Wednesday, February 11, 2009

BAUAW NEWSLETTER - WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2009

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Wall Street Executive Air
http://www.markfiore.com/

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row - U.S. Supreme Court
Legal Update
Robert R. Bryan, lead counsel
February 8, 2009
RobertRBryan@aol.com

New case filing in Supreme Court On February 4, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court docketed and accepted for filing the Petition for Writ of Certiorari, with supporting Appendix, that I had submitted December 19, 2008 on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. (AbuJamal v. Beard, U.S. Sup. Ct. No. 08-8483.) A copy of the petition is attached. The central issue in this case is racism in jury selection. The prosecution systematically removed people from sitting on the trial jury purely because of the color of their skin, that is, being black. The bigotry that killed Martin Luther King, Jr., so many years ago, has been rampant in the case of my client and is a central part of the state's quest to murder him in the name of the law.

Prosecution's separate Supreme Court petition In an entirely separate case (Beard v. Abu-Jamal, Sup. Ct. No. 08-652), the prosecution is seeking to overturn the victory we achieved last year in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. (Abu-Jamal v. Horn, 520 F.3d 272 (3rd Cir. 2008).) In that ruling the court ordered a new jury trial on the question of the death penalty. Our Brief In Opposition will be filed in the Supreme Court on February 13, 2009.

Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense The legal defense for Mumia needs help. The costs for our litigation in two case before the Supreme Court are substantial. To help, please make your checks payable to the “National Lawyers Guild Foundation” (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). The donations are tax deductible, and should be mailed to:

Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012

Conclusion Mumia remains on Pennsylvania's death row. We are in an epic struggle in which his life hangs in the balance. What occurs now in the Supreme Court will determine whether Mumia will have a new jury trial, or die at the hands of the executioner.

As I have previously pointed out, Mumia is in greater danger than at any time since his 1981 arrest. Your support and activism is needed. This great journalist and author does not belong on death row or in prison. We must not rest until he is free.

Yours very truly,

Robert R. Bryan
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117

Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
[E-mail: RobertRBryan@aol.com]

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Israel-Palestine: A Land in Fragments
A film by American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)-- 2 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ewF7AXn3dg

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Resolution regarding an IVAW Position Statement on Afghanistan
http://ivaw.org/afghanistan/resolution

Whereas, Iraq Veterans Against the War is an organization that has opened its membership to veterans of the war in Afghanistan;

Whereas, the war in Afghanistan is continuing into its seventh year with rising casualties among the Afghan people, and with U.S. and Coalition forces facing their deadliest year since the invasion;

Whereas a primary motivation for the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan is competition between the U.S., Russia and China for control of oil and natural gas resources in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea;

Whereas, the military occupation is creating tension and resentment among the Afghan people, to include Afghan women, many of whom are calling for the removal of all foreign occupying troops;

Whereas, the Afghanistan war dehumanizes the Afghan people and denies them their right to self-determination;

Whereas, our military is being exhausted by involuntary extensions, and activations of the Reserve, National Guard and Individual Ready Reserve, and by repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan;

Whereas, service members are facing serious health consequences due to our government's negligence in Iraq and Afghanistan and mismanagement of the Department of Veterans Affairs;

Whereas, there is no battlefield solution to terrorism, and any escalation of the war in Afghanistan will only serve to exacerbate the plight of the Afghan people, destabilize the region, and further the breakdown of our military;

Therefore, be it resolved that Iraq Veterans Against the War calls for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces in Afghanistan and reparations for the Afghan people, and supports all troops and veterans working towards those ends.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.

Dear Friends,

Courage to Resist has published an IRR overview that contains critical
information for anyone nearing the end of their military enlistment and the
hundreds of thousands of recently discharged veterans still eligible for
involuntary recall. I don't believe this information exists anywhere else,
so I'm hoping you might be able to help distribute, link and share this as
broadly as possible so that those who need it the most might find it.

Jeff Paterson
Courage to Resist Project Director

RESISTING INDIVIDUAL READY RESERVE (IRR) RECALL
Courage to Resist.

Online version:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/658/1/
PDF leaflet:
http://couragetoresist.org/x/images/stories/pdf2/irr-leaflet.pdf
Additional related IRR information from Courage to Resist:
http://couragetoresist.org/irr

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

POLICE TERRORISM -- MARTINA CORREIA, sister of Troy Davis, an innocent man on Georgia's death row, and FRED HAMPTON JR, Chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC) and a victim of police terror, will speak in West Oakland this Wednesday.

7 pm, Wednesday, February 11th, at THE BLACK DOT, 1195 West Pine Street, Oakland

This event is sponsored by the POCC, and will be hosted by journalist JR, of Block Report Radio, Flashpoints, and the SF Bay View, and the Minister of Information of the POCC.

NOTE: Martina will also be interviewed on Hard Knock Radio, KPFA, 94.1 FM, on Wednesday Feb 11.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

*please forward*

We must keep the pressure up on the BART BOARD as they are fracturing and moveable as long as they feel the continued heat.

Thursday, February 12, 8:15AM Kaiser Center, 20th Street Mall 344 20th Street, 3rd Street Oakland, CA

It's a small room and we need to pack it!


The BART Board of Directors must take action for Justice for Oscar Grant by taking a pledge to do the following:

1) Fire and Prosecute BART Officer Tony Pirone (& all officers present during the execution of Oscar Grant)

2) Fire BART Police Chief Gary Gee for complicity and incompetence

3) Disarm BART Police

(these are demands that this group of people has the power to carry out!)

Building movement and securing justice requires perseverance and sacrifice for common good. Actions like this require little and have significant impact. If you can come before going to work or going to school or whatevea you bout to do for the day J

Towards peace,
Malachi Larrabee-Garza
Peer Exchange Coordinator

Community Justice Network for Youth
W. Haywood Burns Institute
180 Howard St. Suite 320
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415)321-4100 x110
(415)321-4140 (fax)

mgarza@burnsinstitute.org
www.cjny.org

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

You're invited to join Bay Area CODEPINK in February for exciting actions and informative events. This month we'd like to highlight an event CODEPINKer Tamara has organized with Iraqi author Nadje Al-Ali who will speak on her new book, "What Kind of Liberation: Women and the Occupation of Iraq". Nadje was with CODEPINK on the national Iraqi women's speaking tour around International Women's Day in 2006 and returns to the US from London to share this excellent new book. Join us at The First Unitarian Universalist Society of SF (The Murdock Room, 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, SF) on Thursday, February 12 for this special event.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Celebrate Black History Month
Come To the ILWU Rally!

Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense

12 Noon,
Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco

SPEAKERS:

ANGELA DAVIS UC Santa Cruz Professor,
former Black Panther, witch-hunted by FBI

MARTINA CORREIA Sister of Troy Davis on Georgia's death row

Rev Cecil Williams Glide Memorial Church

Robert R Bryan lead attorney for Mumia Abu-Jamal,
on Pennsylvania death row

Gerald Smith former Black Panther,
Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

Pierre LaBossiere founding member, Haiti Action Committee

JR Prisoners of Conscience Committee, Minister of Information

Richard Brown former Black Panther, San Francisco 8

Cultural presentations:
Jack Hirschman, SF Poet Laureate;
Tayo Aluko, Nigerian actor portraying Paul Robeson: and
Upsurge! Jazz/Poetry Music

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was born out of the militant 1934 strike in which police killed two strikers in San Francisco, shooting them in the back. Still today police are banned from membership in Local 10. The union has a legacy of defending those under attack by the government, in particular reds and blacks, from Harry Bridges and Paul Robeson, to Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Troy Davis. For Black History Month, Local 10 is organizing this rally to teach the lessons of the need for unity of action to defend against government repression and racist profiling. These lessons are never more necessary than today, as evidenced by the brutal murder by BART police of Oscar Grant, who was lying face-down when shot.

Racism, Repression
and Rebellion:
The Lessons of Labor Defense

12 Noon, Saturday, 14 February 2009
ILWU Local 10 Hall, 400 North Point (at Mason)
near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco

MORE INFO: (510) 501-7080

- from Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610 LACFreeMumia@aol.com

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

Justice for Oscar Grant! Justice for Anita Gay!
Mon. Feb. 16, 5pm-7pm
Martin Luther King Blvd & Ashby, near Ashby BART, Berkeley

WE WILL NOT FORGET!

On February 16, 2008, Anita Gay -grandmother and longtime Berkeley resident - was shot in the back and killed on her front porch by a lone Berkeley police officer. The bullets passed through her into her apartment, grazing her daughter’s face and narrowly missing her grandchild. The police claim the shooting was justified. The media demonized the family and blame the shooting on Anita.

Many neighbors saw what really happened.

The police report was a cover up and a lie. Anita called the police for help. She should have not been killed. The officer who killed her and the Berkeley Police Department must be held accountable. Her family, friends, and supporters have organized to demand justice. We need better jobs and housing, not more racist cops and excuses. We need your help.

WE MUST STAND UP!

Too many people have been killed by the police. We haven’t forgotten Gary King Jr., Jose Luis Buenrostro, Casper Banjo, Jody Woodfox, and so many others. One year after Anita Gay was shot in the back by a Berkeley cop, join family, friends and supporters of Anita Gay to celebrate her life, mourn her loss, and demand an end to racist police brutality and murder.

Call 510-435-0844 for more info or to volunteer!

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

MARCH 21 "MARCH ON THE PENTAGON" PLANNING MEETING FOR SAN FRANCISCO PROTEST HAS LAUNCHED THE MARCH 21 COALITION!

MASS COMMUNITY OUTREACH TO BUILD MARCH 21
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 11:00 A.M.
NEXT PLANNING MEETING, SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2:00 P.M.
AT:
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO (UPSTAIRS)
474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET)
SAN FRANCISCO

Check out the new MARCH 21 Coalition Website
(An extensive endorsement list is posted here):

http://www.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=M21_homepage

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations
CALL FOR ENDORSEMENTS FOR MARCH 21:

Greetings:

The March on the Pentagon and the demonstrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities scheduled for Saturday, March 21 – marking the beginning of the 7th year of war and occupation of Iraq – are now only weeks away. This is a time for peace activists across the country to go all-out in helping to publicize and build these actions. You can start by endorsing March 21, if you and your organization have not done so already.

A mass movement in the streets is needed now more than ever if we are to succeed in getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, ending U.S. support for Israel's occupation of Palestine, preventing further attacks on Pakistan, and stopping a war against Iran. The occupation of Iraq continues with every indication that the new administration intends to stay there indefinitely. Meanwhile, 30,000 additional U.S. troops are to be sent to Afghanistan. The whole world watched with horror as Israel massacred thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, using weapons of mass destruction provided by Washington. And only days after the inauguration, orders were given to bomb Pakistan, resulting in 21 deaths, most of them women and children.

March 21 provides concerned people throughout the country an opportunity to let the world know that opposition to these U.S. policies of war, occupation, intervention and expansionism exists and is determined to be heard. It lets the beleaguered people in those countries where the U.S. is an oppressor know that there is an American antiwar movement that does not forget their needs for peace and national sovereignty. That is a message we must also send to the new administration. The size of the turnout on the 21st will be critical if we are to help make a difference. So we count on you to do whatever you can to build highly visible mass actions and to ensure that they are as large, vocal and spirited as possible.

There are March 21 committees and coalitions already formed or being formed in many areas working to publicize the event and send people to one of the demonstration sites. We encourage you to join or organize such a grouping in your locale. The National Assembly, as one of many initiators of March 21, is going all out to make the actions as large as possible.

Please send endorsements to our website at www.natassembly.org, where an endorsement form is provided, or by writing natassembly@aol.com. While we would like to have these endorsements for our records so that we can keep everyone updated regarding National Assembly activities, we will also forward them to the March 21 National Coalition website at www.PentagonMarch.org, where the latest list of endorsers can be viewed.

In solidarity,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
www.natassembly.org
216-736-4704 for more info

P.S. Check out the National Assembly website to see our statement on Gaza, get information on March 21st organizing, learn about our July 10-12 national antiwar conference in Pittsburgh, make a donation, and participate in our discussion blog.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

ARTICLES IN FULL:

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) This Could Be Another Jenna
February 6th, 2009
By James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the team at:
ColorOfChange.org

2) Disappearing Jobs
Editorial
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07sat1.html

3) U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ref=world

4) U.S. Military Violated Security Agreement Twice in 2 Weeks, Iraqi Leaders Say
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html?ref=world

5) Israel Deports Activists From Intercepted Vessel
By ETHAN BRONNER and ISABEL KERSHNER
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07mideast.html?ref=world

6) Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair
By DAMIEN CAVE
February 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/us/08lehigh.html?ref=us

7) Holbrooke Says Afghan War ‘Tougher than Iraq’
By NICHOLAS KULISH and HELENE COOPER
February 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/europe/09munich.html?hp

8) The Destructive Center
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
February 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1

9) No Welfare, No Work
Editorial
February 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09mon2.html

10) NATO Chief Presses Afghan Drug Fight
By JUDY DEMPSEY
February 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/asia/12nato.html?ref=world

11) The Prison Overcrowding Fix
By SOLOMON MOORE
February 11, 2009
News Analysis
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/us/11prisons.html?ref=us

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1) This Could Be Another Jenna
February 6th, 2009
By James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the team at:
ColorOfChange.org

On December 8th, 17-year-old Billey Joe Johnson died from a gunshot wound to the head. Police say he killed himself with a shotgun after being stopped for a simple traffic violation in Lucedale, Mississippi.1 Several things seem to cast doubt on the official story, including an independent investigation that concluded it would have been impossible for the shot that killed Johnson to have been self-inflicted.

Many on the ground smell a murder and a cover-up. We don't have all the answers, but it's clear that in the racially divided town of Lucedale, all the ingredients exist for a miscarriage of justice.

Your voice can help ensure that the District Attorney feels the presence of a national spotlight when he presents his findings to a grand jury on Monday. Let him know that anything short of a thorough investigation will result in massive attention and a call for outside intervention.

Can you lend your voice to demand justice for Billey Joe?

http://colorofchange.org/billeyjoe/?id=1968-349563

From the beginning, the District Attorney has treated the investigation of Billey Joe's death as a suicide or the result of an accidental self-inflicted injury. Based on his public statements and interactions with Billey Joe's family, it appears that the District Attorney hasn't looked into whether Billey Joe was killed by an officer or someone else. Again, we don't have all the answers, but here's what we do know:

Billey Joe was at his former girlfriend's house minutes before the killing.2 He never entered the house, but police were called to respond to an attempted burglary there.3 This fact was not a part of the original story given by the police.

Billey Joe's family says that his ex-girlfriend had been staying at her father's house because her mother threw her out for dating Billey Joe (she is White and Billey Joe was Black). They said Billey Joe knew to only go to the house when the girl's father was not present, that the two of them were on good terms even after they had broken up, and that the breakup was largely because of pressure from her father. The family also claims that there is a relationship between the officer present at the scene of Billey Joe's death and the girl's father.

A witness heard two shots, not one, at the scene where Billey Joe died, according to an independent investigation launched by the Mississippi NAACP. The pathologist in that investigation has indicated that it would be impossible for a bullet from a self-inflicted shot to enter in the manner that it did. He also said that given the length of Billey Joe's arms and the length of the shotgun, it would have been impossible for him to hold the weapon and fire it at himself.

Billey Joe was a star athlete with scholarship offers from more than half a dozen schools. No one--including family, friends, and coaches--could think of a reason that Billey Joe would want to end his life.4,5,6
A true investigation would sort out fact from rumor. But we can't be sure that Johnson's family will get the investigation it deserves. In the case of the Jena 6 we saw a District Attorney and a judge incapable of carrying out justice in a racially charged environment. In the recent case of the murder of Oscar Grant by police (and many like it), we see how unlikely it is for District Attorneys to do their job when the suspect is an officer of the law. But in both these cases, public pressure has made all the difference by shining a spotlight on local authorities.

In the case of Billey Joe Johnson, we're looking for the truth and for justice. A minute of your time can help ensure his family gets both:

http://colorofchange.org/billeyjoe/?id=1968-349563

Thanks and Peace,

-- James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
February 6th, 2009

References:

1. "Mississippi family looks for answers in son's death," USA Today, 12-22-08
http://tinyurl.com/aul9hd

2. "Autopsy not completed in football star's death," The Sun Herald, 1-06-09
http://www.sunherald.com/local/story/1050689.html

3. Police report and radio logs detailing events leading up to Johnson's death, posted on WKRG-TV website
http://www.wkrg.com/news/flash_paper/12_19_08_billy_joe_johnson/

4. "CNN Newsroom: Mystery Death in Mississippi," CNN, 12-17-08
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0812/17/cnr.07.html

5. "Mississippi running back Billey Joe Johnson, Jr. ran for 1,559 yards and 24 touchdowns before his death in December," Collin Mickle-Press-Register, 1-11-09
http://tinyurl.com/cs7cjm

6. "Player's death report leaves many puzzled," The Sun Herald, 12-21-08
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_11280331

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

2) Disappearing Jobs
Editorial
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/opinion/07sat1.html

It was impossible to argue with President Obama on Friday when he said that the dismal new jobs report — the largest loss in 13 consecutive months of decline — made it all the more urgent for Congress to pass the economic stimulus and recovery package.

Our only objection was that he didn’t go further: In fact, the jobs report underscored the need for an even bigger boost than is contemplated by the measure, now clocking in at roughly $800 billion.

One of Mr. Obama’s goals for the stimulus is to create three million to four million jobs. That is more or less in line with official job losses thus far in the recession: Employers shed 598,000 jobs in January, bringing the number of jobs axed since the recession began in December 2007 to 3.6 million. But as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out in a research note on Friday, the economy needed to have added about 1.7 million jobs over the past 13 months just to keep up with population growth. As a result, the economy already is coming up short by more than five million jobs.

Other data in January’s report are also worse than meets the eye. The unemployment rate rose from 7.2 percent in December to 7.6 percent, which works out to 11.6 million unemployed workers. The larger the ranks of the unemployed, the harder it becomes to find a job, leading to longer stretches of unemployment and a bigger hit to families’ finances.

Those are not the only manifestation of deepening job gloom. The underemployment rate, which includes part-time workers who need full-time jobs and jobless workers who have given up looking because their prospects are so dim, plunged deeper into double-digit territory in January, reaching 13.9 percent — or 21.7 million workers — up from 13.5 percent in December.

Rising unemployment and underemployment means that the need for unemployment benefits and income support — such as help in paying for health care — are rising faster than Congress can get its act together to provide relief.

Though both the House and Senate versions of the stimulus package currently include bolstered unemployment pay, the January numbers should compel lawmakers to do more when they write the final version of the bill. Currently, the bills boost unemployment benefits by $25 a week. That easily could be increased.

Similarly, aid to states, which preserves and creates jobs for government employees as well as private contractors — while meeting vital needs for health care and education — should be a prime area for more federal support, not less, as Senate Republicans were clamoring for this week.

Some of the more baldly partisan Republicans seemed to have decided to put the nation’s economic health in grave jeopardy so they can replay a fight they lost big in the 2008 elections. Dragging out the tired economic theories that destroyed Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress and then sank Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, they were even calling for ending the whole discussion about a real stimulus package and just cutting taxes instead.

Fearful Democrats, instead of standing firm on their principles with Mr. Obama’s backing, spent the week cutting here and cutting there to make it look as if they were being more careful about the stimulus and recovery package.

This is the reality: Jobs are being cut and unemployment is rising in virtually all sectors of the economy and among virtually all demographic groups. At the same time, families’ housing values and retirement savings have been pummeled; fully 13.6 million Americans now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, and retirement accounts have collectively lost more than $2 trillion in little more than a year. And by all indications, there is worse yet to come.

The real work will come next week when the House and Senate try to reconcile their different versions of the economic package. No lawmaker has constituents who are unaffected, if not in distress, perhaps severe distress. No lawmaker has an excuse to delay or diminish the help Americans need now.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

3) U.S. Aided a Failed Plan to Rout Ugandan Rebels
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ref=world

DUNGU, Congo — The American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group, but the offensive went awry, scattering fighters who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing as many as 900 civilians.

The operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park, rebuffing efforts to sign a peace treaty. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack town after town in northeastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing to death anyone in their way.

The United States has been training Ugandan troops in counterterrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the United States has helped plan such a specific military offensive with Uganda, according to senior American military officials. They described a team of 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon’s new Africa Command working closely with Ugandan officers on the mission, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1 million in fuel.

No American forces ever got involved in the ground fighting in this isolated, rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers here complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops who carried out the operation did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.

The troops did not seal off the rebels’ escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers’ heads.

“The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed,” said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were “the L.R.A.’s standard operating procedure,” she said. “And the regional governments knew this.”

American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed.

“We provided insights and alternatives for them to consider, but their choices were their choices,” said one American military official who was briefed on the operation, referring to the African forces on the ground. “In the end, it was not our operation.”

Maj. Felix Kulayigye, a Ugandan military spokesman, declined to discuss the American involvement and simply said, “There was no way to prevent these massacres.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.

In Dungu, a 10-year-old girl lay comatose on a metal hospital cot, her face glazed with sweat, her pulse hammering in her neck. She had been sexually assaulted in a nearby village and shot in both legs, bullet through bone.

“The people who did this,” said her nurse, Rosa Apamato, “are demons.”

This used to be a tranquil, bountiful spot where villagers grew corn, beans and peanuts, more or less untouched by the violence that has plagued Congo’s east. But thousands have recently fled, and the town is now crawling with soldiers, aid workers and United Nations personnel, the movable cast that marks the advent of a serious problem.

The villagers who remain are terrified and confused. The Lord’s Resistance Army is not a Congolese movement. It is from Uganda. But once again, it seems that foreign armies are settling their scores in Congo, and the Congolese are paying the price. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Congo became the battlefield for more than a dozen armies and rebel groups from neighboring African countries, and several million Congolese died.

Even now, Rwandan troops are battling militants hundreds of miles south of here. Congo invited the Rwandans in to go after a different rebel group and its commander, much in the same way it allowed Ugandan soldiers to cross the border and hunt down the Lord’s Resistance Army.

“Who are these L.R.A.?” asked Bertrand Bangbe, who had been axed in the head and left for dead. “Why are they here? Why are they killing us?”

There are few answers. The Lord’s Resistance Army may have had some legitimate grievances when it started more than 20 years ago as a cultish rebellion to overthrow the Ugandan government. The fighters hailed their leader, Joseph Kony, as a prophet and a savior for the historically oppressed Acholi people. The movement even proclaimed to be fighting for the Ten Commandants.

But it soon devolved into something more sinister. The Lord’s Resistance Army killed tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda, slicing off lips and terrorizing children, before the Ugandan Army drove it out about five years ago. Mr. Kony then marched his prepubescent death squads and dozens of teenage brides to Garamba National Park, a vast reserve of elephants and swamps near the border of Uganda and Sudan.

The Ugandan government has tried coaxing Mr. Kony out. But the International Criminal Court in The Hague has indicted him on charges of crimes against humanity, and he has long insisted the charges be dropped. In November, as he has many times before, Mr. Kony refused to sign a peace treaty.

After that, Major Kulayigye said, “the only option left open to us was the military option.”

The Ugandan government asked the American Embassy in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for help, and the request was sent up the chain of command in November to President Bush, who personally authorized it, a former senior Bush administration official said.

The American advisers and Ugandan officers used satellite imagery and Ugandan field intelligence reports to triangulate where they believed Mr. Kony and his fighters were hiding. The plan was for the Ugandan military to bomb his camp and then cut off his 700 or so fighters with more than 6,000 Ugandan and Congolese ground troops. On Dec. 13, the day before the attack, several American advisers traveled to a staging site near the Uganda-Congo border for a final coordination meeting, a senior American military official said.

Thick fog delayed the attack by several hours, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Mr. Kony’s hut, it was empty. Ugandan foot soldiers, hiking many miles through the bush, arrived several days later and recovered a few satellite phones and some guns.

The Ugandans say they have destroyed the rebels’ control center and food supplies, rescued around 100 abducted children and killed several fighters, including some commanders. But the operation has been widely criticized by human rights groups as essentially swatting a hornet’s nest.

On Dec. 25, villagers in Faradje, a town near the national park, walked out of church as 50 to 70 armed men emerged from the bush. Most villagers had no idea who they were. Some Congolese towns had been attacked before the offensive, yet the raids were not so widespread that word would have trickled back to remote places like Faradje.

The armed men spoke a strange language, probably Acholi, but there was no misunderstanding them after the first machete was swung. Whoever could run, did. Christine Ataputo, who owns the one restaurant in town, watched from the forest floor as the rebels raped, burned and butchered. She was lying on her belly when she saw that her 18-year-old daughter, Chantal, had been captured.

“They took her away on a rope,” she said.

Chantal has not been seen since, and even more than a month later, Faradje still has the whiff of char. Around 150 people were killed Christmas Day. Several other villages, some more than 100 miles away, were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers’ Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre.

“These guys are just moving around, doing whatever they want, killing, raping, whatever,” said Charles Gaudry, a field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, which says more than 50 villages in the area where it works have been attacked. “There’s zero protection.”

The United Nations has more than 16,000 peacekeepers in Congo, including about 250 in Dungu. But United Nations officials said they were spread too thin in other war-racked parts of eastern Congo to take on the Lord’s Resistance Army. At the time of the nearby massacres, the peacekeepers in Dungu were guarding the airfield.

Villagers across the area are now banding together in local self-defense forces, arming themselves with ancient shotguns and rubber slingshots. In the past in Congo, home-grown militias have only complicated the dynamic and led to more abuses.

Even where there are Congolese troops, there is not necessarily protection. The family of the 10-year-old girl in the hospital said she might have been shot by a Congolese soldier who missed the rebel who was assaulting her.

The other night, by the light of a flashlight, a young doctor took one look at the girl and ordered her evacuation to Goma, a city along the Congo-Rwanda border. She may lose a leg, he said. But at least in Goma there is a special hospital to treat girls who have been raped. In eastern Congo, there are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of them.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Dungu, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

4) U.S. Military Violated Security Agreement Twice in 2 Weeks, Iraqi Leaders Say
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html?ref=world

BAGHDAD — Iraqi leaders in Kirkuk Province have charged that twice in the last two weeks the American military violated the hard-won security agreement signed in November by attacking Iraqi criminal suspects without coordinating with Iraqi security forces.

The first episode occurred last month, when American soldiers fatally shot an Iraqi couple in their home near Kirkuk after the wife reached for a pistol hidden under a mattress, American and Iraqi officials said. The couple’s 8-year-old daughter was wounded. The shooting was reported at the time, but the charges of failure to coordinate emerged on Friday, hours after an American raid in which a 58-year-old man was shot and killed outside of Kirkuk.

The two episodes highlight the difficulties the Americans and Iraqis are encountering as they try to comply with the security agreement’s requirement that American troops have “full coordination with Iraqi authorities,” particularly in places where there are still active counterinsurgency operations.

In some places, Iraqi and American special forces are conducting many of the raids, but it appears that they do not necessarily contact units stationed in the field. Interviews with witnesses to the Friday raid, including the 58-year-old man’s son, suggested it did not involve the military units that regularly patrol in the area.

The son, Nihad Muhammad Hassan al-Bachary, 16, described a sudden, brutal invasion of the family home. “The American forces stormed into our house, and they handcuffed me, my two brothers and my uncle,” the son said. “When my father came out of his room, they opened fire on him point blank and then they stuffed his body in a large, black plastic bag.”

The soldiers who came in were directed by an American in a military uniform, the son said, but unlike most soldiers, he had a beard. The other armed men with him were wearing masks and Iraqi commando uniforms and speaking in “Kurdish and inaccurate Arabic,” the son said. He said that his father was an Agriculture Ministry employee, and that several other family members were detained elsewhere in the village at the same time.

The police chief of the nearby city of Hawija said that he had not been warned of the raid, and that when his officers tried to enter the village, they were stopped by American soldiers. “An American force told us that, ‘There is a special force in there,’ ” said the police chief, Ibrahim al-Juboori.

“The police department for Hawija District had no knowledge of the operation,” he said. “The people who were arrested and the one that was killed were not known as terrorists.”

Hawija was a onetime stronghold for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown insurgent group that American intelligence believes has foreign leadership. Hussein Ali Saleh al-Juboori, a powerful local politician and the founder of the Hawija Awakening Council, which chased Al Qaeda from the area, warned that such episodes ran the risk of inspiring insurgents. “Hawija will become a center for resistance, not terrorism as it was before,” the politician said. “I have spoken with the Americans in Bachary and Kirkuk and the Joint Coordination Center, and they have no knowledge of what happened.

“There have been repeated breaches after the signing of the strategic agreement,” he said, citing the January case “when a man and his wife were killed and his daughter was injured. We demand immediate investigation.”

Iraqi Army commanders underscored the coordination problem. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said that the men who were detained and the man who was killed were suspected of manufacturing explosives, and that they had resisted arrest. But they said such considerations did not exempt Americans from the requirement to coordinate.

Col. Jassim Saadon, head of the Hawija force in the Iraqi Army, said that he, too, knew nothing of the raid until afterward. “There is a lack of coordination between the forces that execute the orders and the local forces,” he said.

Angriest was a high-ranking Iraqi commander. He said that the Americans had apologized, but said, “Upsetting and violating the families will not help the process at all. And though the Americans came down here to apologize for the incident, we said that we did not want an apology but precoordination.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press on this subject.

In the future, he said, military forces undertaking raids outside the city of Kirkuk without coordinating with his division would be treated as “hostile forces.” The only exceptions, he said, were “situations where a terrorist is arrested wearing an explosive belt or planting a bomb.”

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Kirkuk.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

5) Israel Deports Activists From Intercepted Vessel
By ETHAN BRONNER and ISABEL KERSHNER
February 7, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/world/middleeast/07mideast.html?ref=world

JERUSALEM — Israeli officials said on Friday that they had deported most of the activists on a Gaza-bound cargo ship with humanitarian aid intercepted a day earlier by the Israeli Navy. The officials said Israel had sent on to Gaza 1,000 units of donated blood found aboard.

A military official said that some 15 of the people on board the ship were either Lebanese or Syrian and had been driven to Israel’s border areas with those two countries on Thursday night and sent across. The handful of remaining activists, citizens of European countries, were to be deported soon, the official said.

Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the military’s civil affairs department, said that apart from 1,000 liters of blood that had already been sent to Gaza, there were toys, food and medicine that would be handed over to a charity group and sent to Gaza on Sunday or Monday.

The boat, called The Brotherhood Ship, remained docked in the Israeli port of Ashdod and was to be sent back to Lebanon. The navy had stopped the boat out of what it called security concerns. A search found no weapons aboard.

Meanwhile, two rockets were shot from Gaza into southern Israel on Friday morning. Both landed in open areas and caused no injuries or damage, the military reported.

Israel has maintained a strict blockade of Gaza since Hamas took power there in a brief civil war with its secular rival, Fatah, in June 2007. In late December, Israel mounted a three-week military assault in Gaza that left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, also died.

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

6) Florida’s Crossroads of Foreclosure and Despair
By DAMIEN CAVE
February 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/us/08lehigh.html?ref=us

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. — Desperation has moved into this once-middle-class exurb of Fort Myers, where hammers used to pound.

Its straight-ahead stare was hidden amid the chatter of 221 families waiting for free bread at Faith Lutheran Church on a recent Friday morning; and it appeared a block away a few days earlier, as laid-off construction workers in flannel shirts scavenged through trash bags at a home foreclosure, grabbing wires, CDs, anything that could be sold.

“I knew it was coming,” said Gloria Chilson, 56, the former owner of the house, as she watched strangers pick through her belongings. “You take what you can; you try not to care.”

Welcome to the American dream in high reverse. Lehigh Acres is one of countless sprawling exurbs that the housing boom drastically reshaped, and now the bust is testing whether the experience of shared struggle will pull people together or tear them apart.

The changes in these mostly unincorporated areas outside cities like Charlotte, N.C., Las Vegas and Sacramento have been swift and vivid. Their best economic times have been immediately followed by their worst, as they have generally been the last to crest and the first to crash.

In Lehigh Acres, homes are selling at 80 percent off their peak prices. Only two years after there were more jobs than people to work them, fast-food restaurants are laying people off or closing. Crime is up, school enrollment is down, and one in four residents received food stamps in December, nearly a fourfold increase since 2006.

President Obama is scheduled to visit Fort Myers on Tuesday to promote his economic stimulus plan. But residents here tend to view it as the equivalent of an herbal remedy — it can’t hurt but it probably won’t heal. Instead, in church groups and offices, people call for “industry” and repeat one telling question: “What do we want to be when we grow up?”

“That’s one of things we struggle with: What is our identity?” said Joseph Whalen, 37, president of the Lehigh Acres Chamber of Commerce. “We don’t want to be the bedroom community of southwest Florida; we don’t want to be the foreclosure capital.”

A Legacy of the ’50s

Lehigh Acres, like much of Florida and many suburbs nationwide, was born with speculation in its DNA.

The area got its start in the 1950s when a Chicago pest control baron, Lee Ratner, and several partners bought thousands of acres of farmland and plotted about 100,000 lots. With Fort Myers, 15 miles to the west, developers left little room for schools, parks or even businesses.

What they sold was sun and quiet living.

“They used to bring 20 busloads a day,” said Bob Elliott, a former salesman for Mr. Ratner’s company who struck out on his own in 1982. “We had 300 customers, seven days a week.”

By 2000, the lots had been sold, but most stayed empty. Only about 30,000 people were living in an area roughly four times the size of Manhattan. The builders really started to arrive in 2004, setting up model homes on Lee Boulevard next to Mr. Elliott’s office with the faded wooden sign that said “$50 lots.”

Bill Spikowski, a city planning consultant in Fort Myers, said that because Lehigh Acres had so many parcels and few restrictions on what could be built, smaller companies battled for customers. From 2004 to the end of 2006, developers completed 13,183 units in Lehigh Acres — nearly doubling the total stock of 15,216 that existed in 2000, according to Lee County figures.

Residents remember the boom for its noise, with dump trucks lining the streets and power tools heard in nearly every neighborhood. Housing prices doubled, then tripled, and jobs were plentiful, nearly all of them tied to real estate.

Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in,” Mr. Elliott said.

Then in 2007, it all went quiet. Houses stopped selling. Foreclosures multiplied. The median home price in the Fort Myers area dropped to $215,200 in December 2007, from a peak of $322,300 in December 2005. It had fallen to $106,900 two months ago.

Work disappeared with the profits. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Lee County lost a higher percentage of jobs (8.8 percent) from June 2007 to June 2008 than any other county in the nation. Unemployment in the county rose to 9.8 percent in November, from 3.5 percent in March 2007.

Lehigh Acres was particularly hard hit because it relied on construction. This was where the carpenters and exterminators of southwest Florida lived because it was more affordable or close to work. And by last spring, life as they knew it had come to an end.

The Downward Spiral

Trinkets for $1 were an early sign of trouble. Early last year, garage sales and estate auctions became more common in Lehigh Acres as families sold what they could to survive. No one seemed interested in buying whole houses, and foreclosures soon gave way to empty homes that became magnets for crime.

Thieves stole air conditioner parts for scrap. And on distant roads with only a few new homes and faded blue street signs from the ’50s — on Narcissus Boulevard, on Prospect Avenue — drug dealers moved in.

In 2007 and 2008, the Lee County Sheriff’s Department shut down more than 100 houses in Lehigh Acres where marijuana was being grown. In 2008, the police confiscated nearly 3,000 plants valued at nearly $7 million.

Last winter, Charlotte Rae Nicely, executive director of Lehigh Community Services, noticed something else. More people were going hungry. Demand was increasing at the food pantry she runs at a nondescript office park, with dozens of new faces appearing week after week, even as the population was declining.

Wondering what other social service agencies were experiencing, she decided to form a group that would coordinate assistance. It was the first sign that Lehigh Acres was fighting the recession in an organized way, and the group’s mission appeared in its name: Team Rescue.

The monthly meetings now include about a half-dozen churches, nonprofit groups, business owners and representatives from county government, including the sheriff’s office.

Discussion at one recent gathering centered on the host of troubles that follow unemployment — issues that until recently had rarely been seen in new American suburbs. Hunger was chief among them.

The organizations offering food in Lehigh Acres have seen demand increase by as much as 75 percent in the last year. And the people being served are no longer just the chronic poor.

The line at Faith Lutheran included a mix of ages, races and former income levels.

Luis Oquendo, 38, said he had been showing up for his weekly bread allotment since last fall, after full-time construction work disappeared.

Fred Csifortos, 62, a retiree surviving on $650 a month in disability payments, said the free food left more money for his medications.

Megan Brown, standing in line with her well-dressed daughters, Kayley, 2, and Sydney, 4, had come because she feared the worst. Her husband still had his job, she said, “but things are getting more and more tight.”

Team Rescue, of which Faith Lutheran is a member, considers itself successful, not just because it has helped more families but also because organizers believe that the links they are forming will be the foundation of a tighter community.

Ms. Nicely said she was especially encouraged by the Sheriff’s Department’s new “weed and seed” program, intended to revive Lehigh’s most troubled neighborhoods by involving residents in community policing and cleanup.

And home sales in Lee County are picking up, running roughly even with foreclosures.

“Six months ago, you might get one out of 20 houses with a multiple offer,” said Kevin Williamson, a real estate agent who has lived in Lehigh Acres for 22 years. “A couple of weeks ago, I had one with 13 offers.”

But no one here would describe Lehigh Acres as out of the woods. Real estate agents said the homes that are selling here typically go for only about $45,000, a third of what they cost to build. They predict that foreclosures will continue to keep prices low for two more years.

Job growth is also still nonexistent. Randy Burns, 50, the gregarious owner of Lehigh Discount Furniture, says he now receives 15 to 20 calls a week from people asking him to buy their furniture or help them move out of town — and he said he planned to leave, too.

“Until there’s jobs and foreclosures stop,” he said, “nothing’s going to change.”

The Latest Battle

Creating a community in a deepening recession, many here now say, feels harder than dealing with a Category 5 hurricane. Panic is a powerful headwind.

Voters defeated a proposal last year to incorporate Lehigh Acres, partly because residents feared higher taxes. And Team Rescue, for all its strength as a unified front, is still trying to figure out how to curb the spread of desperation.

Most recently the group has been struggling with a growing wave of families that either visit multiple food pantries using aliases or return the food to supermarkets for money or other items.

Ms. Nicely, at Lehigh Community Services, said that in November she started using a magic marker to blacken UPC symbols on cans so grocery stores would not accept them as returns.

“We even had to do that on the toys for Christmas,” Ms. Nicely said. Without such limits, she said, the neediest families might not be served.

Still, she often feels torn, saying, “I can’t be sure I wouldn’t do the same thing if I was a single parent and my kids were hungry.”

“The needs are so strong now,” she added, noting that there were more canned peas than peanut butter on her shelves because of growing demand. “They’ve never been this big before.”

A similar struggle between cohesion and chaos was also evident at a recent evangelical men’s meeting, where 8 of the 15 members said they had been laid off in the last year. Even as the group had helped some of the men cope, others said their families had been broken up by the stress.

And then there is Ms. Chilson. She lost her house partly because of the boom (if not for easy credit, she might not have refinanced her mortgage a few years ago), the bust (which led to her husband being laid off from his pest control job) and overspending (which led to more than $20,000 in credit card debt).

She and her husband had lived in their simple green ranch house for 18 years, and the night they were kicked out, they stayed across the street with an elderly man whom Ms. Chilson had often helped with his medication.

Ms. Chilson put her couch in an old friend’s house, her frozen steaks in another. And as she scrambled to find work and a place to rent, she decided to thank those she could.

At one point, she tried to vacuum a neighbor’s house as an act of appreciation.

But the vacuum stayed quiet. Ms. Chilson discovered that the electricity had been turned off because the bill had not been paid. Any day now, she said, her neighbor will be leaving Lehigh Acres with all the others.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

7) Holbrooke Says Afghan War ‘Tougher than Iraq’
By NICHOLAS KULISH and HELENE COOPER
February 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/europe/09munich.html?hp

MUNICH — The war in Afghanistan will be “much tougher than Iraq,” President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan told a security conference here on Sunday.

“There is no magic formula in Afghanistan,” the envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, warned an audience of European policy makers and military planners. “There is no Dayton agreement in Afghanistan,” he added, referring to the peace accord he negotiated to end the war in Bosnia. “It’s going to be a long, difficult struggle.”

Mr. Holbrooke was part of a high-level American delegation at the annual Munich Security Conference over the weekend. The group, led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and including Gen. James Jones, the national security adviser, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the United States Central Command, did not paint a rosy picture of the situation in Afghanistan.

The American view of Afghanistan’s problems differed from that of its president, Hamid Karzai, who also spoke Sunday.

While Mr. Karzai acknowledged the security problems, he said that great progress had been made, from roads to schools to health services. In an address that at times sounded defensive, he said Afghanistan was neither a “narco-state” nor a “failed state,” as critics have labeled it.

He called again for reconciliation with Taliban forces “who are not part of Al Qaeda, who are not part of terrorist networks, who want to return to their country.” He also criticized NATO over the number of civilian casualties it has incurred in the course of battling the insurgency.

American officials at the conference questioned the “reality gap” between Mr. Karzai’s presentation and what they see as the facts on the ground. The pervasive corruption in the country is viewed as a central reason that the Afghan leader has fallen out of favor with the Obama administration. Mr. Karzai faces an election in August.

General Petraeus’s comments, on the other hand, were greatly anticipated as the final day of the conference got under way. He is widely credited for the improved security situation in Iraq, where he was the senior commander during the troop increase known as the surge. Expectations are running high that he can repeat the success of that strategy in Afghanistan.

General Petraeus spoke of the need for outposts and patrol bases in the provinces. “You can’t commute to work” when conducting counterinsurgency operations, he said Sunday. “A nuanced appreciation of local situations is essential” to understanding “the tribal structures, the powerbrokers, the good guys and the bad guys, local cultures and history,” he said.

“There has been nothing easy about Afghanistan,” said General Petraeus, adding that he “would be remiss if I did not ask individual countries to examine very closely what forces and other contributions they can provide,” ahead of the elections in August. He said needs included not only ground forces but also an array of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, military police, special operations, cargo and attack helicopters and more. President Obama is planning to send as much as 30,000 additional troops to try to turn the tide in the war against insurgents.

Some NATO allies have been slow to contribute additional forces.

In his comments, General Jones was critical of the effort to stabilize the country thus far. “The international coordination was spotty at best,” he said. “We tended to focus too much on the military reconstruction part, which was important but not the only thing that should have been done.”

The Americans were not alone in their calls for a more robust effort. Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister of Poland, called Afghanistan a test for NATO, and emphasized that the security situation had to improve immediately. “If this year we don’t turn the tide it’s going to be much harder later on,” he said.

Britain’s defense secretary, John Hutton, made what may have been the harshest comments directed at the alliance’s prosecution of the war, accusing it of an obsession with bureaucracy. “What I want from NATO is more of a war-time mentality,” he said.

In an interview on Saturday, Vice President Biden expressed sympathy for the challenges Mr. Karzai faces in governing Afghanistan. “Karzai has an incredibly difficult job,” he said.

“Do I think, me speaking, Joe Biden, think he could do more? Yes. Do I understand why from his perspective he might think he couldn’t do more? Yes. Does there ultimately over the next year have to be a change in appointing strong governors? Having a police force that is free of corruption? Cracking down more on the corruption within his own government? The answer is yes. Yes, all of the above has to occur.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

8) The Destructive Center
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
February 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09krugman.html?_r=1

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

9) No Welfare, No Work
Editorial
February 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09mon2.html

Unemployment has been increasing sharply, but so far state welfare programs do not seem to be rising to the challenge. Despite the desperate economic times, the number of people receiving cash assistance is at or near a four-decade low. Welfare is a popular political target, but it is also often the last thing standing between poor people — many of them children — and destitution. States and the federal government need to do more to ensure that Americans get the help they need.

The welfare reform of 1996 ended the idea of welfare as an entitlement. Federal funds were sent as block grants to the states, which were given more discretion over how to spend the money.

The new model included work requirements and limits on how many years people could receive benefits. With the economy strong, the reforms succeeded in moving many people off the rolls and employment rose. Today, there are few jobs available for people on the rolls to be moved into. Welfare programs should be expanding, but as Jason DeParle recently reported in The Times, they often have not been.

Michigan, whose unemployment rate last October was over 9 percent, cut its welfare rolls 13 percent last year. Of the 12 states where unemployment increased most, eight had welfare rolls that held steady or declined.

The states clamored for the increased discretion. Now, in the worst economic times since the reforms passed, they need to use that discretion appropriately. They should be removing overly onerous obstacles to receiving benefits, rolling back work requirements, and doing better outreach to people in need of assistance.

The federal government also has to do more. The stimulus plan pending in Congress may make much-needed matching grants available to states that expand their welfare programs. That would be a good start, but Congress should look for other ways to prod states to provide adequate benefits to their neediest residents.

It should also expand unemployment insurance so states can cover jobless part-time workers, another sizeable group of people falling through the cracks.

Ever since Ronald Reagan gleefully campaigned against “welfare queens,” welfare has been on the political defensive. The truth is, there will always be people who need to rely on welfare, especially when the economy takes a grim turn. Civilized societies make sure that when people are in desperate need of help, the money is there to take care of them.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

10) NATO Chief Presses Afghan Drug Fight
By JUDY DEMPSEY
February 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/asia/12nato.html?ref=world

BERLIN — NATO will remain within international law when it proceeds with new measures to kill drug traffickers in Afghanistan and bomb drug processing laboratories to deprive the Taliban of its main financing, the alliance’s secretary general said Wednesday.

The official, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said that “a number of buffers and filters” had been put in place to safeguard the legality of combatingwhat he termed the nexus between the insurgency and narcotics.

“It is according to international law,” he said. “And if nations at a certain stage think that they would rather not participate, they will not be forced to participate.”

Two weeks ago, the alliance was embroiled in controversy after Gen. John Craddock, the NATO commander who is also chief of American forces in Europe, said troops in Afghanistan would fire on individuals responsible for supplying heroin refining laboratories with opium without need for evidence.

In a letter to Gen. Egon Ramms, a German who heads the NATO command center responsible for Afghanistan, General Craddock said that “it was no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective.”

General Ramms questioned the legality of the proposal, warning that it would violate international law and rules governing armed conflict. General Ramms’s letter was leaked, provoking a debate within NATO about the conditions and circumstances under which troops could attack drug laboratories.

Mr. de Hoop Scheffer ordered an investigation into the leak. “Our enemies and opponents in Afghanistan are reading this leak,” he said. “They are not stupid.”

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

11) The Prison Overcrowding Fix
By SOLOMON MOORE
February 11, 2009
News Analysis
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/us/11prisons.html?ref=us

In San Francisco last week, a federal court was hearing final arguments in the prison overcrowding lawsuit that led Monday to an unprecedented decision to reduce the nation’s largest prison system by one-third. Just a few blocks away, a state appellate court was affirming a life sentence for Ali Foroutan, convicted of possession of 0.03 gram of methamphetamine.

Critics of California’s justice system say Mr. Foroutan’s sentence under the “three-strikes law,” which mandates 25 years to life in prison for three-time felons, is the kind of punishment that has made the state’s prisons the most overcrowded in the nation.

Federal judges tentatively ruled Monday that packed facilities were the chief impediment to adequate health care in prisons — a system so flawed it was tantamount to a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Monday’s ruling signaled the court’s intention to cap the number of prisoners at about 101,000, a reduction of 55,000. It came after more than a decade of federal court orders from exasperated judges who demanded that the state improve its facilities and personnel, after the appointment of the most powerful federal receivership since the days of forced racial integration in the South, and after the death of scores of prisoners who committed suicide or died of preventable illnesses.

The judges encouraged the state to negotiate with inmates’ lawyers to cut the prison population from 156,000, which is about double the system’s capacity, within three years. If the state refuses to negotiate such a plan, the judges could order specific actions, including shortened prison sentences, diversion of nonviolent felons to county programs, and parole reforms that would cut down recidivism.

Few releases of prisoners would be necessary to reduce the prison population if the state carried out sentencing and parole reforms, which could save $903 million a year, according to the federal judges. They also argued that such reforms could be achieved without jeopardizing public safety.

Attorney General Jerry Brown of California vowed to appeal the judges’ final order to the United States Supreme Court, a prospect that could delay the carrying out of the prison population cap or overturn it.

The case is significant because of the scale of the proposed prisoner reduction, and also because it shines a harsh light on the failures of state government to address the problem for years.

Decades of tough-on-crime laws coupled with a failure to finance prison programs have left prisoners stacked three bunks high in prison gymnasiums and hallways throughout the state. With few probation and parole programs available, about two-thirds of all ex-convicts return to prison within three years.

California’s 13-year-old three-strikes law, which doubles sentences for second-time felons, and reserves life sentences for even nonviolent third-felony offenders like Mr. Foroutan, has also increased the prison population by thousands. As of March 2008, there were 41,284 prisoners serving time under the three-strikes law. In 2005, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that the law cost the state $500 million annually.

California is the only state in the nation that paroles 98 percent of released inmates, even if they have completed their sentences. About 70,000 parolees return to prison every year. Nationally, states parole an average of 40 percent of their released inmates.

“That is a major reason for the overcrowding problem,” said Joan Petersilia, a parole expert at the RAND Corporation. “Everybody goes on parole in California,” she said. “Everybody serves at least one year” on parole. Many parolees go back to prison for violations, including failed drug tests.

But Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission, a state-financed watchdog organization, said sentencing reform was the key to reducing prison population.

The Legislature, Mr. Drown says, has added thousands of new penalties for new and old crimes. “We don’t track how judges are sentencing people on a statewide basis,” he said. “We don’t have a sentencing policy.”

In other states, sentencing commissions monitor penalties to help policy makers anticipate how many prisoners will be coming and for how long.

California has no such data, Mr. Drown said. Proposed sentencing commissions have been defeated in the Legislature at least 10 times, according to Ms. Petersilia.

This case began not as an overcrowding lawsuit but as an effort to address inadequate health care. After the state failed to improve its care, Judge Thelton E. Henderson appointed a federal receiver to take over the medical system, and the receiver has demanded billions of state dollars to build health care facilities.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has responded with a mix of conciliatory gestures — supporting an as-yet underfinanced initiative to build space for 53,000 prisoners — and defiance, as when he called for the dissolution of the receivership.

Eventually the receiver concluded that new prison facilities could not be added quickly enough to stem the deaths and injuries to prisoners or to outpace the rising prison population.

Lawyers for the state have argued that the federal courts lack the authority to order prison reforms costing billions of dollars, especially at a time when California is facing a $40 billion deficit.

Counties in California say they cannot afford to serve parolees’ rehabilitation needs without additional financing, as many other states do.

Kara P. Dansky, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, believes that the judges may have the authority to push through sweeping reforms, including more financing for counties, under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

The state disagrees that the court has such authority and plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, which could delay any outcome. Ms. Dansky said policy makers would be watching the case closely. “This is one of the areas that the law is unclear on because we’ve never seen a case like this,” she said.

*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

tramadol overnight shipping tramadol for dogs how much - best way buy tramadol online