is a hero for not only recognizing these truths, but putting his future on the line to courageously resist participating in an immoral occupation. The least we can do is support Robin, and demand his immediate freedom.
What you can do now to support Robin
1. Donate to Robin's legal defense
Online: http://couragetoresist.org/robinlong
By mail: Make checks out to “Courage to Resist / IHC” and note “Robin Long” in the memo field. Mail to:
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave #41
Oakland CA 94610
Courage to Resist is committed to covering Robin’s legal and related defense expenses. Thank you for helping make that possible.
Also: You are also welcome to contribute directly to Robin’s legal expenses via his civilian lawyer James Branum. Visit girightslawyer.com, select "Pay Online via PayPal" (lower left), and in the comments field note “Robin Long”. Note that this type of donation is not tax-deductible.
2. Send letters of support to Robin
Robin Long, CJC
2739 East Las Vegas
Colorado Springs CO 80906
Robin’s pre-trial confinement has been outsourced by Fort Carson military authorities to the local county jail.
Robin is allowed to receive hand-written or typed letters only. Do NOT include postage stamps, drawings, stickers, copied photos or print articles. Robin cannot receive packages of any type (with the book exception as described below).
3. Send Robin a money order for commissary items
Anything Robin gets (postage stamps, toothbrush, shirts, paper, snacks, supplements, etc.) must be ordered through the commissary. Each inmate has an account to which friends may make deposits. To do so, a money order in U.S. funds must be sent to the address above made out to "Robin Long, EPSO". The sender’s name must be written on the money order.
4. Send Robin a book
Robin is allowed to receive books which are ordered online and sent directly to him at the county jail from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble. These two companies know the procedure to follow for delivering books for inmates.
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Yet Another Insult: Mumia Abu-Jamal Denied Full-Court Hearing by 3rd Circuit
& Other News on Mumia
This mailing sent by the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PLEASE FORWARD AND DISTRIBUTE WIDELY
1. Mumia Abu-Jamal Denied Full-Court Hearing by 3rd Circuit
2. Upcoming Events for Mumia
3. New Book on the framing of Mumia
1. MUMIA DENIED AGAIN -- Adding to its already rigged, discriminatory record with yet another insult to the world's most famous political prisoner, the federal court for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia has refused to give Mumia Abu-Jamal an en banc, or full court, hearing. This follows the rejection last March by a 3-judge panel of the court, of what is likely Mumia's last federal appeal.
The denial of an en banc hearing by the 3rd Circuit, upholding it's denial of the appeal, is just the latest episode in an incredible year of shoving the overwhelming evidence of Mumia's innocence under a rock. Earlier in the year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court also rejected Jamal's most recent state appeal. Taken together, state and federal courts in 2008 have rejected or refused to hear all the following points raised by Mumia's defense:
1. The state's key witness, Cynthia White, was pressured by police to lie on the stand in order to convict Mumia, according to her own admission to a confidant (other witnesses agreed she wasn't on the scene at all)
2. A hospital "confession" supposedly made by Mumia was manufactured by police. The false confession was another key part of the state's wholly-manufactured "case."
3. The 1995 appeals court judge, Albert Sabo--the same racist who presided at Mumia's original trial in 1982, where he said, "I'm gonna help 'em fry the n....r"--was prejudiced against him. This fact was affirmed even by Philadelphia's conservative newspapers at the time.
4. The prosecutor prejudiced the jury against inn ocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, by using a slimy tactic already rejected by the courts. But the prosecutor was upheld in Mumia's case!
5. The jury was racially skewed when the prosecution excluded most blacks from the jury, a practice banned by law, but, again, upheld against Mumia!
All of these defense claims were proven and true. But for the courts, these denials were just this year’s trampling on the evidence! Other evidence dismissed or ignored over the years include: hit-man Arnold Beverly said back in the 1990s that he, not Mumia, killed the slain police officer (Faulkner). Beverly passed a lie detector test and was willing to testify, but he got no hearing in US courts! Also, Veronica Jones, who saw two men run from the scene just after the shooting, was coerced by police to lie at the 1982 trial, helping to convict Mumia. But when she admitted this lie and told the truth on appeal in 1996, she was dismissed by prosecutor-in-robes Albert Sabo in 1996 as "not credible!" (She continues to support Mumia, and is writing a book on her experiences.) And William Singletary, the one witness who saw the whole thing and had no reason to lie, and who affirmed that someone else did the shooting, said that Mumia only arriv ed on the scene AFTER the officer was shot. His testimony has been rejected by the courts on flimsy grounds. And the list goes on.
FOR THE COURTS, INNOCENCE IS NO DEFENSE! And if you're a black revolutionary like Mumia the fix is in big-time. Illusions in Mumia getting a "new trial" out of this racist, rigged, kangaroo-court system have been dealt a harsh blow by the 3rd Circuit. We need to build a mass movement, and labor action, to free Mumia now!
2. UPCOMING EVENTS FOR MUMIA --
NEW YORK CITY & PHILADELPHIA -- Join the Free Mumia Coalition NYC and International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, organizing to free Mumia, and remembering the August 8, 1978 military style attack on MOVE. Free Mumia! Free the MOVE 9! Saturday, August 9, 12 Noon, at the AFSCME 1199 union hall, 1319 Locust (near Juniper) in Philadelphia. Arrange group transport, or reserve a set on the bus, from NYC by calling 212 330-8029, or email info@freemumia.com.
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA -- Speaking Tour by J Patrick O'Connor, the author of THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, in the first week of October 2008, sponsored by the Mobilization To Free Mumia. Contributing to this tour, the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia will hold a public meeting with O'Connor on Friday October 3rd, place to be announced. San Francisco, South Bay and other East Bay venues to be announced. Contact the Mobilization at 510 268-9429, or the LAC at 510 763-2347, for more information.
3. NEW BOOK ON MUMIA
Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent! That is the conclusion of THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books), published earlier this year. The author is a former UPI reporter who took an interest in Mumia's case. He is now the editor of Crime Magazine (www.crimemagazine.com).
O'Connor offers a fresh perspective, and delivers a clear and convincing breakdown on perhaps the most notorious frame-up since Sacco and Vanzetti. THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is based on a thorough analysis of the 1982 trial and the 1995-97 appeals hearings, as well as previous writings on this case, and research on the MOVE organization (with which Mumia identifies), and the history of racist police brutality in Philadelphia.
While leaving some of the evidence of Mumia's innocence unconsidered or disregarded, this book nevertheless makes clear that there is a veritable mountain of evidence--most of it deliberately squashed by the courts--that shows that Mumia was blatantly and deliberately framed by corrupt cops and courts, who "fixed" this case against him from the beginning. This is a case not just of police corruption, or a racist lynching, though it is both. The courts are in this just as deep as the cops, and it reaches to the top of the equally corrupt political system.
"This book is the first to convincingly show how the Philadelphia Police Department and District Attorney's Office efficiently and methodically framed [Mumia Abu-Jamal]." (from the book jacket)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal has a limited number of THE FRAMING ordered from the publisher at a discount. We sold our first order of this book, and are now able to offer it at a lower price. $12 covers shipping. Send payment to us at our address below:
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610 • 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org • LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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Sami Al-Arian Subjected to Worst Prison Conditions since Florida
Despite grant of bail, government continues to hold him
Dr. Al-Arian handcuffed
Hanover, VA - July 27, 2008 -
More than two weeks after being granted bond by a federal judge, Sami Al-Arian is still being held in prison. In fact, Dr. Al-Arian is now being subjected to the worst treatment by prison officials since his stay in Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida three years ago.
On July 12th, Judge Leonie Brinkema pronounced that Dr. Al-Arian was not a danger to the community nor a flight risk, and accordingly granted him bail before his scheduled August 13th trial. Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invoked the jurisdiction it has held over Dr. Al-Arian since his official sentence ended last April to keep him from leaving prison. The ICE is ostensibly holding Dr. Al-Arian to complete deportation procedures but, given that Dr. Al-Arian's trial will take place in less than three weeks, it would seem somewhat unlikely that the ICE will follow through with such procedures in the near future.
Not content to merely keep Dr. Al-Arian from enjoying even a very limited stint of freedom, the government is using all available means to try to psychologically break him. Instead of keeping him in a prison close to the Washington DC area where his two oldest children live, the ICE has moved him to Pamunkey Regional Jail in Hanover, VA, more than one hundred miles from the capital. Regardless, even when Dr. Al-Arian was relatively close to his children, they were repeatedly denied visitation requests.
More critically, this distance makes it extremely difficult for Dr. Al-Arian to meet with his attorneys in the final weeks before his upcoming trial. This is the same tactic employed by the government in 2005 to try to prevent Dr. Al-Arian from being able to prepare a full defense.
Pamunkey Regional Jail has imposed a 23-hour lock-down on Dr. Al-Arian and has placed him in complete isolation, despite promises from the ICE that he would be kept with the general inmate population. Furthermore, the guards who transported him were abusive, shackling and handcuffing him behind his back for the 2.5-hour drive, callously disregarding the fact that his wrist had been badly injured only a few days ago. Although he was in great pain throughout the trip, guards refused to loosen the handcuffs.
At the very moment when Dr. Al-Arian should be enjoying a brief interlude of freedom after five grueling years of imprisonment, the government has once again brazenly manipulated the justice system to deliver this cruel slap in the face of not only Dr. Al-Arian, but of all people of conscience.
Make a Difference! Call Today!
Call Now!
Last April, your calls to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail pressured prison officials to stop their abuse of Dr. Al-Arian after only a few days.
Friends, we are asking you to make a difference again by calling:
Pamunkey Regional Jail: (804) 365-6400 (press 0 then ask to speak to the Superintendent's office). Ask why Dr. Al-Arian has been put under a 23-hour lockdown, despite the fact that a federal judge has clearly and unambiguously pronounced that he is not a danger to anyone and that, on the contrary, he should be allowed bail before his trial.
- If you do not reach the superintendent personally, leave a message on the answering machine. Call back every day until you do speak to the superintendent directly.
- Be polite but firm.
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Don't forget: your calls DO make a difference.
FORWARD TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
Write to Dr. Al-Arian
For those of you interested in sending personal letters of support to Dr. Al-Arian:
If you would like to write to Dr. Al-Arian, his new
address is:
Dr. Sami Al-Arian
Pamunkey Regional Jail
P.O. Box 485
Hanover, VA 23069
Email Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace: tampabayjustice@yahoo.com
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow
By SOLOMON MOORE
August 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html?ref=us
2) Immigrants’ Speedy Trials After Raid Become Issue
By JULIA PRESTON
August 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09immig.html?ref=us
3) Army Recruiter Suspended for Threatening High School Student with Jail Time, Sparks Bipartisan Call for Investigation
By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
August 6, 2008
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/6/army_recruiter_suspended_for_threatening_high
4) Buildup to the Next War
The Way We Live Now
By NOAH FELDMAN
August 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10wwln-lede2-t.html?ref=world
5) LC4PJ Urges Opposition Jr. ROTC Ballot Question and Support for Antiwar Initiative
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Labor Cmte. for Peace & Justice
labor-for-peace-and-justice@igc.org
6) Broken Justice in Indian Country
By N. BRUCE DUTHU
Op-Ed Contributor
August 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/opinion/11duthu.html
7) Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Resolution Affiliating With USLAW
[This is a really significant breakthrough. The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO recently voted to affiliate with USLAW. They represent 900,000 workers from 51 International Unions and 1422 local unions in the state.]
NatAssembly@aol.com
8) In Guantánamo, Locals Adapt to Life With an Unwelcome Neighbor
By MARC LACEY
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/world/americas/12cuba.html?ref=world
9) Use of Iraq Contractors Costs Billions, Report Says
By JAMES RISEN
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/washington/12contractors.html?ref=world
10) Auditors Question Blackwater Contracts
By ELIZABETH OLSON
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/business/12sbiz.html?ref=world
11) Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes
Tue Aug 12, 2008 12:54pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1249465620080812?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
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1) As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow
By SOLOMON MOORE
August 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html?ref=us
ANTIOCH, Calif. — From the tough streets of Oakland, where so many of Alice Payne’s relatives and friends had been shot to death, the newspaper advertisement for a federally assisted rental property in this Northern California suburb was like a bridge across the River Jordan.
Ms. Payne, a 42-year-old African-American mother of five, moved to Antioch in 2006. With the local real estate market slowing and a housing voucher covering two-thirds of the rent, she found she could afford a large, new home, with a pool, for $2,200 a month.
But old problems persisted. When her estranged husband was arrested, the local housing authority tried to cut off her subsidy, citing disturbances at her house. Then the police threatened to prosecute her landlord for any criminal activity or public nuisances caused by the family. The landlord forced the Paynes to leave when their lease was up.
Under the Section 8 federal housing voucher program, thousands of poor, urban and often African-American residents have left hardscrabble neighborhoods in the nation’s largest cities and resettled in the suburbs.
Law enforcement experts and housing researchers argue that rising crime rates follow Section 8 recipients to their new homes, while other experts discount any direct link. But there is little doubt that cultural shock waves have followed the migration. Social and racial tensions between newcomers and their neighbors have increased, forcing suburban communities like Antioch to re-evaluate their civic identities along with their methods of dealing with the new residents.
The foreclosure crisis gnawing away at overbuilt suburbs has accelerated that migration, and the problems. Antioch is one of many suburbs in the midst of a full-blown mortgage meltdown that has seen property owners seeking out low-income renters to fill vacant homes. The most recent Contra Costa County records available show that from 2003 to 2005, the number of Section 8 households in Antioch grew by 50 percent, to about 1,500 from 1,000. Many new residents are African-American; Antioch’s black population has grown to about 20 percent, from 3 percent in 1990.
Federally assisted tenants in Antioch brought a class action lawsuit against the police department last month, claiming racial discrimination, intimidation and illegal property searches. The lawsuit, which was filed in the Northern District of California, claims that the police routinely questioned Section 8 residents about their housing status and wrote letters to the county’s housing authority recommending termination of subsidies. They say the police also threatened Section 8 landlords for infractions by tenants. A December 2007 study of Antioch police records by Public Advocates, a law firm in San Francisco, counted 67 investigations of black households, compared with 59 of white families; black households, it found, are four times as likely to be searched based on noncriminal complaints and to be contacted by the police in the first place.
Chief James Hyde of the Antioch Police Department denied that his officers routinely asked whether tenants were Section 8 recipients and said that the police department did not have information about which homes were on federal assistance. But Chief Hyde also said that the local housing authority was not meeting its obligation to screen tenants properly, and that as his department focused on nuisance issues, the police had become a de facto enforcement arm of the federal government.
“Other cities have come asking us for guidance,” Chief Hyde said.
The Section 8 program is designed to encourage low-income tenants to settle in middle-income areas by subsidizing 60 percent of their rent. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development issued 50,000 more vouchers for suburban relocations in 2007 than in 2005, bringing the total number of renter families to 2.1 million.
Federal officials and housing experts say that the increase in vouchers was offset by people being forced out of federal housing projects that closed and by renters moving into foreclosed properties. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy and research group, 30 percent to 40 percent of residents in foreclosed properties were renters, many of whom have since sought federal assistance.
Linda Couch, the coalition’s deputy director, said families often waited a decade or more for housing vouchers.
Demand for subsidized suburban housing, meanwhile, is outstripping supply. In Salinas, Calif., applicants circled an entire block around a housing authority office earlier this month. Mobile, Ala., has 3,400 Section 8 families, and 2,000 more awaiting homes.
Sociologists have long claimed that leaving behind high-crime, low-employment neighborhoods for the middle-class suburbs buoys the fortunes of impoverished tenants. An article in the July/August edition of The Atlantic Monthly, however, cited findings by researchers at the University of Memphis that crime in Memphis appeared to migrate with voucher recipients. More broadly, a 2006 Georgia Institute of Technology study found that every time a neighborhood experienced three foreclosures per 100 owner-occupied properties in a year, violent crime increased by approximately 7 percent.
As Antioch’s population grew to 101,000 in 2005, from 73,386 in 1995, the city built about 4,000 housing units in the early years of this decade.
Now it has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the state, with about 23 of every 1,000 homeowners losing their homes as of June, according to DataQuick, a real estate information clearinghouse.
While total crime in Antioch declined by 15 percent in the first three months of this year, compared to the same period in 2007, violent crime increased by about 16 percent, according to city statistics. Robberies and assaults accounted for most of that rise.
In an incident report filed with the Antioch Police Department, Natalie and Darin Rouse complained of constant problems with gang members’ blaring car stereos and under-age drinking on the street. In a written account, they blamed “gross community overdevelopment, affirmative action loopholes and incompetent state government management of federal affordable housing programs” for the problems.
Several white women, all professionals who attend the same church and have lived in Antioch for 12 years or more, recently sat outside a Starbucks coffee shop and discussed how their declining home equity had trapped them in a city they no longer recognize.
“My father got held up at gunpoint while he was renting a car to a young African-American man,” said Rebecca Gustafson, 35, who owns a graphics and Web design company with her husband. Ms. Gustafson said her car had also been broken into three times before being stolen from her driveway.
Laura Reynolds, 36, an emergency room nurse, said that she often came home to her Country Hills development tract after working a late-shift to find young black teenagers strolling through her neighborhood.
“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?”
Housing advocates argue that the impact of Section 8 in Antioch and other communities is exaggerated and that Section 8 houses make up only a small amount of the real estate market. Section 8 homes rarely exceed more than 2 percent of available housing in any metropolitan area; in Antioch the average is 8 percent, according to housing officials.
Brad Seligman, a lawyer with the Impact Fund, a nonprofit civil rights advocacy group based in San Francisco that is representing Section 8 tenants in Antioch, along with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Advocates, accused the city’s police department of racially profiling black subsidized tenants. The N.A.A.C.P. has made similar accusations.
“Instead of driving while black, it’s renting while black,” Mr. Seligman said.
Thomas and Karen Coleman and their three children were the only black family on their street when they moved to Antioch in 2003 with a housing voucher.
In June 2007, a neighbor told the police that Mr. Coleman had threatened him. Officers from the police community action team visited the house and demanded to be allowed in.
“I cracked the door open, but they pushed me out of the way,” Ms. Coleman said.
The officers searched the house even though they did not have a warrant, said the Colemans, who are now part of the class-action suit against the department. The police questioned Mr. Coleman, a parolee at the time, about his living arrangement. He explained that he and his wife were separated but in the process of reconciling. The police accused the family of violating a Section 8 rule that only listed tenants can live in a subsidized home.
After the raid, officers made repeated visits to the Coleman home and to Mr. Coleman’s job at a movie theater. They also sent a letter to the county housing department recommending that the Colemans be removed from federal housing assistance, a recommendation the authority rejected.
“They kept harassing me until I was off parole,” Mr. Coleman said.
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2) Immigrants’ Speedy Trials After Raid Become Issue
By JULIA PRESTON
August 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09immig.html?ref=us
Immigration and criminal defense lawyers were stunned in May when nearly 300 illegal immigrant workers who had been detained in a raid at an Iowa meatpacking plant were convicted on criminal charges and sentenced to prison — all in just four days.
Now the legal blueprint for those extraordinarily swift proceedings has come to light, and it is raising questions about the close collaboration in the months before the raid between the federal court in Iowa and the prosecutors who pressed the charges.
The blueprint is a 117-page compendium of scripts, laying out step by step the hearings that would come after the raid at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out at a single workplace.
The United States attorney’s office in Iowa said the documents, recently posted on the Web site of the American Civil Liberties Union, were not binding and were prepared to assist defense lawyers with a sudden crush of defendants. Most of the immigrants pleaded guilty to document fraud and were sentenced to five months in prison. Some Iowa lawyers said they did find the scripts helpful.
But some critics of the proceedings say the documents suggest that the court had endorsed the prosecutors’ drive to obtain the guilty pleas even before the hearings began. The scripts included a model of the guilty pleas that prosecutors planned to offer as well as statements to be made by the judges when they accepted the pleas and handed down sentences.
“This was the Postville prosecution guilty-plea machine,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the A.C.L.U. “The entire process seemed to presume and be designed for fast-track guilty pleas.”
One defense lawyer who received the scripts from prosecutors on the day of the raid said he became convinced that the hearings had been organized to produce guilty pleas for the prosecution. As a result, the lawyer, Rockne Cole, declined to represent any of the arrested immigrants and “walked out in disgust,” he wrote in a letter to a Congressional subcommittee that is scrutinizing the raid and the legal proceedings that followed.
Mr. Cole wrote that he was most dismayed to see that the scripts specified the particular plea agreements that would be offered to the defendants. “What I found most astonishing,” he wrote, “is that apparently Chief Judge Reade had already ratified these deals prior to one lawyer even talking to his or her client.”
Preparations for the hearings were overseen by Linda R. Reade, the chief judge of the Northern District of Iowa court, who declined to comment for this article. In an interview in May during the hearings, Judge Reade said she had begun to organize them in December, when she was advised by the immigration authorities to expect a “major law enforcement initiative.”
The hearings were conducted in emergency courtrooms set up in the National Cattle Congress, a fairground in Waterloo. Magistrate judges took guilty pleas from immigrants in groups of 10, then the immigrants were immediately sentenced, five at a time. Only a handful of the workers, mostly illegal immigrants from Guatemala, had prior criminal records.
The scripts were compiled before the raid by court officials under the supervision of Robert Phelps, the clerk of court, with input from the office of United States Attorney Matt M. Dummermuth, prosecutors said. Iowa defense lawyers said they were not included in any discussions before the raid.
Mr. Phelps declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Dummermuth said the intention was not “pushing people into pleading guilty.”
“These documents were there to make sure people were fully advised of their rights and fully understood the consequences of their decisions to plead guilty,” said the spokesman, Bob Teig.
In the May interview, Judge Reade, a former federal prosecutor who was nominated by President Bush in 2002, said she was surprised by how many Agriprocessors defendants had pleaded guilty rather than contest the charges. She said she had planned to spend the summer presiding over trials in those cases.
The scripts were presented by prosecutors to about two dozen defense lawyers who were summoned by the court in meetings at the Cedar Rapids courthouse on May 12 while the raid was under way. Several lawyers who were present said prosecutors told them that they might each be assigned more than two dozen clients.
The scripts specified that prosecutors would offer a particular type of plea agreement that leaves no discretion to judges to raise or lower sentences. Some defense and immigration lawyers said the inclusion of these plea agreements was a sign of overly close cooperation between the court and prosecutors.
“Here you have a court communicating with one side and not the other about substantive issues,” said Robert R. Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The court had bound itself to the agreement before the plea was accepted.”
Professor Rigg and other legal scholars said such plea agreements were generally negotiated between prosecutors and defense lawyers after a defendant was charged, and were later approved by the judge. The rule governing the plea bargaining says, “The court must not participate in these agreements.”
Stephanos Bibas, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is an expert on federal criminal procedure, reviewed the scripts at the request of The New York Times. He said that they contained nothing “legally questionable,” but gave an appearance that “raises eyebrows.”
“It does make it look like the prosecutor and the judge have worked it out ahead of time and made it a fait accompli,” Professor Bibas said. “The defense can think the judge is behind this.”
The Agriprocessors hearings have become a national test case for the Bush administration’s crackdown strategy of bringing criminal charges against illegal immigrants caught in workplace raids. Until recently, most illegal immigrant workers, if they had no prior records, were swiftly deported on civil immigration violations.
The hearings were the highest profile use of an expedited procedure, known as fast track, in a court in the American interior. Such fast-track criminal immigration proceedings, on a smaller scale, have become common in the last year in courts near the Mexican border.
Prosecutors and judges said the Iowa court had used scripts in past criminal hearings and had posted them on the court’s Web site. Paul A. Zoss, a magistrate judge who presided in the Agriprocessors hearings, said the court was seeking to help defense lawyers prepare their cases.
Iowa defense lawyers said they had seen scripts, but never a complete playbook like the one they were handed in May, describing a guilty plea process from start to finish. But some lawyers who represented immigrant defendants said they found the scripts useful.
“Whether the court prepared them or the prosecution prepared them does not change the fact that they were helpful,” said Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 23 immigrant defendants.
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3) Army Recruiter Suspended for Threatening High School Student with Jail Time, Sparks Bipartisan Call for Investigation
By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
August 6, 2008
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/6/army_recruiter_suspended_for_threatening_high
A story involving an Army recruiter in Texas last week has led to a bipartisan call for an investigation. The recruiter from the Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston was suspended after a recording of his threats aired on a local TV station. The recruiter, Sgt. Glenn Marquette, warned eighteen-year-old Irving Gonzalez that he would be sent to jail if he decided to go to college instead of joining the military, even though Gonzalez had signed a non-binding contract that left him free to change his mind before basic training. We play the recording of their conversation, and we speak with two of the teenage Army recruits involved. We also question a spokesman for the US Military Recruiting Command and speak with a Texas Congressman who is calling for an investigation. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Irving Gonzalez, eighteen-year-old who signed up for the non-binding delayed enlistment program while at Aldine High School. He was threatened by a US Army recruiter with jail time if he did not join.
Eric Martinez, seventeen-year-old who signed up for the non-binding delayed enlistment program while at Aldine High School. He was threatened by a US Army recruiter with jail time if he did not join.
Maureen Haver, Truth and recruitment organizer. She is the founder of Not Even One, a website to disseminate information about and take action against illegal military recruitment tactics.
Rep. Gene Green, Democratic congressman from Texas, representing Houston. He is calling on the Department of Defense to investigate recruitment abuses.
Douglas Smith, Public Affairs Officer for the US Army Recruiting Command in Kentucky.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: As the wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military is increasingly desperate to get recruits. A story involving an Army recruiter in Texas last week has now led to a bipartisan call for an investigation.
The recruiter from the Greenspoint Recruiting Station in Houston was suspended last week after a recording of his threats aired on a local CBS affiliate, KHOU. The recruiter, Sergeant Glenn Marquette, warned eighteen-year-old Irving Gonzalez that he would be sent to jail if he decided to go to college instead of joining the military, even though Gonzalez had signed a non-binding contract that left him free to change his mind before basic training.
Republican Congress member Ted Poe told the CBS affiliate that “We don’t want the government, military, the Army, deceiving American citizens" and suggested that Congress might have to get involved if the Army did not react to the incident.
Last year, Irving Gonzalez and Eric Martinez signed up for the non-binding delayed enlistment program in high school. But earlier this summer, when seventeen-year-old Eric Martinez told his recruiters he had decided to go to college instead of the military, his mother was told Eric had no choice and could face jail time if he resisted joining. Irving Gonzalez helped get Eric out of enlistment hours before he was to be shipped out of Houston for training. He knew he was next in line. He decided to record his next conversation with his recruiters. This is a part of what Sergeant Marquette told Irving Gonzalez in that recorded conversation.
IRVING GONZALEZ: The main thing is, I want out. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want to go to the Army.
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: Well, you need to talk to my company commander.
IRVING GONZALEZ: To your company commander?
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: Mm-hmm. You need to come in here, and I need to bring you to my company commander.
IRVING GONZALEZ: But is there a way out? Is there a way for me to get out, because I don’t want to go in there if you are just going to like…
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: No, there is not a way out. You signed a binding contract.
IRVING GONZALEZ: There’s no way out?
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: No. When you sign a contract…
IRVING GONZALEZ: But I’d probably be able to get scholarships.
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: You need a full ride scholarship, full ride, to a state university—UT, AM. Full ride. That means everything is paid for—classes, books, you know, lodging, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner—all paid for, not no partial scholarship, not no FAA scholarship, not no First Citizen Bank scholarship. No, we’re talking full ride scholarship, because there ain’t no partial scholarship out there that even comes close to what the Army’s giving you for college. It’s forty-plus thousand dollars.
IRVING GONZALEZ: Yeah, I know, but, I mean, it’s kind of like a family thing, too. I’d rather just stay here. What if I just don’t show up?
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: Then, guess what. You’re AWOL, absent without leave, punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 86: Deserter. It’s in your contract. Read it. It’s clear as day. So then, guess what happens.
IRVING GONZALEZ: What’s that?
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: Guess what happens to you, I’ll tell you what happens to you, OK? This is what will happen. You want to go to school? You will not get no loans, because all college loans are federal and government loans. So you’ll be black-marked from that. As soon as you get pulled over for a speeding ticket or anything with the law, they’re gonna see that you’re a deserter. Then they’re going to apprehend you, take you to jail. They’re going to call up the military police, the nearest military installation, and they will come down there, correctional officers, 31-series in the Army, pick you up, detain you, put you on a plane and take you to Fort [inaudible], Missouri, where you will do your time, as you deserve. So guess what. All that lovey-dovey “I want to go to college” and all this? Guess what. You just threw it out the window, because you just screwed your life. There’s a right way to do things, and there’s a wrong way to do things.
IRVING GONZALEZ: OK. Well, I mean, [inaudible]—
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: If you get into basic training and you don’t like it, tell the chaplain you don’t like it. That’s the right way to get out of the Army. Then they’ll process you out of the Army, and they’ll tell you to adapt, and there’s nothing against your record.
IRVING GONZALEZ: That would be the right way to do it?
SGT. GLENN MARQUETTE: Yeah, and you can come back home and do your thing. And then, also, guess what. If you do it that way, if you do it that way, maybe they’ll even want you in the future. You may say, “Well, damn, I’m coming to join the Army this time.” Then, guess what. You can. You can join then, because you got out of the Army the right way. You at least got to go to basic training and try it.
AMY GOODMAN: US Army recruiter Sergeant Glenn Marquette, threatening eighteen-year-old Irving Gonzalez. Gonzalez and Eric Martinez now are joining us from Houston, Texas. We’re also joined in Houston by Democratic Congress member Gene Green, who is calling on the Department of Defense to look into the incident, and by community organizer Maureen Haver. She is the founder of Not Even One, a website to disseminate information and take action against illegal military recruiting practices. Douglas Smith is also on the phone with us. He’s the public affairs officer at the US Military Recruiting Command, joining us on the phone from Louisville, Kentucky.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Irving Gonzalez, I’d like to start with you. You had this conversation with the Army recruiter. Explain how this all came about, beginning actually with Eric being threatened.
IRVING GONZALEZ: Well, it started around a year before—a year ago. I was still seventeen, and when I got in, Eric was already thinking about it before I was. But, you know, right after I got in, like two weeks later, he decided to go ahead and join the DEP program, too. And from there, that’s how it started. And, I mean, we didn’t think it was going to get this far, but they started—for a while, whenever we were thinking upon not joining, they started calling us and telling us that we didn’t have a choice, you know, that we could say all we want, we don’t have a choice to go or not, if we want to or not.
AMY GOODMAN: Eric, if you could explain how far this went—first of all, when—how did you meet the military recruiter? Talk about what you understood, what you signed, and how, eventually, you end up basically escaping from a hotel.
ERIC MARTINEZ: Well, I met her at Irving’s house, because the day he went to go enlist for the DEP, I was at his house. And I talked to her and told her I was interested in the military. And then, she says, like, “Well, what branch?” And I wasn’t too sure yet. And she talked to me about it. And I was like, “OK, well, let me get back to you on that.” And it took me about two weeks before I decided to actually join the DEP. And—
AMY GOODMAN: DEP means delayed enlistment program?
ERIC MARTINEZ: Yes. And from what I understood, is that it’s just there so you can save a spot, so, you know, you can have the job you want as soon as you get there and so you won’t have a problem with it later on. And then, as things went further, I decided not to go. And when I told her that, she said I had no choice and that I had to go. So I believed her, and I went to the hotel. They took me to the hotel. And that’s whenever Irving’s little brother contacted me. And then I told him I was leaving—
AMY GOODMAN: The hotel was preparing to leave?
ERIC MARTINEZ: Well, they keep you at the hotel until the morning. And from the—in the morning, you go down to the office, and you do a few more tests. And then you—from there, you leave to the fort you’re supposed to go to.
AMY GOODMAN: Did they approach your family, like your mother?
ERIC MARTINEZ: Well, yeah. Whenever I didn’t want to go, my mom’s like, “OK, well, then just go stay at your sister’s house, and we’ll tell them you left to San Antonio.” And I was like, OK. We did that. And my shipment date came, and my recruiter went to my house, and my mom says, like, “Well, he left to San Antonio.” And he’s all, like, well—she’s all, like, “Well, you’ve got to tell us where. Give us an address, so we can go pick him up.” And my mom’s like, “Well, he don’t want to go. What don’t you understand about that?” And then she told her that I signed a binding contract and that I had to go. So, my mom was like, “Well, let’s go talk to your boss. I’ll meet you down at your office.”
So my mom went, and she talked to Sergeant Marquette and told him that I didn’t want to go, and that’s it. And Marquette said that I had to go, and if I didn’t, that I’d have a warrant for my arrest and I wouldn’t be able to get no government loans or nothing like that. So, my mom doesn’t really know anything about it, so she believed it, and she told me. And I believed it, too, because I didn’t know much about it either. So they extended my time until that Friday. And then, Thursday, they went to get me, so I can go to the hotel.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’ll find out what happened at the hotel and find out about Irving’s brother, who called you, and then what Irving did about this, Irving Gonzalez, himself recruited. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll also speak with a counter-recruiting activist whose husband served in Iraq, and we’ll talk to a US Congress member who’s calling for an investigation, as well as a US Army Recruiting Command spokesperson, who will join us from Kentucky. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are joining us in Houston, Texas: Irving Gonzalez and Eric Martinez. Irving is eighteen; Eric, seventeen. They were both recruited. We’re going to go to finish their story, then talk with the other guests from Texas and Kentucky.
Irving Gonzalez, once Eric went to the hotel, how did your little brother get involved?
IRVING GONZALEZ: Well, I talked to Eric on the Wednesday before, before anything happened, and I told him that he wasn’t going to have to go, but I didn’t keep in contact with him that morning or that afternoon. And around nighttime, like around 10:00 or 11:00, I told my brother, “Call Eric. See what he’s doing.” And when he called him, Eric just seemed like really low-pitch voice. He didn’t say—it took him a while until he finally told us that he was already at the hotel, and he didn’t want to tell nobody bye, because he was just going to get sad. So, we’re like, “You’re at the hotel?” And we’re like, “You don’ have to go. I don’t know why you think you need to go. You don’t need to go.” And Eric was like, “No, I need to go, and you’re going to need to go, too. They’re going to go get you, too. This isn’t a game. You can’t play with them.” And I was like, “Well, just hold on. I’ll call you back.”
And that’s when I decided to call Maureen and Dwight, and I told them about the situation. And they started helping us by contacting anti-recruiters from Washington and people that know more information about it to talk to Eric, because he was kind of like in a state of not knowing who to trust. And we put him on three-way, and we talked to him. And finally, we were able to get everything straight, you know, where it will be good, and we should go get him and stuff.
So, Eric was like, “OK, come pick me up.” But Eric didn’t know where he was at. They just dropped him off at a—he just knew he was at a hotel. He looks out the window. He said all he saw was an Olive Garden. So, I mean, that’s the only thing we knew where to look for him at. And he finally called downstairs, the main office, and they told him the address. And it was like an hour away from our house, to an area I had never been to in Houston. But finally, we went down there.
And when we went down there, we saw that there was security going around the hotel, plus there was maybe like ten recruiters in the main office downstairs. And he was in the second floor, because when we got there, he was already on the balcony looking at us. It took us a while thinking about how we were going to get him out, because I was actually thinking of just walking in, just walking in and seeing what would happen. But it was just too many recruiters. I was like, no, we’re going to have to find another way, because they’re going to ask me questions. And it took us a while, and, I mean, the elevator didn’t want to go down. They had it programmed to where, like, if you were on the second floor, you couldn’t go down unless someone came up to get you. And he was actually thinking about jumping out the window. He actually climbed down to the first floor, and he was going to jump from there, but there was two beams sticking up, and it was just not going to be safe. That was like the last resort or something.
And my friend Junior, he was with us. It was me, my brother Ivan and Junior, and we were in the car. And he just decided to say, “Well, what about if I just walk in and try to get him out?” And he put on his iPod, and he walked in. And they were trying to catch his attention. They were screaming, screaming, trying to see who we was, like, “Eh, come here!” And he just kept walking, and he walked straight into the elevator, and when he got to the second floor, he held the door open so Eric could go in. And Eric was hiding on the second floor, because there was recruiters and security walking around the second floor also. So, when he got in the elevator, they went down, and they went out through the back exit, where we met them at.
And that’s when we’re like, “OK, he’s out. Let’s go home.” But we were completely lost. It took us a while to get home. But he was like an hour away, maybe less than an hour, from them actually taking him to the office to get everything taken care of. It was like 3:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, to where we actually got everything done and got him out of there.
AMY GOODMAN: Eric Martinez, were you scared?
ERIC MARTINEZ: Yeah, because they put you in a place where you’re doing something you don’t want to, and you just start thinking about everything that’s over there and everything you hear on the news. So, yeah, I was scared.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you change your mind?
ERIC MARTINEZ: It’s just mostly like, what I want to do, I know that I don’t have to go to the Army to do it. And I don’t know. It’s just the stuff on the news, and I have people that we know that have been there, people who, like—people we know that have relatives or people that have gone there that just come back really messed up, either physically or emotionally.
AMY GOODMAN: I’d like to go to Democratic Congress member Gene Green. You represent Houston in the US Congress. What Irving and Eric are describing, it sounds like they’re escaping from kidnappers. But this is the US military. What is the legality of this? Eric is seventeen years old. He is a kid. He’s a minor.
REP. GENE GREEN: Well, you know, this is not something that, as a member of Congress, I want to hear about, because it’s not something that should be done. I represent the area where these young men went to high school. My children went to that high school, and my wife taught there for many years. Texas and Harris County has a great recruitment record.
I would hope we could recruit these young men and women without having to play games on them, keep them in some type of solitary confinement while we’re waiting to ship them off to somewhere. You know, the non-binding contract is a bottom line. If they signed with the ability to change their mind later on, that should be the bottom line, not that they play games with them. And that’s not what the military or the US government should be proud of doing.
And this is the second time something like this has happened at that particular recruiting station. And I have an office right close to that station. And I’d like the Department of Defense to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s do recruiting honestly.” Hopefully this is not happening in other parts of the country. But if it isn’t, then why is it happening at this one location?
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s bring Douglas Smith in, public affairs officer for the US Army Recruiting Command, talking to us from Louisville, Kentucky. As you listen to this description by these two young men and what happened to Eric being brought to this hotel and the conversation, the recorded conversation, with the recruiter threatening Irving, saying he’ll go to jail if he doesn’t go into the military, what are your thoughts?
DOUGLAS SMITH: Well, I can’t comment specifically on their—what they’ve said, because the Army Recruiting Command is investigating their allegations against the recruiter. The recruiter has been removed from the recruiting station, pending the investigation.
All I can tell you is that we do have procedures in place for future soldiers who want to be released from their contract. The procedures are going to involve them having to speak to their recruiter, explain their reasons for wanting to be released from the contract. At that point, the recruiter is probably going to try his or her best to remind them of all the good reasons that they chose to enlist in the Army, but ultimately, the recruiter is expected to provide them information on what the procedures are to request in writing to be released from the contract, followed up by an interview with the recruiting company commander and, ultimately, approval of their request by the lieutenant colonel who would be the commanding officer of the recruiting battalion that the station and the company belong to.
AMY GOODMAN: Maureen Haver, you’re founder of Not Even One, notevenone.org. Your husband served in Iraq. He was involved in freeing Eric from the hotel. Can you talk about these practices in Texas, as you understand them?
MAUREEN HAVER: Sure, and I want to make a clarification. Earlier, I was referred to as a counter-recruitment activist, and it’s really a matter of truth in recruitment. If you want to join the military, that is your right and prerogative. In the same manner, if you don’t want to join the military, it is also your right and prerogative not to join the military.
And what’s happening is, with the delayed enlistment program contract, it doesn’t clearly explain to the young men and women who sign up for the DEP contract what their actual rights are, in terms of requesting separation. It doesn’t explain that at all. And Ted Poe actually indicated in his interview with CBS that the DEP contract needs to be rewritten. What we’re specifically looking—
AMY GOODMAN: I want to explain that Ted Poe is a Republican congressman from Texas.
MAUREEN HAVER: Yes. And this is really a bipartisan issue, because this is about: are we going to be lying to teenage kids about joining the military? This should be a concern by everybody.
But going back to your question that’s specifically looking at the situation in Houston and in Texas, Congressman Green referenced that this has happened before at this recruitment station. It happened in 2005, where a recruiter made a threat that was caught on voicemail, where he told a young man that if he didn’t show up for an appointment, he was going to issue a federal warrant.
The Army issued a national stand-down of recruitment offices and promised that this was going to be fixed. And what CBS uncovered months after the initial story broke in 2005 was that Sergeant Kelt, the recruiter in question who had caused the national stand-down, was actually promoted as supervisor at another office. This, to me, indicates that behavior like this is being rewarded.
There is also evidence from a 2006 GAO study that shows that allegations of abuse have increased from 4,400 cases to 6,500 cases, and that’s what the latest information that we have from the GAO, and this is nationwide. So, we’re looking at a systemic problem that’s taking place. It’s unusual that we’ve had two national stories coming out of Greenspoint Recruitment Station, but I think the evidence in the GAO study in 2006 indicates that this is a widespread problem that’s taking place throughout the country.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to that recruiter you just mentioned. This is from three years ago, from the same recruiting station in Houston, as you said, the Greenspoint Recruiting Station. This is the message that Sergeant Kelt, Thomas Kelt, left for a high school student in 2005.
SGT. THOMAS KELT: Hey, Chris. This is Sergeant Kelt with the Army, man. I think we got disconnected. OK, I know you were on your cell probably and just had bad reception—connection or something like that. I know you didn’t hang up on me. Anyway, by federal law, you got an appointment with me at 2:00 this afternoon at Greenspoint Mall, OK? That’s the Greenspoint Mall Army Recruiting Station at 2:00. Fail to appear, and we’ll have a warrant, OK? So give me a call back.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Sergeant Kelt. Douglas Smith, you’re spokesperson for the US Army Recruiting Command in Kentucky. He said they are going to have a warrant out for his arrest if he doesn’t show up. Is that improper?
DOUGLAS SMITH: Yes, it is. Our regulations are quite clear that recruiters are not to coerce or threaten applicants or future soldiers in any way.
AMY GOODMAN: The military removed him, but it turns out he was just moved to another recruiting station, and he was actually promoted. Is that the policy of the military?
DOUGLAS SMITH: Well, I’m hampered by privacy restrictions. All I can tell you is that an administrative action was taken against Sergeant Kelt, and that administration—that administrative action was a negative action. However, the finding was that he had an otherwise stellar career as a soldier and as a recruiter, and he was given additional responsibilities as a recruiting station commander, which he continues to do so today. Just because someone has done something wrong doesn’t mean that they get the death penalty.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, there’s a difference between the death penalty and a promotion. He was actually promoted after this and came to be the commander of another recruiting station.
DOUGLAS SMITH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What was the negative penalty, if he was promoted?
DOUGLAS SMITH: I’m not allowed to tell you. I’m sorry. That’s covered under Army regulations and Department of Defense regulations, so I cannot discuss administrative actions taken against a recruiter.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressman Gene Green, your thoughts?
REP. GENE GREEN: Well, that’s why we need the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives to do an investigation. The GAO study pointed this out two years ago, and it seems like there’s a—there is a problem within the Department of Defense.
The American people and Congress, many years ago, went to an all-volunteer army. That’s what we’re having. And we need to make it work, instead of the subterfuge and the playing games in trying to get young men and women to join. We want them to join. Like I said, Texas and Harris County has a great recruitment record, Texas, particularly, compared to other states, of folks serving in our military. But I want them to be willing to go and willing to serve.
There are a great many benefits, education-wise, for folks who serve in the military. And Congress just enacted a new GI Bill to do that. But we need to sell the positive side, and these games that are being played, one, puts a black eye on the military, and I would hope that we don’t have a whole lot of our young men and women who are serving who were actually tricked into serving. We don’t have a draft. We don’t play games. If you want to go, you can go, and here are the benefits, and here is your responsibility. Don’t put them in a hotel and guard them. Don’t threaten to put them—that you’re going to send a warrant out. I don’t know if a sergeant has the authority to issue a warrant. Frankly, members of Congress can’t issue a warrant for someone. So, you know, this is a hard sell that—at the very least, and it shouldn’t be allowed.
MAUREEN HAVER: And, Amy, the GAO study—
AMY GOODMAN: I want to—Maureen Haver, again, founder of notevenone.org?
MAUREEN HAVER: The GAO study that we’re referencing in 2006 is the latest study that’s been made available. And even within that study, they cited a Department of Defense internal survey of recruiters that stated that 20 percent of active recruiters felt that recruiter irregularities happen frequently. And irregularities are defined as willful acts of omission and improprieties. So when we have even active—20 percent of active recruiters are saying that this is happening frequently, we need a response. And I think it’s clear that the Department of Defense is not responding to these issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Douglas Smith, your response to what Maureen Haver is saying? And also, the pressure the military is facing right now, with fewer people wanting to go and the quotas that these recruiters have to meet every month?
DOUGLAS SMITH: Well, first of all, I’d like to remind everyone that I’m a spokesperson for US Army Recruiting Command and not the other services.
We have more than 8,300 Army recruiters across the country who are working day in and day out within the regulations that we expect them to work and living up to their Army values. We take it very seriously, all of us, when even one recruiter is accused of doing something improper. We investigate and take appropriate actions, as necessary. We don’t take this lightly. We do have annual training. Recruiters get annual training on the ethics of recruiting each year. That follows up on the training they get when they go to the recruiting and retention school, and it builds upon training that they received throughout the year at their company level. We’ve made it quite clear that we take these things seriously, and we investigate when we learn of a problem, which is what we’re doing right now in Houston.
MAUREEN HAVER: An Army investigator contacted Irving—
AMY GOODMAN: Maureen Haver.
MAUREEN HAVER: —contacted Irving once. And Irving was unable to meet with the Army investigator. The Army investigator said that he would come back the next day to talk to Irving. I don’t think, Irving, that you’ve heard from the Army investigator since then, have you?
IRVING GONZALEZ: No, I haven’t heard from them. That was the only time.
MAUREEN HAVER: And I don’t believe Eric has been contacted at all.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I’d like to—
REP. GENE GREEN: Let me—let me say—
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Congressman Green.
REP. GENE GREEN: Well, what I’d like to say is it sounds like it’s not an isolated incident, whether it was in ’05 or this year, and if you have some type of semi-prison system where you’re keeping people in hotels, that sounds like it’s more systemic, it’s a problem with the system, instead of just with individual recruiters.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and then come back to continue this conversation. We’re going to play another clip of a conversation that Irving Gonzalez had with the person who first recruited him and find out about the increasing number of incidents reported of recruiter irregularities and the question of illegality and investigation. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: The person who actually recruited Irving Gonzalez and Eric Martinez was Corporal Lisette Diaz. I want to play an excerpt of her conversation with Irving Gonzalez when he told her that he changed his mind about joining. This is a Democracy Now! exclusive.
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: Have you talked to Eric?
IRVING GONZALEZ: No, but his mom told me.
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: Yeah, he needs—you know, you don’t want whatever is going to happen to him to happen to you.
IRVING GONZALEZ: What’s going to happen?
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: You know, I don’t know. I mean whatever. If he ever gets pulled over or whatever [inaudible], you never know what can happen.
IRVING GONZALEZ: I think I can do better with my life out here than in there.
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: You think so? The way the economy is going right now?
IRVING GONZALEZ: I’d rather struggle and be free.
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: I have your best interest—what’s that?
IRVING GONZALEZ: I think I’d rather struggle.
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: You’d rather struggle?
IRVING GONZALEZ: Yeah.
CPL. LISETTE DIAZ: Are you serious? Think about what you’re saying. The way the economy is going right now and the way it’s going to go for the next couple of years, it’s not looking good. Sometimes you have to grow up and learn how to be a man and to take care of stuff on your own. You know what I’m saying? Do you want to sit there and live with your mom for the next three, four, five, six years or whatever? You know, you want to do something different now to what your friends are doing, because when you come back and you see what your friends are doing, still living at home with mom and dad, struggling, trying to make a job, make money, make a living, you’re going to be like, bam, I’m glad I didn’t. You know what I’m saying? I’m telling you from experience, because I see that.
So now, now you got about a month left before you leave. You got a little less than a month. And if you go to basic training and you still don’t like it, it’s easier getting out of it once you’re in basic training. All you got to do is go to talk to the chaplain and say, “I don’t want this. I want to go home.” And they’ll just send you home. They don’t have time. They got soldiers to train.
AMY GOODMAN: That was the recruiter, Lisette Diaz, attempting to recruit Irving Gonzalez.
Douglas Smith, public affairs officer for the US Army Recruiting Command, I wanted to ask you, is it true? Is it true what she says, that it’s easier to leave after basic training than not to go at all?
DOUGLAS SMITH: No, leaving from basic training is more difficult than asking for release from the Future Soldier Training Program.
AMY GOODMAN: So, is the recruiter, Lisette Diaz, lying to Irving?
DOUGLAS SMITH: I can’t comment on that recording. The matter is under investigation.
AMY GOODMAN: Irving Gonzalez, when you heard this, what did you decide to do? What gave you the strength to think that you wouldn’t be punished if you didn’t go?
IRVING GONZALEZ: Well, Dwight and Maureen, they were helping me a lot with the information, you know, telling me that if—helping me find more information, because I wasn’t even—I was taking their word, too, but I was looking it on the internet, you know, people that this has happened to and stuff. And whenever I had my conversation with Diaz, it was another conversation that I had with her, I told her, “Is there anything I could do? You know, can you help me not go?” And she’s like, “No, you need to go. There’s nothing you can do. You’re going to need to go.”
And at that point, I was like, I’m just a number to her, you know. If she don’t care about me going, why should I, you know, care about her meeting her quota or anything like that? So I started feeling that it wasn’t as—I wasn’t as—it wasn’t as important, me going, as they were making it seem. I mean, they just wanted just that one more person, because even when I talked to—whenever we did the recording for Glenn Marquette, I told him my name, but it didn’t seem like he was actually interested in my name. He was just seeing that I was a future soldier and that I was thinking of not going. So it felt like he was kind of—he was basically like reading it off of a script, what he was saying, because he didn’t even care what my name was, he just knew I was a future soldier.
AMY GOODMAN: Douglas Smith, public affairs officer for the US Army Recruiting Command in Kentucky, you said that the military, the Army, is dealing with this. But it turns out—and I’m looking at the CBS figures—instead of going down, allegations of wrongdoing are going up year after year: in 2005, 836 complaints filed against recruiters; that rose to 874 last year. The Army is on pace to surpass that figure in 2008. What’s more, the number of Army recruiters given formal admonishments has nearly doubled since the first report of three years ago of CBS, with 373 citations going up to 635. Are things getting worse because recruiters are getting more desperate to meet these quotas?
DOUGLAS SMITH: No, things are not getting worse based on recruiters needing to make quotas. We have achieved our national recruiting goals every year—2006 and 2007—and we’re on track to achieve our goals again this year in fiscal year 2008.
AMY GOODMAN: Then why are things getting worse? Why are these incidents going up and up? And, of course, these are only the ones that get reported. We didn’t talk today about the numerous allegations of sexual abuse. AP did some stunning work on that, an exposé that we did another show on.
DOUGLAS SMITH: Well, allegations of recruiters are lower than in previous years. It is true in stating that they were up from fiscal year ’05 through fiscal year ’07. The number of recruiters who were found to have committed an impropriety, that is, doing something that they shouldn’t, has been relatively stable over the past few years. The number of recruiters being admonished is a sign of the fact that we’re taking this very seriously. An admonishment is a negative action taken against a recruiter, whether or not we found that the allegation was substantiated. We admonish recruiters even when we can find no proof that they did something wrong, if we see that they may have skirted the regulation, they may have made a mistake, etc.
AMY GOODMAN: I think the problem with the public hearing that, when you say it’s encouraging to hear that the admonishments have gone up, is that Sergeant Kelt was admonished, and he was promoted. We don’t know what the admonishment was; we just know he’s been made commander of a recruiting center.
DOUGLAS SMITH: Well, I don’t know of any organization where an admonishment, depending on what the finding was, would necessarily result in the person being fired from their job.
AMY GOODMAN: Not necessarily fired, but—
DOUGLAS SMITH: The level of admonishment must meet the level of admonishment, but—
AMY GOODMAN: Right, but not fired, not fired, but promoted.
DOUGLAS SMITH: Same thing.
AMY GOODMAN: Maureen Haver, you have a question for Douglas Smith.
MAUREEN HAVER: Well, I don’t know of too many other organizations that are recruiting teenagers to go and fight in a war. And this also represents a liability to the troops that are over there. If you have an apathetic soldier or an unwilling soldier, that’s a liability to the entire operation over there in Iraq. So we’re dealing with what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, what’s happening to the veterans afterward.
And his comment that it’s going—that the numbers are looking good, and that’s good that’s being admonished, again, we’re going back to the GAO study that found that the data that they examined likely underestimates the true number of recruiter irregularities. And they further found that the Department of Defense has no oversight framework that requires branches of the military to maintain and report on recruiter abuses, nor is there a common criteria for categorizing abuses or establishing shared terminology. So abuses can be terminized as “recruiter error” in the Army or “malpractice” in the Navy, making it difficult to both assign responsibility for and to quantify abuse.
Representative Green made the comment earlier that we have an all-volunteer force. This instance and all the other instances that we’re seeing throughout the country call into question that very basic assumption. We don’t know how many have listened to what the recruiter said who requested separation from the delayed enlistment program and are serving now in Iraq, have died in Iraq or are injured or emotionally scarred. And it’s not acceptable for this to happen to one person.
And I don’t see any clear oversight framework that shows that the Department of Defense is dealing with this or that the individual military branches are dealing with this, because everything is being kept secret. There’s no transparency. And that’s why we need Congress to get involved, because this also links to taxpayer dollars, and one of the powers invested in Congress, and responsibility, is to maintain the military.
AMY GOODMAN: The ACLU came out with a report in May. It says that the United States has failed to uphold its commitments to safeguard the rights of youth under eighteen from military recruitment. And the report goes on to say the military regularly targets youths under eighteen for recruitment and disproportionately targets poor and minority students. Maureen Haver, in Houston, with the work that you’ve been doing, who is being targeted? Where are the recruiters? And I do want to ask both you and Douglas Smith how you feel about videotapes in the recruiting stations of all stations?
MAUREEN HAVER: Well, in Houston, Aldine High School, for example, is in the northern part of Houston, and 70 percent of the students who attend Aldine High School are eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch. 71 percent of the student population is Hispanic, so if we’re looking at the ACLU study that you just referenced, Aldine High School seems to fit that profile.
Another reason why Congress needs to get involved is this also links to the No Child Left Behind Act, which was passed in 2001 and which will withhold federal funding from school districts who don’t allow military recruiters access. And at one point , Irving mentioned that the recruiters, after he told him—told them that he did not want to go, they came into his classroom and harassed them. In his classroom. This is a clear violation of students’ rights to privacy, right to be left alone, and it has to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait. Explain that last point. They came into the classroom?
MAUREEN HAVER: Irving, why don’t—if—
AMY GOODMAN: Irving Gonzalez, what class were you in, and who came in?
IRVING GONZALEZ: They were already waiting for me in class. It was theater—I think it was theater arts. And they were already in the class, and I was going into the class, and as soon as I walked in, I was like, oh, they’re going to mess with me. So I was kind of like, let me just sit down and, you know, mind my business, hopefully they don’t talk to me. So I started talking to my friend, and we were both talking. And they were like on the other side of the room. And in the classroom, the chairs are in a line, like right next to each other; they go around the class like a circle.
So, whenever she was like, “Private Gonzalez,” and I looked at her, everybody was just like shocked. And they looked at me, and then they looked back at her. And she like—she gave me a signal, like to go over there towards her, you know, that she wanted to talk to me. And I didn’t get up. And when I didn’t get up, they like came to my chair, and they got in my face, and they’re like, “Can I see you outside?” And at this point, everybody in the classroom is kind of like shocked, like “What’s going on? You know, why are they doing this?” And I was like, “No, I’m in class. I’m not going to leave my class.” So they asked my teacher, “Can I talk to Irving outside privately?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, you can take him outside.”
So they took me outside. And outside, she was just like, “Why don’t you want to go?” And, “No, you need to go” and all this. And I was like, “Well, no, I’m not going to go. You know, I feel that I can do better here.” And she’s like, “No, no, you can’t. College is hard.” And she was just trying to relate to me, but at the same time trying to scare me into saying—
AMY GOODMAN: In class. Congressman Gene Green, does this sound irregular to you, that Irving Gonzalez is in his high school class, and he is being recruited in the classroom?
REP. GENE GREEN: Well, for one thing, you know, in Texas, we have laws that when you’re in a given class, whether it’s theater art or science or math, you’re supposed to be in that class. There are exceptions. And I know the federal law encourages, as much as it can, recruiters having access to schools, but there is also a level of that. Sure, I want them to recruit in high school to give young people the opportunity, but I also don’t want them to go to take them out of class and harass them to the point, or saying, you know, you have to go, when you signed a non-binding contract. If that contract is non-binding, that’s what it means. And you really shouldn’t be taken out of your class, whether it’s theater arts or any other class, to do that. They ought to visit him, if they have to, at home, or get him to come in a recruiting session.
But again, if you’re unwilling to go, there’s only a certain level of encouragement that you should have to go through from the recruiter, and that’s where we need to find out where is this happening in the chain of command. If it’s not just at—thank goodness it’s not just at the Greenspoint station, because that’s in our district. But I want to know, why is that happening.
AMY GOODMAN: Douglas Smith, does this sound irregular to you, that the recruiters are in the classroom, calling the students out?
DOUGLAS SMITH: Well, what the recruiters do in the school is subject to the regulations and guidelines that the schools establish. We want to be good guests in the high schools. But that varies from location to location. All I can tell you is that we expect our recruiters to abide by the regulations established by the schools they’re working with.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with our two student guests, high school students who have said no to the military. Eric Martinez, what are your plans now, and what do you have to say to other young people? Do you know other young people in your situation?
ERIC MARTINEZ: Well, I already had a few friends that—they signed up for the DEP, and they already left, but that’s because they wanted to. And all I really have to say to some other people is just, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to. Just stay informed about what you can do and what are the ways of getting out.
AMY GOODMAN: And Irving?
IRVING GONZALEZ: Well, in my school, I feel that there’s more than just the recruiters asking for kids’ information, but they’re harassing them in lunch and their classes and putting them on the spots in the hallways, just trying to find a way to get to them and for them to actually start talking to them more. And a lot of families around my area, around the Aldine area, they’re not informed about this. A lot of parents don’t know about this information. So they’re kind of lost in the whole procedure of the military. And we want to inform as many people as we can, that if you want to go, OK, that’s all good, but if you decide that there might be something else you could do, that there is something else and there is that opportunity for you to get out.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us, Irving Gonzalez and Eric Martinez from Aldine High School; Maureen Haver, founder of notevenone.org; Democratic Congress member Gene Green, who’s calling for an investigation into recruiting practices; and Douglas Smith, public affairs officer for the US Army Recruiting Command in Louisville, Kentucky.
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4) Buildup to the Next War
The Way We Live Now
By NOAH FELDMAN
August 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10wwln-lede2-t.html?ref=world
Summer is the time for blockbuster movies — and, it seems, for talking up war with Iran. Five years ago, after Baghdad fell so easily, hard-liners were talking about pushing the fight on to Tehran. Two years ago, Israel and Hezbollah fought a proxy war, leading to speculation that their patrons, the United States and Iran respectively, might well find themselves on the battlefield. Last year, Iran was testing missiles, and the Bush administration was taking a tough line about Iran’s move toward nuclear proliferation. This year, with the end of George Bush’s presidency close at hand, speculation is rife that Israel, with tacit or explicit American assistance, might seize the opportunity to bomb Iranian nuclear installations before a new and possibly less sympathetic president takes office.
The prospect of an Israeli attack on Iran before the next president’s inauguration in January is not just the stuff of airport thrillers. Much of the Israeli military establishment and Israeli public currently believes that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat. This gives Israel a motive for action much stronger than that of the U.S., for whom an Iranian bomb would primarily be a blow to our interests in the gulf region. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or whoever emerges as his successor in September might well be prepared to take risks that would not be worth it for the United States, especially given the vulnerability of our troops in Iraq.
If Israel decides to stage an attack on Iran, would the United States try to stop it? Conventional wisdom holds that Israel’s long-range bombers would need to refuel in the air above Iraq, which would require American acquiescence. The Israelis might rationally gamble that when push came to shove, the U.S. would turn a blind eye. After all, in the beady-eyed but inexorable logic of international security affairs, the Israelis know that the U.S. knows that Iran knows that it would be a bad move to go after the U.S. in retaliation for an Israeli attack. Any Iranian movement against U.S. assets would give President Bush just about the only domestically viable political excuse for bombing Iran that is possible to imagine. Because that would put Iran at war with the United States, not just Israel, Iran might choose to hold back. That likelihood, coupled with President Bush’s visceral support for Israel, might be enough reason for the administration to tolerate an Israeli attack that did not too directly implicate the United States. Given the uncertainty surrounding a potential Obama administration, this autumn may be Israel’s last and best chance to go after Iran’s nuclear capability.
Alongside this war picture, though, another movie is playing. On this side of the split screen, negotiations between the United States and Iran have never been better. True, Iran has replaced its experienced nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, with a neophyte whose inexperience so far does not look like an asset. But with European help, the mutual gestures toward substantive engagement seem to be getting more real with each passing day. Our under secretary of state for political affairs, the impressive regional expert William Burns, made an appearance at the talks to signal seriousness on the American side. It no longer seems unrealistic to imagine these negotiations making some progress, on the model of the six-party talks used to engage wild-card North Korea on the nuclear issue.
Meanwhile, even Israel is pursuing a talking strategy with Iran’s close ally Syria. The United States has been extremely skeptical of contact with the Assad regime, apparently believing that Syria cannot be taken out of Iran’s orbit and into ours in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights. As a result of our slightly astonishing nonparticipation, the Israel-Syria negotiation has been taking place under the delighted auspices of the moderate, democratic, Islamically oriented government of Turkey.
Israel’s current leaders, unlike the Bush administration, either think that real progress with Syria is possible notwithstanding Iran’s influence, or else they calculate that it would be worth it for them to have Syria move a little closer to the U.S.-Israel axis. Syria, for its part, must have surely looked at America’s Shiite allies in Iraq and drawn the conclusion that, when push comes to shove, the United States is willing to work with partners who are at least as close to Iran as they are to us. In the brave new world of our immersion in Iraq, we have increasingly found ourselves waking up with strange bedfellows. Strangest of these, of course, is Iran itself, with whom we have been quietly consulting over Iraq’s affairs because neither country wants an all-out civil war in that country.
So which script will play out, the threat of war or the dull hum of diplomats negotiating a modus vivendi that might someday be called peace? The answer lies in no small part with the Iranian government, itself a complex mix of ideologues and foreign-policy professionals under the not-always-watchful eye of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. If Iran is in fact close to developing functioning nuclear weapons, then it probably will not compromise. As North Korea has shown, even a few weapons are enough to enhance a country’s status and bargaining power immensely. If, however, Iran’s leaders assess the difficulties of mastering centrifuge technology as a real barrier to gaining weapons, they might as well negotiate and try to get the best deal they can while the U.S. and Israel are worried about them.
Paradoxically, then, saber rattling against Iran may help achieve political resolution. It could turn out that the more it looks as if the coming months may bring war, the more likely it becomes that winter will instead bring meaningful progress toward peace.
Noah Feldman, a contributing writer, teaches law at Harvard and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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5) LC4PJ Urges Opposition Jr. ROTC Ballot Question and Support for Antiwar Initiative
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Labor Cmte. for Peace & Justice
labor-for-peace-and-justice@igc.org
Sisters and Brothers:
At its monthly membership meeting this morning, the Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice adopted motions with regard to two San Francisco ballot initiatives.
Ballot initiative supporting Jr. ROTC in San Francisco public schools
LC4PJ members voted unanimously to oppose the proposition placed on the San Francisco ballot in support of Jr. ROTC. LC4PJ urges the labor movement, both individual unions and the San Francisco Labor Council, to actively oppose this initiative and urge its members to vote against it.
Jr. ROTC is an crucial element in the transmission belt that feeds mostly Asian, Black and Latino - but almost universally poor and working class youth from the public schools to the military. It helps to assure a steady supply of cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the military machine that is sucking the human and financial resources of our country down the sewer of militarism and the ill-fated neo-liberal quest for global domination.
Whatever may be said in support of this program, it does not provide our youth with the skills needed to become productive and constructive contributors to society. But it almost certainly sets them up to return in a body bag, or physically maimed and psychologically scarred for life. As we know from our experience with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, returning veterans end up disproportionately counted among the homeless, the addicted, and the destitute. Sadly, this same fate awaits all too many veterans of the current conflicts. Those who truly care about our young people should resolutely support the SF School Board decision to end Jr. ROTC in SF schools.
The voters of San Francisco already expressed themselves by an overwhelming majority in opposition to these policies. They have called for an end to illegal occupation, pre-emptive war and military aggression that has characterized the Bush administration, and sadly, that continues to be funded by the Congress.
The San Francisco School Board wisely decided to phase out Jr. ROTC. Conservative, militarist interests from across the country have funded an advisory ballot question that seeks to reverse that decision. The San Francisco labor movement and the San Francisco Labor Council in particular have been at the forefront of opposition to the neo-liberal militarist agenda. When this matter comes before the SFLC Monday, August 11th, we urge delegates from across the labor movement to soundly reject this ballot proposition and support the decision of the School Board to cleanse militarism from the San Francisco schools.
Support for a ballot initiative that reaffirms San Francisco voters' demand to end the occupation and bring all the troops home.
At the same meeting, again unanimously, the members of LC4PJ voted to support a ballot question that asks:
SHALL IT BE CITY POLICY TO ADVOCATE THAT ITS ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES IN THE U.S. SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES VOTE AGAINST ANY FURTHER FUNDING FOR THE DEPLOYMENT OF U.S. ARMED FORCES IN IRAQ, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF FUNDS SPECIFICALLY EARMARKED TO PROVIDE FOR THEIR SAFE AND ORDERLY WITHDRAWAL?
We endorse this measure and urge you to support it and place the San Francisco Labor Council on record in support of it when that matter comes before the delegates for consideration.
LC4PJ voted to contribute $100 to each of these campaigns.
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6) Broken Justice in Indian Country
By N. BRUCE DUTHU
Op-Ed Contributor
August 11, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/opinion/11duthu.html
White River Junction, Vt.
ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.
The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.
Rapes against American Indian women are also exceedingly violent; weapons are used at rates three times that for all other reported rapes.
Congress should step in and clearly establish the authority of Indian tribes to investigate and prosecute all crimes occurring on Indian lands — no matter whether tribal members or nonmembers are involved.
Historically, Indian tribes have exercised full authority over everyone within Indian lands. A number of the early federal treaties expressly noted a tribe’s power to punish non-Indians. Toward the latter part of the 19th-century, however, federal policy shifted away from tribal self-government in favor of an effort to dismantle tribal government systems. Criminal law enforcement, especially in cases involving non-Indians, increasingly came to be viewed as a federal or state matter.
Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court formalized the prohibition against tribes prosecuting non-Indians with its decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. In this case, a Pacific Northwest tribe was attempting to try two non-Indian residents of the Port Madison Reservation for causing trouble during the annual Chief Seattle Days celebration — one for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest and the other for recklessly endangering another person and harming tribal property. The court held that the tribe, as a “domestic dependent nation,” did not possess the full measure of sovereignty enjoyed by states and the national government, especially when it came to the affairs of non-Indian citizens.
Then in 1990, the court extended its Oliphant ruling to cases involving tribal prosecution of Indian offenders who are not members of that tribe. Congress subsequently passed new legislation to reaffirm the power of tribes to prosecute non-member Indian offenders, but it left the Oliphant ruling intact.
This means that when non-Indian men commit acts of sexual violence against Indian women, federal or state prosecutors must fill the jurisdictional void. But law enforcement in sexual violence cases in Indian country is haphazard at best, recent studies show, and it rarely leads to prosecution and conviction of non-Indian offenders. The Department of Justice’s own records show that in 2006, prosecutors filed only 606 criminal cases in all of Indian country. With more than 560 federally recognized tribes, that works out to a little more than one criminal prosecution for each tribe.
Even if outside prosecutors had the time and resources to handle crimes on Indian land more efficiently, it would make better sense for tribal governments to have jurisdiction over all reservation-based crimes. Given their familiarity with the community, cultural norms and, in many cases, understanding of distinct tribal languages, tribal governments are in the best position to create appropriate law enforcement and health care responses — and to assure crime victims, especially victims of sexual violence, that a reported crime will be taken seriously and handled expeditiously.
Congress should enact legislation to overrule the Oliphant decision and reaffirm the tribes’ full criminal and civil authority over all activities on tribal lands. This law should also lift the sentencing constraints imposed in 1968 that restrict the criminal sentences that tribal courts can impose to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. In cases of rape, state court sentences typically exceed 8 years, while federal sentences are more than 12 years. Tribes should have the latitude to impose comparable sanctions. (A bill pending in Congress would extend tribal sentencing authority to three years, with more latitude in cases of domestic violence, but its prospects of passage are uncertain.)
Congress recently allocated $750 million for enhancing public safety in Indian country. This money will help tribes hire and train more police, build detention facilities and augment federal investigative and prosecutorial capacity for Indian country crimes. Ideally, the grant process will be efficient enough to make sure that this money reaches the places most in need.
But financial aid will not be enough to stop sexual violence against Indian women. Tribal courts have grown in sophistication over the past 30 years, and they take seriously the work of administering justice. Congress must support their efforts by closing the legal gaps that allow violent criminals to roam Indian country unchecked.
N. Bruce Duthu, a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth, is the author of “American Indians and the Law.”
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7) Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Resolution Affiliating With USLAW
[This is a really significant breakthrough. The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO recently voted to affiliate with USLAW. They represent 900,000 workers from 51 International Unions and 1422 local unions in the state.]
NatAssembly@aol.com
WHEREAS the PA AFL-CIO strongly supports our troops and wishes to get them out of harm’s way and to bring them home safely; and
The war in Iraq has already taken the lives of nearly 4,000 US military men and women, and wounded an additional 25,000 US soldiers; and
The number of US troops killed in Iraq has more than doubled since the national AFL-CIO resolution in August, 2005 that called for a “commitment by our nation’s leaders to bring our troops home rapidly”; and
The war in Iraq has also claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens,
The war in Iraq was launched based on lies by the Bush administration; and
It is clear now that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to the security of the United States; and
There is no link established between Iraq and the attacks of September 11, 2001; and
The cost of the war in Iraq to an American family of four will be more than $36,000 based on projected costs from 2002 to 2017; and
The war in Iraq bears a total price tag for Pennsylvanians of $50 billion from 2002-2008, which would have been far better spent on education, housing, mass transportation, and health care for Pennsylvanians; and
The total price tag of the war in Iraq for Pennsylvanians will swell to $106 billion if the US does not withdraw rapidly from Iraq; and
The bulk of the burden of the war in Iraq has fallen on the families of working people; and
US Labor Against the War, founded in 2002 with the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO and other Pennsylvania unions as among the founding members, has become the chief center for organizing efforts within the labor movement to end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home safely; and
US Labor Against the war now has more than 170 affiliated labor organizations, including the Connecticut AFL-CIO, the Maryland and Washington, DC AFL-CIO, and several other state federations; and
The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO is in agreement with the mission statement of US Labor Against the War, including
--A just foreign policy that will bring genuine security and prosperity to working people. A policy that supports global economic and social justice rather than the race-to-the-bottom, job-destroying discriminatory practices favored by multinational corporations.
--Supporting our troops and their families by bringing the troops home now, by not recklessly putting them in harm’s way and by providing decent compensation, veterans’ benefits.
--Protecting workers’ rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and the rights of immigrants by promoting democracy, not subverting it.
--Solidarity with workers and their organizations around the world who are struggling for their own labor and human rights and with those in the US who want US foreign and domestic policies to reflect our nation’s highest ideals.
THEREFORE, be it resolved that the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO reiterates the call of President John Sweeney and the national AFL-CIO for the United States to “clearly articulate the path for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq rapidly”; and
Be if further resolved that the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO affiliate with US Labor Against the War and agrees to work together with US Labor Against the War to further our mutual goals.
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8) In Guantánamo, Locals Adapt to Life With an Unwelcome Neighbor
By MARC LACEY
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/world/americas/12cuba.html?ref=world
GUANTÁNAMO, Cuba — As a major terrorism trial was getting under way at the American naval base not far from here last month, Guantánamo’s municipal court, located in Cuban-controlled territory, had a contested divorce on its docket. It was the only case that afternoon.
The aging Guantánamo courtroom, with its leaky roof and well-worn wooden benches, is a far cry from the fancy new judicial center that the Defense Department installed at its base across the fence. There are typewriters on the desks at Cuba’s court, faded portraits of Che Guevara on the walls and a classic motorcycle, complete with a sidecar bearing the court logo, parked in the courtyard.
Both courts, it turns out, earn international scorn. The United States and other critics of Cuba consider the island’s judiciary an appendage of the Socialist government, a tool of the Castro brothers’ repressive ways. Cuba, in turn, is among the loudest critics of the American policy of holding enemy combatants from the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq at Guantánamo Bay and denying them the legal protections they would be entitled to on American soil.
“The base is needed to humiliate and to do the dirty work that occurs there,” Fidel Castro wrote in a newspaper commentary last year.
Despite the sniping, however, the base has been around so long, 105 years to be exact, that Cubans have grown used to its presence — and its propaganda value — and seem to hold out little hope that the 45 square miles will be returned anytime soon.
“They will leave on their own,” predicted Carlos González, 80, who fought alongside the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and other notable figures during the 1959 revolution, which began in eastern Cuba not far from the base. “We’ll just wait.”
That is an oft-heard sentiment in and around Guantánamo, which relied heavily on the base in the years before relations between Washington and Havana grew frosty once Fidel Castro came to power. There was a time when the base was a major source of employment for local residents. But there were plenty of downsides when the base’s fencing was more porous, local people say, like the many brothels that operated in town.
Around the corner of the Guantánamo courthouse is a park devoted to the popular Cuban song “Guantanamera,” which commemorates a local farm girl. The relatively few tourists who pass through take pictures of themselves in front of the oversize lyrics. Getting a glimpse of the base is trickier, requiring Cuban government permission, which is only sometimes granted.
“It’s right over there,” said Guillermo Elizalde, 78, who is considered one of the heroes of the revolution. He pointed off into the distance toward the site of the American military presence, which was first established in 1898 when the United States landed in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. “It’s our territory,” he said. “They took it.”
Technically, Guantánamo Bay still remains Cuba, though it is the only patch of the Socialist island with a McDonald’s and a Starbucks in operation. That commercial presence would seem to violate the 1903 treaty that set up the base, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt and his Cuban counterpart. The treaty says that it can be used only as a naval base and that commercial activity is banned.
The American presence has long been used as a rallying cry by the Cubans, a sign of old-time imperialism continuing into the present day. The last time it came up was July 11, when Raúl Castro, who took over the presidency from his brother in February, mentioned the base in a speech to challenge criticism of Cuba’s human rights record. He said Washington had lost any moral authority because of the prisoners it held “in the territory usurped from our country.”
But the base, having been in American hands for so many generations, is not one of the issues raised most frequently by the Cubans. Instead, it is the case of five Cuban men who were convicted in the United States seven years ago for infiltrating anti-Cuban organizations in Miami and sending information on them back to Havana. Cuba sees them as heroes, not spies, since they aimed to stop what Cuba says were terrorist plots aimed at Cuban soil.
In its latest public relations push, the government is decrying that two of the five men’s wives have not been allowed to visit their husbands in the decade they have been behind bars, despite applying for visas nine times. The United States counters that the two women who have not been allowed to visit were involved in the Cuban surveillance effort.
Roberto González, the brother of one of the incarcerated men and a member of their legal team, said that when he saw his brother in an American prison dressed in a jumpsuit he could not help but think of the similar outfits that the terrorism suspects don at Guantánamo Bay.
There is a legal underpinning to the American presence in Cuba, albeit one that Havana disputes. Following the 1903 treaty giving the United States rights to the land, the Americans reaffirmed the arrangement with another accord in 1934. Havana says both agreements were imposed upon Cuba and are thus void.
To make its point, Cuba refuses to cash the monthly rent checks that the United States sends to Cuba for the base — a bargain at $4,085 a month. The very first check sent to Fidel Castro’s government, in 1959, was cashed because of what the former president later called confusion in the heady early days of post-revolution Cuba.
“If we have to wait for the collapse of the system, we will wait,” Fidel Castro wrote last year.
Raúl Castro has continued his brother’s policy of not cashing the checks. The last one, dated March 14, 2008, went from the State Department to the Cuban treasury but was never cashed. It becomes void after one year.
The base and its surroundings, although monitored by both countries’ militaries, lack some of the cold war hostility they used to have. In the late 1990s, the United States removed the anti-personnel and anti-tank mines it had placed at the perimeter of the base, eliminating the last minefield that the United States had in the Western Hemisphere. American officials meet along the fence monthly with their Cuban counterparts despite the lack of official diplomatic relations between the countries.
Mr. Elizalde, the revolution veteran, is confident there will be a day when his country controls the entire island again. But he doubts he will ever stroll on that part behind the fence.
“I probably won’t ever see it,” he said. “But I have children and grandchildren, and maybe they’ll see us get it back.”
Then he thought for a minute and added: “Or maybe it will be their children and grandchildren.”
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9) Use of Iraq Contractors Costs Billions, Report Says
By JAMES RISEN
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/washington/12contractors.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released Tuesday.
The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, according to people with knowledge of its contents, will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops.
The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield.
The budget office’s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billion a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accounted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found, according to the people with knowledge of the report.
Several outside experts on contracting said the report’s numbers seemed to provide the first official price tag on contracting in Iraq and raised troubling questions about the degree to which the war had been privatized.
Contractors in Iraq now employ at least 180,000 people in the country, forming what amounts to a second, private, army, larger than the United States military force, and one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view. The widespread use of these employees as bodyguards, translators, drivers, construction workers and cooks and bottle washers has allowed the administration to hold down the number of military personnel sent to Iraq, helping to avoid a draft.
In addition, the dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts. When the war began, for example, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company run by Dick Cheney before he was vice president, became the largest Pentagon contractor in Iraq. After years of criticism and scrutiny for its role in Iraq, Halliburton sold the unit, which is still the largest defense contractor in the war, and has 40,000 employees in Iraq.
“This is the first war that the United States has fought where so many of the people and resources involved aren’t of the military, but from contractors,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School and a member of an independent commission created by Congress to study contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is unprecedented,” he added. “It was considered an all-out imperative by the administration to keep troop levels low, particularly in the beginning of the war, and one way that was done was to shift money and manpower to contractors. But that has exposed the military to greater risks from contractor waste and abuse.”
Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war. “It is a shocking number, but I still don’t think it is the full cost,” Ms. Rasor said. “I don’t think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went.”
Peter W. Singer, a defense contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, said the biggest problem was that the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq, almost no thought had been given to an overall strategy to determine which jobs and functions should be handled by the government, and which could be turned over to private companies without damaging the military effort.
“These new numbers point to the overall question — when do you cross the line in terms of turning over too much of the public mission of defense to private firms,” Mr. Singer said. “There are some things that are appropriate for private companies to do, but others things that are not. But we don’t seem to have had a strategy for determining which was appropriate and which wasn’t. We have just handed over functions to contractors in a very haphazard way.”
Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said recently that the Pentagon’s outsourcing in Iraq had grown so large and raised so many unanswered policy questions that he had been pushing for the Senate to create a special war-contracting committee, like the panel that Harry S. Truman led in the Senate before he was tapped to be Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944.
“The Truman Committee held 60 hearings on waste, fraud and abuse,” Mr. Dorgan said. “It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have a bipartisan investigative committee on contracting in Iraq.”
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10) Auditors Question Blackwater Contracts
By ELIZABETH OLSON
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/business/12sbiz.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — Blackwater Worldwide, the contractor whose provision of private security in Iraq has been under scrutiny, and its affiliated companies may have improperly obtained more than $100 million in contracts meant for small businesses, according to federal auditors.
A report by the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, issued in July, found that Blackwater and its affiliates, including Presidential Airways, won 39 contracts in the fiscal years 2005, 2006 and 2007 despite indications that the companies employed more than the number specified by the federal government. In some cases, the report said, the companies also had higher revenues than allowed for a small business.
Blackwater is a major provider of security for American diplomats in Iraq and was the subject of a Congressional hearing after a Blackwater shooting in Baghdad last September left 17 Iraqis dead.
Blackwater and Presidential Airways, both based in Moyock, N.C., and owned by EP Investments, of McLean, Va., won 31 contracts set aside for companies with revenues of $6.5 million or less, and one additional contract for a company with no more than $750,000 in annual revenues. Those contracts, in all, were valued at $2.1 million.
In addition, Presidential Airways, which carries both passengers and cargo, won some $107 million in contracts reserved for companies whose revenues were no more than $25.5 million or had fewer than 1,500 employees.
Although most of the challenged contracts were awarded by the Defense Department, the initial determinations of whether the companies qualified as small businesses were made by the Small Business Administration.
The companies could have skirted small business size criteria because they counted many workers as independent contractors, not employees, which allowed them to exceed the 1,500-employee ceiling set in some contracts, according to the auditors.
The inspector general’s office found that Blackwater and the other companies’ sizes and revenues may have “involved misrepresentations,” and suggested that the agency may want to “determine whether it is appropriate for Blackwater affiliates to continue receiving small business set-aside contracts.”
When rival firms had challenged the 2006 contract for helicopter services to Presidential Airways on grounds that the company was too large, the airline provided data that 28 Blackwater-affiliated entities had a total of only 715 employees.
But the inspector general found that Blackwater had hired more than a thousand independent contractors and treated them as if they were regular employees, with scheduled shifts, for example, which called the size determination into question. The report also said the Small Business Administration should have “attempted to reconcile discrepancies” in the data Blackwater provided.
Anne E. Tyrrell, Blackwater’s spokeswoman, called the report “unnecessarily speculative,” and said the “classification of security personnel as independent contractors is reasonable, correct and legally protected.” She said that “all contracted personnel serving on government contracts in Iraq for Blackwater work under the direct operational control of the United States government.”
The report, which was requested last March by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, asked the inspectors general of the Defense Department and other contracting agencies to “review these contracts to determine whether misrepresentations were made” to obtain them.
In a letter to Mr. Waxman, the S.B.A. said it had relied on the figures provided by Blackwater and Presidential Airways.
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11) Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes
Tue Aug 12, 2008 12:54pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1249465620080812?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.
The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.
More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.
During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.
The report did not name any companies. The GAO said corporations escaped paying federal income taxes for a variety of reasons including operating losses, tax credits and an ability to use transactions within the company to shift income to low tax countries.
With the U.S. budget deficit this year running close to the record $413 billion that was set in 2004 and projected to hit a record $486 billion next year, lawmakers are looking to plug holes in the U.S. tax code and generate more revenues.
Dorgan in a statement called the report "a shocking indictment of the current tax system." Levin said it made clear that "too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States."
The study showed about 28 percent of large foreign corporations, those with more than $250 million in assets, doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes in 2005 despite $372 billion in gross receipts, the senators said. About 25 percent of the largest U.S. companies paid no federal income taxes in 2005 despite $1.1 trillion in gross sales that year, they said.
(Reporting by Donna Smith, Editing by David Wiessler)
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Canada: Rioting in Montreal
By IAN AUSTEN
World Briefing | The Americas
Three police officers were injured, one shot in the leg, during rioting in Montreal that erupted late Sunday in response to the killing of an 18-year-old by the police the day before. A fire station, fire trucks, cars and about 20 shops were vandalized or set ablaze. An ambulance worker was also injured. About 500 riot police officers quelled the violence.
August 12, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/world/americas/12briefs-RIOTINGINMON_BRF.html?ref=world
Arizona: Court Allows Fake Snow Opposed by Tribes
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal appeals court has ruled that a ski resort’s plan to use recycled wastewater for making snow would not violate the religious freedom of Indian groups who had claimed that the practice would be blasphemous to a mountain they hold sacred. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ruling in a lawsuit against the Arizona Snowbowl near Flagstaff that was filed by 13 tribes and the Sierra Club, overturned a ruling by a smaller panel of the court that said the plan would violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The 1993 act is intended to ensure that government actions do not infringe on religious freedom. Lawyers for the tribes and the Sierra Club said they expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.
August 9, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09brfs-COURTALLOWSF_BRF.html?ref=us
Bolivia: Tin Miners Die in Clashes
By REUTERS
World Briefing | The Americas
At least two miners were killed and many more were injured Tuesday in clashes between the police and workers at the country’s largest tin mine, Huanuni, local radio reported. The violence erupted when police officers clashed with groups of striking miners who had blocked a road, Interior Minister Alfredo Rada said. The strike is in support of a drive by a labor federation for higher pensions and a lowering of the retirement age to 55.
August 6, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/world/americas/06briefs-TINMINERSDIE_BRF.html?ref=world
Proposed Kosher Certification Rules
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Conservative Jewish leaders are seeking to protect workers and the environment at kosher food plants like the one raided this spring in Iowa. They issued draft guidelines for a kosher certification program meant as a supplement to the traditional certification process that measures compliance with Jewish dietary law. The proposed “hekhsher tzedek,” or “certificate of righteousness,” would be awarded to companies that pay fair wages, ensure workplace safety, follow government environmental regulations and treat animals humanely, among other proposed criteria. Support for the idea has been fueled by controversies at Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville, Iowa, the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant. In May, immigration officials raided the plant, arresting nearly 400 workers.
August 1, 2008
National Briefing | Immigration
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/us/01brfs-PROPOSEDKOSH_BRF.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Torture
On the Waterboard
How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. VF.com has the footage. Related: “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” from the August 2008 issue.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808
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Alison Bodine defense Committee
Lift the Two-year Ban
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/
Watch the Sept 28 Video on Alison's Case!
http://alisonbodine.blogspot.com/2007/10/blog-post.html
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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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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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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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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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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"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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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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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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"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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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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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
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