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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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No New Korean War!
Emergency Protest in San Francisco at Powell and Market Sts. -- Mon., Nov. 29 at 5pm
Show your support for the rally by signing this statement!
Stop the Provocations - U.S. Military Out of Asia Now!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
415-821-6545
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PALESTINE, AMERICAN WARS AND ISLAMOPHOBIA IN AMERICA
Bay Area Teach-In
Tuesday, November 30, 7:00 P.M.
East Pauley Ballroom (MLK Student Union UC Berkeley, corner of Bancroft and Telegraph)
Speakers: Hatgem Bazian, UCB; Michael Shehader, LA8; Ziad Abbas, MECA; Barbara Lubin, MECA; Jeff Mackler, UNAC; Masao Suzuki, Committee to Stop FBI Repression; Blanca Misse, UCB Student Worker Action Team; Rep., Cal Students for Justice in Palestine; Rep., UCB Muslim Student Assoc.
Billions for Education, Not Wars and Occupations! End U.S. Aid to Israel--Military, Economic, Diplomatic! Defend Civil Liberties and End the FBI Raids!
Sponsors: United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC); Cal Students for Justice in Palestine; UCB Muslim Student Association; Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA).
Donations Suggested, No one turned away for lack of funds.
For more information: 510-268-9429, teachinnov30@gmail.com, teachinnov30.wordpress.com, ASUC Sponsored, ADA Accessible
Endorsers (partial list): November 30 UC Berkeley Teach-in
USPCN - US Palestinian Community Network - SF Bay • Alliance for South Asians Taking Action (ASATA) • Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) • Code Pink, Golden Gate Chapter • Code Pink Women for Peace, East Bay Chapter • Peninsula Peace and Justice Center •Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture • California Peace and Freedom Party • Socialist Action • Voz de los Trabajadores • International Socialist Organization • Solidarity • Youth for Socialist Action • Committee to Stop FBI Repression • Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal • Lynne Stewart Defense Committee • Haiti Action Committee • Bail Out the People Movement • Workers World Party • Berkeley Alliance Against Torture • Law Students for Justice in Palestine (UCB) • International Action Center • Socialist Organizer • One Struggle One Fight • Bay Area Labor for Peace and Justice • Freedom Road Socialist Organization • Bay Area Social Justice Committee of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian-Universalists • Bay Area United Against War Newsletter • Cafe Intifada • Socialist Viewpoint Magazine • Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Los Angeles
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FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
Community Panel Discussion & Album Listening Party
Tuesday, November 30 · 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Black Dot Cafe
1195 Pine Street
West Oakland, CA
Created By: Block Report Radio
The album features M1 of dead prez, Talib Kweli, T-Kash, Immortal Technique and many other talented artists. Be the first to hear this dope "Free Leonard Peltier" fundraising album.
Proceeds from album purchases will help pay the significant legal expenses associated with Leonard's case-filing and cost recovery fees and attorney travel, for example-as well as community outreach and public education efforts conducted on his behalf.
Visit Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee's website at : http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/index1.htm to educate yourself about this case!
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
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Road To Hope Convoy Reaches Gaza - Special Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_2sO-T_AjY
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A little holiday levity:
Check this out. It's for Willie Nelson (he's actually in it). It's a video from the Colbert Report and make sure to watch the very end:
http://rutube.ru/tracks/1248708.html
I have no money in my coffer,
No gold or silver do I bring,
Nor have I precious jewels to offer,
To celebrate the newborn king.
Yet do not spurn my gift completely,
O ye three wise men please demur,
Behold a plant that smokes more sweetly,
Than neither frankincense or myrrh.
And like a child born in this manger,
This herb is mild yet it is strong,
And it brings peace to friend and stranger,
Goodwill to men lies in this bong.
And now my wonder weed is flaring, - "Are you high?"
Lit like that special star above, - "Can it be?"
Pass it around in endless sharing, - "On christmas day"
And let not mankind bogart love. - "You'd smoke my tree!"
And the wise men started toking,
And yea, the bud was kind,
It was salvation they were smoking,
And his forgiveness blew their mind.
And still that wonder weed is flaring, - "Are you high?"
Lit like that special star above, - "You're so high!"
Pass it around in endless sharing, - "Dude, man, dude"
And let not mankind bogart love. - "You're really high, I'm gonna tell your savior"
And let not mankind bogart love.
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20 November 2010 Afghanistan: Time to Go
On 20 November 2010, as the Nato leaders met in Lisbon to discuss war strategy thousands of anti-war protesters marched through London calling for all British troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan now.
The march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square was led by military families who have lost loved ones in the war, or who have relatives serving there now, and by Joe Glenton, the soldier who was jailed and court martialled for refusing to fight a war that he believed to be unjustified.
These videos capture the spirit of the day on which the cry was Afghanistan: Time to Go and Cut War Not Welfare.
Watch the great video's of this demonstration at this site:
http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/2170/246/
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The New Normal Recovery
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z87XBKNto4Q&feature=player_embedded
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Don't Touch My Junk (the TSA Hustle) song + video by Michael Adams
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhEMRSp7vaY&feature=player_embedded
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Bird's Eye View: You've Got To See This
Blog - BPs Oil Drilling Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
Wednesday, 24 November 2010 11:22
http://healthygulf.org/201011241558/blog/bps-oil-drilling-disaster-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/birds-eye-view-you-ve-got-to-see-this
Yesterday's monitoring trip took me down to an isolated area on the eastern edge of Bay Ronquille on Louisiana's coast. Bay Ronquille is to the southeast of Barataria Bay. I went to this area after being informed by a source that there are stretches of beach near Ronquille that are "completely covered in oil "and "untouched "by any clean-up crew.
Our journey began in Myrtle Grove, LA aboard a boat with Captain Zach Mouton. On board this day was Jo Billups, GRN sponsor and member of the band Sassafrass, Randy Perez, a videographer from New Orleans, and my brother Jason Henderson, a Geography Professor visiting from San Francisco.
My source was correct in that there are miles long stretches of beach that are caked with huge mats of oil. There are enormous mats of tar that stretch from the shore to the water. In some spots, the tide covers the mats as it washes in only to reveal them as it washes back out. In other areas, the mats are so huge that they stretch from the sea bed all the way to the beach. It's impossible to tell how far out underwater they stretch. There are areas where you think you are standing on sand or mud only to realize that you are standing on huge blankets of weathered oil. There are tidal pools in the middle of the island that are filled with oil. The smell of oil is everywhere. Skulls and bones from dead birds and fish litter the sand and coyote tracks are all around. What a pity.
Whether BP has sent anyone to attempt to clean this area anytime in that last few months was hard to discern just by looking at the sand and soil. There were no usual tell-tell signs like tire tracks from four wheelers or left behind plastic bags., water bottles, and gloves. BP is aware of the area because as soon as we got onto the beach, a boat carrying BP workers saw us and sent someone to chase after us. Having been through this song and dance so many times with BP "supervisors", I decided to let my brother run interference while I foraged ahead to document the disaster. According to Jason, the BP contractor was cordial but did ask a lot of questions about who we were and what we were doing. The man explained that BP will be cleaning this area starting Monday, complete with heavy equipment and all. I am planning another trip next week to see if his claim is accurate. I've heard it all before.
By the way, on the way down to Bay Ronquille, we made a pass through Bay Jimmy. While the marsh is still covered in oil, there was not one clean up worker to be found anywhere in the Bay. That's funny considering I know of thousands of struggling out of work Gulf coast residents that would love a job cleaning up BP's mess.
Jonathan Henderson is the Coastal Resiliency Organizer for GRN
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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Quantitative Easing Explained
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k&feature=player_embedded#
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Report: "Tar balls and black oily plumes" wash up in Apalachicola Bay, FL - 70 miles EAST of Panama City (VIDEO)
November 12th, 2010 at 09:02 AM Email Post
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Seattle Cop: 'I'll Beat the F--ing Mexican Piss Out of You Homey'
http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/05/seattle_cop_ill_beat_the_f---ing_mexican_piss_out_of_you_homey.html
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Burning Desperation
Self-immolation has become a common form of suicide for Afghan women. Photographer Lynsey Addario speaks with women who survived their suicide attempts.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/11/07/world/1248069290784/burning-desperation.html?ref=world
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Anonymous BP cleanup worker: The oil "really hasn't even been touched"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vegVKrg84HI&feature=player_embedded
http://allhiphop.com/stories/editorial/archive/2010/11/09/22476630.aspx
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Tag-Team Wrestling
"We have Learned who is For Real and who is Frontin'."
Glen Ford speaks in West Haven, CT just before the Oct. 2010 "One Nation Working Together" DC demo. See his scathing comments about the speakers from the main stage at the actual demo at blackagendareport.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIuTM3cK9I
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Video of massive French protest -- inspiring!
http://www.dailymotion.com/Talenceagauchevraiment
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UAW Workers Picket The UAW Over Two-Tier
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/uaw-workers-picket-the-uaw/
Rally To End Two-Tier & Stand in Solidarity with GM Lake Orion | UAW HQ, Detroit MI (1 of 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bST5aTYZa00&feature=player_embedded
Rally To End Two-Tier & Stand in Solidarity with GM Lake Orion | UAW HQ, Detroit MI (2 of 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHLb-KMXD9c&feature=player_embedded
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BP Contract Worker "Trenches Dug To Bury Oil On Beaches"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qop9xbGv4&feature=player_embedded
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RETHINK Afghanistan: The 10th Year: Afghanistan Veterans Speak Out
http://rethinkafghanistan.com/
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Firefighters Watch As Home Burns:
Gene Cranick's House Destroyed In Tennessee Over $75 Fee
By Adam J. Rose
The Huffington Post -- videos
10- 5-10 12:12 AM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/04/firefighters-watch-as-hom_n_750272.html
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Soldier Describes Murder of Afghan for Sport in Leaked Tape
By ROBERT MACKEY
September 27, 2010, 6:43 pm
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/soldier-describes-murder-of-afghan-for-sport-in-leaked-tape/?ref=world
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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Stephen Colbert's statement before Congress
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/39343087#39343087
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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AN ATTACK AGAINST ONE IS AN ATTACK AGAINST ALL! WE ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS OUR WEAKEST LINK! UNITY AND SOLIDARITY AGAINST THESE ATTACKS IS OUR MOST POWERFUL DEFENSE!
THIS JUST IN: NEW GRAND JURY INVESTIGATIONS; AND ATTACK AGAINST JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE ACTIVISTS:
FBI Raid Victims Get New Grand Jury Subpoenas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIlMwbkIo2E
APNewsBreak: Activists called back to grand jury
By AMY FORLITI
The Associated Press
Wednesday, November 17, 2010; 6:10 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/17/AR2010111705560.html
MINNEAPOLIS -- Three Minnesota anti-war activists who refused to testify before a federal grand jury in Chicago after their homes were raided in a terrorism investigation have been told they'll be called again, an attorney told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
In late September, authorities searched seven homes and an office in Minneapolis and Chicago in what the FBI said was an investigation into material support of terrorism. Fourteen activists in the two states were summoned to testify, but they refused and their subpoenas were postponed.
None of the activists have been charged. Warrants suggest agents were looking for connections between them and terrorist groups in Colombia and the Middle East.
Bruce Nestor, an attorney who represents some of the activists, said Wednesday that three of them have been told they'll be called back to the grand jury, but it's not clear when. Individual attorneys for those activists are working out details with prosecutors, Nestor said.
"They don't have a specific date, but they are being told that basically they will be called back in front of the grand jury," Nestor said. "They all have individual counsel, and those individual counsel are in the process of discussing with the U.S. attorney the details as to how proceed."
Randall Samborn, a spokesman with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, declined to comment about the case, saying he could neither confirm nor deny anything involving a federal grand jury because such proceedings are confidential.
Nestor said activists Anh Pham, Sarah Martin and Tracy Molm - whose homes were raided in September - have been told they'll be called again before the grand jury.
"These three are being called back, and within a matter of weeks will be facing the decision of testifying or facing contempt," Nestor said.
Pham said Wednesday she knew little about the situation and declined comment until she had a chance to talk to her attorney. Messages left for Martin were not immediately returned, and a phone number for Molm was not immediately available.
The activists said previously that they wouldn't appear before a grand jury because they felt grand juries had historically been used to harass activists and that testifying in secret would stifle free speech.
The government has not revealed the target of its investigation, but the activists have said they felt singled out because of their work in the anti-war movement.
"The government is not saying much, and they kind of hold all the cards at the moment," Nestor said.
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NOTE TO READERS:
The BAUAW Newsletter stands squarely opposed to the Grand Jury investigation of antiwar and social justice activists. An injury to one is an injury to all. We are all under attack now! We must stand united in defense of our fellow activists!
We have a right to fight injustice wherever it occurs in the world! Justice is an inalienable human right for everyone!
We are also alarmed and outraged about the recent pepper-spray attack against Jewish Voice for Peace activists at their own meeting carried out by Zionist thugs:
Right-wing Israel advocacy group San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs
Member Pepper Sprays Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) members
at Bay Area JVP Chapter Meeting. Wraps self in Israeli flag.
Group well known in Bay Area for harassing and intimidating peace activists
Contact: Jesse AT Jvp.org
[Oakland, CA November 15, 2010]
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/right-wing-israel-advocacy-group-pepper-sprays-jewish-voice-peace-jvp-members
Sunday night, November 14, 2010, up to a dozen members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, a right-wing Israeli advocacy group with a documented track record of aggressively taunting and intimidating grassroots peace activists, attended a Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace community meeting at a South Berkeley Senior Center.
Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest U.S. Jewish peace group dedicated to a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on democracy and full equality --- the Bay Area chapter is the founding chapter of the organization. Approximately 50 to 60 people were at the meeting, and numerous witnesses are available to corroborate the events.
Watch video of some of the disruptions and the victims and perpetrator of attacks here:
StandWithUs/SF Voice for Israel Pepper-sprays peace activists
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLO2xKcYDwc
Eyewitness testimonies are here:
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-testimony-jvp-member-about-stand-us-swu-attacks
and here:
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-report-stand-us-attacks-jvp-meeting
Article by a Berkeley Daily Planet reporter here:
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/eyewitness-testimony-berekeley-daily-planet-reporter-about-swu-attacks
Americans for Peace Now condemned the attack here:
http://peacenow.org/entries/post_25
and Meretz USA called it not a legitimate part of Jewish communal discourse here.
http://meretzusa.blogspot.com/2010/11/meretz-usa-violence-not-legitimate-part.html
Wrapped in an Israeli flag, San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs (SFVI/SWU) member Robin Dubner, an Oakland based attorney, pepper-sprayed two JVP members in the eyes and face after they attempted to nonviolently block her ability to aggressively videotape the faces of JVP meeting attendees against their will. The members, Alexei Folger and Glen Hauer, were careful to make no physical contact with her or her camera prior to the attack.
Folger said, "I did not see it coming and all of a sudden there was gooey stuff all over my head and hand. I have never been pepper-sprayed before, my whole head felt like it was on fire."
JVP had earlier this year filed a police report about a June SFVI/SWU protest at which JVP and (peace group) Women in Black members were intimidatingly videotaped and threatened by a StandWithUs supporter after being taunted with chants like "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi" or "Kapo,Kapo,Kapo".
Caught on a widely seen videotape was a SFVI/SWU supporter pointing his camera to the faces of silent peace vigil participants while saying "You're all being identified, every last one of you...we will find out where you live. We're going to make your lives difficult. We will disrupt your families..."
For that reason, JVP members were particularly concerned about protecting the safety of meeting attendees and preventing the videotaping.
Hauer, a retired attorney and member of San Francisco's Congregation Sha'har Zahav who was treated for pepper spray explained, "When one of the intruders [Dubner] continued standing and filming people despite the facilitator and facility manager repeatedly telling her that she could not, I first asked her politely to please put away the video camera, then several times told her to put away the camera, and then tried nonviolently to stay in front of the camera with my body, even when she shoved me. I could have taken the camera but decided instead to talk to the woman and to try to be the only person she photographed."
Hauer, who also leads groups on healing from WWII & the Holocaust, and speaks to churches about anti-Semitism as it relates to the movement for peace in the Middle East, went on:
"In my mind was the history of targeting of Jewish peace activists by the right wing of the Jewish community--the posting of our photos on internet hate sites, for example, followed by acts of vandalism at our homes and places of work. There were many in the room for whom I care deeply. I could also see that many at the meeting were new to the work we were doing, and I did not want them to be scared away."
Dubner was accompanied by up to a dozen other StandWithUs members--including Dan Spitzer, Susan Meyers, Mike Harris, Bea Lieberman, Faith Meltzer, and Ross Meltzer--who repeatedly disrupted and aggressively videotaped the JVP meeting and JVP members against their will, wielding the cameras in an intimidating and belligerent manner. Despite repeated requests from the JVP meeting facilitator and other JVP activists to desist from recording and put away their videocameras, the SFVI/SWU activists - who had spread themselves throughout the room - continued to record and launch lengthy monologues while the presenters attempted to speak.
They were explicitly invited by the JVP facilitator to stay in the meeting and participate without videotaping but they refused. They also refused offers for floor time by the presenters. The manager of the facility asked the SFVI/SWU members to abide by JVP's rules or face the police, and when SFVI/SWU refused to comply with JVP's protocol, the police were called.
At one point, JVP members and presenters worked to restore calm and de-escalate by singing the Hebrew peace song, Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu (Peace will come to us) while waiting for the police to arrive. Most meeting attendees did not know until later that 2 people had been attacked with pepper spray.
When police arrived, Dubner was temporarily placed in handcuffs while other members of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs remained inside the meeting blowing loud whistles, using videocameras to intimidate meeting attendees.
Dubner refused repeated requests by JVP members or the police to identify the substance she sprayed. A police officer later identified it as pepper spray and paramedics were called to help treat the victims of the attack. One of them, Alexei Folger, looked visibly red and swollen, as though she had been burned on more than half her face.
Immediately following the attack, Ms. Folger, not knowing the nature of the substance on her face, rubbed some of it on Ms. Dubner's shirtsleeve at which point Ms.Dubner, who is a large woman, started physically shoving the petite Ms. Folger. A Jewish Voice for Peace staff member stood between them to prevent further escalation or physical contact between Ms Dubner and the shocked and injured Ms. Folger.
This deliberate confrontation is part of a pattern of escalating intimidation and attacks against peace activists in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, the home of Tikkun Magazine editor Michael Lerner was covered in threatening posters. In addition to the videotaped harassment of Women in Black and JVP members, several months ago someone placed threatening graffiti outside of the JVP offices.
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These actions cannot be tolerated by the peace and justice movement--anywhere! We have a right to meet and protest injustice without being harassed, videotaped, pepper-sprayed, disrupted or summoned by the FBI for Grand Jury questioning!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War Newsletter. bauaw.org
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FREE THE SCOTT SISTERS
http://mije.org/node/1343
freethescottsisters.blogspot.com/
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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San Francisco Labor Council Resolution Adopted unanimously on Nov. 8, 2010
Resolution Condemning Police Attack on Free Speech & Assembly following Oscar Grant Rally
Whereas, on Friday November 5, former BART cop Johannes Mehserle was given a jail sentence of 2 years for the 'involuntary manslaughter' of Oscar Grant. Subtracting time served and 'good behavior', Mehserle may be back on the streets in as little as 7 months; and
Whereas, the organizers of a November 5th Rally and Gathering in Frank Ogawa Plaza to honor Oscar Grant and Respond to the sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, were refused a permit for an organized march after the rally to an indoor gathering at DeFremery Park; and
Whereas, after the rally many hundreds of community members spontaneously started marching toward Fruitvale BART, the site of Oscar Grant's murder, and after the cops sealed off an entire city block, police did not allow people to disperse, called it a 'crime scene', and arrested 152 people, including San Francisco Labor Council Delegate Dave Welsh, resulting in more arrests than at any other Oscar Grant-related protest; and
Whereas, most arrestees have been cited on misdemeanor charges, held for 24 hours and have mass arraignments in the first week of December at Wiley Manuel Courthouse, 661 Washington Street in Oakland.
Therefore be It Resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council condemns this assault on freedom of speech and assembly and demands that all these misdemeanor assembly charges be dropped.
Presented by Marcus Holder, delegate from ILWU Local 10, and adopted unanimously at the regular delegates meeting of the San Francisco Labor Council held Nov. 8, 2010 in San Francisco, California.
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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Deafening Silence, Chuck Africa (MOVE 9)
Check out other art and poetry by prisoners at:
Shujaas!: Prisoners Resisting Through Art
...we banging hard, yes, very hard, on this system...
http://shujaas.wordpress.com/
Peace People,
This poem is from Chuck Africa, one of the MOVE 9, who is currently serving 30-100 years on trump up charges of killing a police officer. After 32 years in prison, the MOVE 9 are repeatly denied parole, after serving their minimum sentence. Chuck wanted me to share this with the people, so that we can see how our silence in demanding the MOVE 9's freedom is inherently an invitation to their death behind prison walls.
Deafening Silence
Don't ya'll hear cries of anguish?
In the climate of pain come joining voices?
But voices become unheard and strained by inactions
Of dead brains
How long will thou Philly soul remain in the pit of agonizing apathy?
Indifference seems to greet you like the morning mirror
Look closely in the mirror and realize it's a period of mourning....
My Sistas, mothers, daughters, wives and warriors
Languish in prisons obscurity like a distant star in the galaxies as does their brothers
We need to be free....
How loud can you stay silence?
Have the courage to stand up and have a say,
Choose resistance and let go of your fears.
The history of injustice to MOVE; we all know so well
But your deafening silence could be my DEATH KNELL.
Chuck Africa
Please share, inform people and get involve in demanding the MOVE 9's freedom! www.MOVE9parole.blogspot.com
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Say No to Islamophobia!
Defend Mosques and Community Centers!
The Fight for Peace and Social Justice Requires Defense of All Under Attack!
http://www.petitiononline.com/nophobia/petition.html
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Kevin Keith Update: Good News! Death sentence commuted!
Ohio may execute an innocent man unless you take action.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-kevin-keith
Ohio's Governor Spares Life of a Death Row Inmate Kevin Keith
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/us/03ohio.html?ref=us
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Please sign the petition to release Bradley Manning
http://www.petitiononline.com/manning1/petition.html (Click to sign here)
To: US Department of Defense; US Department of Justice
We, the Undersigned, call for justice for US Army PFC Bradley Manning, incarcerated without charge (as of 18 June 2010) at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.
Media accounts state that Mr. Manning was arrested in late May for leaking the video of US Apache helicopter pilots killing innocent people and seriously wounding two children in Baghdad, including those who arrived to help the wounded, as well as potentially other material. The video was released by WikiLeaks under the name "Collateral Murder".
If these allegations are untrue, we call upon the US Department of Defense to release Mr. Manning immediately.
If these allegations ARE true, we ALSO call upon the US Department of Defense to release Mr. Manning immediately.
Simultaneously, we express our support for Mr. Manning in any case, and our admiration for his courage if he is, in fact, the person who disclosed the video. Like in the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, W. Mark Felt, Frank Serpico and countless other whistleblowers before, government demands for secrecy must yield to public knowledge and justice when government crime and corruption are being kept hidden.
Justice for Bradley Manning!
Sincerely,
The Undersigned:
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?manning1
--
Zaineb Alani
http://www.thewordsthatcomeout.blogspot.com
http://www.tigresssmiles.blogspot.com
"Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday." -Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi poet
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Please forward widely...
HELP LYNNE STEWART -- SUPPORT THESE BILLS
These two bills are now in Congress and need your support. Either or both bills would drastically decrease Lynne's and other federal sentences substantially.
H.R. 1475 "Federal Prison Work Incentive Act Amended 2009," Congressman Danny Davis, Democrat, Illinois
This bill will restore and amend the former federal B.O.P. good time allowances. It will let all federal prisoners, except lifers, earn significant reductions to their sentences. Second, earn monthly good time days by working prison jobs. Third, allowances for performing outstanding services or duties in connection with institutional operations. In addition, part of this bill is to bring back parole to federal long term prisoners.
Go to: www.FedCURE.org and www.FAMM.org
At this time, federal prisoners only earn 47 days per year good time. If H.R. 1475 passes, Lynne Stewart would earn 120-180 days per year good time!
H.R. 61 "45 And Older," Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (18th Congressional District, Texas)
This bill provides early release from federal prison after serving half of a violent crime or violent conduct in prison.
Please write, call, email your Representatives and Senators. Demand their votes!
This information is brought to you by Diane E. Schindelwig, a federal prisoner #36582-177 and friend and supporter of Lynne Stewart.
Write to Lynne at:
Lynne Stewart 53504-054
MCC-NY 2-S
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007
For further information call Lynne's husband, Ralph Poynter, leader of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Send contributions payable to:
Lynne Stewart Organization
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York, 11216
---
Listen to Lynne Stewart event, that took place July 8, 2010 at Judson Memorial Church
Excerpts include: Mumia Abu Jamal, Ralph Poynter, Ramsey Clark, Juanita
Young, Fred Hampton Jr., Raging Grannies, Ralph Schoenman
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
And check out this article (link) too!
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2010/062210Lendman.shtml
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AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL GRAVELY CONCERNED THAT RULING PUTS TROY DAVIS ON TRACK FOR EXECUTION; CITES PERSISTING DOUBTS ABOUT HIS GUILT
"Judge William T. Moore, Jr. ruled that while executing an innocent person would violate the United States Constitution, Davis didn't meet the extraordinarily high legal bar to prove his innocence."
Amnesty International Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Contact: Wende Gozan Brown at 212-633-4247, wgozan@aiusa.org.
(Washington, D.C.) - Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) today expressed deep concern that a federal district court decision puts Georgia death-row inmate Troy Anthony Davis back on track for execution, despite doubts about his guilt that were raised during a June evidentiary hearing. Judge William T. Moore, Jr. ruled that while executing an innocent person would violate the United States Constitution, Davis didn't meet the extraordinarily high legal bar to prove his innocence.
"Nobody walking out of that hearing could view this as an open-and-shut case," said Larry Cox, executive director of AIUSA. "The testimony that came to light demonstrates that doubt still exists, but the legal bar for proving innocence was set so high it was virtually insurmountable. It would be utterly unconscionable to proceed with this execution, plain and simple."
Amnesty International representatives, including Cox, attended the hearing in Savannah, Ga. The organization noted that evidence continues to cast doubt over the case:
· Four witnesses admitted in court that they lied at trial when they implicated Troy Davis and that they did not know who shot Officer Mark MacPhail.
· Four witnesses implicated another man as the one who killed the officer - including a man who says he saw the shooting and could clearly identify the alternative suspect, who is a family member.
· Three original state witnesses described police coercion during questioning, including one man who was 16 years old at the time of the murder and was questioned by several police officers without his parents or other adults present.
"The Troy Davis case is emblematic of everything that is wrong with capital punishment," said Laura Moye, director of AIUSA's Death Penalty Abolition Campaign. "In a system rife with error, mistakes can be made. There are no do-overs when it comes to death. Lawmakers across the country should scrutinize this case carefully, not only because of its unprecedented nature, but because it clearly indicates the need to abolish the death penalty in the United States."
Since the launch of its February 2007 report, Where Is the Justice for Me? The Case of Troy Davis, Facing Execution in Georgia, Amnesty International has campaigned intensively for a new evidentiary hearing or trial and clemency for Davis, collecting hundreds of thousands of clemency petition signatures and letters from across the United States and around the world. To date, internationally known figures such as Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter have all joined the call for clemency, as well as lawmakers from within and outside of Georgia.
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 2.8 million supporters, activists and volunteers who campaign for universal human rights from more than 150 countries. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.
# # #
For more information visit www.amnestyusa.org/troydavis.
Wende Gozan Brown
Media Relations Director
Amnesty International USA
212/633-4247 (o)
347/526-5520 (c)
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501c)3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) SOA Speaking Truth to Power
David Omondi and Father Louis Vitale Sentenced to Six Months in Federal Prison -- Incarcerated in Georgia Jail
www.SOAW.org
2) Demonstrators in Ireland Protest Austerity Plan
By JOHN F. BURNS
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/world/europe/28dublin.html?hp
3) Oregon Teen Arrested in Plot to Bomb Holiday Event
By LIZ ROBBINS and EDWARD WYATT
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28portland.html?hp
4) Winning the Class War
By BOB HERBERT
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/opinion/27herbert.html?hp
5) Iraq's Troubles Drive Out Refugees Who Came Back
By JOHN LELAND
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world/middleeast/27refugees.html?hp
6) Don't Just Tell Us. Show Us That You Can Foreclose.
"For years, the trustee would always take the creditors' side," Mr. Rothbloom said. "My strong opinion is the U.S. trustee's perspective is that they exist to stop borrowers from cheating banks. Perhaps they are coming to the realization that banks can also cheat borrowers."
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28gret.html?src=busln
7) Zodiac actor placed on terror list for opposing oil drilling method
By Daniel Tencer
Friday, November 26th, 2010 -- 4:09 pm
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/zodiac-actor-terror-list-drilling-method/
The following trailer for GasLand was uploaded to YouTube on May 5, 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8&feature=player_embedded
8) Thousands protest against Irish bailout
More than 100,000 people gather in Dublin to demonstrate against four-year austerity plan to reduce debts
By Henry McDonald Dublin
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 November 2010 14.23 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/27/ireland-bailout-angry-demonstrators-dublin
9) Rape case draws outrage, judge rejects plea
By Saeed Shabazz -Staff Writer-
Updated Nov 16, 2010 - 12:27:54 PM
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_7433.shtml
10) The Unemployed Held Hostage, Again
"The jobless rate, 9.6 percent, has been essentially unchanged since May, and nearly 42 percent of the 14.8 million jobless workers have been sidelined for six months or more."
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28sun1.html?hp
11) In Italy, Education Protests Spread
By GAIA PIANIGIANI
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world/europe/27Italy.html?ref=world
12) Ex-Justice Criticizes Death Penalty
By ADAM LIPTAK
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28memo.html?ref=us
13) War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat
"War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots."
By JOHN MARKOFF
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/science/28robot.html?ref=us
14) WikiLeaks Reports Attack on Its Web Site
By ROBERT MACKEY
November 28, 2010, 12:46 pm
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/wikileaks-reports-attack-on-its-web-site/?hp
15) Intelligence Directives Blur Lines Between Diplomacy and Spying
By MARK MAZZETTI
November 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29spy.html?ref=world
16) Pat-Downs: Enhanced but Hardly Thorough
By ARIEL KAMINER
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28critic.html?ref=nyregion
17) US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis
• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Saudi king urged Washington to bomb Iran
By David Leigh
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 28 November 2010 18.13 GMT
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/368-wikileaks/4075-breaking-wikileaks-releases-diplomatic-bombshell
18) Obama Freezes Pay for Federal Workers for Two Years
"Union leaders said Mr. Obama was playing politics at workers' expense. 'It's a panic reaction,' John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in an interview. 'It's superficial. People in this country voted for jobs and income. Sticking it to a V.A. nurse and a Social Security worker is not the way to go.'"
By PETER BAKER
November 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30freeze.html?_r=1&hp
19) Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy
By SCOTT SHANE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
November 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?hp
20) AG Confident FBI Acted Properly in Portland Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/11/29/us/politics/AP-US-Portland-Car-Bomb-Plot-Holder.html?hp
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1) SOA Speaking Truth to Power
David Omondi and Father Louis Vitale Sentenced to Six Months in Federal Prison -- Incarcerated in Georgia Jail
www.SOAW.org
Four human rights activists were in court on Tuesday, November 23 after being arrested and charged with federal trespassing at Ft. Benning, Georgia on November 20 and 21. During their arraignment before U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Hyles, Nancy Smith and Christopher Spicer pled not guilty. Their trial is set for January 5. Franciscan priest Fr. Louis Vitale, OFM and David Omondi of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker Community pled no contest and put the SOA on trial through their statements in court. Fr. Louis and David were sentenced to the maximum 6 months in jail. While nonviolent resisters are being sent to prison, those responsible for the use of torture manuals at the SOA have never even been charged for their crimes. Father Louis and David are presently in a Georgia county jail.
Write to the prisoners:
Because they may be transferred at any time, cards and letters to David may be sent to his community for forwarding: David Omondi, c/o The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, 632 N. Brittania St., Los Angeles, CA 90033. Louis' mail may be sent to the Nuclear Resister for forwarding at P.O. Box 43383, Tucson, AZ 85733.
Click here to read the letter that vigil speaker Father Alberto Franco wrote to all the prisoners of conscience from the November vigil and please feel free to ad your own message to the prisoners in the comment section below the letter text!
On Saturday, November 20, twenty-two others were arrested on city and state charges, including unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, and parading without a permit. Two were charged but not taken into custody. Some were blockading the highway leading into Fort Benning with a sign that read, "Stop: This is the End of the Road for the SOA". Many of those arrested were not intending to risk arrest but were swept up as they walked back to their cars after they left the permitted protest following the vigil on Saturday. These included journalists and a Columbus, Georgia resident who came out of a barber shop to take a photo of the protest. The SOA Watch Legal Collective is collecting testimony and photos of the indiscriminate arrests that took place on Saturday afternoon. Stay tuned!
On Sunday, November 21, Columbus Recorder's Court Judge Michael Cielinski found 21 of the 24 who were arrested by the city guilty on all charges. Two were convicted in a state court the next day. All were released from jail by Monday, with fines and bonds as high as $4,152.50. The SOA Watch community stepped up in a big way, supporters maxed out their credit cards at ATMs to ensure that no one had to stay another day in the Muscogee County Jail. Those who were arrested still have to answer state charges, and expect to be arraigned in January.
For more information about the Ft. Benning protest, visit www.SOAW.org.
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2) Demonstrators in Ireland Protest Austerity Plan
By JOHN F. BURNS
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/world/europe/28dublin.html?hp
DUBLIN - After a week that brought Ireland a pledge of an $114 billion international rescue package and the toughest austerity program of any country in Europe, thousands of demonstrators took to Dublin's streets on Saturday to protest wide cuts in the country's welfare programs and in public-sector jobs.
The protests centered on a milelong march along the banks of the Liffey river in central Dublin to the General Post Office building on O'Connell Street, site of the battle between Irish republican rebels and British troops in the Easter Uprising in 1916 - an iconic event that many in Ireland regard as the tipping point in Ireland's long struggle for independence.
The choice of venue for the protests by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, coordinating the march through the city, reflected the mood of anger, dismay and recrimination in the wake of the economic shocks of the past 10 days. Those shocks have been the culmination of two years in which the Irish economy has shrunk by about 15 percent, faster than any other European economy.
Before that, Ireland enjoyed more than a decade of unprecedented prosperity, so the rescue package being worked out by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union and the austerity program the Dublin government has been forced to adopt to secure the bailout loans have come as a deep shock.
Among other things, the austerity package will involve the loss of about 25,000 public-sector jobs, equivalent to 10 percent of the government work force, as well as a four-year, $20 billion program of tax increases and spending cuts like sharp reductions in state pensions and the minimum wage. One Dublin newspaper, the Irish Independent, estimated that the cost of the measures for a typical middle-class family earning $67,000 a year would be about $5,800 a year.
The ensuing political turmoil has raised questions about the ability of the government of Prime Minister Brian Cowell to secure backing for the austerity package when it is presented to Parliament on Dec. 7. The coalition government was weakened last week by a split between the Fianna Fail party, which Mr. Cowen leads, and its main coalition partner, the Green Party, and a stunning loss by Fianna Fail in an election Friday for a parliamentary seat that reduced the government majority to two.
The peaceful and restrained nature of the protests on Saturday was one indication that the unrest may not lead to confrontations in the streets, as some have feared. On a bitterly cold day, turnout appeared to have fallen far short of the 50,000 that organizers had forecast.
Organizers had called for a "family friendly" demonstration, and that appeared to be what they got. With a police helicopter hovering overhead, speeches at the post office building drew cheers and shouts of support, and the detonation of some fireworks, but there were no reports of arrests. Protesters waved banners that depicted the austerity measures as an attack on the country's poor, and told reporters that they feared for their futures, and the country's.
"Everything's collapsing," one woman said.
"We can't afford it," a father with a young child said of the spending cuts. "I don't know how we're ever going to come out of it."
The anger of many speakers, and among the protesters, appeared to fall about equally on the Cowen government and on the international financial institutions working out the details of the rescue package. Officials in Brussels, where European finance ministers were meeting on Saturday to discuss the package, said it could be confirmed with an announcement on Sunday.
One of the O'Connell Street speakers, typical of others, urged the country "not to allow a government with no mandate, bowing to people in Europe who are not elected, to determine our future."
But if the government could take some encouragement from the relative quiescence of the demonstrators, its wider political prospects remained deeply uncertain. Fianna Fail's share of the vote in the election last week, in Donegal, fell to 21 percent from 51 percent in the general election of 2007. The seat was won by Sinn Fein, a historical rival of Fianna Fail dating from the struggle for independence a century ago, but a marginal force in the republic's politics in recent decades.
Although by-elections are regarded as unreliable bellwethers of voting patterns in general elections, the Donegal result was a further pointer to what many Irish political commentators expect to be a harsh loss for Fianna Fail in a general election that Mr. Cowen has indicated he will call for February or March.
In the meantime, the prime minister has rejected calls for his or the government's resignation. He has said he intends to see the rescue package and the austerity program approved by Parliament before calling an election, the reverse of the pattern that Sinn Fein, among other groups, has demanded.
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3) Oregon Teen Arrested in Plot to Bomb Holiday Event
By LIZ ROBBINS and EDWARD WYATT
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28portland.html?hp
A Somali-born teenager attempting to detonate what he believed was a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland, Ore., was arrested by the authorities on Friday night. They had spent nearly six months tracking him and setting up a sting operation, officials in Oregon said.
The bomb, which was in a van parked off Pioneer Courthouse Square, was a fake - planted by F.B.I. agents as part of the elaborate sting - but "the threat was very real," said Arthur Balizan, the F.B.I.'s special agent in charge in Oregon. An estimated 10,000 people were at the ceremony on Friday night, the Portland police said.
Mr. Balizan identified the suspect as Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized United States citizen who lived in Corvallis, Ore. He was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
"Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale," Mr. Balizan said in a statement released by the Department of Justice.
"At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack," he added.
The foiled terrorism plot was the latest aimed at a mass gathering in the United States, including an attempted car bombing in Times Square in May. In that case, a Pakistani-born American citizen was arrested and pleaded guilty.
But unlike that plan, which the authorities learned about only at the last minute, an affidavit filed in the Oregon case indicates that the F.B.I. learned early on of Mr. Mohamud's desire to plot violence. His planning unfolded under the scrutiny and even assistance of undercover agents, officials said.
The arrest also marks another episode in which a Somali-American has been accused of being drawn into radical attempts at violence. In 2009, after a sweeping federal investigation of more than 20 young Americans believed to have joined the Shabaab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia that is affiliated with Al Qaeda, the authorities charged two of the men with providing material support for terrorism. In 2008, another man under investigation blew himself up in an attack in Somalia, becoming the first known American suicide bomber.
But in this case, according to the affidavit, Mr. Mohamud was in e-mail contact with an unnamed associate in Pakistan in August 2009, who referred him to another an associate overseas.
The F.B.I. said that during the sting operation, Mr. Mohamud repeatedly expressed his desire to kill Americans. Reminded by F.B.I. agents posing as accomplices that many children and families would be at the Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, Mr. Mohamed said that he was looking for "a huge mass" that could "be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays," according to the F.B.I.
Federal agents also said that Mr. Mohamud thought Portland would be a good target because Americans "don't see it as a place where anything will happen."
"It's in Oregon, and Oregon, like, you know, nobody ever thinks about it," the affidavit quotes him as saying.
Dwight C. Holton, the United States attorney for Oregon, said, "This defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people - even here in Oregon - who are determined to kill Americans."
The authorities arrested Mr. Mohamud around 5:40 p.m. on Friday, 20 minutes before the tree-lighting ceremony was planned to start. As he was taken into custody, he kicked and screamed at the agents and yelled, "Allahu akbar," an Arabic phrase for "God is Great," the authorities said.
Undercover agents F.B.I. first came into contact with Mr. Mohamud in June, and repeatedly asked him if he was prepared to go through with the bombing at Pioneer Courthouse Square.
"I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured," Mr. Mohamud told the agents, according to the affidavit.
He referred to the Sept. 11 attacks, calling the destruction "awesome."
At the end of September, Mr. Mohamud mailed bomb components to agents he thought were fellow operatives who would assemble the device. On Nov. 4, the agents traveled with Mr. Mohamud to a remote location in Lincoln County, Ore., where they detonated a bomb as a trial run.
Mr. Mohamud, who had told undercover agents that he had thought about committing a terrorist act since he was 15, taped a statement that included a goodbye to his family and an explanation for his actions, the authorities said.
As the clock ticked down on Friday afternoon, Mr. Mohamud again met with the undercover agents and prepared to detonate the bomb. When he dialed a number from his cellphone, thinking it would activate the bomb, he was instead arrested.
Mr. Mohamud is scheduled to appear in federal court in Portland on Monday and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Defense attorneys in such cases often accuse the F.B.I. of entrapment. Anticipating such claims, undercover agents in Mr. Mohamud case offered him several nonfatal ways that he could serve his cause, including mere prayer. But he told the agents he wanted to be "operational."
Colin Miner contributed reporting.
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4) Winning the Class War
By BOB HERBERT
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/opinion/27herbert.html?hp
The class war that no one wants to talk about continues unabated.
Even as millions of out-of-work and otherwise struggling Americans are tightening their belts for the holidays, the nation's elite are lacing up their dancing shoes and partying like royalty as the millions and billions keep rolling in.
Recessions are for the little people, not for the corporate chiefs and the titans of Wall Street who are at the heart of the American aristocracy. They have waged economic warfare against everybody else and are winning big time.
The ranks of the poor may be swelling and families forced out of their foreclosed homes may be enduring a nightmarish holiday season, but American companies have just experienced their most profitable quarter ever. As The Times reported this week, U.S. firms earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter - the highest total since the government began keeping track more than six decades ago.
The corporate fat cats are becoming alarmingly rotund. Their profits have surged over the past seven quarters at a pace that is among the fastest ever seen, and they can barely contain their glee. On the same day that The Times ran its article about the third-quarter surge in profits, it ran a piece on the front page that carried the headline: "With a Swagger, Wallets Out, Wall Street Dares to Celebrate."
Anyone who thinks there is something beneficial in this vast disconnect between the fortunes of the American elite and those of the struggling masses is just silly. It's not even good for the elite.
There is no way to bring America's consumer economy back to robust health if unemployment is chronically high, wages remain stagnant and the jobs that are created are poor ones. Without ordinary Americans spending their earnings from good jobs, any hope of a meaningful, long-term recovery is doomed.
Beyond that, extreme economic inequality is a recipe for social instability. Families on the wrong side of the divide find themselves under increasing pressure to just hold things together: to find the money to pay rent or the mortgage, to fend off bill collectors, to cope with illness and emergencies, and deal with the daily doses of extreme anxiety.
Societal conflicts metastasize as resentments fester and scapegoats are sought. Demagogues inevitably emerge to feast on the poisonous stew of such an environment. The rich may think that the public won't ever turn against them. But to hold that belief, you have to ignore the turbulent history of the 1930s.
A stark example of the potential for real conflict is being played out in New York City, where the multibillionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has selected a glittering example of the American aristocracy to be the city's schools chancellor. Cathleen Black, chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, has a reputation as a crackerjack corporate executive but absolutely no background in education.
Ms. Black travels in the rarefied environs of the very rich. Her own children went to private boarding schools. She owns a penthouse on Park Avenue and a $4 million home in Southampton. She was able to loan a $47,600 Bulgari bracelet to a museum for an exhibit showing off the baubles of the city's most successful women.
Ms. Black will be peering across an almost unbridgeable gap between her and the largely poor and working-class parents and students she will be expected to serve. Worse, Mr. Bloomberg, heralding Ms. Black as a "superstar manager," has made it clear that because of budget shortfalls she will be focused on managing cutbacks to the school system.
So here we have the billionaire and the millionaire telling the poor and the struggling - the little people - that they will just have to make do with less. You can almost feel the bitterness rising.
Extreme inequality is already contributing mightily to political and other forms of polarization in the U.S. And it is a major force undermining the idea that as citizens we should try to face the nation's problems, economic and otherwise, in a reasonably united fashion. When so many people are tumbling toward the bottom, the tendency is to fight among each other for increasingly scarce resources.
What's really needed is for working Americans to form alliances and try, in a spirit of good will, to work out equitable solutions to the myriad problems facing so many ordinary individuals and families. Strong leaders are needed to develop such alliances and fight back against the forces that nearly destroyed the economy and have left working Americans in the lurch.
Aristocrats were supposed to be anathema to Americans. Now, while much of the rest of the nation is suffering, they are the only ones who can afford to smile.
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5) Iraq's Troubles Drive Out Refugees Who Came Back
By JOHN LELAND
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world/middleeast/27refugees.html?hp
BAGHDAD - A second exodus has begun here, of Iraqis who returned after fleeing the carnage of the height of the war, but now find that violence and the nation's severe lack of jobs are pulling them away from home once again.
Since the American invasion in 2003, refugees have been a measure of the country's precarious condition, flooding outward during periods of violence and trickling back as Iraq seemed to stabilize. This new migration shows how far the nation remains from being stable and secure.
Abu Maream left Iraq after a mortar round killed his brother-in-law in 2005. Amar al-Obeidi left when insurgents threatened to kill him and raided his shops. Hazim Hadi Mohammed al-Tameemi left because the doctors who treated his wife's ovarian cancer had fled the country.
All three joined the flow of refugees who returned as violence here ebbed. But now they want to leave again.
"The only thing that's stopping me is I don't have the money," said Mr. Maream, who gave only a partial name - literally, father of Maream - because he feared reprisal from extremists in his neighborhood. "We are Iraqis in name only."
Nearly 100,000 refugees have returned since 2008, out of more than two million who left since the invasion, according to the Iraqi government and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.
But as they return, pulled by improved security in Iraq or pushed by a lack of work abroad, many are finding that their homeland is still not ready - their houses are gone or occupied, their neighborhoods unsafe, their opportunities minimal.
In a recent survey by the United Nations refugee office, 61 percent of those who returned to Baghdad said they regretted coming back, most saying they did not feel safe. The majority, 87 percent, said they could not make enough money here to support their families. Applications for asylum in Syria have risen more than 50 percent since May.
As Iraq struggles toward a return to stability, these returnees risk becoming people without a country, displaced both at home and abroad. And though departures have ebbed since 2008, a wave of recent attacks on Christians has prompted a new exodus.
Mr. Obeidi, who used his tribe's name instead of his father's name as a surname, left for Syria in 2006 after an improvised bomb exploded near his nephew, terrifying the boy, and insurgents threatened to kill Mr. Obeidi. On a recent evening in Baghdad, he had trouble controlling his breathing as he talked about the daily blasts in his neighborhood.
"There's no security here," he said, ticking off his close encounters with guns and bombs. "I was near a female suicide bomber a couple months ago. Then I was in my brother's truck when insurgents opened fire on a bridge. My friend was killed in front of me with a knife. I've been destroyed. My mother needs an operation for her eyes, and I don't have money. We need someone to help us."
"Feel my stomach," he said. "It's like a rock. It's going to blow out."
Before insurgents robbed his tool shops in 2006, he said, he earned about $1,000 a month and was planning to marry. But during several trips abroad he was unable to find work. Since returning to Baghdad he has struggled to find day labor, earning about $6 a day. The woman he had intended to marry is now with another man.
He has twice paid smugglers, to take him to Austria on one occasion and to Italy on another, but each time the men took his money without helping him.
"Life was better in Syria, but I can't work there," said Mr. Obeidi, who is a Sunni. "Jordan was the same. Turkey was the same. And it was expensive to live there. That's why I had to come back. But our country is not our country. It's Iran's country. We need someone to help us."
The United Nations provides some transportation costs and a small stipend for families that come back, but fewer than 4 percent of returnees take advantage of the program. Most either do not know about it or think they may still want to return to their asylum country and will want the agency to help them as refugees, not as returnees.
For Abu Maream and his family, who left for Syria in 2005 and came back last year, life has come down to a choice between bad options. Syria seemed safe, he said, but he felt "humiliated" as an unemployed foreigner seeking work, selling off his possessions to keep the family afloat. Back here, he has been unable to find work, and neighbors who used to respect the family now "look down on us," he said.
On a recent afternoon he sat in a two-room apartment with only a mattress on the floor and a few possessions in boxes. He had no refrigerator and received only a few hours of electricity a day.
"Before, we had Shiite neighbors, and there were no problems at all," said Mr. Maream, who is Sunni. "The government created the sectarian thing," he said, meaning that the political parties formed along ethnic or religious lines, formalizing the division. Now his neighborhood has become a stronghold for Sunni extremists.
He sat on the edge of the mattress, his mother sitting behind him. In the coming months, he said, he will send his sisters and mother back to Syria for their safety, and he and his wife and three children will move in with an uncle in Iraq, splitting up the family. When the family would be reunited in Syria he could not say.
"It's over; that's it," he said. "I'm not coming back. How can I come back? I don't believe Iraq will have a chance again."
Mr. Tameemi, who fought in the bloody eight-year war with Iran, said he hated leaving Iraq in 2006. "I love my country," he said. But after years of sanctions and the American-led invasion, doctors and medicines were scarce in the country - one of the many toxic effects of displacement in Iraq.
In Jordan he found doctors to treat his wife's cancer, but he could not find work. "They don't treat us well," he said.
Now, after two months back in Iraq, Mr. Tameemi is ready to leave again. Despite improvements in security, medical care here - once a model for the region - is still inadequate, and doctors have not returned. "Even if I have to sleep in the road, I want to take care of my wife," he said.
His next plan is to apply for asylum in the United States, but he knows that the odds are against him. In the meantime, his experience has soured him on the country he can no longer call home.
"I regret coming back, but financial problems pushed me to do it," he said. "The Iraqis don't help the Iraqis."
Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.
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6) Don't Just Tell Us. Show Us That You Can Foreclose.
"For years, the trustee would always take the creditors' side," Mr. Rothbloom said. "My strong opinion is the U.S. trustee's perspective is that they exist to stop borrowers from cheating banks. Perhaps they are coming to the realization that banks can also cheat borrowers."
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28gret.html?src=busln
AFTER examining their foreclosure practices for flaws in mortgage documentation and other procedures, many of the nation's largest banks have resumed - or will soon resume - trying to evict defaulted borrowers.
JPMorgan Chase, for example, told investors this month that it had extensively reviewed its foreclosure controls, trained personnel in the unit and started new procedures to ensure that all legal requirements would be met when it moves to seize a property in default.
"If we find any foreclosures in error, we will fix them," JPMorgan Chase said.
But while banks may have booted a few robo-signers and tightened up some lax procedures, one question at the heart of the foreclosure mess refuses to go away: whether institutions trying to take back a property can prove they even have the right to foreclose at all.
Some in the industry believe that questions about this issue - known as "legal standing" - are trivial. They say it's just a gambit by borrowers' lawyers to throw sand in the foreclosure machine. Nine times out of 10, bankers say, the right institutions are foreclosing on the right borrowers.
Maybe so. But the United States Trustee Program, the unit of the Justice Department charged with overseeing the integrity of the nation's bankruptcy courts, is taking a different view. The unit is stepping up its scrutiny of the veracity of banks' claims against borrowers, and its approach is evident in two cases in federal bankruptcy court in Atlanta.
In both cases, Donald F. Walton, the United States trustee for the region, has intervened, filing motions contending that the banks trying to foreclose have not shown they have the right to do so.
The matters involve borrowers operating under Chapter 13 bankruptcy plans overseen by the court in the Northern District of Georgia. In both cases, the banks have filed motions with the bankruptcy court to remove the automatic foreclosure stay that results when a court confirms a debtor's Chapter 13 repayment plan. If the stay is removed, the banks can foreclose.
In one case, the borrower had her Chapter 13 plan confirmed by the court early last month. About two weeks later, Wells Fargo asked the court for relief from the stay so that it could foreclose.
Responding on Nov. 16, Mr. Walton asked the court to deny the bank's request because it had failed to produce any facts showing that it was entitled to foreclose - either as the holder of the underlying note or as the agent for the holder.
The other case involves a couple who had their Chapter 13 plan confirmed by the court in March 2009. A month ago, Chase Home Finance, a unit of JPMorgan Chase, asked the court for relief from the automatic stay so that it could start foreclosure proceedings.
Again, Mr. Walton objected, asking the court to deny the request on the same grounds as argued in the Wells Fargo matter - in this case, that Chase hadn't proved that it controlled the note on the property.
Jane Limprecht, a spokeswoman for the trustee program, confirmed that it was ratcheting up its scrutiny on banks' foreclosure practices.
"The United States Trustee Program is engaged in an enhanced review of mortgage servicer filings in bankruptcy cases to help ensure the accuracy of the claim to repayment," she said. She declined to comment on specific filings.
A Chase spokesman said the bank is the holder of the note in the Georgia case, giving it standing to file the motion.
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said that in its case, it is the trustee of a mortgage security that contains the loan, not the servicer. In its capacity as the trustee for mortgage loans serviced by others, it says it expects those servicers to abide by all required laws, processes and procedures.
Howard D. Rothbloom, a lawyer in Atlanta who represents borrowers in bankruptcy, welcomed the actions by Mr. Walton and said he believes they show a sea change in the United States trustee's thinking on the foreclosure mess.
"Until now, what we had was homeowners complaining about a lack of due process," Mr. Rothbloom said. "Now you have the federal government complaining about the abuse of the judicial process. That's really what was missing before."
The judges overseeing these matters have not yet ruled on the banks' or the trustee's requests. And Wells Fargo and Chase may indeed be able to persuade the trustee that their filings were proper.
But the trustee's intervention in these matters indicates that it wants banks to show the courts that they have the right to foreclose, rather than simply telling them they do. That had been the custom, after all. Now, Mr. Walton's motions may serve as a warning to banks that they need to be better prepared if they want to foreclose on a borrower.
"For years, the trustee would always take the creditors' side," Mr. Rothbloom said. "My strong opinion is the U.S. trustee's perspective is that they exist to stop borrowers from cheating banks. Perhaps they are coming to the realization that banks can also cheat borrowers."
FEDERAL trustees in other parts of the country have also intervened in borrower cases, but many of these actions have been related to questionable foreclosure fees or to dubious legal or documentation practices. The shift to a broader focus on the issue of standing suggests that the courts may no longer accept at face value the banks' arguments that they have the right to foreclose or represent the institution that does.
David Shaev, a lawyer in New York who works with troubled borrowers, says the United States trustee there has also intervened in one of his cases, taking up the issue of a bank's right to foreclose.
In his experience, Mr. Shaev said: "The attorneys who represent the banks invariably state that they will get the collateral file for us and prove that the banks had possession of the documents at the appropriate time. But then when we review the file it doesn't show that at all."
As many large banks renew their foreclosure efforts, Mr. Rothbloom says he hopes that the United States trustee will bring about a comprehensive change in bank practices.
"I've gotten resolutions for clients in individual cases, but I'm just a flea on the tail of an elephant," he said. "Resolutions of individual cases don't bring about systemic change."
And systemic change is precisely what's needed.
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7) Zodiac actor placed on terror list for opposing oil drilling method
By Daniel Tencer
Friday, November 26th, 2010 -- 4:09 pm
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/zodiac-actor-terror-list-drilling-method/
The following trailer for GasLand was uploaded to YouTube on May 5, 2010:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe1AeH0Qz8&feature=player_embedded
Indie actor Mark Ruffalo says he found himself on the Pennsylvania Homeland Security office's terror watch list for organizing screening of an oil-drilling documentary.
According to the World Entertainment News Network, Ruffalo -- who has starred in such films as The Kids Are All Right, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Zodiac -- told GQ magazine he found it "pretty f--cking funny" that he would be suspected of terrorism for raising the alarm about what many say is an environmentally harmful way of drilling for oil and gas.
Ruffalo has been promoting GasLand, a documentary that focuses on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." It's a process of drilling for oil and gas that involves pumping large amounts of water into a well to crack the rock under the ground, releasing the oil or gas. As energy prices rise and fossil fuels become scarcer, the practice has been growing in popularity.
The trailer for GasLand states that at least six states have documented some 1,000 incidents of groundwater pollution related to fracking. The documentary interviews people who say they suffered from neurological diseases and other conditions as a result of contaminated water.
The Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security appears to be at least as heavily focused on anti-oil and gas documentaries as it is on international terrorism. In October, it was revealed that the department had declared the documentary Coal Country to be a "potential catalyst for inspiring 'direct action' protests or even sabotage against facilities, machinery, and/or corporate headquarters."
A Pennsylvania activist Web site reported earlier this month that the department has been monitoring the Twitter feeds of known anti-war activists.
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8) Thousands protest against Irish bailout
More than 100,000 people gather in Dublin to demonstrate against four-year austerity plan to reduce debts
By Henry McDonald Dublin
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 November 2010 14.23 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/27/ireland-bailout-angry-demonstrators-dublin
More than 100,000 Irish citizens took to the streets of Dublin today to protest against the international bailout and four years of austerity.
Despite overnight snow storms and freezing temperatures, huge crowds have gathered in O'Connell Street to demonstrate against the cuts aimed at driving down Ireland's colossal national debt.
So far the march has passed off peacefully although there is a huge Garda presence with up to 700 officers on duty working alongside 250 security guards for the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
Among the marchers there is deep anger that most of the more than €80bn (£67bn) from the EU and the International Monetary Fund will be given to shore up Ireland's ailing banks.
Marching in the rally was Irish builder Mick Wallace who has had to lay off 100 workers due to the crash in the construction industry. Wallace said it was time the Irish became more militant.
"We should be more like the French and get onto the streets more often. Because our politicians go over to Europe and tell the EU that our people do not demonstrate, they don't take to the streets. It's time we changed that and openly opposed what is going on," he said.
Placards carried by the marchers reflect the mood of anger and humiliation at having to be bailed out by the EU and IMF. One was designed to look like an estate agent's billboard and read: "3,599 square miles For Sale. Full Planning Permission Granted".
The protest has not halted at the GPO in Dublin, the scene of the 1916 rising where trade unionists and workers are denouncing the government's cost cutting programme which will take €15bn out of the Irish economy over the next four years.
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9) Rape case draws outrage, judge rejects plea
By Saeed Shabazz -Staff Writer-
Updated Nov 16, 2010 - 12:27:54 PM
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/National_News_2/article_7433.shtml
Sexual assault case raises concern about abuse of young girls, say advocates
NEW YORK (FinalCall.com) - A rape case continues to draw outrage and anger from women's organizations as more is learned about the alleged courthouse assault of a teenage girl and a proposed plea deal that offered the alleged rapist no jail time.
The National Organization for Women, the New York Coalition of One Hundred Black Women, Inc., the National Action Network and the president of Bennett College for women were among those astounded by the alleged crime and proposed plea agreement.
But as controversy about the case grew, a judge killed the plea agreement Nov. 15, saying the defendant had shown no remorse and offered three years imprisonment and three years probation as an alternative. She said her decision was based on statements the accused rapist had made to probation officials. Her decision followed review of a report from the probation department.
Defendant Tony Simmons didn't chose between the option of jail time or a trial so Judge Cassandra Mullen vacated the deal. Mr. Simmons is scheduled to return to court Dec. 15. He will have the opportunity to accept the new punishment or go to trial.
The judge's decision also means there is no admission of guilt.
"I felt relief that the judge was willing to do the right thing," said Sonia Ossorio, executive director of the New York Chapter of the National Organization for Women. "The courtroom was packed, a lot of people turned out; it shows that sometimes it really pays to step up. We slowed down the train, everyone believes this is a strong case."
NOW-NY will be monitoring the case but no demonstrations are planned at this time. "Hopefully the wheels of justice are turning in the right way," Ms. Ossorio said. The atmosphere in the packed courtroom was intense, and when the judge finally had her say, there was a collective sigh of relief, Ms. Ossorio said. The assistant district attorney is new and told the judge prosecutors were ready for trial, she continued. "It's now up to the jurors of New York City," Ms. Ossorio said.
Days earlier, activists gathered across the street from the courtroom of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Cassandra Mullen demanding jail time for Mr. Simmons, a former juvenile counselor with the Department of Juvenile Justice. The 45-year-old had entered a guilty plea for raping a Black 15-year-old and sexually assaulting two other teens, ages 15 and 13, that he transported to Manhattan Family Court.
"Hey Judge Mullen, we're here to say serial rape is not okay!" chanted protestors during a Nov. 9 demonstration.
"This outrageous case is just one example of a widespread problem in our criminal justice system: The under prosecution and shockingly lenient sentencing of sexual predators," Jane Manning, president of NOW-NY told protestors.
"If we cannot deliver justice for these victims who were assaulted on the premises of the Manhattan Family Court building by an employee assigned to protect them, how can we expect justice for any victims of violence?" asked NOW-NY executive director Ossorio.
The voided plea deal had offered 10-years probation and mandatory registration as a sex offender.
The judge had to review a report on Mr. Simmons from the Dept. of Probation. She said his comments in part blamed the victims and described one sexual encounter with a minor as consensual.
Since the story broke in October, there had been a blame game between the office of District Attorney Cy Vance and the judge's office.
Mr. Simmons was suspended from his juvenile counseling job the day after pleading guilty to the rapes. A spokesperson for his former employer called any counselor's exploitation of minors, or anyone else, a heinous abuse of the public trust.
Mr. Vance, who is elected, had told local newspapers the judge's decision to give the rapist probation was "outrageously lenient." The district attorney, who is serving his first term, has since said nothing-and did not return Final Call phone calls asking for a statement.
A spokesperson for the state court system, speaking for Judge Mullen and speaking to only the New York dailies reportedly said: "The blame rests with DA Cy Vance, Jr. who didn't object to the sentencing."
"We are outraged, a slap on the wrist for someone who is supposed to protect young people-what message does this send?" asked Tamika Mallory, national executive director of the National Action Network, which is led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. Her comments came before the judge rejected the plea agreement.
Mr. Simmons had admitted raping a young woman who has only used her first name, Ashley, out of fear her alleged rapist could still harm her. She was 15-years-old when Mr. Simmons allegedly took her by elevator to the basement of the Family Court building and raped her. He then allegedly returned her to a courtroom to be sentenced for filing a false police report.
Ashley was sentenced to 12 months for lying to police about the identity of persons who assaulted her on the way to school.
At the time of the alleged rape, Ashley was an orphan and lived with foster parents who reportedly left her to the system after her sentencing. She is now 20-years-old and has completed her GED and professional courses at a university.
Ashley, speaking to a news outlet in a rare interview, talked about suffering a "bad time" while incarcerated. Anger over the alleged rape led to problems with behavior while in detention.
Ashley came forward after another 15-year-old accused the same juvenile counselor of sexual assault in 2008.
'He needs to go to jail'
"Probation is no consequence for this man, he needs to go to jail," declared Dr. Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College in North Carolina and a national leader on women's issues.
"Our children in foster care are treated poorly, they suffer in silence, because they are not taken seriously, not valued-just thrown away," Dr. Malveaux said.
One can only imagine how youth who come forward have been scarred for life, Dr. Malveaux added.
Speaking of the role Black women and their organizations must play, Dr. Malveaux said, "We need to be big sisters for them, and we need to monitor more closely what is happening throughout all of the systems that deal with these children."
Virginia M. Montague, president of the N.Y. Coalition of 100 Black Women, agreed with Dr. Malveaux.
"Black women and their organizations must rise up and stand together with other organizations to send a message that we will no longer allow our young Black women to be viewed as disposable individuals who can be dismissed, physically and psychologically damaged by an ineffective and uncaring society," she told The Final Call.
Ms. Montague said she has first-hand knowledge of issues facing teens in the juvenile system. "As a former probation officer, and a former counselor in a juvenile facility in North Carolina, I saw what happens to young women caught up in the legal system," she said in an e-mail. "I have seen first-hand the abuse perpetrated on young women who are preyed on by the same persons hired to protect and care for them."
"I have seen allegations dismissed or ignored, and I know the struggle that young women of color are subjected to in the best of circumstances; and to read that the offender plead guilty to the charges of rape and yet, will possibly only receive probation is unconscionable; and a true miscarriage of justice," Ms. Montague said.
Rape of youth a national problem
Lovisa Stannow, executive director of Los Angeles-based Just Detention International said juvenile rape is "an enormous nationwide problem."
And, she said, a Justice Dept. report released in January found one in eight detained youth had been sexually abused within a 12-month period.
Juveniles of color were disproportionately victimized, she added.
The report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, "The National Survey of Youth in Custody 2008-2009," surveyed detention facilities in all 50 states.
Reported sexual victimization by faculty or staff was slightly higher for Black youth at 11.9 percent while such assault rates for White youth were reported at 9.7 percent and for Latino youth the abuse rate was 8.1 percent.
The report added that White youth (4.4 percent) were more likely than Black youth (2.1 percent) and Latino youth (0.9 percent) to report victimization by other youth.
The report stated that the chance of staff victimization of youth who had spent at least 12 months or more in a facility was 14.6 percent, compared to the 8.3 percent for those in custody six months or less.
"A lot of these rapes go unreported, which stems from a belief that staff members have unlimited immunity," said Ms. Stannow. "We have heard from youth that they are told by perpetrators, 'don't you even think about revealing this, because nobody is going to believe you.' "
It has been reported that the assistant district attorney trying the case of Mr. Simmons felt a jury would reject allegations lodged by a prisoner against someone who worked in the criminal justice system.
The stated goal of the youth correction system is rehabilitation, Ms. Stannow noted.
"The very people who are supposed to help you, turn around and destroy your life. Our goal, our focus is to seek an end to sexual abuse of detainees," she said.
Dr. Malveaux is hoping for more outrage from Black women's organizations, groups such as the National Association of Black Social Workers and political leaders.
"Black legislators need to strengthen penalties-zero tolerance-for this behavior in the criminal justice system and in the foster care system. We must draw the line," she said.
Ms. Mallory felt the reason for the initial lack of outrage from Black women's organizations in New York was due to the lack of publicity concerning the case.
"I plan to call together the heads of these organizations," she told The Final Call.
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10) The Unemployed Held Hostage, Again
"The jobless rate, 9.6 percent, has been essentially unchanged since May, and nearly 42 percent of the 14.8 million jobless workers have been sidelined for six months or more."
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28sun1.html?hp
It is hard to believe, as the holidays approach yet again amid economic hard times, but Congress looks as if it may let federal unemployment benefits lapse for the fourth time this year.
Lame duck lawmakers will have only one day when they return to work on Monday to renew the expiring benefits. If they don't, two million people will be cut off in December alone. This lack of regard for working Americans is shocking. Last summer, benefits were blocked for 51 days, as senators in both parties focused on preserving tax breaks for wealthy money managers and other affluent constituents.
This time, tax cuts for the rich are bound to drive and distort the debate again. Republicans and Democrats will almost certainly link the renewal of jobless benefits to an extension of the high-end Bush-era tax cuts. That would be a travesty. There is no good argument for letting jobless benefits expire, or for extending those cuts.
The recession that began in 2007 has led to the worst unemployment in nearly 30 years. We have record levels of long-term unemployment. The jobless rate, 9.6 percent, has been essentially unchanged since May, and nearly 42 percent of the 14.8 million jobless workers have been sidelined for six months or more.
Some opponents of unemployment benefits - mostly Republicans but a few Democrats as well - would have you believe those figures are evidence of laziness, enabled by generous benefits. They conveniently ignore three facts. One, there are five unemployed people for every job opening - a profound scarcity of jobs. Two, federal benefits average $290 a week, about half of what the typical family spends on basics and hardly enough to dissuade someone from working. Three, as unemployment has deepened, benefits have become less generous. Earlier this year, lawmakers ended a subsidy to help unemployed workers pay for health insurance and dropped an extra $25 a week that had been added to benefits by last year's stimulus law.
Other opponents would have you believe that the nation cannot afford to keep paying unemployment benefits: a yearlong extension would cost about $60 billion. The truth is, we cannot afford not to. The nation has never ended federal benefits when unemployment is as high as it is now, and for good reason: Without jobs, there is inadequate spending, and that means ever fewer jobs. A wide range of private and government studies show that unemployment benefits combat that vicious cycle by ensuring that families can buy the basics.
Nor do jobless benefits bust the budget. Just the opposite. They do not add to dangerous long-term deficits because the spending is temporary. And because they support spending and jobs, they contribute powerfully to the economic growth that is vital for a healthy budget. Extending the Bush high-end tax cuts would be budget busting, because they are likely to endure, adding $700 billion to the deficit over 10 years. Tax cuts for the rich provide virtually no economic stimulus, because affluent people tend to save their bounty.
Ignoring facts and logic, several Republicans have said that any benefit extension must be paid for with spending cuts elsewhere. That would, in effect, be giving with one hand while taking away with the other. It is not only cruel, but foolish, because it would reduce the economic boost that benefits would provide.
President Obama should pound the table for a clean, yearlong extension of unemployment benefits, and should excoriate phony deficit hawks - in both parties - who say that jobless benefits are too costly, even as they pass vastly more expensive tax cuts for the rich.
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11) In Italy, Education Protests Spread
By GAIA PIANIGIANI
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world/europe/27Italy.html?ref=world
ROME - This week, a group of students broke into the hall of the Italian Senate in Rome, while another occupied the Colosseum; in Pisa, students took over a runway at the airport; in Palermo, they sat on the railway tracks; in Florence and Milan, they clashed with the police, while at a dozen universities, researchers dragged their sleeping bags onto the roofs, where they have been sleeping as a sign of protest.
The demonstrations, which spread to many other Italian cities this month, were aimed at a new bill, currently being discussed in the lower house, to overhaul the Italian university system. If it is approved in upcoming weeks, it will pass to the Senate, as long as Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's tottering majority holds and his conservative government remains in power.
Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini's proposed bill is one of the most far-reaching education overhaul efforts in recent years. It aims to reorganize the governance of institutions and the system of recruiting university teachers, and to change the way funds are allocated, by rewarding meritorious institutions and forcing schools that are running a deficit to close, the minister said.
The students are also protesting sharp cuts imposed by Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti on many Italian ministries.
For 2011, according to data posted on the Senate Web site, the government has allocated €6.9 billion, or $9.1 billion, to universities. This includes an additional €800,000 - yet to be approved - that Mr. Tremonti proposed just this month. But the extra funds have done little to calm tempers. The money, critics say, is insufficient to counter the deep crisis facing public education.
For the first time in 30 years, when classes began this autumn, researchers - who make up about 40 percent of the teaching staff - had abandoned their lecterns in protest of the bill, which they said would essentially dismantle public universities.
As a result, many courses usually listed in university curriculums were not offered. Many other courses began weeks late.
Overcrowding is common at dozens of institutions: on average, the ratio at Italian universities is 19.5 students per teacher, compared to an average of 15.4 students per teacher in other European Union member countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The researchers' protest has made the situation worse. At the University of Turin, for example, biology students had to take the same physics exam as physics students, said Alessandro Ferretti, one of the coordinators of the researchers' association, Rete 29 Aprile (April 29 Network), named after the day the movement organized throughout the country.
"I am aware that we are causing major inconveniences to our students," he said. Researchers are not formally on strike, he emphasized, because their contracts do not oblige them to teach. "We teach because we want to, but if this law doesn't change, the second semester will just never happen," he said.
Ms. Gelmini has said that she believes that in the long run, her overhaul will streamline Italy's costly university system, trimming useless degrees and shutting down many of the tiny post-secondary institutions that have mushroomed in recent years.
Moreover, the new rules for governance and recruiting are expected to greatly reduce the influence of so-called university barons, powerful academics who often sway hiring policies.
And hiring teachers is no small matter: many university professors in Italy are reaching retirement age. The Education Ministry's statistical office estimates that, on average, 18 percent of teaching staff at universities will retire in the next few years, reaching as high as 36 percent in some faculties.
This year, the law faculty at La Sapienza University, Italy's largest post-secondary institution, lost 38 professors from its staff due to retirement, roughly a fifth of the whole teaching body. They have not been replaced.
But at the same time, under the overhaul, researchers who could eventually fill the gaps left by retirees would only be able to maintain their status for a maximum of eight years, and critics of the changes say this makes their situation precarious.
"What is at stake here is the very existence of Italian universities," said Alberto Civica, an official with the U.I.L. trade union, which represents about 500 researchers and 300 professors.
"And all that this reform does is ignore the real problems of our universities."
Previous overhauls, he said, have been equally ineffective.
If anything, critics say, the plethora of legislation that has been passed in recent years to better the Italian post-secondary education system has actually made things worse.
From 1990 to 2006, there were 1,371 newly enacted laws, bills, ministry decrees, general norms and internal rules applying to Italian universities, according to statistics from the Education Ministry, compiled by Alessandro Monti, a professor of economic policies and university legislation at the University of Camerino and author of the book "Investigation on the Decline of Italian University," published in 2007. More laws have since been introduced.
The result is a system that forces students to juggle their education amid ever changing rules, students say.
For example, a 1999 overhaul that introduced a division between a three-year bachelor's degree and a two-year master's degrees (intended to equalize Italian degrees to those of other E.U. countries) prompted a proliferation of degrees and a subsequent recruitment of new professors, often hired on short-term contracts, sometimes for little or no pay. Some universities offered 12 different degrees within the same field.
"It is a Kafkaesque situation," Mr. Monti said. "There is no money, far too many courses, far too many directives and zero control over their application. But what I fear the most is the disqualification of our universities."
Giada Ianni, 27, will have taken about 50 exams when she graduates next year. In 2003, she started a three-year, 30-exam architecture degree at Rome's Valle Giulia, one of the two architecture schools of La Sapienza University. She had anticipated that she would also take a 2-year graduate degree. But by the time she had finished her undergraduate studies, an overhaul had come along and the 2-year degree that she had chosen no longer existed. She had to fight to have her exams validated within the new system, which meant taking 20 more exams.
But she received a region-funded scholarship to help pay for her undergraduate degree. Students entering the university system today may not be that lucky. In October, the government approved a bill that cut scholarships by 90 percent to €26 million for 2011, and to €13 million for 2012.
Squeezed between bureaucracy, decreasing scholarships and a lack of basic structures like cafeterias, university students say they have little motivation to enter the world of academia.
"Youth are an opportunity for this country and they just don't get it," said Ms. Ianni, the mother of a 20-month-old who lives in a town 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, from the capital and gets up at 6 a.m. to drive to the city center with her baby.
"And my child needs a public university exactly as I do."
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12) Ex-Justice Criticizes Death Penalty
By ADAM LIPTAK
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28memo.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - In 1976, just six months after he joined the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens voted to reinstate capital punishment after a four-year moratorium. With the right procedures, he wrote, it is possible to ensure "evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law."
In 2008, two years before he announced his retirement, Justice Stevens reversed course and in a concurrence said that he now believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional.
But the reason for that change of heart, after more than three decades on the court and some 1,100 executions, has in many ways remained a mystery, and now Justice Stevens has provided an explanation.
In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote that personnel changes on the court, coupled with "regrettable judicial activism," had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.
The essay is remarkable in itself. But it is also a sign that at 90, Justice Stevens is intent on speaking his mind on issues that may have been off limits while he was on the court.
In the process, he is forging a new model of what to expect from Supreme Court justices after they leave the bench, one that includes high-profile interviews and provocative speeches.
He will be on "60 Minutes" on Sunday night.
Earlier this month, he weighed in on the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero in a speech to the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation.
During World War II, Justice Stevens served as a Navy cryptographer at Pearl Harbor for more than two years. On returning to Hawaii in 1994, he said he had an emotional reaction to seeing Japanese tourists at a memorial there. "We shouldn't allow them to celebrate their attack on Pearl Harbor," he remembered thinking.
He added that he understood why some New Yorkers would have a similar reaction to the proposed Islamic center near ground zero.
"But then, after a period of reflection, some of those New Yorkers may have second thoughts, just as I did," he went on. "The Japanese tourists were not responsible for what some of their countrymen did decades ago; the Muslims planning to build the mosque are not responsible for what an entirely different group of Muslims did on 9/11."
The two other retired justices have been active, too, but they have largely limited their public comments to more traditional matters like judicial independence and constitutional interpretation. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who is 80, speaks frequently on what she says are the problems inherent in electing state court judges.
Justice David H. Souter, 71, in a commencement address in May at Harvard, gave a detailed critique of the mode of constitutional interpretation associated with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who rely on the text and original meaning of the Constitution.
Justice Souter said those tools are inadequate given the "open-ended language" in the Constitution, which, moreover, "contains values that may well exist in tension with each other."
But that sort of abstract discussion is nothing like the blow-by-blow critique in Justice Stevens's death penalty essay, which will be published in The New York Review's Dec. 23 issue and will be available on its Web site on Sunday evening.
The essay is actually a review of the book "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition," by David Garland, a professor of law and sociology at New York University. The book compares American and European approaches to the death penalty, and Justice Stevens appears to accept its major conclusions.
Professor Garland attributes American enthusiasm for capital punishment to politics and a cultural fascination with violence and death.
In discussing the book, Justice Stevens defended the promise of the Supreme Court's 1976 decisions reinstating the death penalty even as he detailed the ways in which he said that promise had been betrayed.
With the right procedural safeguards, Justice Stevens wrote, it would be possible to isolate the extremely serious crimes for which death is warranted. But he said the Supreme Court had instead systematically dismantled those safeguards.
Justice Stevens said the court took wrong turns in deciding how juries in death penalty cases are chosen and what evidence they may hear, in not looking closely enough at racial disparities in the capital justice system, and in failing to police the role politics can play in decisions to seek and impose the death penalty.
In Payne v. Tennessee in 1991, for instance, the court overruled a 1987 decision, Booth v. Maryland, that had banned statements from victims at sentencing because of their tendency to inflame juries.
"I have no doubt that Justice Lewis Powell, who wrote the Booth opinion, and Justice William Brennan, who joined it, would have adhered to its reasoning in 1991 had they remained on the court," Justice Stevens wrote. "That the justices who replaced them did not do so was regrettable judicial activism and a disappointing departure from the ideal that the court, notwithstanding changes in membership, upholds its prior decisions."
Justice Stevens did not name those new justices. One was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, lately the court's swing justice, who replaced Justice Powell.
The other was Justice Souter, who replaced Justice Brennan and in other cases generally voted with Justice Stevens and the rest of the court's more liberal wing.
Justice Stevens also had harsh words for the 5-to-4 decision in 1987 in McCleskey v. Kemp, which ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not violate the Constitution. He said the decision effectively allowed "race-based prosecutorial decisions."
"That the murder of black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings," Justice Stevens wrote.
Here, too, Justice Stevens wrote, the decision turned on changes in the court's membership. Justice Potter Stewart "surely would have voted with the four dissenters," Justice Stevens said. Justice Stewart was replaced by Justice O'Connor, who voted with the majority.
The problems with the administration of capital punishment extend beyond the courthouse and into the voting booth, Justice Stevens said.
"Local elections affect decisions of state prosecutors to seek the death penalty and of state judges to impose it," he wrote.
He was also critical of decisions allowing prosecutors to exclude jurors with qualms about the death penalty, tilting the legal playing field toward conviction. The better approach, he said, is one in which "a jury composed of 12 local citizens selected with less regard to their death penalty views than occurs today - in that respect, a truer cross-section of the community - would determine individual defendants' fates."
Robert B. Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, said the idea of asking Justice Stevens to contribute occurred to him after he read passages from the justice's dissent in Citizens United, the January decision that lifted restrictions on campaign spending.
"It was clear that he was a very strong writer," Mr. Silvers said. "We simply sent him the book, and we got back a letter saying he'd be delighted to review it."
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13) War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat
"War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots."
By JOHN MARKOFF
November 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/science/28robot.html?ref=us
FORT BENNING, Ga. - War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots.
And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots - none of them particularly human-looking - are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.
In a mock city here used by Army Rangers for urban combat training, a 15-inch robot with a video camera scuttles around a bomb factory on a spying mission. Overhead an almost silent drone aircraft with a four-foot wingspan transmits images of the buildings below. Onto the scene rolls a sinister-looking vehicle on tank treads, about the size of a riding lawn mower, equipped with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.
Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.
The machines, viewed at a "Robotics Rodeo" last month at the Army's training school here, not only protect soldiers, but also are never distracted, using an unblinking digital eye, or "persistent stare," that automatically detects even the smallest motion. Nor do they ever panic under fire.
"One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second," said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.
Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.
"Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs" as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.
Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach's camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.
This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.
But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers - and even some human rights advocates.
"A lot of people fear artificial intelligence," said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. "I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force."
Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.
His faith in machines is already being tested.
"Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines," Dr. Arquilla said. "We think that that's the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs."
Automation has proved vital in the wars America is fighting. In the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft with names like Predator, Reaper, Raven and Global Hawk have kept countless soldiers from flying sorties. Moreover, the military now routinely uses more than 6,000 tele-operated robots to search vehicles at checkpoints as well as to disarm one of the enemies' most effective weapons: the I.E.D., or improvised explosive device.
Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design "ethical" robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.
But the ethical issues are far from simple. Last month in Germany, an international group including artificial intelligence researchers, arms control specialists, human rights advocates and government officials called for agreements to limit the development and use of tele-operated and autonomous weapons.
The group, known as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, said warfare was accelerated by automated systems, undermining the capacity of human beings to make responsible decisions. For example, a gun that was designed to function without humans could shoot an attacker more quickly and without a soldier's consideration of subtle factors on the battlefield.
"The short-term benefits being derived from roboticizing aspects of warfare are likely to be far outweighed by the long-term consequences," said Mr. Wallach, the Yale scholar, suggesting that wars would occur more readily and that a technological arms race would develop.
As the debate continues, so do the Army's automation efforts. In 2001 Congress gave the Pentagon the goal of making one-third of the ground combat vehicles remotely operated by 2015. That seems unlikely, but there have been significant steps in that direction.
For example, a wagonlike Lockheed Martin device that can carry more than 1,000 pounds of gear and automatically follow a platoon at up to 17 miles per hour is scheduled to be tested in Afghanistan early next year.
For rougher terrain away from roads, engineers at Boston Dynamics are designing a walking robot to carry gear. Scheduled to be completed in 2012, it will carry 400 pounds as far as 20 miles, automatically following a soldier.
The four-legged modules have an extraordinary sense of balance, can climb steep grades and even move on icy surfaces. The robot's "head" has an array of sensors that give it the odd appearance of a cross between a bug and a dog. Indeed, an earlier experimental version of the robot was known as Big Dog.
This month the Army and the Australian military held a contest for teams designing mobile micro-robots - some no larger than model cars - that, operating in swarms, can map a potentially hostile area, accurately detecting a variety of threats.
Separately, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School has proposed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency finance a robotic submarine system that would intelligently control teams of dolphins to detect underwater mines and protect ships in harbors.
"If we run into a conflict with Iran, the likelihood of them trying to do something in the Strait of Hormuz is quite high," said Raymond Buettner, deputy director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. "One land mine blowing up one ship and choking the world's oil supply pays for the entire Navy marine mammal program and its robotics program for a long time."
Such programs represent a resurgence in the development of autonomous systems in the wake of costly failures and the cancellation of the Army's most ambitious such program in 2009. That program was once estimated to cost more than $300 billion and expected to provide the Army with an array of manned and unmanned vehicles linked by a futuristic information network.
Now, the shift toward developing smaller, lighter and less expensive systems is unmistakable. Supporters say it is a consequence of the effort to cause fewer civilian casualties. The Predator aircraft, for example, is being equipped with smaller, lighter weapons than the traditional 100-pound Hellfire missile, with a smaller killing radius.
At the same time, military technologists assert that tele-operated, semi-autonomous and autonomous robots are the best way to protect the lives of American troops.
Army Special Forces units have bought six lawn-mower-size robots - the type showcased in the Robotics Rodeo - for classified missions, and the National Guard has asked for dozens more to serve as sentries on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. These units are known as the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or Maars, and they are made by a company called QinetiQ North America.
The Maars robots first attracted the military's interest as a defensive system during an Army Ranger exercise here in 2008. Used as a nighttime sentry against infiltrators equipped with thermal imaging vision systems, the battery-powered Maars unit remained invisible - it did not have the heat signature of a human being - and could "shoot" intruders with a laser tag gun without being detected itself, said Bob Quinn, a vice president at QinetiQ.
Maars is the descendant of an earlier experimental system built by QinetiQ. Three armed prototypes were sent to Iraq and created a brief controversy after they pointed a weapon inappropriately because of a software bug.
However, QinetiQ executives said the real shortcoming of the system was that it was rejected by Army legal officers because it did not follow military rules of engagement - for example, using voice warnings and then tear gas before firing guns. As a consequence, Maars has been equipped with a loudspeaker as well as a launcher so it can issue warnings and fire tear gas grenades before firing its machine gun.
Remotely controlled systems like the Predator aircraft and Maars move a step closer to concerns about the automation of warfare. What happens, ask skeptics, when humans are taken out of decision making on firing weapons? Despite the insistence of military officers that a human's finger will always remain on the trigger, the speed of combat is quickly becoming too fast for human decision makers.
"If the decisions are being made by a human being who has eyes on the target, whether he is sitting in a tank or miles away, the main safeguard is still there," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes. "What happens when you automate the decision? Proponents are saying that their systems are win-win, but that doesn't reassure me."
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14) WikiLeaks Reports Attack on Its Web Site
By ROBERT MACKEY
November 28, 2010, 12:46 pm
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/wikileaks-reports-attack-on-its-web-site/?hp
WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowers' Web site that has announced plans to begin publishing another tranche of secret American documents, reported on Sunday that its Web site was under attack. The message posted on Twitter said: "We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack."
No more details about the nature of the denial of service attack have yet been made public, but WikiLeaks.org is currently accessible, about one hour after the Twitter alert was posted.
On Saturday night, the State Department released the text of a letter sent by its legal adviser, Harold Hongju Koh, to Julian Assange, the Web site's public face, and his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, concerning its intended publication of secret State Department documents. The full text of the letter, which was posted online by Reuters, can be read below.
Dear Ms. Robinson and Mr. Assange:
I am writing in response to your 26 November 2010 letter to U.S. Ambassador Louis B. Susman regarding your intention to again publish on your WikiLeaks site what you claim to be classified U.S. Government documents.
As you know, if any of the materials you intend to publish were provided by any government officials, or any intermediary without proper authorization, they were provided in violation of U.S. law and without regard for the grave consequences of this action. As long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing.
It is our understanding from conversations with representatives from The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, that WikiLeaks also has provided approximately 250,000 documents to each of them for publication, furthering the illegal dissemination of classified documents.
Publication of documents of this nature at a minimum would:
* Place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals - from journalists to human rights activists and bloggers to soldiers to individuals providing information to further peace and security;
* Place at risk on-going military operations, including operations to stop terrorists, traffickers in human beings and illicit arms, violent criminal enterprises and other actors that threaten global security; and,
* Place at risk on-going cooperation between countries - partners, allies and common stakeholders - to confront common challenges from terrorism to pandemic diseases to nuclear proliferation that threaten global stability.
In your letter, you say you want - consistent with your goal of "maximum disclosure" - information regarding individuals who may be "at significant risk of harm" because of your actions.
Despite your stated desire to protect those lives, you have done the opposite and endangered the lives of countless individuals. You have undermined your stated objective by disseminating this material widely, without redaction, and without regard to the security and sanctity of the lives your actions endanger. We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials. If you are genuinely interested in seeking to stop the damage from your actions, you should: 1) ensure WikiLeaks ceases publishing any and all such materials; 2) ensure WikiLeaks returns any and all classified U.S. Government material in its possession; and 3) remove and destroy all records of this material from WikiLeaks' databases.
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15) Intelligence Directives Blur Lines Between Diplomacy and Spying
By MARK MAZZETTI
November 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29spy.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - The United States has expanded the role of American diplomats in collecting intelligence overseas and at the United Nations, ordering State Department personnel to gather the credit card and frequent-flier numbers, work schedules and other personal information of foreign dignitaries.
Revealed in classified State Department cables, the directives, going back to 2008, appear to blur the traditional boundaries between statesmen and spies.
The cables give a laundry list of instructions for how State Department employees can fulfill the demands of a "National Humint Collection Directive" in specific countries. ("Humint" is spy-world jargon for human intelligence collection.) One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about "office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes," as well as "internet and intranet 'handles', internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information."
The cables, sent to embassies in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the United States mission to the United Nations, provide no evidence that American diplomats are actively trying to steal the secrets of foreign countries, work that is traditionally the preserve of the nation's spy agencies. While the State Department has long provided information about foreign officials' duties to the Central Intelligence Agency to help build biographical profiles, the more intrusive personal information diplomats are now being asked to gather could be used by the National Security Agency for data mining and surveillance operations. A frequent-flier number, for example, could be used to track the travel plans of foreign officials.
Several of the cables also asked diplomats for details about the telecommunications networks supporting the military and intelligence agencies of foreign countries.
The United States regularly puts undercover intelligence officers in foreign countries posing as diplomats, but the vast majority of diplomats are not spies. Several retired ambassadors, told about the information-gathering assignments disclosed in the cables, expressed concern that State Department employees abroad could routinely come under suspicion of spying and find it difficult to carry out their work or even risk expulsion.
Ronald E. Neumann, a former American ambassador in Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said that Washington was constantly sending requests for voluminous information about foreign countries. But he said he was puzzled about why Foreign Service officers - who are not trained in clandestine collection methods - would be asked to gather information like credit card numbers.
"My concerns would be, first of all, whether the person could do this responsibly without getting us into trouble," he said. "And, secondly, how much effort a person put into this at the expense of his or her regular duties."
The requests made to State Department employees have come at a time when the nation's spy agencies are struggling to meet the demands of two wars and a global hunt for militants. The Pentagon has also sharply expanded its intelligence work outside of war zones, sending teams of Special Operations troops to American embassies abroad to gather information about militant networks in various countries.
Unlike the thousands of cables, originally obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, that were sent from far-flung embassies to State Department headquarters, the roughly half-dozen cables from 2008 and 2009 detailing the more aggressive intelligence collection were sent from Washington and signed by Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
One of the cables, signed by Secretary Clinton, lists information gathering priorities to American staff members at the United Nations headquarters in New York, including "biographic and biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats."
While several international treaties prohibit spying at the United Nations, it is an open secret that countries try nevertheless. In one embarrassing episode in 2004, a British official revealed that the United States and Britain eavesdropped on the conversations of Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The requests for more personal data about foreign officials were included in several cables requesting all manner of information from posts overseas, information that would seem to be the typical business of diplomats.
State Department officials in Asuncion, Paraguay, were asked in March 2008 about the presence of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas in the lawless "Tri-Border" area of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. Diplomats in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo were asked in April 2009 about crop yields, rates of H.I.V. contraction and China's quest for copper, cobalt and oil in Africa.
In a cable sent to the American Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, in June 2009, the State Department requested information about the Bulgarian government's efforts to crack down on money laundering and drug trafficking and for "details about personal relations between Bulgarian leaders and Russian officials or businessmen."
And a cable sent on Oct. 31, 2008, to the embassies in Israel, Jordan, Egypt and elsewhere asked for information on "Palestinian issues," including "Palestinian plans, intentions and efforts to influence US positions on the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations." To get both sides, the State Department also sought information on "Israeli leadership intentions and strategy toward managing the US relationship."
Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting from New York.
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16) Pat-Downs: Enhanced but Hardly Thorough
By ARIEL KAMINER
November 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28critic.html?ref=nyregion
It does not take much to come face to face - or hand to buttock - with the controversial inner cordon of our nation's antiterrorist strategy. You don't have to break into Langley or crack open an encrypted file. All you have to do is snake your way through the airport security line, then step up to the person monitoring the metal detector or the full-body scanner and say, "Manual, please."
A stoic Transportation Security Administration employee (male or female, in accordance with your gender) will snap on a pair of latex gloves and brace himself or herself for yet another encounter with the public's privates.
Last Monday at Kennedy International Airport, as I went - ticket in hand - to experience it for myself, a uniformed officer informed me that she would be patting me down from head to toe, using a new enhanced technique. On "sensitive areas" - the breasts, buttocks and groin - she would use the back of her hand.
Did I have any metal objects in my pockets? No. Would I prefer a private screening area? No.
Then the officer's hands did as she warned me they would. They poked around the back of my collar, they extended along my shoulders, they ran up and down my arms, they smoothed down my back, they slid inside the back waistband of my pants and they glided down my butt. The officer bent down and I felt her hands skate up the back of my left thigh - all the way up - and then do the same on my right. Then she rose, came around in front of me, and began again.
As she acquainted herself with the precise topography of my bra, it seemed a fitting moment to get to know each other a bit. "I bet people are freaking out about this," I said.
It wasn't much of a bet. Those freakouts - by passengers who were subjected to the new screening techniques, by passengers who have never been and want to keep it that way, by elected officials - had already gone viral. A "National Opt-Out Day" had already been scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving to protest the full-body scanners. Still, opting out of them may shield you from prying electronic eyes, but it just lands you where I was, right in the palm of the security agency's roving hands.
So, were people freaking out? My screener flashed me a "you don't know the half of it" look. Then she worked her way over my belly and inside the waistband of my jeans. (A note to airline travelers: You might want to rethink those fashionably low-waist pants. I wished I had.) Then it was up and down my thighs again, and over a "sensitive area" indeed.
How many films and novels have imagined thrilling physical encounters between traveling strangers, set against the no-nonsense atmosphere of the modern airport? After those encounters the participants head to the bar for a brandy. After mine, the officer tested her latex gloves for traces of dangerous substances, and I, cleared of suspicion, headed to the Cibo Express Gourmet Market for a yogurt.
Reaching into my pocket to pay, I found metal objects (keys and coins) that the pat-down had missed. Oh well. I exited the secure area, put a battery in my pocket to up the ante, and headed back to the tail end of the security line to see if a second inspector might be any more perceptive.
Up ahead of me a family of elderly Hasidic Jews was preparing for a pat-down. The ancient-looking patriarch, in a wheelchair, was first. When a female security officer instructed him to remove his belt, he looked up, confused. So she leaned down and, unbuckling it for him, removed it. With his eyebrows raised in disbelief and his pants hanging half open, he was wheeled to the left for further inspection.
His wife, meanwhile, standing unstably on her own two feet, was guided to the right, where in full view of everyone she was treated to the same humiliation techniques.
Critics have derided some of the showier aspects of airport security as "security theater," something that looks impressive but accomplishes little. If so, the invasion of an old woman's personal space has got to count as security theater of the absurd. I watched in squirming discomfort. Her son averted his eyes. And the rest of the world buzzed by, oblivious, grumbling about luggage fees and seating assignments as they bustled off to Rochester, Miami or Oakland.
All told, I submitted to the security agency's 10-fingered salutation eight times in one day - enough to win the respect of George Clooney's character in "Up in the Air."
Some officers began their work with a lengthy preamble; others were terse. Some seemed grateful for a little friendly conversation; others appeared on guard. And some took their time, covering every square inch of my person, while others finished quickly.
All of the officers reassured me they would use the back of their hand on those sensitive areas. Who cares, really? A hand is a hand, even when it's attached to the long arm of the law.
It's amazing how quickly the pat-down evolves from shocking indignity to banal hassle, just like padding around barefoot while your pants fall down and your toothpaste tube gets the third degree, something airline travelers have been experiencing for years now. The inconvenience is worth it, of course, if it works - if it uncovers potential dangers before they board a plane.
That's what a spokesman for the T.S.A. informed me, afterward, the officers' job was: to assess whether I posed a threat to aviation. He would not comment on whether that should have included checking out the objects hidden in my pocket. All I know is I went through the line eight times, and not a single inspector noticed them.
E-mail: citycritic@nytimes.com
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17) US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis
• More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies
• Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies
• Saudi king urged Washington to bomb Iran
By David Leigh
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 28 November 2010 18.13 GMT
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/368-wikileaks/4075-breaking-wikileaks-releases-diplomatic-bombshell
The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.
At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables - many designated "secret" - the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.
These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.
These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan's growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.
Among scores of disclosures that are likely to cause uproar, the cables detail:
• Grave fears in Washington and London over the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, with officials warning that as the country faces economic collapse, government employees could smuggle out enough nuclear material for terrorists to build a bomb.
•_Inappropriate remarks by Prince Andrew about a UK law enforcement agency and a foreign country.
• Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government, with one cable alleging that vice-president Zia Massoud was carrying $52m in cash when he was stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Massoud denies taking money out of Afghanistan.
• How the hacker attacks which forced Google to quit China in January were orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticising him personally.
•_Allegations that Russia and its intelligence agencies are using mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations, with one cable reporting that the relationship is so close that the country has become a "virtual mafia state".
• The extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, which is causing intense US suspicion. Cables detail allegations of "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and the use by Berlusconi of a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italiango-between.
•_Devastating criticism of the UK's military operations in Afghanistan by US commanders, the Afghan president and local officials in Helmand. The dispatches reveal particular contempt for the failure to impose security around Sangin - the town which has claimed more British lives than any other in the country.
The US has particularly intimate dealings with Britain, and some of the dispatches from the London embassy in Grosvenor Square will make uncomfortable reading in Whitehall and Westminster. They range from political criticisms of David Cameron to requests for specific intelligence about individual MPs.
The cables contain specific allegations of corruption, as well as harsh criticism by US embassy staff of their host governments, from Caribbean islands to China and Russia. The material includes a reference to Putin as an "alpha-dog" and Hamid Karzai as being "driven by paranoia", while Angela Merkel allegedly "avoids risk and is rarely creative". There is also a comparison between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler.
The cables names Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of terror groups, and provide an extraordinarily detailed account of an agreement between Washington and Yemen to cover up the use of US planes to bomb al-Qaida targets. One cable records that during a meeting in January with General David Petraeus, then US commander in the Middle East, Yemeni president Abdullah Saleh said: "We'll continue saying they are our bombs, not yours."
Other revelations include a description of a near "environmental disaster" last year over a rogue shipment of enriched uranium, technical details of secret US-Russian nuclear missile negotiations in Geneva, and a profile of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who they say is accompanied everywhere by a "voluptuous blonde" Ukrainian nurse.
Clinton led a frantic damage limitation exercise this weekend as Washington prepared foreign governments for the revelations, contacting leaders in Germany, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, France and Afghanistan.
US ambassadors in other capitals were instructed to brief their hosts in advance of the release of unflattering pen-portraits or nakedly frank accounts of transactions with the US which they had thought would be kept quiet. Washington now faces a difficult task in convincing contacts around the world that any future conversations will remain confidential.
As the cables were published, the White House released a statement condemning their release. "Such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the US for assistance in promoting democracy and open government. By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals."
In London, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "We condemn any unauthorised release of this classified information, just as we condemn leaks of classified material in the UK. They can damage national security, are not in the national interest and, as the US have said, may put lives at risk. We have a very strong relationship with the US government. That will continue."
The US ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, said: "We have briefed the UK government and other friends and allies around the world about the potential impact of these disclosures ... I am confident that our uniquely productive relationship with the United Kingdom will remain close and strong, focused on promoting our shared objectives and values."
Sir Christopher Meyer, who was British ambassador to the US in the Blair years, thought the leaks would have little impact on diplomatic behaviour. "This won't restrain dips' [diplomats'] candour," he said. "But people will be looking at the security of electronic communications and archives. Paper would have been impossible to steal in these quantities."
The state department's legal adviser has written to the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and his London lawyer, warning that the cables were obtained illegally and that the publication would place at risk "the lives of countless innocent individuals ... ongoing military operations ... and co-operation between countries".
The electronic archive of embassy dispatches from around the world was allegedly downloaded by a US soldier earlier this year and passed to WikiLeaks. Assange made it available to the Guardian and four other news organisations: the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El País in Spain. All five plan to publish extracts from the most significant cables, but have decided neither to "dump" the entire dataset into the public domain, nor to publish names that would endanger innocent individuals. WikiLeaks says that, contrary to the state department's fears, it also initially intends to post only limited cable extracts, and to redact identities.
The cables published today reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.
Classified "human intelligence directives" issued in the name of Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA.
The most controversial target was the UN leadership. That directive requested the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top officials and their staff and details of "private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys".
PJ Crowley, the state department spokesman in Washington, said: "Let me assure you: our diplomats are just that, diplomats. They do not engage in intelligence activities. They represent our country around the world, maintain open and transparent contact with other governments as well as public and private figures, and report home. That's what diplomats have done for hundreds of years."
The acting deputy spokesman for Ban Ki-moon, Farhan Haq, said the UN chief had no immediate comment. "We are aware of the reports."
The dispatches also shed light on older diplomatic issues. One cable, for example, reveals, that Nelson Mandela was "furious" when a top adviser stopped him meeting Margaret Thatcher shortly after his release from prison to explain why the ANC objected to her policy of "constructive engagement" with the apartheid regime.
"We understand Mandela was keen for a Thatcher meeting but that [appointments secretary Zwelakhe] Sisulu argued successfully against it," according to the cable. It continues: "Mandela has on several occasions expressed his eagerness for an early meeting with Thatcher to express the ANC's objections to her policy. We were consequently surprised when the meeting didn't materialise on his mid-April visit to London and suspected that ANC hardliners had nixed Mandela's plans."
The US embassy cables are marked "Sipdis" - secret internet protocol distribution. They were compiled as part of a programme under which selected dispatches, considered moderately secret but suitable for sharing with other agencies, would be automatically loaded on to secure embassy websites, and linked with the military's Siprnet internet system.
They are classified at various levels up to "secret noforn" [no foreigners]. More than 11,000 are marked secret, while around 9,000 of the cables are marked noforn.
More than 3 million US government personnel and soldiers, many extremely junior, are cleared to have potential access to this material, even though the cables contain the identities of foreign informants, often sensitive contacts in dictatorial regimes. Some are marked "protect" or "strictly protect".
Last spring, 22-year-old intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was charged with leaking many of these cables, along with a gun-camera video of an Apache helicopter crew mistakenly killing two Reuters news agency employees in Baghdad in 2007, which was subsequently posted by WikiLeaks. Manning is facing a courtmartial.
In July and October WikiLeaks also published thousands of leaked military reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. These were made available for analysis beforehand to the Guardian, along with Der Spiegel and the New York Times.
A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning to the US authorities, said the soldier had told him in chat messages that the cables revealed "how the first world exploits the third, in detail".
He also said, according to Lamo, that Clinton "and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available in searchable format to the public ... Everywhere there's a US post ... there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed".
Asked why such sensitive material was posted on a network accessible to thousands of government employees, the state department spokesman told the Guardian: "The 9/11 attacks and their aftermath revealed gaps in intra-governmental information sharing. Since the attacks of 9/11, the US government has taken significant steps to facilitate information sharing. These efforts were focused on giving diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to more data to more effectively do their jobs."
He added: "We have been taking aggressive action in recent weeks and months to enhance the security of our systems and to prevent the leak of information."
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18) Obama Freezes Pay for Federal Workers for Two Years
"Union leaders said Mr. Obama was playing politics at workers' expense. 'It's a panic reaction,' John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in an interview. 'It's superficial. People in this country voted for jobs and income. Sticking it to a V.A. nurse and a Social Security worker is not the way to go.'"
By PETER BAKER
November 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30freeze.html?_r=1&hp
WASHINGTON - President Obama announced a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal workers on Monday as he sought to address concerns over sky-high deficit spending and appeal to Republican leaders to find a common approach to restoring the nation's economic and fiscal health.
"The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice and that sacrifice must be shared by employees of the federal government," Mr. Obama said at a White House news conference.
"I did not reach this decision easily," he said. "This is not just a line item on a federal ledger. These are people's lives."
He called federal workers "patriots who love their country" but added that "I'm asking civil servants to do what they've always done" and sacrifice for the good of the nation.
The president's proposal comes a day before he hosts Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders at the White House to begin mapping a way forward after midterm elections handed Republicans control of the House and six more seats in the Senate. The meeting, which was delayed when Republicans rebuffed Mr. Obama's first proposed date, will be the first time since the midterms that the defeated Democrats and the triumphant Republicans sit down to figure out whether they can work together.
At the top of the agenda are the economy and federal spending, both prime targets of voter anger during the just-concluded campaign. Even before the new Congress takes office in January, the two sides must tackle such matters as whether to extend the Bush-era tax cuts that expire at the end of the year and whether to extend unemployment insurance payments that expire for many Americans as well.
The White House meeting also comes a day before a fiscal commission appointed by Mr. Obama is scheduled to issue its final report on how to curb deficit spending, a topic that has polarized Washington over questions about tax increases and entitlement benefit cuts.
Mr. Obama expressed optimism that the meeting with legislators would be a productive and fresh beginning. "My hope is starting today, we can begin a bipartisan conversation about our future," he said. "Everybody's going to have to cooperate. We can't afford to fall back onto the same old ideologies or the same stale sound bites."
The president's proposed pay freeze would wipe out plans for a 1.4 percent across-the-board raise in 2011 for 2.1 million federal civilian employees, including those working at the Defense Department. But the freeze would not affect the nation's uniformed military personnel. It would also mean no raise in 2012 for civilian employees.
The pay freeze will save $2 billion in the current fiscal year that ends in September 2011, $28 billion over five years and more than $60 billion over 10 years, according to Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and the government's chief performance officer. That represents just a tiny dent in a $1.3 trillion annual deficit but it offers a symbolic gesture toward public anger over unemployment, the anemic economic recovery and rising national debt.
Mr. Zients said the president made the announcement on Monday because of an approaching legal deadline for submitting a pay plan to Congress. But by doing it now, the president also effectively gets ahead of Republicans who have been talking about making such a move once they assume greater power in January. Some Republicans have gone further, proposing to slash federal worker salaries.
With Republicans vowing to make deep budget cuts, Mr. Obama must decide how far he is willing to go and where he will draw a line. He pointed out that he has already found $20 billion in savings from eliminating or scaling back unnecessary programs, identified $150 billion in improper payments and proposed selling $8 billion in unneeded federal buildings and land. "We believe it's the first of many difficult steps ahead," Mr. Zients said.
The federal workforce is an obvious first target, if one fraught with political risk for a president who relies on union support. Critics have said the federal workforce has been protected from the ravages of the economy. Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute referred to federal workers, in a study in June, as "an elite island of secure and high-paid workers, separated from the ocean of average American workers."
Mr. Edwards found that federal civilian workers had an average annual wage of $81,258 in 2009, compared with $50,464 for the nation's private-sector workers. Average federal salaries rose 58 percent from 2000 to 2009, compared with 30 percent in the private sector, according to his study.
Union leaders said Mr. Obama was playing politics at workers' expense. "It's a panic reaction," John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in an interview. "It's superficial. People in this country voted for jobs and income. Sticking it to a V.A. nurse and a Social Security worker is not the way to go."
Mr. Gage said the notion that federal employees make too much money "is a myth," especially in light of million-dollar bonuses paid to Wall Street executives who he said helped trigger the financial crisis that plunged the nation into recession. A typical border patrol officer makes $34,000 a year, a nursing assistant makes $27,000 and a mine inspector makes $38,000, Mr. Gage said. "We're an easy scapegoat," he said. "We weren't the ones who got us into this fix."
Republicans welcomed Mr. Obama's announcement even as they criticized it as not aggressive enough.
"At a time when our nation's seniors have been denied a cost-of-living increase and private sector hiring is stagnant, it is both necessary and quite frankly long overdue to institute a pay freeze for the federal workforce," Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican who is likely to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement.
This is not the first time Mr. Obama has addressed government pay to make a political point. He froze the salaries of his own top White House staff members when he took office 22 months ago and later extended that to senior political appointees throughout the government and canceled their bonuses.
In their draft report, the chairmen of Mr. Obama's fiscal commission proposed a three-year freeze for federal employees.
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19) Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy
By SCOTT SHANE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
November 28, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?hp
WASHINGTON - A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.
Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration's exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks posted 220 cables, some redacted to protect diplomatic sources, in the first installment of the archive on its Web site on Sunday.
The disclosure of the cables is sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: "We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information."
The White House said the release of what it called "stolen cables" to several publications was a "reckless and dangerous action" and warned that some cables, if released in full, could disrupt American operations abroad and put the work and even lives of confidential sources of American diplomats at risk. The statement noted that reports often include "candid and often incomplete information" whose disclosure could "deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world."
The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States' relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:
¶ A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, "if the local media got word of the fuel removal, 'they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan's nuclear weapons,' he argued."
¶ Thinking about an eventual collapse of North Korea: American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North's economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode. The South Koreans even considered commercial inducements to China, according to the American ambassador to Seoul. She told Washington in February that South Korean officials believe that the right business deals would "help salve" China's "concerns about living with a reunified Korea" that is in a "benign alliance" with the United States.
¶ Bargaining to empty the Guantánamo Bay prison: When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of "Let's Make a Deal." Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be "a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe."
¶ Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan's vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. With wry understatement, a cable from the American Embassy in Kabul called the money "a significant amount" that the official, Ahmed Zia Massoud, "was ultimately allowed to keep without revealing the money's origin or destination." (Mr. Massoud denies taking any money out of Afghanistan.)
¶ A global computer hacking effort: China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. They have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002, cables said.
¶ Mixed records against terrorism: Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the "worst in the region" in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December. Qatar's security service was "hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals," the cable said.
¶ An intriguing alliance: American diplomats in Rome reported in 2009 on what their Italian contacts described as an extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and business magnate, including "lavish gifts," lucrative energy contracts and a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italian go-between. They wrote that Mr. Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe. The diplomats also noted that while Mr. Putin enjoyed supremacy over all other public figures in Russia, he was undermined by an unmanageable bureaucracy that often ignored his edicts.
¶ Arms deliveries to militants: Cables describe the United States' failing struggle to prevent Syria from supplying arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has amassed a huge stockpile since its 2006 war with Israel. One week after President Bashar al-Assad promised a top State Department official that he would not send "new" arms to Hezbollah, the United States complained that it had information that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the group.
¶ Clashes with Europe over human rights: American officials sharply warned Germany in 2007 not to enforce arrest warrants for Central Intelligence Agency officers involved in a bungled operation in which an innocent German citizen with the same name as a suspected militant was mistakenly kidnapped and held for months in Afghanistan. A senior American diplomat told a German official "that our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the U.S."
The 251,287 cables, first acquired by WikiLeaks, were provided to The Times by an intermediary on the condition of anonymity. Many are unclassified, and none are marked "top secret," the government's most secure communications status. But some 11,000 are classified "secret," 9,000 are labeled "noforn," shorthand for material considered too delicate to be shared with any foreign government, and 4,000 are designated both secret and noforn.
Many more cables name diplomats' confidential sources, from foreign legislators and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning to Washington: "Please protect" or "Strictly protect."
The Times, after consultations with the State Department, has withheld from articles and removed from documents it is posting online the names of some people who spoke privately to diplomats and might be at risk if they were publicly identified. The Times is also withholding some passages or entire cables whose disclosure could compromise American intelligence efforts. While the White House said it anticipated WikiLeaks would make public "several hundred thousand" cables Sunday night, the organization posted only 220 released and redacted by The Times and several European publications.
The cables show that nearly a decade after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the dark shadow of terrorism still dominates the United States' relations with the world. They depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against Al Qaeda, adding Australians who have disappeared in the Middle East to terrorist watch lists, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, Pakistan, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate.
They show officials managing relations with a China on the rise and a Russia retreating from democracy. They document years of effort to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon - and of worry about a possible Israeli strike on Iran with the same goal.
Even when they recount events that are already known, the cables offer remarkable details.
For instance, it has been previously reported that the Yemeni government has sought to cover up the American role in missile strikes against the local branch of Al Qaeda. But a cable's fly-on-the-wall account of a January meeting between the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the American commander in the Middle East, is breathtaking.
"We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," Mr. Saleh said, according to the cable sent by the American ambassador, prompting Yemen's deputy prime minister to "joke that he had just 'lied' by telling Parliament" that Yemen had carried out the strikes.
Mr. Saleh, who at other times resisted American counterterrorism requests, was in a lighthearted mood. The authoritarian ruler of a conservative Muslim country, Mr. Saleh complains of smuggling from nearby Djibouti, but tells General Petraeus that his concerns are drugs and weapons, not whiskey, "provided it's good whiskey."
Likewise, press reports detailed the unhappiness of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, when he was not permitted to set up his tent in Manhattan or to visit ground zero during a United Nations session last year.
But the cables add a touch of scandal and alarm to the tale. They describe the volatile Libyan leader as rarely without the companionship of "his senior Ukrainian nurse," described as "a voluptuous blonde." They reveal that Colonel Qaddafi was so upset by his reception in New York that he balked at carrying out a promise to return dangerous enriched uranium to Russia. The American ambassador to Libya told Colonel Qaddafi's son "that the Libyan government had chosen a very dangerous venue to express its pique," a cable reported to Washington.
The cables also disclose frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan.
Speaking to another Iraqi official about Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, "You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not." The king called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan the greatest obstacle to that country's progress. "When the head is rotten," he said, "it affects the whole body."
The American ambassador to Eritrea reported last year that "Eritrean officials are ignorant or lying" in denying that they were supporting the Shabab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia. The cable then mused about which seemed more likely.
As he left Zimbabwe in 2007 after three years as ambassador, Christopher W. Dell wrote a sardonic account of Robert Mugabe, that country's aging and erratic leader. The cable called him "a brilliant tactician" but mocked "his deep ignorance on economic issues (coupled with the belief that his 18 doctorates give him the authority to suspend the laws of economics)."
The possibility that a large number of diplomatic cables might become public has been discussed in government and media circles since May. That was when, in an online chat, an Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, described having downloaded from a military computer system many classified documents, including "260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world." In an online discussion with Adrian Lamo, a computer hacker, Private Manning said he had delivered the cables and other documents to WikiLeaks.
Mr. Lamo reported Private Manning's disclosures to federal authorities, and Private Manning was arrested. He has been charged with illegally leaking classified information and faces a possible court-martial and, if convicted, a lengthy prison term.
In July and October, The Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel published articles based on documents about Afghanistan and Iraq. Those collections were placed online by WikiLeaks, with selective redactions of the Afghan documents and much heavier redactions of the Iraq reports.
Fodder for Historians
Traditionally, most diplomatic cables remain secret for decades, providing fodder for historians only when the participants are long retired or dead. The State Department's unclassified history series, titled "Foreign Relations of the United States," has reached only 1972.
While an overwhelming majority of the quarter-million cables provided to The Times are from the post-9/11 era, several hundred date from 1966 to the 1990s. Some show diplomats struggling to make sense of major events whose future course they could not guess.
In a 1979 cable to Washington, Bruce Laingen, an American diplomat in Tehran, mused with a knowing tone about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred: "Perhaps the single dominant aspect of the Persian psyche is an overriding egoism," Mr. Laingen wrote, offering tips on exploiting this psyche in negotiations with the new government. Less than three months later, Mr. Laingen and his colleagues would be taken hostage by radical Iranian students, hurling the Carter administration into crisis and, perhaps, demonstrating the hazards of diplomatic hubris.
In 1989, an American diplomat in Panama City mulled over the options open to Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader, who was facing narcotics charges in the United States and intense domestic and international political pressure to step down. The cable called General Noriega "a master of survival"; its author appeared to have no inkling that one week later, the United States would invade Panama to unseat General Noriega and arrest him.
In 1990, an American diplomat sent an excited dispatch from Cape Town: he had just learned from a lawyer for Nelson Mandela that Mr. Mandela's 27-year imprisonment was to end. The cable conveys the momentous changes about to begin for South Africa, even as it discusses preparations for an impending visit from the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.
The voluminous traffic of more recent years - well over half of the quarter-million cables date from 2007 or later - show American officials struggling with events whose outcomes are far from sure. To read through them is to become a global voyeur, immersed in the jawboning, inducements and penalties the United States wields in trying to have its way with a recalcitrant world.
In an era of satellites and fiber-optic links, the cable retains the archaic name of an earlier technological era. It has long been the tool for the secretary of state to send orders to the field and for ambassadors and political officers to send their analyses to Washington.
The cables have their own lexicon: "codel," for a Congressional delegation; "visas viper," for a report on a person considered dangerous; "démarche," an official message to a foreign government, often a protest or warning.
But the drama in the cables often comes from diplomats' narratives of meetings with foreign figures, games of diplomatic poker in which each side is sizing up the other and neither is showing all its cards.
Among the most fascinating examples recount American officials' meetings in September 2009 and February 2010 with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half brother of the Afghan president and a power broker in the Taliban's home turf of Kandahar.
They describe Mr. Karzai, "dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez," the traditional dress of loose tunic and trousers, appearing "nervous, though eager to express his views on the international presence in Kandahar," and trying to win over the Americans with nostalgic tales about his years running a Chicago restaurant near Wrigley Field.
But in midnarrative there is a stark alert for anyone reading the cable in Washington: "Note: While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker." (Mr. Karzai has denied such charges.) And the cables note statements by Mr. Karzai that the Americans, informed by a steady flow of eavesdropping and agents' reports, believe to be false.
A cable written after the February meeting coolly took note of the deceit on both sides.
Mr. Karzai "demonstrated that he will dissemble when it suits his needs," the cable said. "He appears not to understand the level of our knowledge of his activities. We will need to monitor his activity closely, and deliver a recurring, transparent message to him" about the limits of American tolerance.
Not All Business
Even in places far from war zones and international crises, where the stakes for the United States are not as high, curious diplomats can turn out to be accomplished reporters, sending vivid dispatches to deepen the government's understanding of exotic places.
In a 2006 account, a wide-eyed American diplomat describes the lavish wedding of a well-connected couple in Dagestan, in Russia's Caucasus, where one guest is the strongman who runs the war-ravaged Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
The diplomat tells of drunken guests throwing $100 bills at child dancers, and nighttime water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea.
"The dancers probably picked upwards of USD 5000 off the cobblestones," the diplomat wrote. The host later tells him that Ramzan Kadyrov "had brought the happy couple 'a five-kilo lump of gold' as his wedding present."
"After the dancing and a quick tour of the premises, Ramzan and his army drove off back to Chechnya," the diplomat reported to Washington. "We asked why Ramzan did not spend the night in Makhachkala, and were told, 'Ramzan never spends the night anywhere.' "
Scott Shane reported from Washington, and Andrew W. Lehren from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jo Becker, C. J. Chivers and James Glanz from New York; Eric Lichtblau, Michael R. Gordon, David E. Sanger, Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson from Washington; and Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan.
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20) AG Confident FBI Acted Properly in Portland Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/11/29/us/politics/AP-US-Portland-Car-Bomb-Plot-Holder.html?hp
Filed at 1:19 p.m. EST
WASHINGTON (AP) - Attorney General Eric Holder says he is confident that federal agents acted properly in the case of a Somali-American man who allegedly tried to blow up what he thought was a van full of explosives in Portland, Ore., during the city's Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
The FBI set up a sting operation to investigate Mohamed Osman Mohamud after receiving a tip.
At a news conference Monday, Holder said that once the undercover operation began, the suspect chose at every step to continue with the bombing plot.
The attorney general rejected the suggestion that Mohamud was a victim of illegal entrapment by the FBI.
Holder also says the FBI is trying to determine if a fire at an Islamic center in Oregon is related to the arrest of Mohamud.
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