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[please excuse duplicate postings, and please post widely]
APPEAL from San Francisco Labor Council:
"It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price!"
We Are One.
Forty-three years ago, a struggle by 1,300 city sanitation workers for economic justice brought Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis. Dr. King, along with a coalition of civil and human rights organizations, the religious community and the union movement stood with the striking workers and faced down the armed forces of a city and state.
Dr. King was assassinated on Apr. 4, 1968 in Memphis.
On April 4th, we will honor Dr. King by continuing this struggle across our nation.
Union members, community activists, advocates for civil and human rights, and religious leaders will flood the streets around this country to stand together and declare that all workers deserve the right to bargain for a better life. It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price.
In San Francisco,we will be meeting at Bank of America (555 California) before marching to several locations that represent the ultra-rich who fail to pay their taxes and are fundamentally responsible for the economic downturn, high unemployment, government budget deficits, and huge spikes in public employee pension costs.
Now is the time for action.
To Download the Flyer and Route Map for the April 4th March and Rally in San Francisco, go to http://sflaborcouncil.org/ and click "April 4 - We are One - End the $$$" under Upcoming Events.
April 4th Rally and March
4:45 pm
Meet at 555 California, Bank of America
6:00 pm
Rally at 101 Market, Federal Reserve Building
Speakers Include:
Stephanie Bloomingdale, Secretary-Treasurer with the Wisconsin AFL-CIO
Eva Paterson with the Equal Justice Society and the California Civil Rights Coalition
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING! HANDS OFF JULIAN ASSANGE!
In a recent New York Daily News Poll the question was asked:
Should Army pfc Bradley Manning face charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and providing them for WikiLeaks?
New York Daily News Poll Results:
Yes, he's a traitor for selling out his country! ...... 28%
No, he's a hero for standing up for what's right! ..... 62%
We need to see more evidence before passing judgment.. 10%
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/03/05/2011-03-05_wikileaks_private_loses_his_underwear.html?r=news
Sign the Petition:
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
Stand with Bradley!
A 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead were two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries" - tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk ... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are just as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
http://standwithbrad.org/
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U.S./NATO HANDS OFF MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA! END ALL AID TO ISRAEL! STOP FUNDING DICTATORS ACROSS THE GLOBE! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT FOR WAR AND OCCUPATION! LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE HERE AND EVERYWHERE!
TAX THE RICH! LEAVE WORKERS AND THEIR UNIONS ALONE! DON'T AGONIZE, ORGANIZE!...BW
Resolution passed by the San Francisco Labor Council in support of April 10:
Rally and March: The Wars Against Working People at Home and Abroad April 10th
Whereas the wealthy and corporations now in control of our country continue to take more, while we get less, continue to destroy our environment, exploit our labor and reduce our services for ever-increasing profits, using half of our Federal tax dollars for military purposes, and our youth, under an economic draft, as cannon fodder to invade and occupy other countries, and
Whereas, the price of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya is creating a permanent war economy draining the US of trillions of dollars that could be used for jobs, education, and social services, draining funds at the state and local level, while providing a convenient excuse for draconian cuts in services and extreme austerity measures resulting in the decimation of collective bargaining agreements now being carried out in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and other states.
Therefore be it resolved that the San Francisco Labor Council join the Bay Area Chapter of US Labor Against War, and hundreds of social justice organizations, nation-wide, calling for an immediate end to these wars, and endorsing the bi-coastal marches and rallies occurring on April 9th in New York City and April 10th in San Francisco, sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee.
Submitted by Tom Lacey, OPEIU, Local 3, Alan Benjamin, OPEIU, Local 3, Ann Robertson, California Faculty Association, Tom Edminster, UESF, Local 61*, David Welsh, NALC, Local 214, Kathy Lipscomb, Retired, SEIU, Rodger Scott, AFT, Local 2121, Shane Hoff, UTU, Local 1741*
* for identification purposes only
RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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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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4/2 SF Rally to Stop ARBORETUM FEE
Rally to Stop
ARBORETUM FEE
Saturday April 2nd, 2011
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Strybing Arboretum Main Gate
(9TH AVE & LINCOLN WAY)
Save this Public Garden from
Permanent Fees, Gates and ID Checks
On April 6, 2011, the Budget Committee of the Board of Supervisors will be making
a crucial decision on the future of the Arboretum non-resident fee,
either free admissions for all or a permanent non-resident fee.
We ask you to SUPPORT ordinance 110113, sponsored by Supervisor Avalos, Mirkarimi, Mar, Kim and Campos who seek to use Prop N tax revenues as a sustainable solution to support a free public garden and end the non-resident fee.
We ask you to OPPOSE ordinance 110225 sponsored by Mayor Lee for a permanent fee.
After 7 months the fee has been a failure. Only $54,800 out of a promised $250,000 has been collected. Moreover, attendance, based on Rec & Park figures, has declined sharply, with
non-resident visitors down 70% and resident visitors down 36% from pre-fee estimates.
WHAT ELSE YOU CAN DO:
(1) Forward this electronic flyer to your members and friends.
(2) Go to our WEBSITE, and call and send letters to the supervisors listed ;
(3) Attend the April 6 Budget Committee hearing on the two fee ordinances.
SPEAKERS
QUINTIN MECKE, ASSY. AMMIANO's STAFF
SUPERVISOR ROSS MIRKARIMI
SF LABOR COUNCIL VICE PRESIDENT CONNY FORD
KEEP ARBORETUM FREE .ORG
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First Organizing Meeting for May 1st Demonstration
Call out to individuals and groups to participate in organizing for International Workers' Day 2011
Saturday, April 2, 1-3pm
Redstone Building
2940 16th St. (between Mission and South Van Ness Sts.), San Francisco
Across the country, working people- employed and unemployed- are facing vicious assaults by the corporate rulers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians. Immigrant workers-documented and undocumented- are facing a rise in racism and anti-immigrant hatred carried out by these same politicians and their discriminatory laws. But all working people are standing up to say, "Enough is Enough!" The workers can show the world, just as in Egypt, that unity is the force that can change history.
Join community activist, immigrant rights groups, labor groups, and social-justice groups to organize for May 1st 2011- International Workers' Day
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COMMITTEE (UNAC) NEXT MEETING TO BUILD APRIL 10TH
SUNDAY, April 3, 2011, 1:00 P.M.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street
(Between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
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APPEAL from San Francisco Labor Council:
"It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price!"
We Are One.
Forty-three years ago, a struggle by 1,300 city sanitation workers for economic justice brought Dr. Martin Luther King to Memphis. Dr. King, along with a coalition of civil and human rights organizations, the religious community and the union movement stood with the striking workers and faced down the armed forces of a city and state.
Dr. King was assassinated on Apr. 4, 1968 in Memphis.
On April 4th, we will honor Dr. King by continuing this struggle across our nation.
Union members, community activists, advocates for civil and human rights, and religious leaders will flood the streets around this country to stand together and declare that all workers deserve the right to bargain for a better life. It was corporate greed that led to this economic downturn and workers should not continue to pay the price.
In San Francisco,we will be meeting at Bank of America (555 California) before marching to several locations that represent the ultra-rich who fail to pay their taxes and are fundamentally responsible for the economic downturn, high unemployment, government budget deficits, and huge spikes in public employee pension costs.
Now is the time for action.
To Download the Flyer and Route Map for the April 4th March and Rally in San Francisco, go to http://sflaborcouncil.org/ and click "April 4 - We are One - End the $$$" under Upcoming Events.
April 4th Rally and March
4:45 pm
Meet at 555 California, Bank of America
6:00 pm
Rally at 101 Market, Federal Reserve Building
Speakers Include:
Stephanie Bloomingdale, Secretary-Treasurer with the Wisconsin AFL-CIO
Eva Paterson with the Equal Justice Society and the California Civil Rights Coalition
San Francisco Labor Council Resolution - Unanimously adopted 3/14/2011
Resolution in Support of April 4, 2011
No Business as Usual
Solidarity Actions
Whereas, the San Francisco Labor Council Executive Committee is calling for a mobilization in San Francisco on April 4, 2011 against union-busting and the budget cuts;
Therefore be it Resolved, that in the event that a Council affiliate votes to engage in an industrial action on April 4, the San Francisco Labor Council will call on all its affiliates with fax blast, e-mail, phone etc. to support such action by engaging, wherever possible, in work stoppages, sick-outs and any other solidarity actions.
Resolution adopted March 14, 2011 by unanimous vote of the regular Delegates Meeting of the Council, meeting in San Francisco, California.
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CWA ANNOUNCES NATIONWIDE DAY OF ACTION APRIL 4
http://www.cwa-union.org/news/entry/cohen_announces_nationwide_day_of_action_april_4
'We Have the Opportunity to Plan and Build Something Enormous'
The voice of the labor movement and its allies will roar louder than ever on April 4, the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when "it will not be business as usual at workplaces and communities across this nation," CWA President Larry Cohen said Wednesday.
Speaking to 10,000 CWA members on a nationwide phone call, Cohen said the AFL-CIO Executive Board had adopted his proposal for "movement-wide dramatic action" to honor King and the workers fighting for their rights today.
King was shot to death while he was in Memphis to support 1,300 striking city sanitation workers. "Their fight was about recognition, respect and dignity," Cohen said. "Dr. King called it a moral struggle for an economic outcome, much like the fights in the states and at the bargaining table and in every one of our organizing drives."
Cohen urged CWA locals and members to begin brainstorming ideas and making plans for April 4, challenging them and all Americans to "create events at every workplace in America."
It could be as simple as everyone wearing red that day, having workers meet outside and march into work together or standing up at noon and shouting, "Workers rights are human rights!" Cohen said.
Other ideas include candlelight vigils in parks, meetings of church congregations, rallies at statehouses and protests in front of corporate offices. Cohen said CWA locals and activists will receive an e-mail shortly asking them to submit their ideas and plans, and another town hall-style phone call will be held in advance of the events.
King's murder while fighting for city workers spurred public organizing drives across the United States. Cohen said there is no better way to honor that and King than by doing what he would do, "create a new movement for economic justice."
"We need to combine offense and defense," Cohen said. "We need to take it to every workplace, union and non union, private and public sector. We have an opportunity to plan and build something enormous."
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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?
So far these are some of the suggested actions:
Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.
Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.
A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.
Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.
Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."
Banner hanging from a bridge.
Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.
Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.
Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.
Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."
Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."
Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.
As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."
Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.
Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.
What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.
Kagiso,
Max
April 8, 2011 participants
Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson
April 8 Outreach
Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).
Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.
Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY
Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.
Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore
Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list
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ENDING THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
An Evening with MALALAI JOYA
When: Saturday April 9th, 2011
6-7 pm reception/light food
7-9 pm program
Where: Episcopal Church of St. John the Evangelist
corner of 15th and Julian (btw Mission & Valencia) San Francisco
with music by Kaylah Marin
$10-25 (no one turned away)
wheelchair accessible (wheelchair entrance on 15th Street)
Malalai Joya has been called the "bravest woman in Afghanistan." She was the youngest member elected to the Afghan Parliament but was suspended for denouncing the warlords and the US/NATO war and occupation. She continues to speak out despite death threats and assassination attempts.
Join us as she talks about the situation in Afghanistan and why it's essential that US/NATO troops leave immediately.
Her book, "A Woman Among Warlords," with a new afterward about the war under Obama, is now in paperback and will be available for purchase.
For more information: or if you want to endorse: sfjoya@gmail.com
Endorsed by (partial list): American Friends Service Comm • ANSWER/SF • Arab Resource Organizing Center • BAYAN • Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace • Bay Area Women in Black • Black Alliance for Just Immigration • Black Women Stirring the Waters • Buddhist Peace Fellowship • California Women's Agenda • Catalyst Project • Code Pink/Women for Peace • Courage to Resist • Eastside Arts Alliance • Ecumenical Peace Institute • Freedom Archives • Global Exchange • Grandmothers Against the War • Haiti Action Committee • International Action Center • International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network • International Socialist Organization • KPFA Women's Magazine •LAGAI • Middle East Children's Alliance • National Radio Project/ Making Contact • Priority Africa Network • Queers Undermining Israeli Terror • Radical Women • San Francisco Women In Black • Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SF • UNAC • War Resisters League/West • Women for Genuine Security • WILPF/ Berkeley /East Bay • WILPF/ Santa Cruz) • Veterans For Peace Chapter 69
•Unitarian Universalists for Peace-SFUNAC • War Resisters League/West • Women for Genuine Security • WILPF/ Berkeley /East Bay • WILPF/ Santa Cruz) • Veterans For Peace Chapter 69
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Atomic Mom at the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival
Atomic Mom, a feature length documentary by M.T. Silvia, will screen on Saturday, April 9th @ 7:30pm at the Roxie Theater at 3117 16th Street San Francisco, CA 94103 in the San Francisco International Women's Film Festival.
Media Contact:
M.T. Silvia
mtsilvia@atomicmom.org
510-541-0413
- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -
Atomic Mom weaves an intimate portrait of a complex mother-daughter relationship within an obscure - but important - moment in American history.
As the only female scientist present during atomic detonations in the Nevada desert, Pauline Silvia, the filmmaker's mother, undergoes a crisis of conscience. After a long silence and prompted by her daughter, she finally reveals grim secrets of working in the U.S. atomic testing program.
In our present moment of Wikileaks, Pauline is a similar whistle-blower having been cowed by the silencing machine of the US military for decades. In an attempt to reconcile with her own mother's past, her daughter, filmmaker M.T. Silvia, meets Emiko Okada, a Hiroshima survivor trying to reconcile her own history in Japan. The film follows these survivors, each on a different end of atomic warfare, as they "meet" through the filmmaking process, and as they, with startling honestly, attempt to understand the other.
With the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the footage of the devastation is hauntingly familiar to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Japan experiences its second nuclear crisis, Atomic Mom illustrates how we are all downwind of this story.
Atomic Mom invites viewers to confront American nuclear history in a completely new way and will inspire dialogue about human rights, personal responsibility, and the possibility - and hope - of peace.
More info at http://www.atomicmom.org
M.T. Silvia is an independent filmmaker. Her first documentary Picardy Drive (2002, Documentary, 57min) aired on KQED's ImageMaker series, FreeSpeechTV and airs yearly during the holidays on Oakland's KTOP. She has worked professionally in the film industry for over twenty years at both Skywalker Sound and Pixar Animation Studios. Among many mainstream film and CD credits, she has also worked on several independent films.
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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!NO NUKES/NO WAR!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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NO MORE NUCLEAR VICTIMS
Posted on Mar 31, 2011 by Coffee House Teach Ins
PROTEST against Diablo and stand up for clean energy.
Join at a peaceful demonstration on
Saturday, April 16.
Meet at Avila Pier in Avila Beach, CA, at noon.
Bring signs and the messages that:
We can no longer ignore the warnings from Fukushima Daiichi,
Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island
Diablo Canyon is on shaky ground; the area is riddled with over a
dozen earthquake faults
Nuclear Energy is not worth the risk to our lives and our planet
Stop the license renewal process at Diablo
San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace
http://mothersforpeace.org
(805)773-3881
P.O. Box 3608
San Luis Obispo, CA 93403
Date: Sat, Apr 16th, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm
More Info: http://mothersforpeace.org
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Please announce, forward, share, come
For the Beauty of the Earth
Good Friday, Earth Day & the Bomb
The Cross in the Midst of Creation
Rev. Sharon Delgado, preaching
Liturgical dance led by Carla DeSolaa
April 22, 6:45 a.m.
Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory
Vasco Road & Patterson Pass Road, Livermore
Livermore Lab was founded to develop the hydrogen bomb, and new weapons of mass destruction are still designed there. For more than 25 years, people of faith and others concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons have gathered on Good Friday outside the Livermore Laboratory.
This year Good Friday and Earth Day coincide. We will hear from Sharon Delgado, a longtime advocate for peace, justice and the environment, a United Methodist clergywoman, founder of interfaith Earth Justice Ministries, and author of Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization.
We will be led in dance by Carla DeSola a nationally recognized teacher of liturgical dance, presently teaching at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley and through the Center for the Arts, Religion & Education.
After the service we will walk about one-half mile to the main gate, where there will be opportunity for nonviolent witness. Please bring banners, puppets and other visuals for the walk to the gate.
We invite your participation in this event, your financial support, and, if available, your organization's co-sponsorship
Information, downloadable flyer etc at http://www.epicalc.org/ email to epicalc@lmi.net
Surface mail to EPI PO Box 9334, Berkeley, CA 94702
Write or email us if you can help or want to participate in some way. Please spread the word.
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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Dr. Michio Kaku says three raging meltdowns under way at Fukushima (22442 views)
Uploaded 3/31/2011
http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=604AB3FA803FF3647DF6E34EC5E8C8A0
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26th March Insurrection - Statement by Charlie Veitch of the the Love Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nroZMHBlui4
NOTE: I do not support the tactics of the "Love Police" or the "black block" but the perspective that it is the system of capitalism that is at the root of the crisis working people of the world face today, I do support.
What working people need and want is not violence and war; it's peace, justice, democracy and equality--including economic equality. It is not working people that declare war; imprison masses of the poor; steal food out of the mouths of children and their parents. It's not working people that order clones to bomb the innocent; that chooses to invade foreign lands or to deport children because their parents are immigrants. The purveyors of violence are the rulers of capital--the most powerful being the bi-partisan rulers of the U.S.A.
Working people can change things without the slightest use of violence--through rational, democratic planning and organization. But the commanders of capital, as they are consistently illustrating, will use any and all force necessary to stop us from making rational choices. And, we have the right to defend ourselves from those acts of violence they will use against us as do the people under the U.S. guns and drones, warships and nuclear weapons of mass destruction today. Our goal should be to disarm them militarily and confiscate the wealth they have pillaged from us and use it to build a better world in the interests of all working people and the planet we share. That's what a democratic, socialist society is all about and it's our last hope!...Bonnie Weinstein
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Michael Moore on the Colbert Report -- March 28th, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5452-michael-moore-stephen-colbert-union-busting
Michael Moore on the Colbert Report -- March 28th, 2011 from MMFlint on Vimeo.
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Afghans for Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ror0qPcasM&NR=1
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Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
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END THE U.S./UN/NATO KILL TEAM NOW!
WARNING: THESE ARE HORRIFIC, DISGUSTING, VIOLENT CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE U.S. MILITARY MAKING THE UPCOMING APRIL 10 [APRIL 9 IN NEW YORK] MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS A FIRST PRIORITY FOR WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S. WE DEMAND OUT NOW! END THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND EVERYWHERE! BRING ALL THE TROOPS, UN/NATO/US/ and CONTRACTORS HOME NOW!
The Kill Team Photos More war crime images the Pentagon doesn't want you to see
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327
'Death Zone' How U.S. soldiers turned a night-time airstrike into a chilling 'music video'
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/death-zone-20110327
'Motorcycle Kill' Footage of an Army patrol gunning down two men in Afghanistan
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/motorcyle-kill-20110327
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BOB MARLEY - WAR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zaNwyhXn0&playnext=1&list=PLA467527F8DD7DE1F
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Frederick Alexander Meade on The Prison Industrial Complex
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vqzfEYo6Lo
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Chernobyl 25 years on -- The Big Cover-Up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9URUQvGE9g&feature=player_embedded
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Dropkick Murphys - Worker's Song (with lyrics)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTafZRecy2k&feature=email&tracker=False
Worker's Song Lyrics
Artist(Band):Dropkick Murphys
Yeh, this one's for the workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain to earn your pay
Who for centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead
In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed
[Chorus:]
We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about
And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth?
[Chorus x3]
All of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can
Which Side Are You On - Dropkick Murphys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWfnO7fhQM&feature=email&tracker=False
Lyrics :
Our father was a union man
some day i'll be one too.
The bosses fired daddy
what's our family gonna do?
Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.
CHORUS:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on? (x2)
My dady was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son,
And I'll stick with the union
'Til every battle's won.
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?
Don't scab for the bosses,
Don't listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize !
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'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw&feature=player_embedded
Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
By Bonnie Weinstein
info@socialistviewpoint.org
socialistviewpoint.org
The problem with Michael Moore's speech in Wisconsin March 5, 2011 is that the 14 Democratic emigres have already given away the economic security of the workers--their pay; their benefits; their vacations; their sick-days; their overtime. They have even convinced organized labor to accept the pay cuts, shorter hours--anything but unemployment, starvation and homelessness!
What noble choices the good Democrats have given to the masses of struggling working people in Wisconsin and everywhere!
In the prelude to his speech, Moore lauds those "heroic 14 Democratic" émigrés that have already given away the workers hard-won benefits and conditions for holding firm and staying away--"not one has come back!" he cheers.
Where are the rest of the Democratic politicians around the country? Where's Obama when masses of workers are being sold down the river? What about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are doing the same thing in their respective states and cities across the country. There isn't one state or city that's lavishing more on social services; on schools; on community medical centers; on healthcare--everyone everywhere EXCEPT THE TOP ONE PERCENT is being asked to give back and give up and surrender to the new middle ages--with the Democrats pretending and promising to steal a little less from workers than the Republicans! Workers can't depend upon any party that claims to represent both workers and the bosses. The jig is up!
Working people need to make democratic decisions based upon our own needs and wants and what is good for us and our families; like whether to spend trillions of OUR dollars on wars based upon lies; or on massive bailouts to corporations who have stolen and hoarded the wealth for themselves; or whether to use the fruits of our labor to pay for healthcare; schools; housing; all the things people need to live healthy, free and happy lives.
Working people produce the wealth; working people should have democratic control over that wealth and the means of production they operate to produce it.
The game of voting for one capitalist liar over another is over. It's like plea-bargaining when you are innocent. It's a lose/lose situation and certainly, the workers of the world are losing the game!
No, America is not broke. But telling workers to depend upon the capitalist electoral process, which only allows workers to vote for one capitalist representative over another, is preposterous and makes workers broke!
We workers must take that wealth that we, and we alone create, into our own hands. We can. We are the majority. And it's the only hope for creating a happy and healthy future for all of us, our children and the world. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the only choice for workers is Socialism; or else, we will continue the plunge into Barbarism!
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BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
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Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
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Labor Beat: No Concessions Emergency Meeting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaFrWNi2gM0
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Iraq Veterans Against the War in Occupied Capitol, Madison, WI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7K0wn73uJU
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A joke:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are
sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a
dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies,
looks at the tea partier and says,"watch out for that union guy, he
wants a piece of your cookie."
Marc Luzietti
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18th dead baby dolphin washes ashore in Northern Gulf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybFeuSNszSg&feature=player_embedded
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[This is a great video. Kipp Dawson, the school teacher in the video, is an old friend...bw]
Middle Class Revolution
Hundreds packed USW headquarters Feb. 24. 2011, to rally for the middle class and stand up against attacks on workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere. Check out highlights here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_UmZYlSyC5U
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solidarity
'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM
About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:
Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.
KAMAL ABBAS: I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, "Liberation Square", which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.
From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.
I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.
No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people. When the working class of Egypt joined the revolution on 9 and 10 February, the dictatorship was doomed and the victory of the people became inevitable.
We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.
We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.
As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.
We support you. we support the struggle of the peoples of Libya, Bahrain and Algeria, who are fighting for their just rights and falling martyrs in the face of the autocratic regimes. The peoples are determined to succeed no matter the sacrifices and they will be victorious.
Today is the day of the American workers. We salute you American workers! You will be victorious. Victory belongs to all the people of the world, who are fighting against exploitation, and for their just rights.
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Stop LAPD Stealing of Immigrant's Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lf4kENkxo
On Februrary 19, 2011 Members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC) organized and engaged in direct action to defend the people of Los Angeles, CA from the racist LAPD "Sobriety" Checkpoints that are a poorly disguised trap to legally steal the cars from working class people in general and undocumented people in particular. Please disseminate this link widely.
Venceremos,
SCIC
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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The Most Heroic Word in All Languages is Revolution
By Eugene Debs
Eugene Debs, that greatest son of the Middle American west, wrote this in 1907 in celebration of that year's May Day events. It retains all of its vibrancy and vitality as events breathe new life into the global struggle for emancipation. "Revolution" remains the most heroic word in every language. -The Rustbelt Radical
Today the slaves of all the world are taking a fresh breath in the long and weary march; pausing a moment to clear their lungs and shout for joy; celebrating in festal fellowship their coming Freedom.
All hail the Labor Day of May!
The day of the proletarian protest;
The day of stern resolve;
The day of noble aspiration.
Raise high this day the blood-red Standard of the Revolution!
The banner of the Workingman;
The flag, the only flag, of Freedom.
Slavery, even the most abject-dumb and despairing as it may seem-has yet its inspiration. Crushed it may be, but extinguished never. Chain the slave as you will, O Masters, brutalize him as you may, yet in his soul, though dead, he yearns for freedom still.
The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope; the inspiration that nerves them all with sinews of steel.
They are still in bondage, but no longer cower;
No longer grovel in the dust,
But stand erect like men.
Conscious of their growing power the future holds up to them her outstretched hands.
As the slavery of the working class is international, so the movement for its emancipation.
The salutation of slave to slave this day is repeated in every human tongue as it goes ringing round the world.
The many millions are at last awakening. For countless ages they have suffered; drained to the dregs the bitter cup of misery and woe.
At last, at last the historic limitation has been reached, and soon a new sun will light the world.
Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of universal kinship.
Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold it.
We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity-come life or death-to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.
Socialist greetings this day to all our fellow-workers! To the god-like souls in Russia marching grimly, sublimely into the jaws of hell with the Song of the Revolution in their death-rattle; to the Orient, the Occident and all the Isles of the Sea!
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.
The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.
Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of toil.
It was with Revolution as his theme that Mark Twain's soul drank deep from the fount of inspiration. His immortality will rest at last upon this royal tribute to the French Revolution:
"The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood-one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
-The Rustbelt Radical, February 25, 2011
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/the-most-heroic-word-in-all-languages-is-revolution/
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New music video by tommi avicolli mecca of the song "stick and stones," which is about bullying in high school, is finished and up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_twpu3-Nw
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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:
box
http://www.youtube.com/user/avimecca
by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan
I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old
what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC
CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad
send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad
I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true
to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil
CHO
I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough
you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here
CHO
last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least
I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill
CHO
it's really just so sad
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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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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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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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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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS ALERT:
San Francisco Health Center/PLANNED PARENTHOOD - San Francisco, CA
1650 Valencia St
San Francisco, CA 94110
IS BEING PICKETED DAILY BY RIGHT TO LIFE DEMONSTRATORS CARRYING GIANT SIGNS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CLINIC INTIMIDATING PATIENTS!
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The Arab Revolutions:
Guiding Principles for Peace and Justice Organizations in the US
Please email endorsement to ekishawi@yahoo.com
We, the undersigned, support the guiding principles and demands listed in this statement. We call on groups who want to express solidarity with the Arab revolutions to join our growing movement by signing this statement or keeping with the demands put forward herewith.
Background
The long-awaited Arab revolution has come. Like a geologic event with the reverberations of an earthquake, the timing and circumstances were unpredictable. In one Arab country after another, people are taking to the street demanding the fall of monarchies established during European colonial times. They are also calling to bring down dictatorships supported and manifested by neo-colonial policies. Although some of these autocratic regimes rose to power with popular support, the subsequent division and subjugation of the Arab World led to a uniform repressive political order across the region. The Arab masses in different Arab countries are therefore raising a uniform demand: "The People Want to Topple the Regimes!"
For the past two decades, the Arab people witnessed the invasion and occupation of Iraq with millions killed under blockade and occupation, Palestinians massacred with the aim to crush the anti-Zionist resistance, and Lebanon repeatedly invaded with the purposeful targeting of civilians. These actions all served to crush resistance movements longing for freedom, development, and self-determination. Meanwhile, despotic dictatorships, some going back 50 years, entrenched themselves by building police states, or fighting wars on behalf of imperialist interests.
Most Arab regimes systematically destroyed the social fabric of civil society, stifled social development, repressed all forms of political dissent and democratic expression, mortgaged their countries' wealth to foreign interests and enriched themselves and their cronies at the expense of impoverishing their populations. After pushing the Arab people to the brink, populations erupted.
The spark began in Tunisia where a police officer slapped and spat on Mohammad Bou Azizi, flipping over his produce cart for not delivering a bribe on time. . Unable to have his complaint heard, he self-immolated in protest, igniting the conscience of the Tunisian people and that of 300 million Arabs. In less than a month, the dictator, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, was forced into exile by a Tunisian revolution. On its way out, the regime sealed its legacy by shooting at unarmed protestors and burning detention centers filled with political prisoners. Ben Ali was supported by the US and Europe in the fight against Islamic forces and organized labor.
Hosni Mubarak's brutal dictatorship fell less than a month after Tunisia's. The revolution erupted at a time when one half of the Egyptian population was living on less than $2/day while Mubarak's family amassed billions of dollars. The largest population recorded in Egyptian history was living in graveyards and raising their children among the dead while transportation and residential infrastructure was crumbling. Natural gas was supplied to Israel at 15% of the market price while the Rafah border was closed with an underground steel wall to complete the suffocation of the Palestinians in Gaza. Those who were deemed a threat swiftly met the fate of Khalid Said. 350 martyrs fell and 2,000 people were injured.
After Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan exploded in protest. Some governments quickly reshuffled faces and ranks without any tangible change. Some, like Bahrain and Yemen, sent out their security forces to massacre civilians. Oman and Yemen represent strategic assets for the US as they are situated on the straits of Hormuz and Aden, respectively. Bahrain is an oil country that hosts a US military base, situated in the Persian Gulf. A new round of US funded blood-letting of Arab civilians has begun!
Libyan dictator Qaddafi did not prove to be an exception. He historically took anti-imperialist positions for a united Arab World and worked for an African Union. He later transformed his regime to a subservient state and opened Libya to British Petroleum and Italian interests, working diligently on privatization and political repression. He amassed more wealth than that of Mubarak. In the face of the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi exceeded the brutality of Ben Ali and Mubarak blind-folding and executing opponents, surrounding cities with tanks, and bombing his own country. Death toll is expected to be in the thousands.
Qaddafi's history makes Libya an easy target for imperialist interests. The Obama administration followed the Iraq cookbook by freezing Libyan assets amounting to 30% of the annual GDP. The White House, with the help of European governments, rapidly implemented sanctions and called for no-fly zones. These positions were precipitated shortly after the US vetoed a resolution condemning the illegal Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Special operations personnel from the UK were captured by the revolutionary commanders in Ben Ghazi and sent back. The Libyan revolutionary leadership, the National Council clearly stated: "We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people ... and Gaddafi's security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya."
Demands of the Solidarity Movement with Arab Revolutions
1. We demand a stop to US support, financing and trade with Arab dictatorships. We oppose US policy that has favored Israeli expansionism, war, US oil interest and strategic shipping routes at the expense of Arab people's freedom and dignified living.
2. We support the people of Tunisia and Egypt as well as soon-to-be liberated nations to rid themselves of lingering remnants of the deposed dictatorships.
3. We support the Arab people's right to sovereignty and self-determination. We demand that the US government stop its interference in the internal affairs of all Arab countries and end subsidies to wars and occupation.
4. We support the Arab people's demands for political, civil and economic rights. The Arab people's movement is calling for:
a. Deposing the unelected regimes and all of its institutional remnants
b. Constitutional reform guaranteeing freedom of organizing, speech and press
c. Free and fair elections
d. Independent judiciary
e. National self-determination.
5. We oppose all forms of US and European military intervention with or without the legitimacy of the UN. Standing in solidarity with the revolution against Qaddafi, or any other dictator, does not equate to supporting direct or indirect colonization of an Arab country, its oil or its people. We therefore call for:
a. Absolute rejection of military blockades, no-fly zones and interventions.
b. Lifting all economic sanctions placed against Libya and allowing for the formation of an independent judiciary to prosecute Qaddafi and deposed dictators for their crimes.
c. Immediately withdrawing the US and NATO troops from the Arab region.
6. We support Iraq's right to sovereignty and self determination and call on the US to immediately withdraw all occupation personnel from Iraq.
7. We recognize that the borders separating Arab nations were imposed on the Arab people by the colonial agreements of Sykes-Picot and the Berlin Conference on Africa. As such, we support the anti-Zionist nature of this revolution in its call for:
a. Ending the siege and starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza
b. Supporting the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own representation, independent of Israeli and US dictates
c. Supporting the right of the Lebanese people to defend their country from Israeli violations and their call to end vestiges of the colonial constitution constructed on the basis of sectarian representation
d. Supporting the right of the Jordanian people to rid themselves of their repressive monarchy
e. Ending all US aid to Israel.
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY -- ANY DAY
to Fitzgerald, Holder and Obama
The Grand Jury is still on its witch hunt and the FBI is still
harassing activists. This must stop.
Please make these calls:
1. Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 . Then dial 0
(zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
2. Call U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder 202-353-1555
3. Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Suggested text: "My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in
______(state). I am calling _____ to demand he call off the Grand Jury
and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and Palestine solidarity
movements. I oppose U.S. government political repression and support
the right to free speech and the right to assembly of the 23 activists
subpoenaed. We will not be criminalized. Tell him to stop this
McCarthy-type witch hunt against international solidarity activists!"
If your call doesn't go through, try again later.
Update: 800 anti-war and international solidarity activists
participated in four regional conferences, in Chicago, IL; Oakland,
CA; Chapel Hill, NC and New York City to stop U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald's Grand Jury repression.
Still, in the last few weeks, the FBI has continued to call and harass
anti-war organizers, repressing free speech and the right to organize.
However, all of their intimidation tactics are bringing a movement
closer together to stop war and demand peace.
We demand:
-- Call Off the Grand Jury Witch-hunt Against International Solidarity
Activists!
-- Support Free Speech!
-- Support the Right to Organize!
-- Stop FBI Repression!
-- International Solidarity Is Not a Crime!
-- Stop the Criminalization of Arab and Muslim Communities!
Background: Fitzgerald ordered FBI raids on anti-war and solidarity
activists' homes and subpoenaed fourteen activists in Chicago,
Minneapolis, and Michigan on September 24, 2010. All 14 refused to
speak before the Grand Jury in October. Then, 9 more Palestine
solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear
at the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011, launching renewed protests.
There are now 23 who assert their right to not participate in
Fitzgerald's witch-hunt.
The Grand Jury is a secret and closed inquisition, with no judge, and
no press. The U.S. Attorney controls the entire proceedings and hand
picks the jurors, and the solidarity activists are not allowed a
lawyer. Even the date when the Grand Jury ends is a secret.
So please make these calls to those in charge of the repression aimed
against anti-war leaders and the growing Palestine solidarity
movement.
Email us to let us know your results. Send to info@StopFBI.net
**Please sign and circulate our 2011 petition at http://www.stopfbi.net/petition
In Struggle,
Tom Burke,
for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
FFI: Visit www.StopFBI.net or email info@StopFBI.net or call
612-379-3585 .
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights
reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm
Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,
1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
3. One hour time difference
4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)
5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.
6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.
7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.
Love Struggle
Lynne
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010
The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.
We need your help in pressing the following demands:
End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.
Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)
Background
In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.
Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."
Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."
In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."
In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.
What can you do?
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed
The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.
As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings
Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.
China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.
The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.
On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.
UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:
15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!
UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.
The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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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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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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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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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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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 (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
afghans4peace
We stand united against the atrocious crimes committed by the "Kill Team" against the civilian population in Afghanistan. We stand against all crimes committed in the name of war. We demand that each human being be treated with dignity, respect, and compassion. We also ask everyone to share their feelings and response to the photos released. This is a place for you to share your deepest and heartfelt opinion on this issue. You are not alone. Silence is a weapon of mass destruction. Let us unite in solidarity and use our voices as a tool for justice.
Actions you can take:
1. Please sign our petition to Stop War Crimes Against Afghan Civilians: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/afghancivilians
2. Please share your feelings by posting a "Video Response" to our video: http://www.youtube.com/video_response_upload?v=3guxWIorhdA
Also check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ror0qPcasM&NR=1
2) U.S. Gives Its Air Power Expansive Role in Libya
By ERIC SCHMITT
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29military.html?hp
3) Japan Tries to Stem Leak of Radioactive Water
By HIROKO TABUCHI
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/world/asia/30japan.html?hp
4) Food Inflation Kept Hidden in Tinier Bags
[This is legal grand theft on a massive scale....bw]
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CATHERINE RAMPELL
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/business/29shrink.html?hp
5) Marine Life Faces Threat From Runoff
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and WILLIAM J. BROAD
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/world/asia/29safety.html?ref=world
6) Michigan Cuts Jobless Benefit by Six Weeks
By MICHAEL COOPER
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/politics/29michigan.html?ref=us
7) Justices Deny New Appeal by Convict in Georgia
By ADAM LIPTAK
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29teacher.html?ref=us
8) Maine: Labor Mural Is Moved to Undisclosed Location
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29brfs-LABORMURALIS_BRF.html?ref=us
9) Pentagon: Libya mission has cost US $550M so far
by Pauline Jelinek
The Associated Press
3/29/11
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/29/pentagon-libya-mission-has-cost-us-550-million-so-far/
10) Why We're Fasting
By MARK BITTMAN
"This is a moral issue; the budget is a moral document. We can take care of the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure and strengthen our safety net by reducing military spending and eliminating corporate subsidies and tax loopholes for the rich. Or we can sink further into debt and amoral individualism by demonizing and starving the poor. Which side are you on?"
March 29, 2011, 10:28 pm
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/why-were-fasting/?hp
11) As Sweeping Layoffs Loom, Schools Gird for Turmoil
By SAM DILLON
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/education/31layoffs.html?hp
12) Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/world/asia/30japan.html?hp
13) Developments in Japan's Disasters, Nuclear Crisis
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/30/world/asia/AP-AS-Japan-Earthquake-Today.html?hp
14) Mexican Immigrants Face Darkest Housing Picture
By KIRK SEMPLE
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/nyregion/30mexicans.html?ref=world
15) $14 Million Jury Award to Ex-Inmate Is Dismissed
"If I'd spilled hot coffee on myself, I could have sued the person who served me the coffee," he said. "But I can't sue the prosecutors who nearly murdered me."
By ADAM LIPTAK
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/us/30scotus.html?ref=us
16) 4-Year-Old Citizen Who Was Deported Comes Back
By TIM STELLOH
March 30, 2011, 9:15 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/4-year-old-citizen-who-was-deported-comes-back/?ref=nyregion
17) Black bloc: 'Only actions count now'
Two participants in the black bloc protest at Saturday's anti-cuts rally tell Stephen Moss why they're the true face of protest
By Stephen Moss
Guardian.co.uk
March 31, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/31/black-bloc-anti-cuts-protest
18) C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/africa/31intel.html?src=mv
19) Safety Concerns Often Amount to Status Quo at U.S. Nuclear Industry's Aging Reactors
Leaks, burst cooling pipes, faulty controls, misplaced fuel rods and engineers' warnings about design flaws have done little to slow down approvals for continued operation of the nation's aging nuclear plants
By David Biello
Friday, March 25, 2011 | 8
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=safety-concerns-status-quo-at-us-reactors
20) King's Call for Worker Justice Runs Through April 4 Solidarity Actions
by Mike Hall
March 30, 2011
http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/03/30/kings-call-for-worker-justice-runs-through-april-4-solidarity-actions/
21) They've Got to Fix Their Priorities
New York Times Editorial
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/opinion/31thu1.html?hp
22) Low Levels of Radiation Found in American Milk
By MATTHEW L. WALD
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/us/31milk.html?ref=world
23) NATO Warns Rebels Against Attacking Libyan Civilians
By THOM SHANKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/africa/01civilians.html?hp
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1) The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.
Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.
Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company's 3rd Platoon - part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington - left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.
To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs.
While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. "The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it," one of the men later told Army investigators.
The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.
He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. "He was not a threat," Morlock later confessed.
Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still.
The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.
Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head.
The loud report of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. The sound of such unexpected gunfire typically triggers an emergency response in other soldiers, sending them into full battle mode. Yet when the shots rang out, some soldiers didn't seem especially alarmed, even when the radio began to squawk. It was Morlock, agitated, screaming that he had come under attack. On a nearby hill, Spc. Adam Winfield turned to his friend, Pfc. Ashton Moore, and explained that it probably wasn't a real combat situation. It was more likely a staged killing, he said - a plan the guys had hatched to take out an unarmed Afghan without getting caught.
Back at the wall, soldiers arriving on the scene found the body and the bloodstains on the ground. Morlock and Holmes were crouched by the wall, looking excited. When a staff sergeant asked them what had happened, Morlock said the boy had been about to attack them with a grenade. "We had to shoot the guy," he said.
It was an unlikely story: a lone Taliban fighter, armed with only a grenade, attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, let alone in an area that offered no cover or concealment. Even the top officer on the scene, Capt. Patrick Mitchell, thought there was something strange about Morlock's story. "I just thought it was weird that someone would come up and throw a grenade at us," Mitchell later told investigators.
But Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to "make sure" the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice.
As the soldiers milled around the body, a local elder who had been working in the poppy field came forward and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder. Pointing to Morlock, he said that the soldier, not the boy, had thrown the grenade. Morlock and the other soldiers ignored him.
To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. "The father was very upset," the report noted.
The father's grief did nothing to interrupt the pumped-up mood that had broken out among the soldiers. Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, they cut off the dead boy's clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Next they scanned his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.
Then, in a break with protocol, the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin's bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy's head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento.
No one seemed more pleased by the kill than Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the platoon's popular and hard-charging squad leader. "It was like another day at the office for him," one soldier recalls. Gibbs started "messing around with the kid," moving his arms and mouth and "acting like the kid was talking." Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic's shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy's pinky finger and gave it to Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.
According to his fellow soldiers, Holmes took to carrying the finger with him in a zip-lock bag. "He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out," one of his friends would later report. "He was proud of his finger."
After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin's death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a "rogue unit" operating completely on its own, without the knowledge of its superiors. Military prosecutors swiftly charged five low-ranking soldiers with murder, and the Pentagon clamped down on any information about the killings. Soldiers in Bravo Company were barred from giving interviews, and lawyers for the accused say their clients faced harsh treatment if they spoke to the press, including solitary confinement. No officers were charged.
But a review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive "kill team" were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by "pretty much the whole platoon," according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. "The platoon has a reputation," a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. "They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it."
From the start, the questionable nature of the killings was on the radar of senior Army leadership. Within days of the first murder, Rolling Stone has learned, Mudin's uncle descended on the gates of FOB Ramrod, along with 20 villagers from La Mohammad Kalay, to demand an investigation. "They were sitting at our front door," recalls Lt. Col. David Abrahams, the battalion's second in command. During a four-hour meeting with Mudin's uncle, Abrahams was informed that several children in the village had seen Mudin killed by soldiers from 3rd Platoon. The battalion chief ordered the soldiers to be reinterviewed, but Abrahams found "no inconsistencies in their story," and the matter was dropped. "It was cut and dry to us at the time," Abrahams recalls.
Other officers were also in a position to question the murders. Neither 3rd Platoon's commander, Capt. Matthew Quiggle, nor 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay has been held accountable for their unit's actions, despite their repeated failure to report killings that they had ample reason to regard as suspicious. In fact, supervising the murderous platoon, or even having knowledge of the crimes, seems to have been no impediment to career advancement. Ligsay has actually been promoted to captain, and a sergeant who joined the platoon in April became a team leader even though he "found out about the murders from the beginning," according to a soldier who cooperated with the Army investigation.
Indeed, it would have been hard not to know about the murders, given that the soldiers of 3rd Platoon took scores of photographs chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. "Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals," one soldier explained to investigators. "Everyone would say they're savages." One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.
In many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But it is a violation of Army standards to take such photos of the dead, let alone share them with others. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.
The collection also includes several videos shot by U.S. troops. In a jumpy, 30-minute clip titled "Motorcycle Kill," soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the Stryker Brigade gun down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. One of the most chilling files shows two Afghans suspected of planting an IED being blown up in an airstrike. Shot through thermal imaging, the grainy footage has been edited into a music video, complete with a rock soundtrack and a title card that reads 'death zone.'
Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos - an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. Investigators in Afghanistan searched the hard drives and confiscated the computers of more than a dozen soldiers, ordering them to delete any provocative images. The Army Criminal Investigation Command also sent agents fanning out across America to the homes of soldiers and their relatives, gathering up every copy of the files they could find. The message was clear: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.
By suppressing the photos, however, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In one image, two dead Afghans have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road. A sign - handwritten on cardboard from a discarded box of rations - hangs around their necks. It reads "Taliban are Dead." The Pentagon says it is investigating the photos, but insists that there is little more investigators can do to identify the men. "It's a mystery," says a Pentagon spokesman. "To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure they know where to take it next. All we have is two apparently dead Afghans handcuffed to each other against a mile marker. We don't know much beyond that. For all we know, those two guys may have been killed by the Taliban for being sympathizers."
But such statements suggest that the Pentagon isn't following every lead. A Stryker vehicle in the photos, for example, bears identifying marks that are clearly visible in the image. And according to a source in Bravo Company, who spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity, the two unarmed men in the photos were killed by soldiers from another platoon, which has not yet been implicated in the scandal.
"Those were some innocent farmers that got killed," the source says. "Their standard operating procedure after killing dudes was to drag them up to the side of the highway."
Army prosecutors insist that blame for the killings rests with a soldier near the bottom of the Stryker Brigade's totem pole: Calvin Gibbs, a three-tour veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who served as a squad leader in 3rd Platoon. Morlock and five soldiers charged with lesser crimes have pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against Gibbs, who faces life in prison for three counts of premeditated murder.
The 26-year-old staff sergeant has been widely portrayed as a sociopath of Mansonesque proportions, a crazed killer with a "pure hatred for all Afghans" who was detested and feared by those around him. But the portrait omits evidence that the Army's own investigators gathered from soldiers in Bravo Company. "Gibbs is very well-liked in the platoon by his seniors, peers and subordinates alike," Spc. Adam Kelly reported, adding that Gibbs was "one of the best NCOs I've ever had the pleasure of working with in my military career. I believe that because of his experience, more people came back alive and uninjured than would have without him having been part of the platoon." Another soldier described Gibbs as an "upbeat guy, very funny. He was one of those guys you could talk to about anything and he would make you feel better about the situation."
At six-feet-four and 220 pounds, Gibbs could certainly intimidate those around him. Growing up in a devout Mormon family in Billings, Montana, he had dropped out of high school to get an equivalency degree and enlist in the Army. He plunged into soldiering, accumulating a slew of medals in Iraq, where the line between legitimate self-defense and civilian deaths was often blurry at best. In 2004, Gibbs and other soldiers allegedly fired on an unarmed Iraqi family near Kirkuk, killing two adults and a child. The incident, which was not prosecuted at the time, is now under investigation by the Army.
Before he joined Bravo Company in November 2009, Gibbs worked on the personal security detail for one of the top commanders in Afghanistan, a controversial, outspoken colonel named Harry Tunnell. Tunnell, who at the time was the commander of 5th Stryker Brigade, openly mocked the military's approach to counterinsurgency - which emphasizes the need to win the support of local civilians - as better suited to a "social scientist." "Political correctness dictates that we cannot talk about the oppressive measures employed during successful counterinsurgency campaigns," he wrote. Tunnell also pushed his men to go after "guerrilla hunter killers," insisting that the enemy "must be attacked relentlessly."
When Gibbs left Tunnell's detail and arrived at the front, he quickly became an extreme version of a relentless attacker. After he took command, Gibbs put a pirate flag on his tent. "Hey, brother," he told a friend. "Come down to the line and we'll find someone to kill." A tattoo on his left shin featured a pair of crossed rifles offset by six skulls. Three of the skulls, colored in red, represented his kills in Iraq. The others, in blue, were from Afghanistan.
By the time Gibbs arrived, morale in the Stryker Brigade had hit rock bottom. Only four months earlier, the unit had been deployed to Afghanistan amid a chorus of optimism about its eight-wheeled armored vehicles, a technological advancement that was supposed to move infantry to the battlefield more quickly and securely, enabling U.S. troops to better strike against the Taliban. By December, however, those hopes had dissolved. The Taliban had forced the Strykers off the roads simply by increasing the size and explosive force of their IEDs, and the brigade had suffered terrible casualties; one battalion had lost more soldiers in action than any since the start of the war. Gibbs, in fact, had been brought in after a squad leader had his legs blown off by an IED.
The soldiers were bored and shellshocked and angry. They had been sent to Afghanistan as part of a new advance guard on a mission to track down the Taliban, but the enemy was nowhere to be found. "To be honest, I couldn't tell the difference between local nationals and combatants," one soldier later confessed. During the unit's first six months in Afghanistan, the Taliban evaded almost every patrol that 3rd Platoon sent out. Frustrations ran so high that when the unit came across the body of an insurgent killed by a helicopter gunship in November 2009, one soldier took out a hunting knife and stabbed the corpse. According to another soldier, Gibbs began playing with a pair of scissors near the dead man's hands. "I wonder if these can cut off a finger?" Gibbs asked.
The Pentagon's top command, rather than addressing the morale problems, actually held up the brigade as a media-worthy example of progress in the war. The month after the helicopter incident - only four weeks before the killings began - the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, paid a heavily publicized visit to the area. The military's strategy of counterinsurgency, he reminded members of 5th Stryker Brigade, required them to win hearts and minds by protecting the population. "If we're killing local civilians," he cautioned, "we're going to strategically lose."
Gibbs had a different idea about how to breathe new life into 3rd Platoon. Not long after he arrived, he explained to his fellow soldiers that they didn't have to wait passively to be attacked by the enemy's IEDs. They could strike back by hitting people in towns known to be sympathetic to the Taliban. "Gibbs told everyone about this scenario by pitching it - by saying that all these Afghans were savages, and we had just lost one of our squad leaders because his legs got blown off by an IED," Morlock recalled. Killing an Afghan - any Afghan - became a way to avenge the loss.
The members of Bravo Company began to talk incessantly about killing Afghans as they went about their daily chores, got stoned or relaxed over a game of Warhammer. One idea, proposed half in jest, was to throw candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shoot the children who came running to pick up the sweets. According to one soldier, they also talked about a second scenario in which they "would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over." Another elaborate plan involved waiting for an IED attack, then using the explosion as an excuse to kill civilians. That way, the soldiers reasoned, "you could shoot anyone in the general area and get away with it."
"We were operating in such bad places and not being able to do anything about it," Morlock said in a phone interview from the jail at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. "I guess that's why we started taking things into our own hands."
After killing the Afghan boy at La Mohammad Kalay, members of 3rd Platoon were jubilant. "They were high-fiving each other about having killed the guy," one soldier recalled. They put the corpse in a black body bag and stowed it on top of their Stryker for the ride back to FOB Ramrod. No sooner had they arrived at the base than they were recounting the tale to soldiers they barely knew.
A few hours after the shooting, during a routine checkup at the base's clinic, Holmes and Morlock bragged about having killed an insurgent to Alyssa Reilly, a fair-skinned, blond medic who was popular among the men in the unit. Reilly later paid the soldiers a social visit, and they all sat around playing spades. When it came time for their wager, Morlock and Holmes said they would bet a finger. Then they tossed the finger that Gibbs had sliced from Mudin's body on the card pile. "I thought it was gross," Reilly told investigators.
Morlock was particularly eager to volunteer the truth to his fellow soldiers, evidently unconcerned about how they would react to his having murdered an unarmed Afghan. The same evening he shot Mudin, several members of Bravo Company convened in the privacy of a Stryker vehicle for a nightcap of hashish, a common activity among the unit. Hash supplied by Afghan translators was a major part of the daily lives of many soldiers; they smoked up constantly, getting high in their vehicles, their housing units, even porta-potties. Now, in the tanklike interior of the Stryker, surrounded by its mesh of wires and periscopes and thermal-imaging computers, Morlock passed the hash and recounted the killing in detail, even explaining how he had been careful not to leave the grenade's spoon and pin on the ground, where they might have been used as evidence that a U.S. weapon had been involved in the attack. For the same reason, he'd also been careful to brush away traces of white explosive powder around Mudin's body.
Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid whom the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. In those days, he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident. Even after he joined the Army, Morlock continued to get into trouble. In 2009, a month before he deployed to Afghanistan, he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife with a cigarette. After he arrived in Afghanistan, he did any drug he could get his hands on: opium, hash, Ambien, amitriptyline, flexeril, phenergan, codeine, trazodone.
As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. "There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder," he told his father. "Everyone pretty much knows it was staged. . . . They all don't care." Winfield added that the victim was "some innocent guy about my age, just farming."
During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. "Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man," Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. "They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy." Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that "stuff like that happens" and that "it would be sorted out when Adam got home." Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report.
Back in Afghanistan, Winfield was having second thoughts about reporting the incident. He believed the killings were wrong, but he had finally earned a place in the "circle of trust" erected by Gibbs, who had started off thinking of him as too "weak" to belong to the kill team. Reversing course, he begged his father to stop contacting the Army, saying that he feared for his life. Winfield said Gibbs had warned him that if he told anyone about the murder, he would "go home in a body bag." His father agreed to keep the matter quiet.
Given the lack of response from their superiors, the soldiers of 3rd Platoon now believed they could kill with impunity - provided they planted "drop weapons" at the scene to frame their victims as enemy combatants. The presence of a weapon virtually guaranteed that a shooting would be considered a legitimate kill, even under the stricter rules of engagement the military had implemented as a key element of counterinsurgency. A drop weapon was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. And in the chaotic war zone, they were easy to find.
The military keeps close track of the weapons and ammunition it issues to soldiers, carefully documenting every grenade exploded, every magazine expended. So Gibbs made it his business to gather "off the books" weapons through a variety of channels. He got friendly with guys in the Afghan National Police and tried to trade them porn magazines in exchange for rocket-propelled grenades; he cajoled other units to give him munitions; he scrounged for broken and discarded UXO - unexploded ordnance - until he had collected a motley arsenal of random weaponry, old frag grenades, bent RPG tails, duct-taped claymore mines, C-4, mortar rounds. His best find was a working AK-47 with a folding butt stock and two magazines, which he pulled from the wreckage of an Afghan National Police vehicle that had been blown up near the base's gate. Gibbs placed the AK-47 and the magazines in a metal box in one of the Strykers. Later, a corporal named Emmitt Quintal discovered the gun and wondered what it was doing there. As he recalled, Staff Sgt. David Bram "sat me down and explained to me that it was basically to cover our ass if anything happened."
Two weeks after the murder of Gul Mudin, something did.
It was the night of January 27th and the platoon was driving along the highway near their forward operating base. Suddenly, through their thermal imaging, they spotted a human heat signature on the side of the road - a potentially suspicious sign, since the Taliban often operate at night, using the cover of darkness to plant IEDs.
The patrol stopped 100 yards away from the man, and a handful of soldiers and an interpreter got out of their vehicles. They could see that the man was crouched down, or curled up like a ball close to the ground. As they approached, the man stood up and held his arms in front of his chest. To the soldiers, the motion was either an indication that he was cold, or that he was hiding a suicide-bomb vest.
Shouting to the man in Pashto, the soldiers illuminated him with intense, high-power spotlights and ordered him to lift up his shirt. But the man began to pace back and forth in the blinding white light, ignoring their calls. "He was acting strange," recalls a soldier. For several minutes the man shuffled around as the soldiers fired warning shots at him. The bullets skipped around him.
Then - ignoring the warnings - the man began walking toward the troops. "Fire!" someone yelled. Gibbs opened fire, followed by at least five other soldiers. In the course of a few seconds, they expended approximately 40 rounds.
The man's body lay on the ground. He turned out to be completely unarmed. According to official statements made by several soldiers, he also appears to have been deaf or mentally disabled. Above his beard, a large portion of his skull was missing, blown away by the hail of bullets. Spc. Michael Wagnon collected a piece of the skull and kept it as a trophy.
It was the team's second killing of an unarmed man in as many weeks, and the second time they violated a body. But rather than investigate the shooting, the platoon's officers concentrated on trying to justify it. When 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay radioed Capt. Matthew Quiggle, the platoon's commanding officer, and informed him that the same unit had shot an unarmed Afghan male, the captain was furious. "He strongly believed that we had illegitimately killed a local national," recalls Quintal.
Quiggle ordered Ligsay to search until they found a weapon. "Lt. Ligsay was pretty freaked out," Quintal recalls. "He was positive he was going to lose his job." For the next hour the platoon swept the area with their flashlights looking for weapons, but they couldn't find anything.
Then Staff Sgt. Bram ordered Quintal to hand him the AK-47 magazine that Gibbs had stowed in the metal box in the Stryker. A private named Justin Stoner passed it down. A few minutes later, a voice called out in the darkness. "Sir!" Bram yelled. "I think I found something."
Lt. Ligsay walked up and saw the black magazine lying on the ground. He called it in, and the platoon breathed a sigh of relief. The members of the kill team knew it was a drop magazine, but it turned the shooting into a legitimate kill.
"The incident was staged to look like he may have had a weapon," Stoner told investigators. "Basically, what we did was a desperate search to justify killing this guy. But in reality he was just some old, deaf, retarded guy. We basically executed this man."
Under the rules of engagement, however, the U.S. military still considers the man responsible for his own death. Because he ignored the platoon's warnings and moved in their direction, no one has been charged in his killing - even though the Army now knows he was gunned down by soldiers intent on shooting unarmed civilians for sport.
Within a month, according to the Army, Gibbs executed another civilian and planted a weapon on the body. It was during Operation Kodak Moment, a routine mission to photograph and compile a database of the male residents of a village called Kari Kheyl. On February 22nd, the day of the mission, Gibbs hid the AK-47 he had stolen from the Afghan National Police in a black assault pack. As the platoon made its way through the village, he went to the hut of Marach Agha, a man he suspected of belonging to the Taliban, and ordered him outside.
First Gibbs fired the AK-47 into a nearby wall and dropped the weapon at Agha's feet. Then he shot the man at close range with his M4 rifle. Morlock and Wagnon followed up with a few rounds of their own. With the scene staged to his satisfaction, Gibbs called in a report.
Staff Sgt. Sprague was one of the first to respond. Gibbs claimed that he had turned a corner and spotted the man, who had fired at him with the AK-47, only to have the rifle jam. But when Sprague picked up the Kalashnikov, it seemed to be in perfect operating condition. A short time later, as he walked down a dusty alley in the village, Sprague himself came under attack from small-arms fire. He responded instinctively by squeezing the trigger on the AK-47 - and the gun fired "with no problems at all."
Sprague reported the discrepancy to Lt. Ligsay. When the body was identified, relatives also reported that Agha was a deeply religious man who would never have taken up arms. He "did not know how to use an AK-47," they told Ligsay. Once again, however, no action was taken, nor was Gibbs disciplined.
With their commanding officers repeatedly failing to investigate, the kill team was starting to feel invulnerable. To encourage soldiers in other units to target unarmed civilians, Gibbs had given one of the "off the books" grenades he had scrounged to a friend from another battalion, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens. "It showed up in a box on my desk," recalled Stevens, a senior medic. "When I opened the box, I saw a grenade canister, which had a grenade in it and a dirty green sock." Figuring the sock was some kind of joke, Stevens threw it away. Later, when he saw Gibbs, he mentioned getting the grenade.
"Did you get the other thing?" Gibbs asked.
"What, the sock?" Stevens said.
"No, what was in the sock," Gibbs replied.
Inside the sock, Gibbs had placed a severed human finger.
Stevens got the message. On March 10th, as his convoy was driving down Highway 1, the central road connecting Kandahar to the north, Stevens stuck his head out of his Stryker's open hatch and tossed the grenade. It detonated a few seconds later than he had anticipated, and when it blew, it thudded into the vehicle. Stevens immediately began firing at a nearby compound of huts, yelling at another platoon member to do the same. "Get the fuck up, Morgan!" he screamed. "Let's go, shoot!"
No casualties were reported from the incident, but it earned Stevens an Army Commendation Medal and a Combat Medical Badge. Stevens later admitted that he had concocted the ambush not only because he wanted to get rid of the illegal grenade but because he "wanted to hook up the guys in the company" with their Combat Infantryman Badges, 14 of which were awarded in the aftermath of the shooting. All of the awards were revoked when the Army learned the attack had been faked.
The assault staged by Stevens suggested a new way to target Afghan civilians. In addition to approaching targets on foot, Gibbs decided to use his Stryker as a shooting platform, affording greater mobility with the protection of armor. In a perverse twist, the vehicle that had proved ineffective at combating the Taliban was about to be turned on the very people it was supposed to defend.
On March 18th, during a maintenance run to Kandahar Airfield, the unit drove past a populated area of the city. According to one soldier, Gibbs opened the hatch of the moving Stryker and tossed out a grenade. As it exploded with a loud bang, shrapnel hit the Stryker. "RPG!" Gibbs shouted. "RPG!" Sgt. Darren Jones, who had discussed faking attacks with Gibbs, opened fire indiscriminately on the local residents, who frantically scrambled to avoid the incoming rounds. Gibbs raised his M4 and laid down fire as well.
There is no way to know how many, if any, casualties resulted from the fusillade. Lt. Ligsay, who was in the same Stryker with Gibbs and Jones, maintains that he mistakenly believed the attack to be genuine and ordered the convoy to keep moving. The platoon did not return to the area to conduct a battle damage assessment, and no charges were ever filed in the incident.
A few weeks later, sometime in late March or early April, members of 3rd Platoon fired on unarmed civilians twice on the same day, indicating a growing sense of their own invincibility. Five soldiers were part of a patrol in a grape field in the Zhari District when they spotted three unarmed men. According to Stevens, Gibbs ordered the soldiers to open fire, even though the men were standing erect and posed no threat. All five soldiers fired their weapons at the men, but they managed to escape unscathed. Gibbs was not pleased. "He mentioned that we needed to work on our accuracy," Stevens recalled, "because it did not appear that anyone was hurt."
That same evening, while manning a guard tower overlooking a field in the Zhari District, soldiers from 3rd Platoon were directly told not to shoot at an elderly farmer who had been granted permission to work his land nearby. Despite the warning, two soldiers reportedly shot at the farmer as if he were an armed combatant. They once again failed to hit their target, but the officer in charge was furious. "This farmer has never been a problem," he later told investigators. "He's 60 to 70 years old."
One morning that spring, Gibbs approached Morlock flashing what looked like a small metal pineapple. "Hey, man, I've got this Russian grenade," he said. Gibbs added that the weapon would be the perfect tool to fake another attack, since the Taliban were known to carry Russian explosives. Morlock liked the idea. The night before, talking with a bunch of soldiers outside their bunk rooms, he had announced that he was looking to kill another haji, a pejorative term that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan use for Muslims. One soldier who took part in the conversation dismissed it as idle talk. "I didn't really think anything of it," he told investigators, "because soldiers say stuff like that all the time."
The morning of May 2nd, the platoon was on a routine patrol in a village called Qualaday, a few miles from base. Following standard procedure, the unit's leaders entered a house to talk with a man who had previously been arrested for having an IED. That inadvertently left the rest of the platoon free to roam the village looking for targets, without having to worry about an officer's supervision.
Outside the house, Morlock was overheard instructing Winfield in how a grenade explodes, cautioning him to remain on the ground during the blast. Then the two soldiers moved off with Gibbs. Nearby, in a compound filled with children, they picked out a man with a white beard and escorted him outside. "He seemed friendly," Winfield recalled. "He didn't seem to have any sort of animosity toward us."
Gibbs turned to his men. "You guys want to wax this guy or what?" he asked. Morlock and Winfield agreed that the man seemed perfect.
Gibbs walked the Afghan to a nearby ditch and forced him to his knees, ordering him to stay that way. Then he positioned Morlock and Winfield in a prone position behind a small berm no more than 10 feet away. "To be honest," Morlock later told investigators, "me and Winfield thought we were going to frag ourselves, 'cause we were so fucking close."
With everyone in position, Gibbs took cover behind a low wall and chucked a grenade toward the Afghan. "All right, dude, wax this guy!" he shouted. "Kill this guy, kill this guy!"
As the grenade went off, Morlock and Winfield opened fire. Morlock got off several rounds with his M4. Winfield, who was armed with the more powerful SAW machine gun, squeezed off a burst that lasted for three to five seconds.
Gibbs shouted for Morlock to proceed with the next stage of the plan. "Get up there and plant that fucking grenade!"
The man lay where he had fallen. One of his feet had been blown off by the blast; his other leg was missing below the knee. Morlock ran up and dropped the Russian pineapple grenade near the dead man's hand. Gibbs walked up to the body, stood directly over it, and fired twice into the man's head, shattering the jaw.
Later, when the scene had calmed down - after soldiers had pushed away the dead man's wife and children, who were screaming, hysterical with grief, and Morlock had spun the story to the higher-ups - Gibbs took out a pair of medical shears and cut off the corpse's left pinky finger, which he kept for himself. Then, wearing a surgical glove, he reached into the dead man's mouth, pulled out a tooth and handed it to Winfield.
Winfield held the tooth for a while. Then he tossed it aside, leaving it behind on the ground at Qualaday.
This time, though, the villagers refused to be placated. The dead man, it turned out, was a peaceful cleric named Mullah Allah Dad. Two days later, the murder provoked an uproar at a districtwide council attended by Capt. Quiggle, the unit's commanding officer. The district leader launched into a blistering attack of the platoon. "He pretty much told us that we planted the grenade in order to shoot the guy," recalled 1st Lt. Stefan Moye, who escorted Quiggle to the meeting.
But the next day, instead of launching an inquiry into the platoon's behavior, Quiggle dispatched Moye to the scene of the shooting to do damage control. With Gibbs hovering nearby, the lieutenant found two elderly villagers who claimed to have seen Mullah Allah Dad with a grenade. Relieved, Moye urged them to spread the word. "This is the type of stuff that the Taliban likes to use against us and try to recruit people to fight against us," he said.
His mission accomplished, Moye left the village feeling that the platoon could return to its usual rhythms. "After that," he said, "everything was normal."
Things might have remained "normal," and the killings might have continued, if it hadn't been for what began as a trivial spat between bunkmates. Around midnight, the same evening that Moye returned from pacifying village elders, Pfc. Stoner walked into the company's tactical operations center to register a complaint. Stoner, who had helped plant the AK-47 magazine on the civilian murdered by the highway, said he was sick and tired of other soldiers in the unit using his room as "a smoke shack for hash." Worried that the lingering odor would get him busted, he had asked them to find another place to get stoned. They had refused, pausing only to remove the battery from the room's smoke detector.
"They baked the room many times until it stank constantly," Stoner said. "I was worried for my own job." Emphasizing that he wasn't a snitch, Stoner told the sergeant on duty that he didn't want to get his fellow soldiers in trouble. Then, growing emotional, he mentioned that "he and a bunch of other guys had executed a local national out on Highway 1." The sergeant didn't take the story seriously enough to report it up the chain of command. "I thought he was just upset and needed to talk to someone about the incident," he later recalled. Instead of alerting his superiors about the murder allegation, the sergeant simply assured Stoner that the matter of hash smoking in his room would be handled quietly, and that his identity would be kept confidential.
But discretion wasn't exactly the unit's strong suit. By the next day, everyone knew that Stoner had ratted them out. "Everyone began to panic," Quintal recalls. Gibbs, who didn't care for hashish, gathered members of the kill team in his room. "We need to address the situation with Stoner," he reportedly said. "Snitches get stitches."
On May 6th, Gibbs and six other soldiers descended on Stoner's room, locking the door behind them, and attacked Stoner while he was sitting on his bed. Grabbing him by the throat, they dragged him to the floor and piled on, striking him hard but taking care to avoid blows to the face that might leave visible bruises. "I've been in the Army four years," Morlock said as he pummeled Stoner in the stomach. "How could you do this to me?" Before leaving, they struck Stoner in the crotch and spit in his face.
A few hours later, Gibbs and Morlock returned to Stoner's room. As Stoner sat on his bed, still dazed from the assault, Morlock explained that the beating would not happen again, so long as Stoner kept his mouth shut "from fucking now on." If Stoner were disloyal again, Gibbs warned, he would be killed the next time he went out on patrol. "It's too easy," he added, explaining that he could hide Stoner's body in a Hesco barrier, one of the temporary structures used to fortify U.S. positions.
Then Gibbs reached into his pocket and took out a bit of cloth. Unfolding it, he tossed two severed fingers on the floor, with bits of skin still hanging off the bone. If Stoner didn't want to end up like "that guy," Morlock said, he better "shut the hell up." After all, he added, he "already had enough practice" at killing people.
Stoner had no doubt that Morlock would follow through on the threat. "Basically, I do believe that Morlock would kill me if he had the chance," he said later.
But the beating proved to be the kill team's undoing. When a physician's assistant examined Stoner the next day, she saw the angry red welts covering his body. She also saw the large tattoo across Stoner's back. In gothic type, beneath a grinning red skull flanked by two grim reapers, it read:
what if im not the hero
what if im the bad guy
Stoner was sent to talk to Army investigators. In the course of recounting the assault, he described how Gibbs had thrown the severed fingers on the floor. The investigators pressed him about how Gibbs came by the fingers. Stoner told them it was because the platoon had killed a lot of innocent people.
At that point, the investigators asked Stoner to start from the beginning. When had the platoon killed innocent people? Bit by bit, Stoner laid out the whole history, naming names and places and times.
As other members of the platoon were called in and interviewed, many confirmed Stoner's account and described the shootings for investigators. Morlock, who proved particularly gregarious, agreed to speak on videotape. Relaxed and unconcerned in front of the camera, he nonchalantly described the kills in detail.
Morlock's confession kicked off an intense search for evidence. When the Army's investigators were dispatched to FOB Ramrod, they went straight to the top of a Hesco barrier near Gibbs' housing unit. Right where Morlock said it would be, they found the bottom of a plastic water bottle containing two pieces of cloth. Inside each piece of cloth was a severed human finger. But then a strange thing happened. When investigators compared prints of the two fingers to those in the company's database, the prints didn't match up. Either the records were screwed up, which was quite possible, or there were more dead guys out there who were unaccounted for.
Last week, on March 23rd, Morlock was sentenced to 24 years in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. "The Army wants Gibbs," says one defense lawyer. "They want to throw him in jail and move on." Gibbs insists that all three killings he took part in were "legitimate combat engagements." Three other low-level soldiers facing murder charges - Winfield, Holmes and Wagnon - also maintain their innocence. As for the other men in Bravo Company, five have already been convicted of lesser crimes, including drug use, stabbing a corpse and beating up Stoner, and two more face related charges. In December, Staff Sgt. Stevens was sentenced to nine months in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. He was stripped to the lowest service rank - private E-1 - but over the protests of military prosecutors, he was allowed to remain in the Army.
So far, though, no officers or senior officials have been charged in either the murders or the cover-up. Last October, the Army quietly launched a separate investigation, guided by Brig. Gen. Stephen Twitty, into the critical question of officer accountability. But the findings of that inquiry, which was concluded last month, have been kept secret - and the Army refuses to say whether it has disciplined or demoted any of the commanders responsible for 3rd Platoon. Even if the commanding officers were not co-conspirators or accomplices in the crimes, they repeatedly ignored clear warning signs and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit. Indeed, the resentment of Afghans was so commonplace among soldiers in the platoon that when Morlock found himself being questioned by Army investigators, he expressed no pity or remorse about the murders.
Toward the end of Morlock's interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur. "None of us in the platoon - the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant - no one gives a fuck about these people," Morlock said.
Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan. "Some shit goes down," he said, "you're gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck 'em."
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2) U.S. Gives Its Air Power Expansive Role in Libya
By ERIC SCHMITT
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29military.html?hp
WASHINGTON - Even as President Obama on Monday described a narrower role for the United States in a NATO-led operation in Libya, the American military has been carrying out an expansive and increasingly potent air campaign to compel the Libyan Army to turn against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
When the mission was launched, it was largely seen as having a limited, humanitarian agenda: to keep Colonel Qaddafi from attacking his own people. But the White House, the Pentagon and their European allies have given it the most expansive possible interpretation, amounting to an all-out assault on Libya's military.
A growing armada of coalition warplanes, armed with more precise information about the location and abilities of Libyan Army units than was known a week ago, have effectively provided the air cover the ragtag opposition has needed to stave off certain defeat in its de facto eastern capital, Benghazi.
Allied aircraft are not only dropping 500-pound bombs on Libyan troops, they are also using psychological operations to try to break their will to fight, broadcasting messages in Arabic and English, telling Libyan soldiers and sailors to abandon their posts and go back to their homes and families, and to defy Colonel Qaddafi's orders.
The Obama administration has been reluctant to call the operation an actual war, and it has sought to emphasize the involvement of a dozen other countries, particularly Italy, Britain and France. In his speech on Monday night, Mr. Obama, as he has in the past, portrayed the mission as a limited one, and described the United States' role as "supporting."
But interviews in recent days offer a fuller picture of American involvement, and show that it is far deeper than discussed in public and more instrumental to the fight than was previously known.
From the air, the United States is supplying much more firepower than any other country. The allies have fired nearly 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles since the campaign started on March 19, all but 7 from the United States. The United States has flown about 370 attack missions, and its allied partners have flown a similar number, but the Americans have dropped 455 precision-guided munitions compared with 147 from other coalition members.
Besides taking part in the airstrikes, the American military is taking the lead role in gathering intelligence, intercepting Libyan radio transmissions, for instance, and using the information to orchestrate attacks against the Libyan forces on the ground. And over the weekend the Air Force quietly sent three of its most fearsome weapons to the operation.
The strategy for White House officials nervous that the Libya operation could drag on for weeks or months, even under a NATO banner, is to hit Libyan forces hard enough to force them to oust Colonel Qaddafi, a result that Mr. Obama has openly encouraged.
"Certainly, the implied though not stated goal here is that the Libyan Army will decide they're fighting for a losing cause," said Gen. John P. Jumper, a retired Air Force chief of staff. "You're probably dealing with a force that may not be totally motivated to continue this for the long haul."
Ten days into the assault, the officials said that Libya's formidable integrated air defense has been largely obliterated, and that the operation was shifting to a new phase devised to put even more pressure on the country's armored columns and ground troops.
For the Americans, six tank-killing A-10 Warthogs that fire laser-guided Maverick missiles or 30-millimeter cannons arrived on the scene this weekend. The United States also deployed two B-1B bombers, as well as two AC-130 gunships, lumbering aircraft that orbit over targets at roughly 15,000 feet, bristling with 40-millimeter and 105-millimeter cannons. The gunships' weapons are so precise that they could operate against Libyan forces in cities, which so far have been off limits for fear of civilian casualties.
On Sunday, allied warships and submarines fired six Tomahawk cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Libyan 32nd Brigade, based in Tripoli and commanded by one of the Libyan leader's sons, Khamis Qaddafi. Colonel Qaddafi has used the brigade in the past for internal repression.
"This is one of Qaddafi's most loyal units and are also one of the most active in terms of attacking innocent people," Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, the director of the military's joint staff, told reporters on Monday.
Despite this increased pressure on Libya's elite forces, Admiral Gortney insisted that the military was not going beyond the mandate of the United Nations resolution.
"I would definitely not say mission creep," he said.
Over all, commanders say they are trying to create havoc among the Libyan forces, cutting off their logistic pipeline, severing their communications back to headquarters in Tripoli, and stoking fear within the ranks with round-the-clock attacks.
"You want to create confusion at the front, go in after command and control at the rear and supply lines in between and ammunition facilities anywhere that we can find them," Admiral Gortney said Monday, describing the overall effect the campaign is trying to achieve.
On Sunday, an EC-130J Commando Solo aircraft broadcast messages in English and Arabic, to warn Libyan armed forces. "Libyan sailors, leave your ship immediately," the message warned. "Leave your equipment and return to your family or your home. The Qaddafi regime forces are violating a United Nations resolution ordering the end of hostilities in your country."
Air commanders provided an example of the role of American intelligence-gathering. Air Force eavesdropping planes intercept communications from Libyan troops and relay that information to a Global Hawk drone flying high overhead. The Global Hawk zooms in on the location of armored forces and determines rough coordinates. In some cases, the drones are the first to detect moving targets. The Global Hawk sends the coordinates to analysts at a ground station, who pass the data on to the command center for targeting. The command center beams the coordinates to an E-3 Sentry Awacs command-and-control plane, which in turn directs F-16 and Harrier jets and other warplanes to their targets.
"Our message to the regime troops is simple: Stop fighting, stop killing your own people, stop obeying the orders of Colonel Qaddafi," Admiral Gortney said last week. "To the degree that you defy these demands, we will continue to hit you and make it more difficult for you to keep going."
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3) Japan Tries to Stem Leak of Radioactive Water
By HIROKO TABUCHI
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/world/asia/30japan.html?hp
TOKYO - Workers at Japan's crippled nuclear plant piled up sandbags and readied emergency storage tanks on Tuesday to stop a fresh leak of highly contaminated water from reaching the ocean, opening up another front in the battle to contain the world's worst nuclear accident in decades.
As fears of further contamination grew, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said his government was in a state of maximum alert over the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
The Japanese government said the discovery of plutonium in the soil near the plant provided new evidence that the fuel in at least one of the plant's reactors had experienced a partial meltdown. A full meltdown of the fuel rods could release huge amounts of radiation into the environment.
"There is a high possibility that there has been at least some melting of the fuel rods," said Yukio Edano, the government's chief spokesman. "That in itself is a very serious situation," he said.
"This quake, tsunami and the nuclear accident are the biggest crises for Japan" in decades, Mr. Kan said in Parliament.
Mr. Kan defended his visit to a nuclear power plant crippled by a tsunami earlier this month. Responding to questions for the first time since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit northeast Japan, Mr. Kan acknowledged that the crisis at the plant gave little cause for optimism.
Mr. Kan toured the plant the day after the tsunami, and some lawmakers have suggested his presence delayed efforts by the plant operator to immediately confront the emergency.
He said his March 12 visit was not a "political performance," the Kyodo news service reported.
"Grasping the situation at the plant at that time was extremely important," he said.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is scheduled to meet the embattled prime minister on a visit to Japan Thursday, the French leader's office said. Mr. Sarkozy will travel to Japan on behalf of the Group of 20 leading world economies. Mr. Sarkozy's visit will be separate from a trip by French nuclear experts, who will consult with the operator of the Fukushima plant.
Efforts to contain the unfolding crisis at the plant, ravaged in the quake and tsunami, have focused on restoring power and restarting the cooling systems at the plant's six reactors, while keeping the nuclear fuel rods cool in the meantime with fire hoses and pumps.
But in the past days, work at the plant's most severely damaged reactors, Nos. 1 through 3, has slowed, after the discovery of highly radioactive water around and inside the reactor buildings. Last week, three workers were injured after stepping into radioactive water at Reactor No. 3. The water has now accumulated inside the turbine buildings of the three reactors and is now making its way through separate underground tunnels to openings just 200 feet from the sea, officials say.
A leak of the radioactive water, which measured more than 1,000 millisieverts an hour on the surface at Reactor No. 3, could exacerbate smaller leaks of radiation detected in the seawater around the plant. Contaminated water was also found at tunnels from the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, though with much lower levels of radiation. Officials have said that the water is likely leaking either from broken pipes inside the reactor, or from a breach in the reactor's pressure vessel, which houses the nuclear fuel.
On Tuesday, workers piled sandbags outside the opening of one tunnel in danger of overflowing near Reactor No. 1, according to the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company. They also prepared to pump water out of the turbine buildings, and to secure storage tanks to hold the highly radioactive water.
But capacity may be running out, officials said. At Reactor No. 3, for example, a 750-gallon tank inside the reactor building is already full, while a smaller tank is more than half full. "When there is no more room in the tanks," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, a top official at Japan's nuclear regulator, "we will need to think of another option."
Radioactive leaks at the plant have become a growing concern. Shipments of milk, spinach and other agricultural produce were banned last week after tests showed higher-than-normal amounts of radioactive iodine 131 and cesium. Tokyo briefly advised that infants not drink tap water after the radioactive iodine was detected in the city's water supply.
Last week, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, an independent think tank in the United States, said that since the quake and its aftermath, the plant has already released far more radioactivity than the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. The institute, based in Takoma Park, Maryland, said that by March 22, the Fukushima reactors had released about 2.4 million curies of iodine 131, about 160,000 times the best estimate of the amount released at Three Mile Island, and about 10 percent of the amount released in Chernobyl in 1986. Fukushima Daiichi has also released half-a-million curies of cesium-134 and cesium-137, which have longer half lives, also about 10 percent the amount released in Chernobyl.
"While the releases are still considerably below Chernobyl, they have already reached a level that could affect the region around the site for a prolonged period," Arjun Makhijani, the institute's president, said in a statement.
Concerns over the leaks took on an added urgency late Monday, as Tokyo Electric Power announced it had found traces of plutonium in the plant's soil. The plutonium levels detected were not a risk to humans, but the development added urgency to regain control of the plant, Mr. Edano said Tuesday.
It was unknown where the plutonium had come from. The reactors could be a source, and tests of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, which ended in 1980, left trace amounts of plutonium around the world. The highest levels in the soil were found about 500 yards from the most heavily damaged reactors, the company said.
All the reported readings are within the safe range of plutonium levels in sediment and soil given by the United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. But Tokyo Electric Power said the highest reading was more than three times the level found in Japan compared with the average during the past 20 years.
The challenge now, Mr. Edano said, is to keep pumping enough water to ensure that fuel rods do not overheat while at the same time trying to minimize the overflow of contaminated water.
All three kinds of nuclear fuel at the complex could leak plutonium. Reactor No. 3 is fueled partly by mixed oxide fuel, or mox, which is made from plutonium and uranium. Most reactor fuel is uranium.
Mr. Nishiyama, who is deputy director general for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said that while the detected plutonium levels were low, they pointed to the gravity of the crisis at the complex. Plutonium is a heavy element and not easily dispersed, he said, so higher levels outside the reactor suggested a wider leak.
"This detection from the soil speaks to the importance and seriousness of the situation," Mr. Nishiyama said.
The government's official death toll from the quake and tsunami rose above 11,000 on Tuesday, with more than 17,000 listed as missing.
Reporting was contributed from Tokyo by Ayasa Aizawa, Ken Ijichi and Moshe Komata, and Kevin Drew in Hong Kong.
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4) Food Inflation Kept Hidden in Tinier Bags
[This is legal grand theft on a massive scale....bw]
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and CATHERINE RAMPELL
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/business/29shrink.html?hp
Chips are disappearing from bags, candy from boxes and vegetables from cans.
As an expected increase in the cost of raw materials looms for late summer, consumers are beginning to encounter shrinking food packages.
With unemployment still high, companies in recent months have tried to camouflage price increases by selling their products in tiny and tinier packages. So far, the changes are most visible at the grocery store, where shoppers are paying the same amount, but getting less.
For Lisa Stauber, stretching her budget to feed her nine children in Houston often requires careful monitoring at the store. Recently, when she cooked her usual three boxes of pasta for a big family dinner, she was surprised by a smaller yield, and she began to suspect something was up.
"Whole wheat pasta had gone from 16 ounces to 13.25 ounces," she said. "I bought three boxes and it wasn't enough - that was a little embarrassing. I bought the same amount I always buy, I just didn't realize it, because who reads the sizes all the time?"
Ms. Stauber, 33, said she began inspecting her other purchases, aisle by aisle. Many canned vegetables dropped to 13 or 14 ounces from 16; boxes of baby wipes went to 72 from 80; and sugar was stacked in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags, she said.
Five or so years ago, Ms. Stauber bought 16-ounce cans of corn. Then they were 15.5 ounces, then 14.5 ounces, and the size is still dropping. "The first time I've ever seen an 11-ounce can of corn at the store was about three weeks ago, and I was just floored," she said. "It's sneaky, because they figure people won't know."
In every economic downturn in the last few decades, companies have reduced the size of some products, disguising price increases and avoiding comparisons on same-size packages, before and after an increase. Each time, the marketing campaigns are coy; this time, the smaller versions are "greener" (packages good for the environment) or more "portable" (little carry bags for the takeout lifestyle) or "healthier" (fewer calories).
Where companies cannot change sizes - as in clothing or appliances - they have warned that prices will be going up, as the costs of cotton, energy, grain and other raw materials are rising.
"Consumers are generally more sensitive to changes in prices than to changes in quantity," John T. Gourville, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School, said. "And companies try to do it in such a way that you don't notice, maybe keeping the height and width the same, but changing the depth so the silhouette of the package on the shelf looks the same. Or sometimes they add more air to the chips bag or a scoop in the bottom of the peanut butter jar so it looks the same size."
Thomas J. Alexander, a finance professor at Northwood University, said that businesses had little choice these days when faced with increases in the costs of their raw goods. "Companies only have pricing power when wages are also increasing, and we're not seeing that right now because of the high unemployment," he said.
Most companies reduce products quietly, hoping consumers are not reading labels too closely.
But the downsizing keeps occurring. A can of Chicken of the Sea albacore tuna is now packed at 5 ounces, instead of the 6-ounce version still on some shelves, and in some cases, the 5-ounce can costs more than the larger one. Bags of Doritos, Tostitos and Fritos now hold 20 percent fewer chips than in 2009, though a spokesman said those extra chips were just a "limited time" offer.
Trying to keep customers from feeling cheated, some companies are introducing new containers that, they say, have terrific advantages - and just happen to contain less product.
Kraft is introducing "Fresh Stacks" packages for its Nabisco Premium saltines and Honey Maid graham crackers. Each has about 15 percent fewer crackers than the standard boxes, but the price has not changed. Kraft says that because the Fresh Stacks include more sleeves of crackers, they are more portable and "the packaging format offers the benefit of added freshness," said Basil T. Maglaris, a Kraft spokesman, in an e-mail.
And Procter & Gamble is expanding its "Future Friendly" products, which it promotes as using at least 15 percent less energy, water or packaging than the standard ones.
"They are more environmentally friendly, that's true - but they're also smaller," said Paula Rosenblum, managing partner for retail systems research at Focus.com, an online specialist network. "They announce it as great new packaging, and in fact what it is is smaller packaging, smaller amounts of the product," she said.
Or marketers design a new shape and size altogether, complicating any effort to comparison shop. The unwrapped Reese's Minis, which were introduced in February, are smaller than the foil-wrapped Miniatures. They are also more expensive - $0.57 an ounce at FreshDirect, versus $0.37 an ounce for the individually wrapped.
At H. J. Heinz, prices on ketchup, condiments, sauces and Ore-Ida products have already gone up, and the company is selling smaller-than-usual versions of condiments, like 5-ounce bottles of items like Heinz 57 Sauce sold at places like Dollar General.
"I have never regretted raising prices in the face of significant cost pressures, since we can always course-correct if the outcome is not as we expected," Heinz's chairman and chief executive, William R. Johnson, said last month.
While companies have long adjusted package sizes to appeal to changing tastes, from supersizes to 100-calorie packs, the recession drove a lot of corporations to think small. The standard size for Edy's ice cream went from 2 liters to 1.5 in 2008. And Tropicana shifted to a 59-ounce carton rather than a 64-ounce one last year, after the cost of oranges rose.
With prices for energy and for raw materials like corn, cotton and sugar creeping up and expected to surge later this year, companies are barely bothering to cover up the shrinking packs.
"Typically, the product manufacturers are doing this slightly ahead of the perceived inflationary issues," Ms. Rosenblum said. "Lately, it hasn't been subtle - I mean, they've been shrinking by noticeable amounts."
That can work to a company's benefit. In the culture of thinness, smaller may be a selling point. It lets retailers honestly claim, for example, that a snack package contains fewer calories - without having to change the ingredients a smidge.
"For indulgences like ice cream, chocolate and potato chips, consumers may say 'I don't mind getting a little bit less because I shouldn't be consuming so much anyway,' " said Professor Gourville. "That's a harder argument to make with something like diapers or orange juice."
But even while companies blame the recession for smaller packages, they rarely increase sizes in good times, he said.
He traced the shrinking package trends to the late 1980s, when companies like Chock full o' Nuts downsized the one-pound tin of ground coffee to 13 ounces. That shocked consumers, for whom a pound of coffee had been as standard a purchase unit as a dozen eggs or a six-pack of beer, he said.
Once the economy rebounds, he said, a new "jumbo" size product typically emerges, at an even higher cost per ounce. Then the gradual shrinking process of all package sizes begins anew, he said.
"It's a continuous cycle, where at some point the smallest package offered becomes so small that perhaps they're phased out and replaced by the medium-size package, which has been shrunk down," he said.
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5) Marine Life Faces Threat From Runoff
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL and WILLIAM J. BROAD
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/world/asia/29safety.html?ref=world
The announcement by Japan's Agency for Natural Resources and Energy that high levels of radioactive cesium have been detected in seawater near the crippled nuclear reactors raises the prospect that radiation could enter the food chain.
Cesium 137 levels were 20 times the normal level about 1,000 feet from the effluent at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. That is far less than the level of the other main radioactive isotope spilling from the plant, iodine 131. It was found in concentrations of more than 1,150 times the maximum allowable for a seawater sample a mile north of the plant.
Still, scientists say, cesium 137 poses the greater long-term danger to the marine food chain.
Iodine 131 degrades relatively fast, becoming half as potent every eight days. So the radioactive risk can be combated by banning fishing and the consumption of seafood for a period of time, as the Japanese have already done.
Cesium 137, on the other hand, has a half-life of 30 years. Worse still, it is absorbed by marine plants, which are eaten by fish and - like mercury - tends to become concentrated as it moves up the food chain.
"It's worrisome in that CS 137 is leaking, although the levels are still low," said Paul G. Falkowski, a professor at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. "At some point this water that is pooling in various places is ultimately going to make its way out to the sea." And if there is a lot of cesium 137 over an extended period "then you'll have to worry."
The exact source of the cesium 137 is unclear, although some scientists have speculated that the seawater dumped on the overheating reactors to cool them picked up radiation and then washed back out to sea. But Japanese officials said highly radioactive water in several tunnels is threatening to overflow and may also contain cesium 137.
Even so, the ocean has remarkable power to dilute radioactive effluents, because of its sheer volume and depth. And the ocean is already slightly radioactive.
Over the eons, elements like uranium have washed into it from rivers. More recently, humans have dumped radioactive materials into the marine environment, including dozens of nuclear warheads and reactors that are slowly decaying, as well as many thousands of barrels of radioactive waste.
In October 1993, a Russian ship dumped hundreds of tons of low-level nuclear waste into the Sea of Japan, touching off a diplomatic row between Tokyo and Moscow.
Oceanographers have monitored the areas around the dumps for dangerous levels of radioactivity but typically find little of consequence because of the sea's powers of dilution. Even so, in 1994 most countries gave up the longstanding practice of dumping radioactive materials into the sea.
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6) Michigan Cuts Jobless Benefit by Six Weeks
By MICHAEL COOPER
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/politics/29michigan.html?ref=us
Michigan, whose unemployment rate has topped 10 percent longer than that of any other state, is about to set another record: its new Republican governor, Rick Snyder, signed a law Monday that will lead the state to pay fewer weeks of unemployment benefits next year than any other state.
Democrats and advocates for the unemployed expressed outrage that a such a hard-hit state will become the most miserly when it comes to how long it pays benefits to those who have lost their jobs. All states currently pay 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, before extended benefits paid by the federal government kick in. Michigan's new law means that starting next year, when the federal benefits are now set to end, the state will stop paying benefits to the jobless after just 20 weeks. The shape of future extensions is unclear.
The measure, passed by a Republican-led Legislature, took advocates for the unemployed by surprise: the language cutting benefits next year was slipped quietly into a bill that was originally sold as way to preserve unemployment benefits this year.
The original bill was aimed at reducing unemployment fraud and making a technical change so the state's current long-term unemployed could continue receiving extended unemployment benefits from the federal government for up to 99 weeks - benefits that would have been phased out next week without a change in the state law to make the unemployed in the state eligible to continue receiving benefits. Republican lawmakers amended it to cut the length of benefits starting in January.
"It turns the clock back 50 years at a time when unemployment is at historic highs since the Depression," Representative Sander M. Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said in an interview, adding that he worried that the state would set a precedent that would be followed by other states, including Florida, that are thinking of curtailing their unemployment programs. "I think that Michigan should not be to unemployment insurance what Wisconsin has become to collective bargaining."
But Republicans and business groups said that cutting benefits was necessary, because the unemployment trust fund, which was ill-prepared to cope with the recession, is insolvent. The state owes the federal government $4 billion that it borrowed to keep its program afloat, and unemployment taxes on businesses have already been raised, and will need to be raised more, to repay the money. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce called the new law "a huge win for job providers," and said it could save up to $300 million a year.
Mr. Snyder issued a statement after signing the bill trumpeting the fact that it would preserve the extended benefits this year - and making no mention of the fact that it would cut state benefits beginning next year. "Snyder Signs Bill to Protect Unemployed," was the headline of the news release that his office sent out. "Now that we have continued this safety net, we must renew our focus on improving Michigan's economic climate," he said in the statement.
Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Mr. Snyder, said in an e-mail that he signed the bill because 35,000 Michiganders would have lost their extended benefits this week, and an additional 150,000 would have lost them by year's end, if the state's law had not been altered. She said that about 250,000 people collected more than 20 weeks of benefits in 2010.
Advocates for the unemployed called it a bad trade. "We have a temporary change to help some jobless workers that is imposing an indefinite or permanent cost on future jobless workers," said Rick McHugh, a staff lawyer for the National Employment Law Project, which opposed the law. "And that does seem doubly unfair when the temporary help for current jobless workers is almost totally paid for by the federal government."
But business groups saw the state's need to change its unemployment law as an opportunity to make the cuts to benefits that they have long sought.
"The business community, the chamber included, were opposed to a one-sided benefits increase," said Wendy Block, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce's lobbyist responsible for health policy and human resources initiatives, and unemployment insurance. She said that while the extended benefits were currently paid for by the federal government, the money comes from a fund that is financed by federal unemployment taxes on employers. "Employers will ultimately see higher federal unemployment taxes to pay for this," Ms. Block said.
More than half the states together owe the federal government more than $46 billion that they borrowed to pay for their unemployment programs during the downturn. Many states had salted away too little money in their unemployment trust funds during good times - often because they cut taxes on employers - and saw their funds depleted by the length and depth of the recession, and the slow pace at which businesses have begun hiring again. Now some other states are thinking about reducing unemployment benefits.
In Florida, where the unemployment rate hovers at 11.5 percent, even higher than Michigan's current rate of 10.4 percent, lawmakers are zeroing in on a similar bill. The Florida House also approved a bill this month to reduce the number of weeks unemployed workers could receive benefits to 20 weeks, from 26, and make it easier for businesses to deny benefits to applicants. A Senate bill takes a less stringent approach and does not cut the number of weeks workers can receive benefits. (It is unclear how the differences will be resolved.) Doing so would undo a consensus that emerged in the years after World War II that states should pay up to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits. And it would come as the average length of unemployment has risen.
Richard A. Hobbie, the executive director of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, said "at a time when long-term unemployment is worse than ever, it doesn't match up well with the trends in the labor market."
One of the unemployed Michiganders who was warned that her extended benefits could run out next week without action was Melissa Barone, 42, who lost her job with a software company in August 2009, and has been collecting unemployment since then. She has gone back to school to train to be a nurse.
"Maybe what they need to do is look at giving businesses more incentives," Ms. Barone said, "rather than taking from the guy that is unemployed and needs those funds."
Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting from Miami.
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7) Justices Deny New Appeal by Convict in Georgia
By ADAM LIPTAK
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29teacher.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday turned down what were probably the last set of appeals from Troy Davis, a death row inmate from Georgia who was convicted of murdering an off-duty police officer and whose case has attracted international attention.
In 2009, Mr. Davis obtained a new hearing from the Supreme Court by an unusual route, filing an original writ of habeas corpus with the justices rather than appealing from a lower-court ruling. The court responded by ordering a federal trial court in Georgia to consider whether new evidence clearly established Mr. Davis's innocence. Several witnesses in the case against him had recanted, and some had implicated the prosecution's main witness as the actual killer.
In August, the trial judge, Judge William T. Moore Jr., concluded that Mr. Davis's evidence was "largely smoke and mirrors." On Monday, the justices refused to review that ruling.
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8) Maine: Labor Mural Is Moved to Undisclosed Location
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 28, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29brfs-LABORMURALIS_BRF.html?ref=us
A mural depicting Maine's labor history was removed from the lobby of the state's Department of Labor and stored at an undisclosed location over the weekend by directive of Gov. Paul LePage. Mr. LePage, a Republican elected in 2010, says the mural favors labor interests at the expense of business interests. Last week, he ordered that the mural be taken down and that Labor Department conference rooms named for labor leaders be renamed for mountains, counties or something else perceived as neutral. Robert Shetterly, president of the Union of Maine Visual Artists, called it "an exceptionally cowardly act" to move it over the weekend when no one would notice.
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9) Pentagon: Libya mission has cost US $550M so far
by Pauline Jelinek
The Associated Press
3/29/11
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/29/pentagon-libya-mission-has-cost-us-550-million-so-far/
WASHINGTON -- The military intervention in Libya has cost the Pentagon an extra $550 million so far, mostly for bombs and missiles, officials said Tuesday.
The figure is not a full picture of the price tag for the operation in that it does not include such money as pay for U.S. sailors, airmen and other forces, who would have been deployed somewhere in the world anyway, officials said. But it is the first official figure released on the cost of setting up the no-fly zone in the North African nation and protecting civilians from strongman Moammar Gadhafi as he resists a movement to oust him.
Of the $550 million in added spending through Monday, about 60 percent was "for munitions, the remaining costs are for higher operating tempo" of U.S. forces and of getting them there, Cmdr. Kathleen Kesler, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Tuesday.
As of Monday, the 10th day of the intervention, the U.S. had launched 192 long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles from naval positions in the Mediterranean Sea -- at a cost of about $1 million to $1.5 million each. The U.S. also had flown 983 sorties, 370 of those bombing missions against Gadhafi military sites and forces and the rest for surveillance, refueling and so on.
The spending only addresses the U.S. part of the costs in Libya, where an international coalition has been operating and NATO is now taking over command.
"Future costs are highly uncertain," Kesler said. But officials estimate that they'll see added costs of about $40 million over the next three weeks as U.S. forces are reduced and NATO assumes more responsibility for the operation started March 19, she said.
After that, officials expect to spend about $40 million a month, "if U.S. forces stay at the levels currently planned and the operation continues," Kesler said.
With the U.S. already stretching to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan amid difficult financial times, the operation has drawn mixed opinions among lawmakers, including one who estimated last week that Libya could be a $1 billion campaign.
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10) Why We're Fasting
By MARK BITTMAN
"This is a moral issue; the budget is a moral document. We can take care of the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure and strengthen our safety net by reducing military spending and eliminating corporate subsidies and tax loopholes for the rich. Or we can sink further into debt and amoral individualism by demonizing and starving the poor. Which side are you on?"
March 29, 2011, 10:28 pm
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/why-were-fasting/?hp
I stopped eating on Monday and joined around 4,000 other people in a fast to call attention to Congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry.
By doing so, I surprised myself; after all, I eat for a living. But the decision was easy after I spoke last week with David Beckmann, a reverend who is this year's World Food Prize laureate. Our conversation turned, as so many about food do these days, to the poor.
Who are - once again - under attack, this time in the House budget bill, H.R. 1. The budget proposes cuts in the WIC program (which supports women, infants and children), in international food and health aid (18 million people would be immediately cut off from a much-needed food stream, and 4 million would lose access to malaria medicine) and in programs that aid farmers in underdeveloped countries. Food stamps are also being attacked, in the twisted "Welfare Reform 2011" bill. (There are other egregious maneuvers in H.R. 1, but I'm sticking to those related to food.)
These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts - they'd barely make a dent - will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now. And: The bill would increase defense spending.
Beckmann, who is president of Bread for the World, made me want to join in just by talking about his commitment. For me, the fast is a way to demonstrate my interest in this fight, as well as a way to remind myself and others that there are bigger things in life than dinner. (Shocking, I know.) I expect I'll learn something about patience and fortitude while I'm at it. Thirty-six hours into the fast, my senses are heightened and everything feels a bit strange. Odors from the cafeteria a floor away drift down to my desk. In the elevator, I can smell a muffin; on the street, I can smell everything - good and bad. But as hungry as I may get, we know I'll eat well soon. (Please check my blog for a progress report.)
Many poor people don't have that option, and Beckmann and his co-organizers are calling for God to create a "circle of protection" around them. Some are fasting for a day, many for longer. (I'm fasting until Friday, and Beckmann until Monday. And, no, it's not too late to join us.)
When I reminded Beckmann that poor people's hunger was hardly a new phenomenon, and that God hasn't made a confirmed appearance recently - at least that I know of - he suggested I read Isaiah 58, in which God says that if we were more generous while we fasted he'd treat us better. Maybe. But a billion people are just as hungry, human, and as deserving now as the Israelites were when they were fleeing Egypt, and I don't see any manna.
This isn't about skepticism, however; it's about ironies and outrages. In 2010, corporate profits grew at their fastest rate since 1950, and we set records in the number of Americans on food stamps. The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all American households combined, the effective tax rate on the nation's richest people has fallen by about half in the last 20 years, and General Electric paid zero dollars in U.S. taxes on profits of more than $14 billion. Meanwhile, roughly 45 million Americans spend a third of their posttax income on food - and still run out monthly - and one in four kids goes to bed hungry at least some of the time.
It's those people whom Beckmann and his allies (more than 30 organizations are on board) are trying to protect. The coalition may be a bit too quick to support deficit reduction, essentially saying, "We understand the need for fiscal responsibility, but we don't want to sacrifice the powerless, nearly voiceless poor in its name. As Beckmann knows, however, deficit reduction isn't as important as keeping people from starving: "We shouldn't be reducing our meager efforts for poor people in order to reduce the deficit," he told me by phone. "They didn't get us into this, and starving them isn't going to get us out of it."
This is a moral issue; the budget is a moral document. We can take care of the deficit and rebuild our infrastructure and strengthen our safety net by reducing military spending and eliminating corporate subsidies and tax loopholes for the rich. Or we can sink further into debt and amoral individualism by demonizing and starving the poor. Which side are you on?
If faith increases your motivation, that's great, but I doubt God will intervene here. Instead, we need to gather and insist that our collective resources be used for our collective welfare, not for the wealthiest thousand or even million Americans but for a vast majority of us in the United States and, indeed, for citizens of the world who have difficulty making ends meet. Or feeding their kids.
Though Beckmann is too kind to say it, he and many other religious leaders believe that true worship can't take place without joining this struggle: "You can't have real religion," he told me, "unless you work for justice for hungry and poor people."
I don't think you can have much humanity, either.
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11) As Sweeping Layoffs Loom, Schools Gird for Turmoil
By SAM DILLON
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/education/31layoffs.html?hp
School authorities across the nation are warning thousands of teachers that they could lose their jobs in June, raising the possibility that America's public schools may see the most extensive layoffs of their teaching staffs in decades.
Though many of the warnings may not be acted upon - school systems, their budget outlook unclear, routinely overstate their likely layoffs at this time of year - when layoffs do occur, they cause a chaotic annual reshuffling of staff members.
Thousands of teachers are forced to change schools, grade levels or subjects, creating a chronic instability that educators call "teacher churn."
"Most districts have not done layoffs for years, so they have no idea how bad this is going to be when it hits," said Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that has studied the effects of teacher layoffs.
Much of the public debate over teacher layoffs has concerned the question of how layoffs are decided, with sharp divisions between politicians and union leaders over the seniority-based layoff methods stipulated in union contracts.
Many argue that the rules rob schools of the talented young teachers who are the first to be let go. Union officials say that without such protections, more senior teachers would be let go first to save money.
But school superintendents say that the consequences of sweeping teacher layoffs are often overlooked in the policy debate. Layoffs, they say, hurt school cohesion, undermine student achievement and rupture ties with parents.
"I'm getting nauseous just remembering," said Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who as the Cleveland superintendent in the last decade had to make draconian teacher cuts. "The result was devastating for our classrooms."
School districts from Rhode Island to California have begun notifying teachers of layoffs. State laws or union contracts require notifications in the spring to teachers whose contracts might not be renewed, but because most school budgets are just estimates in March, districts routinely exaggerate the likely cuts, just to be safe.
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg painted a worst-case outcome of 4,675 teacher layoffs last month. But the city has not cut large numbers of teachers in three decades, and may avoid that this year too.
The New York State School Boards Association estimated that the state's other 675 districts - excluding the big five districts of New York, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Yonkers - could cut as many as 9,300 teachers or as few as 900, depending on how much financial reserve money each district spends to avoid layoffs.
School finance experts say widespread teacher layoffs are more likely this year. The billions that Congress approved in 2009 and 2010 to forestall school layoffs is mostly spent. And, because their 401(k)'s have dwindled during the recession, older teachers are delaying retirement, which could have reduced the layoffs required to close district deficits, said Marguerite Roza, a researcher at the University of Washington.
"It's logical to anticipate much larger layoffs this year," Dr. Roza said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said criticism by politicians of seniority-based layoffs had obscured that "this magnitude of cuts will hurt children, whether you lay off senior people or junior people."
Arun Ramanathan, a former senior administrator in the San Diego school district, said seniority-based layoff policies created more turmoil than was publicly recognized. "The public imagines that districts just lay off teachers starting at the bottom of a long seniority list," Mr. Ramanathan said.
But the process is more complex in many districts, he said, partly because layoff quotas are first allocated to each of a district's schools, and teachers laid off from one school have the right to take the job of any junior educator at any other school, if they are certified to teach that subject.
"As a result, the harm of a single layoff can be multiplied, as a cascading process of 'bumping' begins," said a February study by Education Trust-West, a nonprofit group, that was critical of California's seniority-based layoff policies. Mr. Ramanathan was one of its authors.
"The system is quite insane," he said.
Quyen Tran knows this turmoil well. A 30-year-old teacher in the New Haven Unified School District south of San Francisco, Ms. Tran has been pink-slipped in the spring four of the five years she has taught, but called back to teach every year. The layoffs and recalls have repeatedly forced her to refocus. She has taught five subjects and grade levels in three schools.
At the end of each of her first two years, Ms. Tran was bumped from her classroom by more senior teachers. Since getting tenure in her third year, she has twice bumped junior teachers from their classrooms. She received her fourth pink slip this month, and has attended California Teachers Association rallies to protest the layoffs.
Rick LaPlante, a spokesman for her district, said Ms. Tran's career upheaval was "not common but not rare."
"It's chaos," Mr. LaPlante said of California's system of annual layoffs. "Maybe unfortunate is the best word. Or terrible."
Those adjectives also describe the disruption layoffs caused in Minneapolis in the mid-2000s, according to a report by the New Teacher Project, which worked with the district.
As enrollments dropped from 2005 to 2009, Minneapolis schools shed 15 percent of their teachers, the report says. But each year half the teachers laid off in the spring were rehired in the fall. Half of those rehired returned to teach in a different school.
William Green, who was the Minneapolis superintendent from 2006 through last year, said parents felt victimized, because teachers were constantly being shuffled.
"Parents are scared to death when they send kids to school, and teachers become the face of the system for parents," Dr. Green said. "We hurt relations with a lot of parents by laying off their child's teacher."
In Cleveland, Dr. Byrd-Bennett presided over even more severe teacher layoffs. During her seven-year tenure, which began in 1998, she created dozens of specialized theme schools, and student achievement began rising.
But in the years after the 2004-5 layoffs, achievement leveled off, and it eventually dropped. In 2009, school authorities invited the Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit that represents urban districts, to visit Cleveland to diagnose problems.
The council's report concluded that teacher layoffs, carried out by seniority, had stripped Cleveland's specialty schools of key teachers. A Spanish-English immersion school had lost its dual language teachers; a school for gifted children had lost teachers who had special training to work with those students.
Cleveland's seniority layoff provisions "enforced an untenable bumping system during budget cuts," the report concluded.
"The churn caused by layoffs can be extremely disruptive and hurt student achievement," said Michael Casserly, the council's executive director. "And conditions are ripe for disruptions to be dramatic this year."
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12) Confidence Slips Away as Japan Battles Nuclear Peril
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/world/asia/30japan.html?hp
TOKYO - After workers switched on the first set of control room lights at Japan's crippled power plant in Fukushima last week, the Japanese government offered its strongest assurances yet that its nuclear crisis was close to being under control.
Heroic workers and firefighters continued to cool the volatile reactors by pumping in hundreds of tons of water a day. Much-awaited electricity had reached the plant after a rush to extend new power lines, ready to hook up to vital cooling systems and guide the plant to a long-term "cold shutdown."
But less than a week later, a deluge of contaminated water, plutonium traces in the soil and an increasingly hazardous environment for workers at the plant have forced government officials to confront the reality that the emergency measures they have taken to keep nuclear fuel cool are producing increasingly dangerous side effects. And the prospect of restoring automatic cooling systems anytime soon is fading.
The recent flow of bad news from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station has undermined the drumbeat of optimistic statements by government and company officials who have at times tried to reassure a nervous public that significant progress is at hand - only to come up short.
"The earthquake, tsunami and the ensuing nuclear accident may be Japan's largest-ever crisis," the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, told Parliament on Tuesday, in his most sober message to date on the nuclear crisis. "We find ourselves in a situation where we can't let down our guard. We will continue to handle it in a state of maximum alert."
The setbacks have raised questions about how long, and at what cost, Japan can keep up what experts call its "feed and bleed" strategy of cooling the reactor' fuel rods with emergency infusions of water from the ocean and now from freshwater sources.
That cooling strategy, while essential to prevent full meltdowns, has released harmful amounts of radioactive steam into the atmosphere and set off leaks of highly contaminated water, making it perilous for some of the hundreds of workers at the plant to further critical repair work.
Moreover, the discovery of radioactive elements that experts say could come only from the core of a reactor suggest that the government's strategy may not be working and that partial fuel melting has not been completely halted.
The continuing crisis also underscores the unprecedented scale and complexity of the problems facing Fukushima: a plant ravaged by a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and 45-foot tsunami, and three reactors and four spent fuel pools with no proper cooling system yet and containing more long-lived radioactivity than the Chernobyl reactor, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, based in Takoma Park, Md.
This is why, despite the damage caused by the efforts so far, Japanese officials have little choice but to continue down the feed-and-bleed path. "The worst-case scenario is that a meltdown makes the plant's site a permanent grave," said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. "In a small island nation like Japan, that's just not an option. That is why the government is trying to prevent a meltdown at any cost."
The events have been a quick turn for the worse for the Japanese government. Just last week, officials at Tokyo Electric Power Company, the Fukushima Daiichi plant's operator, repeatedly hailed the extension of electrical wires to the plant, spoke of resuming electrically operated cooling systems and offered assurances that the situation would not get worse.
But late last week, three workers in a building next to Reactor No. 3 were injured when they stepped in contaminated water. Radioactive water was later discovered at two other reactors, making some areas of the reactor buildings dangerous for workers to approach.
Some of that water in the reactor structures also appears to be leaking out through damaged pipes or vessels, forming highly contaminated pools at the bottom of the turbine buildings adjacent to the reactors. On Tuesday, workers were forced to divert their attention to readying sandbags and pumps after the contaminated water was discovered in a tunnel leading close to the sea.
Compounding the matter, the government said Tuesday that the recent discovery of plutonium in the soil at the plant provided new evidence that at least one reactor was experiencing melting of its nuclear fuel, as happened in the early days of the crisis.
While the source of the plutonium found at the plant was unclear, all three kinds of nuclear fuel at the complex could leak plutonium.
Fresh signs of radiation leaks have raised questions about the sustainability of the government's feed-and-bleed approach.
One major problem, said Murray E. Jennex, an associate professor at San Diego State University with 20 years of experience in examining nuclear containment structures, was that all the water the Japanese were spraying had soaked important machinery like generators and pumps, further hampering efforts to restore the reactors' electricity supply. The use of helicopters in the first week to drop water on the rectors from above was especially ineffective in hitting the target and may have done more harm than good, he said.
"They dumped water all over the place," he said. "They keep on generating more contamination. That's the consequence of doing it. They got water on things that shouldn't be wet."
Hiroto Sakashita, an associate professor in nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics at Hokkaido University, said that though the fuel rods in the nuclear reactors had already lost over 99 percent of their heat, they were still giving off enough heat to evaporate an estimated 200 tons of water a day.
And the remaining heat, from isotopes with long half-lives, will take years to cool. "They will just have to keep on pouring and pouring," Mr. Sakashita said, "but contaminated water will keep leaking out."
"Handling this situation is getting increasingly difficult," he said.
Another hurdle workers face, of course, is to keep pumping enough water to cool the fuel rods, while at the same time trying to minimize the overflow of contaminated water. Tokyo Electric is also struggling to replace workers at the crippled plant, who must be cycled out as they approach a cumulative radiation exposure limit set by the Japanese government.
The company is leaning on its contractors to provide more workers, sometimes offering many times normal wages for the increasing risks of working at Fukushima, according to local news reports.
The risks that Japan could export its nuclear problems by allowing radioactive contaminants to get into the air and sea are among the reasons why the government and Tokyo Electric have enlisted the help of experts from France, the United States and elsewhere to make sure conditions do not spiral out of control.
On Tuesday, Peter B. Lyons, a senior United States nuclear energy official, said the Energy Department was preparing a shipment to Japan of radiation-hardened robots, and the personnel to demonstrate how to use them.
In an admission of how long the cooling process may take, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan's nuclear regulator, said late Tuesday: "We will have to continue cooling for quite a long period. We should be thinking years."
Kuni Yogo, a former atomic energy policy planner in the Japan Science and Technology Agency, said: "There is some trial and error, but this is the beginning of a three- to five-year effort."
Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.
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13) Developments in Japan's Disasters, Nuclear Crisis
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/30/world/asia/AP-AS-Japan-Earthquake-Today.html?hp
- NEW HIGH IN OCEAN RADIATION LEVELS. Nuclear safety officials say waters 300 yards (meters) from the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi plant contain 3,355 times the legal limit for the amount of radioactive iodine - the highest rate yet. The amount of iodine-131 found south of the plant does not pose an immediate threat to human health but is concerning, officials say.
- EMPEROR VISITS EVACUEES. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko console some of the thousands displaced by the twin disasters, spending about an hour at a Tokyo center. The respected royal couple typically visits disaster victims and made a trip to the site of the Kobe earthquake in 1995.
- UTILITY COMPANY PRESIDENT HOSPITALIZED. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the plant, announces that President Masataka Shimizu was admitted to a hospital late Tuesday after suffering dizziness and high blood pressure. The 66-year-old has not been seen in public since a March 13 news conference in Tokyo, raising speculation that he had suffered a breakdown.
- SAFETY REVIEW ORDERED. Amid criticism that safeguards were lax at the Fukushima plant, the nuclear agency orders plant operators nationwide to review their emergency procedures. The agency tells utilities they must have on hand mobile backup generators and fire engines, which have been used at Fukushima to cool the reactors.
- DEATH TOLL. The National Police Agency says 11,362 people have died in the disasters. Another 16,290 are missing.
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14) Mexican Immigrants Face Darkest Housing Picture
By KIRK SEMPLE
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/nyregion/30mexicans.html?ref=world
Among New Yorkers, it is a sentiment universally shared: the housing situation is tough. But a new study suggests that no one has it as tough as the city's Mexican immigrants.
Mexican immigrant households are more likely to experience overcrowding and spend more than half their income on rent than those of any other immigrant group or the native-born population, says the study, to be released Wednesday by the Community Service Society, an anti-poverty advocacy and research group in New York.
About 43 percent of all Mexican immigrant households are overcrowded, compared with an average of 15 percent of all immigrant households and 9 percent of households in the general population, according to the report, titled "Housing the City of Immigrants." The study also finds that about 35 percent of Mexican households spend more than half their income on rent, compared with 26 percent of all immigrant households and 24 percent of all households combined.
"Immigrants as a whole experience worse housing conditions than other New Yorkers," wrote the authors, Tom Waters and Victor Bach, who based their study on the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey conducted in 2008. "They pay a larger share of their income in rent and they are twice as likely to live in crowded conditions."
But the researchers, both housing policy analysts at the Community Service Society, also warned that such generalizations could be misleading because when examined close up, housing conditions differ widely among immigrant groups, reflecting the diversity and complexity of the immigrant experience in the city.
The report suggests that the relatively poor housing experience of many Mexicans is a function in part of the population's newness to New York and their low income levels.
Those immigrant groups that have been in the city for a longer period of time tend to have better access to subsidized and public housing, the report said. In addition, Mexicans, particularly men who have immigrated alone to the United States for work, will crowd apartments to save money, especially if they live in neighborhoods where affordable housing is scarce, scholars say.
Among its other intriguing observations, the report noted that while home ownership rose from one generation to the next - to 44 percent of all second-generation immigrant households from 31 percent of first-generation households - the increase was even sharper among low-income immigrants, rising to 34 percent among second-generation households from 17 percent among first-generation households.
While the authors did not suggest a reason for this difference, David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative at the Fiscal Policy Institute, said it could partly reflect the fact that some low-income immigrants were "pushed prematurely into home ownership by predatory lending."
The study also found that 61 percent of all households led by Dominican immigrants occupied rent-controlled or rent-stabilized housing, the highest of any group. The authors posited one possible cause: Dominicans first settled in areas where Puerto Ricans were already established and where there was a large stock of rent-regulated housing, like Washington Heights.
While there is often a direct parallel between income levels and housing conditions, the study showed that such a correlation sometimes breaks down. Asian immigrants from countries outside South Asia, China, Taiwan and South Korea have the highest median household income of any group, yet 17 percent of their households are overcrowded, nearly double the rate among the general population. At the same time, that group has one of the lowest percentages, 22 percent, of households with extraordinary rent burdens.
The report also found that households led by European immigrants were more likely to be owner-occupied (47 percent) than those of any other group, and the least likely to be overcrowded (4 percent). About 24 percent of all European households are spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent, one of the lowest rates among immigrant groups. But in low-income European households, that rate shoots up to 62 percent, the highest - along with Mexicans - of any low-income immigrant group.
The authors speculated that low-income Europeans "may be paying a premium in order to live close to the higher-income members of their group."
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15) $14 Million Jury Award to Ex-Inmate Is Dismissed
By ADAM LIPTAK
March 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/us/30scotus.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a $14 million jury award in favor of a former death row inmate who was freed after prosecutorial misconduct came to light.
The 5-to-4 decision divided along the court's ideological fault line and prompted the first dissent read from the bench this term, from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The former inmate, John Thompson, had sued Harry F. Connick, a former district attorney in New Orleans, saying his office had not trained prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence. Prosecutors in the office had failed to give Mr. Thompson's lawyers a report showing that blood at a crime scene was not his.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, said that only a pattern of misconduct would warrant holding Mr. Connick accountable for what happened on his watch.
Mr. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. "I was delivered an execution warrant in my cell seven times," he said in a statement on Tuesday. "I was only weeks from being executed when my lawyers got the killing stopped."
The blood evidence would have proved Mr. Thompson innocent of a 1984 armed robbery. Soon after he was convicted on that charge, prosecutors tried him for an unrelated murder. After the failure to turn over the blood evidence came to light in 1999, prosecutors dismissed the armed robbery charges. A state appeals court later reversed the murder conviction, reasoning that Mr. Thompson's armed robbery conviction had dissuaded him from testifying in his own defense in the murder case. In 2003, Mr. Thompson was retried for the murder and found not guilty.
"The role of a prosecutor," Justice Thomas wrote, "is to see that justice is done."
"By their own admission," he continued, "the prosecutors who tried Thompson's armed robbery case failed to carry out this responsibility. But the only issue before us is whether Connick, as the policy maker for the district attorney's office, was deliberately indifferent to the need to train the attorneys under his authority."
The answer to that question was no, Justice Thomas wrote, given what he said was an absence of proof concerning a pattern of misconduct.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justice Thomas's opinion.
Justice Scalia, in a concurrence joined by Justice Alito, said the misconduct in the case was the work of a single "miscreant prosecutor," Gerry Deegan, who suppressed evidence "he believed to be exculpatory, in an effort to railroad Thompson." No amount of training, Justice Scalia wrote, would have countered such willful wrongdoing.
In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that "no fewer than five prosecutors" were complicit in a violation of Mr. Thompson's constitutional rights. "They kept from him, year upon year, evidence vital to his defense."
The prosecutors' conduct, Justice Ginsburg wrote, "was a foreseeable consequence of lax training." Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the dissent.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Leon A. Cannizzaro Jr., the current district attorney in New Orleans, expressed relief over not having to pay a judgment that with interest was approaching $20 million, more than his office's annual budget. He said his office "should not be held financially responsible for the intentional, unethical and illegal acts of a rogue prosecutor."
Mr. Thompson expressed frustration about the Supreme Court's ruling in his case, Connick v. Thompson, No. 09-571.
"If I'd spilled hot coffee on myself, I could have sued the person who served me the coffee," he said. "But I can't sue the prosecutors who nearly murdered me."
Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from New Orleans.
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16) 4-Year-Old Citizen Who Was Deported Comes Back
By TIM STELLOH
March 30, 2011, 9:15 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/30/4-year-old-citizen-who-was-deported-comes-back/?ref=nyregion
Emily Ruiz, the 4-year-old United States citizen who was deported to her parents' native country, Guatemala, this month, has returned to New York.
She was greeted at Kennedy International Airport early Wednesday morning by hugs from her mother, the family's lawyer, David M. Sperling, wrote on Twitter.
"Mission accomplished," he wrote.
Mr. Sperling said a news conference would be held later in the day.
The case has caused outrage among immigration lawyers and reform advocates.
When Emily, a Long Island native, was detained at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on March 11, she was returning to the United States with her grandfather from a trip to Guatemala.
Because of an immigration infraction two decades ago, her grandfather was told he could not stay in the country. Emily's parents are illegal immigrants - a fact that left the young girl in limbo and complicated her return to the United States.
"She was treated like a second-class citizen or worse," Mr. Sperling has said. "She's a U.S. citizen, and she's entitled to the same rights as any other U.S. citizen."
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17) Black bloc: 'Only actions count now'
Two participants in the black bloc protest at Saturday's anti-cuts rally tell Stephen Moss why they're the true face of protest
By Stephen Moss
Guardian.co.uk
March 31, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/31/black-bloc-anti-cuts-protest
"Meet us outside the British Library. That seems appropriate." I'm due to interview two men in their late 20s who were part of the "black bloc" direct action wing of last Saturday's anti-cuts protest. We'd originally agreed to meet at a bar in King's Cross, but they tell me later it was "too media" for their security concerns.
I conduct an interview of sorts, but they are reluctant to tell me much about themselves other than that one is a "low-paid public sector worker". In any case, they have come armed with handwritten answers to questions they have posed to themselves. Anarchists like to be in control. I agree to edit those answers for length, then show them the edited version. Their "self-interview" appears below. I never do learn their names.
The media, police and other sections of the left have called the black bloc "criminals", "hooligans" and "cowards". How do you respond?
In the legal sense, those who damage property or fight the police have committed crimes, so yes they are criminals. But in everyday language, a criminal is someone who lives by criminal means. We saw plenty of nurses, education workers, tech workers, unemployed workers, students, campaigners and charity workers on the bloc on Saturday, but we didn't see any criminals.
As for being hooligans or cowards, the black bloc formation is used for tactical purposes. We aren't trying to be "hard" or to give ourselves a thrill. We are trying to give uncompromising opposition to capitalism an appropriate image on the streets - and not end up in jail. True cowardice would be not fighting an economic system that wants to destroy us.
The black bloc is not a group or organisation; it's something that happens on marches or actions. It's not pre-planned; it relies on people turning up with the same ideas and clothes. That is why there is a "uniform": people who want to take direct action and resist containment arrive on the day in black and identify people with the same ideas this way.
We had no idea of the numbers before the event on Saturday, and no idea it would be so radical in its actions. The black bloc idea spread like a ripple through the march. As people saw others in black, they changed into black themselves. Some marchers even left the protest to buy black clothing.
Is it not fair to say you hijacked the TUC march?
No. To hijack it would have meant taking the front of the march and leading it away. What happened was that thousands of marchers left of their own accord to support our direct action and do some of their own. The black bloc largely avoided the march route, only dropping into it twice, briefly. We support the other marchers who didn't take direct action, just like many of them supported us.
Don't you think the violence has invalidated your message?
Our only collective points were the promotion of a confrontational attitude and the use of symbolic direct action to show that direct action in the wider society was both valid and possible, and that there is a radical movement in this country that's going to put up a fight. We made these points. Anyway, you cannot be "violent" to property. The police chose to attack and arrest people in their defence of property, and got themselves hurt in the attempt. If they had acted rationally, and decided a cracked window was not worth a protester's cracked skull, they would have been fine.
Is the black bloc a reaction to police heavy-handedness?
We don't do "good cops" versus "bad cops"; whether they smile or snarl while they do it, their primary function is to defend the rule of the wealthy. We do not want the police to control us "more justly" in the interests of capitalism. We want them to stand back for a just society to be created. If they don't, they have picked their side, and they will have to be opposed.
Was the bloc anarchist?
From the red and black flags in the crowd it seemed to be, but there is nothing inherently anarchist about masking up. By the evening thousands of people had left Hyde Park and were taking action all over central London; the open class warfare of the cuts has convinced far more than the UK's minority of radicals that only actions count.
Do you consider the black bloc to be the most radical part of the new movement?
No. Occupations of universities and town halls are far more important, and this is where the anti-cuts movement has been heading. To develop, it needs to spread into workplaces next. The black bloc tactic was appropriate to give the day a confrontational edge, and to target the real enemies: the rich. The aim was to make people realise this is not an abstract struggle between "the economy" and us, but between a group of super-rich exploiters and those they are exploiting - the workers.
There is now talk of a "mask law" in response to Saturday's action. Don't you feel responsible for that?
Introducing a mask law would be a serious misjudgment. Already we've seen how the tactic of kettling has backfired on the police, creating a desire among the crowd to be mobile and in effect unpoliceable. A mask law would probably just make more people wear masks. If last Saturday is anything to go by, they already are.
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18) C.I.A. Agents in Libya Aid Airstrikes and Meet Rebels
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/world/africa/31intel.html?src=mv
WASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency has inserted clandestine operatives into Libya to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces, according to American officials.
While President Obama has insisted that no American military ground troops participate in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi's military, the officials said.
In addition to the C.I.A. presence, composed of an unknown number of Americans who had worked at the spy agency's station in Tripoli and others who arrived more recently, current and former British officials said that dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces and missile installations, the officials said.
American officials hope that similar information gathered by American intelligence officers - including the location of Colonel Qaddafi's munitions depots and the clusters of government troops inside towns - might help weaken Libya's military enough to encourage defections within its ranks.
In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups opposed to Colonel Qaddafi, said United States government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the activities. American officials cautioned, though, that the Western operatives were not directing the actions of rebel forces.
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.
The United States and its allies have been scrambling to gather detailed information on the location and abilities of Libyan infantry and armored forces that normally takes months of painstaking analysis.
"We didn't have great data," Gen. Carter F. Ham, who handed over control of the Libya mission to NATO on Wednesday, said in an e-mail last week. "Libya hasn't been a country we focused on a lot over past few years."
Several weeks ago, President Obama signed a secret finding authorizing the C.I.A. to provide arms and other support to Libyan rebels, American officials said Wednesday. But weapons have not yet been shipped into Libya, as Obama administration officials debate the effects of giving them to the rebel groups. The presidential finding was first reported by Reuters.
In a statement released Wednesday evening, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, declined to comment "on intelligence matters," but he said that no decision had yet been made to provide arms to the rebels.
Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday that he opposed arming the rebels. "We need to understand more about the opposition before I would support passing out guns and advanced weapons to them," Mr. Rogers said in a statement.
Because the publicly stated goal of the Libyan campaign is not explicitly to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi's government, the clandestine war now going on is significantly different from the Afghan campaign to drive the Taliban from power in 2001. Back then, American C.I.A. and Special Forces troops worked alongside Afghan militias, armed them and called in airstrikes that paved the rebel advances on strategically important cities like Kabul and Kandahar.
In recent weeks, the American military has been monitoring Libyan troops with U-2 spy planes and a high-altitude Global Hawk drone, as well as a special aircraft, JSTARS, that tracks the movements of large groups of troops. Military officials said that the Air Force also has Predator drones, similar to those now operating in Afghanistan, in reserve.
Air Force RC-135 Rivet Joint eavesdropping planes intercept communications from Libyan commanders and troops and relay that information to the Global Hawk, which zooms in on the location of armored forces and determines rough coordinates. The Global Hawk sends the coordinates to analysts at a ground station, who pass the information to command centers for targeting. The command center beams the coordinates to an E-3 Sentry Awacs command-and-control plane, which in turn directs warplanes to their targets.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who recently retired as the Air Force's top intelligence official, said that Libya's flat desert terrain and clear weather have allowed warplanes with advanced sensors to hunt Libyan armored columns with relative ease, day or night, without the need for extensive direction from American troops on the ground.
But if government troops advance into or near cities in along the country's eastern coast, which so far have been off-limits to coalition aircraft for fear of causing civilian casualties, General Deptula said that ground operatives would be particularly helpful in providing target coordinates or pointing them out to pilots with hand-held laser designators.
The C.I.A. and British intelligence services were intensely focused on Libya eight years ago, before and during the successful effort to get Colonel Qaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons program. He agreed to do so in the fall of 2003, and allowed C.I.A. and other American nuclear experts into the country to assess Libya's equipment and bomb designs and to arrange for their transfer out of the country.
Once the weapons program was eliminated, a former American official said, intelligence agencies shifted their focus away from Libya. But as Colonel Qaddafi began his recent crackdown on the rebel groups, the American spy agencies have worked to rekindle ties to Libyan informants and to learn more about the country's military leaders.
A former British government official who is briefed on current operations confirmed media reports that dozens of British Special Forces soldiers, from the elite Special Air Service and Special Boat Service units, are on the ground across Libya. The British soldiers have been particularly focused on finding the locations of Colonel Qaddafi's Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.
A spokesman for Britain's Ministry of Defense declined to comment, citing a policy not to discuss the operations of British Special Forces.
Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting from London, and David E. Sanger from Washington.
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19) Safety Concerns Often Amount to Status Quo at U.S. Nuclear Industry's Aging Reactors
Leaks, burst cooling pipes, faulty controls, misplaced fuel rods and engineers' warnings about design flaws have done little to slow down approvals for continued operation of the nation's aging nuclear plants
By David Biello
Friday, March 25, 2011 | 8
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=safety-concerns-status-quo-at-us-reactors
On December 1, 1969, Jersey Central Power & Light initiated fission in the fuel rods of the nation's first boiling-water nuclear reactor-one of 31 ultimately built in the U.S. The first "turnkey" plant, Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in New Jersey was sold for less than $100 million in 1964-a price well below what it would ultimately cost to build the reactor. The point was to prove that a nuclear power facility could be built as cheaply as a coal-fired power plant, and the key to that was a smaller safety system. As the recent meltdown in Fukushima showed, the design of these reactors' systems, such as the donut-shaped "suppression pool" of water meant to cool the reactor in a crisis, showed flaws-flaws identified by regulators decades ago.
"Recent events have highlighted the safety disadvantages of pressure-suppression containments," words that could have been written today but instead appeared in a memo from safety official Stephen Hanauer (pdf) to his fellow workers at the now-defunct U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1972. "What are the safety advantages of pressure suppression, apart from cost saving?"
Yet, Oyster Creek continues to operate today, churning out electricity for Exelon Corp. Were it not for a requirement that it add cooling towers, Oyster Creek would probably continue to operate for decades-that added expense prompted owner Exelon to announce plans to close the plant in 2019. But on March 21, one of Oyster Creek's sister plants-Entergy Corp.'s Vermont Yankee-received permission to operate for another 20 years, despite a recent history that includes leaks, burst cooling pipes and misplaced fuel rods.
"The acceptance of pressure-suppression containment concepts by all elements of the nuclear field...is firmly embedded in the conventional wisdom," wrote AEC official Joseph Hendrie in response to Hanauer's suggestion. (pdf) "Reversal of this hallowed policy, particularly at this time, could well be the end of nuclear power. It would throw into question the continued operation of licensed plants...and would generally create more turmoil than I can stand thinking about."
The question remains, however: Are such old nuclear reactors safe?
The U.S. has 104 reactors scattered throughout the country, producing 20 percent of the nation's electricity-and 70 percent of our electricity that emits relatively little CO2 pollution, a point emphasized by U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. The oldest is Oyster Creek; the youngest is the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Browns Ferry unit No. 1 in Alabama, which first went online in 1974 and underwent a refurbishment that brought it back online four years ago after more than two decades out of commission.
These reactors could face extraordinary challenges, such as the recent twin blows of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which knocked out connections to the local power grid, followed by a wall of water that destroyed the fuel tanks for backup diesel generators and flooded critical electrical equipment, crippling the boiling-water reactors at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan. "Our [eight diesel generators] are protected from the seismic and hydrology hazards expected in the area," in addition to being buried in hardened facilities, says TVA spokesman, Terry Johnson, which operates three such boiling-water reactors at Browns Ferry.
All U.S. reactors are in principle designed to withstand the largest earthquake in the local seismological record. "That earthquake becomes the design basis for engineering at that site," says Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the AEC's successor, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "The reactor must be able to safely shut down even if there is an earthquake of that magnitude."
Boiling-water reactors, such as those at Fukushima Daiichi or Oyster Creek, directly produce the steam that then turns the turbine to make electricity-adding a sheen of radioactivity to the power-generating equipment. Surrounding this steam-producing core is an upside down lightbulb-shaped steel and concrete containment structure that is connected via large pipes to a donut-shaped pool, which is half-filled with cooling water. In the event of an accident hot steam shoots down those pipes into the ringing pool where it is cooled.
But in a meltdown that ring can be prone to cracking or leakage-as may have occurred at Fukushima Daiichi in multiple reactors. Because of this "generic" flaw built into the original plants, a special vent was added after the Three Mile Island accident to reactors in the U.S. and Japan that allows operators to release radioactive steam before pressure gets too high-steam that can also carry even longer-lived radioactive particles, such as iodine 131 or cesium 137, in the event of a meltdown.
"It was made stronger to accept the higher pressures that would be involved during venting," Johnson explains. But the pressures reported at Fukushima-more than seven kilograms per square centimeter at times-more than double the pressures even the hardened vent was designed to handle.
"The NRC's actions in the 1980s and 1990s regarding Mark I [model boiling-water reactor] containment issues significantly improved the Mark I's ability to deal with accident conditions," Burnell says. "The agency continues to conclude the Mark I containment design provides appropriate protection of public health and safety."
These reactors also face a more insidious threat: age. Concrete, pumps, pipes and wiring face a daily load of some combination of high temperatures and pressures, vibration and-unique to nuclear infrastructure-bombardment with the neutrons thrown off by splitting atoms. Thick steel walls become brittle over time when exposed to a reactor's extreme temperatures, pressures and radiation. In fact, the NRC has shown that the stainless steel surrounding the reactor cores in boiling-water reactors degrades over time. Cracks also form at welds or joints.
Of course, it's not just the old General Electric boiling-water reactors aging in place. Pressurized-water reactors designed by Westinghouse-such those that employ pressurized water and heat exchangers to produce power, unlike the boiling-water variety-face similar challenges. In the 1990s the two pressurized-water reactors at the Salem nuclear facility in New Jersey were shut down for two years due to leaks, faulty reactor controls, poor maintenance and other serious issues.
Plus, parts fail: In the 1970s and 1980s, nuclear power plants endured a rash of steam-filled tubes bursting as a result of a faulty alloy-Inconel 600-used in their construction. Patches held the vital component together but, ultimately, entire steam generators had to be replaced as a result. Leaks have released radioactive hydrogen-tritium-into the environment at reactors from Vermont to Illinois.
And then there's the human element: The accident at Three Mile Island was made worse by operators reading a lack of cooling water as too much water in the reactor. And, in 1990, Plant Vogtle in Georgia lost all externally supplied electric power-just like Fukushima Daiichi's reactors-when a truck backed into a transmission line and the backup diesel generator failed, forcing it to rely on its last power source: batteries with an eight-hour life.
The U.S. has endured a slew of "near misses" in recent years: a 0.48-centimeter thick stainless steel lining is all that stood between Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Ohio and a meltdown in 2002. And in 2010, alone, the NRC launched 14 investigations into safety-related issues at U.S. nuclear plants. "Many of these significant events occurred because reactor owners, and often the NRC, tolerated known safety problems," wrote David Lochbaum a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists in a report examining the 2010 track record. According to Lochbaum, the NRC overlooks some safety problems, such as a refueling-cavity liner leaking at the Indian Point facility in New York State since 1993. "By allowing this reactor to continue operating with equipment that cannot perform its only safety function, the NRC is putting people living around Indian Point at elevated and undue risk," Lochbaum writes.
The nuclear industry certainly has a history of ignoring potential problems until they become critical. Flaws in the boiling-water reactor safety system at Fukushima Daiichi (as well as Oyster Creek and Vermont Yankee) had been known since 1972. The potential for Inconel 600 to crack under pressure was first identified in the 1950s. A new report from the NRC Inspector General notes that nuclear power plant operators have consistently failed to report equipment defects. And the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2006 suggested the practice of overcrowding pools for the storage of spent nuclear fuel rods-that has caused fires and explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, which stores far less used fuel than typical U.S. plants-could prove dangerous.
This problem continues to grow because there remains no place for used nuclear fuel rod storage other than such pools or massive dry casks-both located on nuclear facility grounds. Yet, since 2000 more than half of the U.S. fleet of nuclear reactors have received 20-year operating extensions, piling yet more (thermally and radioactively) hot nuclear rods into their spent-fuel cooling pools.
Regardless of those extensions, all U.S. nuclear power plants currently in operation most likely will be decommissioned by 2050. Replacing them, however, may prove more difficult than extending their useful lives. Simply swapping old for new would require starting construction on a new reactor every six months for the next 40 years. As it stands, there are four new reactors under construction in the U.S.-and applications for another 16.
And that's why the U.S. Department of Energy, the NRC and industry are currently assessing whether the first-generation plants could operate another 20 years-thereby lengthening the life span of a given reactor to 80 years. "The NRC is a full participant into the ongoing research examining whether it's technically feasible to consider 'second' renewals to extend reactor operating life," Burnell says. "The matter has yet to be decided."
Editor's Note: David Biello is the host of a forthcoming series on PBS this April, titled "Beyond the Light Switch." The series, produced by Detroit Public Television, will explore how transformation is coming to how we use and produce electricity, impacting the environment, national security and the economy.
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20) King's Call for Worker Justice Runs Through April 4 Solidarity Actions
by Mike Hall
March 30, 2011
http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/03/30/kings-call-for-worker-justice-runs-through-april-4-solidarity-actions/
Monday, April 4 marks the 43rd anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was assassinated while helping Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers fight for the same workers' rights that governors and state legislators in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other states are now trying to eliminate. These assaults have sparked energy and built a solidarity movement to defend workers' rights and middle-class job
Starting this weekend with religious services around the nation and continuing next week, working people will gather in We Are One events to honor King's memory and stand in solidarity with workers across the country who are facing unprecedented attacks on their rights and their jobs.
More than 400 events have already been set and union, civil rights, faith and community activists are announcing more each day. We expect as a many as many as 1,000 large and small events nationwide, from more than 100 teach-ins to candle-light vigils and worksite actions. Click here to find an event near you: http://local.we-r-1.org/
There is still time to plan an event-a get together with co-workers at lunchtime, spending a few minutes with friends to e-mail or call your state legislators or congressional representatives, or holding a bake sale or carwash to help raise funds for working people fighting for a better life. Click here: http://www.we-r-1.org/weareone_ideas.cfm for ideas you can use to stage your own event, here: http://www.we-r-1.org/weareone_resourcesforaction.cfm for resources and here to add an event to our We Are One calendar. (Follow the events and tell about yours on Twitter with the hashtag #april4)
King often drew a parallel between the civil rights and union movements. Economic justice and workers' rights were an integral part of his vision for racial equality. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says King was "a tireless champion of the working class."
In Memphis, King was supporting the 1,300 striking African American sanitation workers who were demanding recognition of their union (AFSCME), an agreement that the city would withhold union dues from workers' paychecks, a small pay raise and improved safety standards.
In one his speeches to workers King said:
All labor has dignity. You are...reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. We know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?
Earlier this year, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker reminded a Cincinnati crowd protesting Gov. John Kasich's (R) executive order eliminating collective bargaining rights for home health care and child care workers King's commitment to social and economic justice.
As we look back at the legacy of Dr. King, we recall that he traveled to Memphis more than 40 years ago to defend and uphold the dignity and value of all work, and all working people. Tonight we affirm our commitment to those principles and that moral vision.
Click here: http://www.aflcio.org/mediacenter/speakout/michael_honey.cfm for more on King and labor rights from historian Michael Honey, who will be at AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. April 4 reading from his new book, "All Labor Has Dignity": a compilation of King's speeches on labor and economic justice. If you're in Washington, D.C., click here: https://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4001/c/968/p/salsa/event/common/public/?event_KEY=1349 for more information on how you can attend.
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21) They've Got to Fix Their Priorities
New York Times Editorial
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/opinion/31thu1.html?hp
The banks may have weathered the financial crisis, but the rest of the country hasn't. Taxpayers are still on the hook for federally guaranteed bank debt. Homeowners' equity continues to erode. Small businesses still have trouble getting loans, and savers are still getting hammered by near zero interest rates. Joblessness remains high. State budgets are ravaged.
So whom have Washington policy makers singled out for help? Bank shareholders, including bank executives who are invariably big holders of stock in their banks.
The Federal Reserve recently gave the all-clear for several banks to increase dividends and expand share buybacks, among them JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. That's good news, at least in the short run for bank investors, but it is a dubious development for everyone else.
The dividend-boosting banks that were too big to fail before the crisis are even bigger now, while reforms to rein them in are under political attack even before they have been implemented. Sheer size and inadequate regulation - the combination that led to the crisis - argue for banks to use their earnings to build bigger capital cushions, not to pay dividends and repurchase shares.
Yet Fed officials have concluded that many banks are safe and sound enough to pay out cash and still withstand a severe shock should one occur again. It's hard to share their confidence. Before it approved new dividends, the Fed required banks to test their crisis-readiness against several criteria, like elevated unemployment, but it did not release detailed results of the tests. Public data do not inspire confidence either. There is much debate over whether banks are valuing their mortgage assets correctly, and, by extension, whether they are adequately capitalized.
What is known is that recent bank profits have been boosted not by increasing revenues, but by downward revisions to expected future losses. With house prices falling anew, further reducing the value of mortgage assets, how reasonable is that?
Even if banks were ready for anything, more dividends and buybacks still would be premature. Big banks that plan to increase payouts still hold nearly $120 billion in government-backed debt under a crisis-era program from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The subsidized bonds come due between now and the end of 2012. Paying shareholders before the bonds are retired puts bank investors before taxpayers - talk about skewed priorities. Banks also face potentially huge fines in court cases and in settlement talks with government officials over mortgage and foreclosure practices that have harmed both homeowners and mortgage investors. It is irresponsible for the Fed to allow bolstered dividends before the penalties are known and paid. It is also a disturbing omen. Regulators are part of the settlement talks over the banks' wrongful practices. Are they assuming that banks can afford both stiff penalties and bolstered dividends? Or are they assuming that the penalties will be weak?
When it comes to redress and reward, bank shareholders should be at the back of the line, behind taxpayers who stand behind too-big-to-fail banks and behind homeowners who are bearing the brunt of a housing debacle for which banks bear considerable responsibility. For the Fed to allow new dividends and bigger buybacks before these issues are settled is a display of the same type of "banks first" favoritism that got us into this mess to start.
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22) Low Levels of Radiation Found in American Milk
By MATTHEW L. WALD
March 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/us/31milk.html?ref=world
Tests of milk samples taken last week in Spokane, Wash., indicate the presence of radioactive iodine from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, but at levels far below those at which action would have to be taken, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday.
Radioactive materials in liquids are measured in pico-curies per liter, and the sample, taken March 25, showed a reading of 0.8 pico-curies, the agency said. Those numbers, it said, would have to be 5,000 times higher to reach the "intervention level" set by the Food and Drug Administration.
"These types of findings are to be expected in the coming days and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children," the environmental agency said.
Levels of iodine 131 entering the air can be very diluted, but if the iodine is deposited on grass eaten by cows, the cows will reconcentrate it in their milk by a factor of 1,000. This is mainly a concern with fresh milk, not for dairy products that are stored before consumption.
Iodine 131 has a half-life of eight days, meaning that every eight days it loses half its strength. Since production of iodine 131 stopped when the Fukushima reactors shut down on March 11, it has already been through two half-lives and could easily be halved once or twice more again before the milk is consumed as cheese or yogurt.
Iodine 131 emits beta particles, which resemble electrons. They are not considered a major hazard outside the human body, although in large doses, they can damage the cornea of the eye.
The problem arises when materials that emit beta particles are ingested or inhaled. Iodine 131 is chemically identical to normal, nonradioactive iodine and thus is absorbed into the body just as normal iodine is, mainly in the thyroid gland, where it delivers a concentrated dose to that small organ and can cause cancer.
In the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, the biggest health effect was cases of thyroid cancer, especially in children living near the nuclear plant in Ukraine.
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23) NATO Warns Rebels Against Attacking Libyan Civilians
By THOM SHANKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/africa/01civilians.html?hp
WASHINGTON — Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to senior military and government officials.
As NATO takes over control of airstrikes in Libya and the Obama administration considers new steps to tip the balance of power there, the coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime’s forces have been punished.
“We’ve been conveying a message to the rebels that we will be compelled to defend civilians, whether pro-Qaddafi or pro-opposition,” said a senior Obama administration official. “We are working very hard behind the scenes with the rebels so we don’t confront a situation where we face a decision to strike the rebels to defend civilians.”
The warnings, and intense consultations within the NATO-led coalition over its rules for attacking anyone who endangers innocent civilians, come at a time when the civil war in Libya is becoming ever more chaotic, and the battle lines ever less distinct. They raise a fundamental question that the military is now grappling with: Who in Libya is a civilian?
In the early days of the campaign, the civilian population needing protection was hunkered down in cities like Benghazi, behind a thin line of rebel defenders who were easily distinguishable from the attacking government forces.
That is no longer always the case. Armed rebels — some in organized militias, as are other young men who have picked up rifles to fight them — have moved out of Benghazi in an effort to take control of other population centers along the way, they hope, to seizing Tripoli.
Meanwhile, fresh intelligence this week showed that Libyan government forces were supplying assault rifles to civilians in the town of Surt, which is populated largely by Qaddafi loyalists. These civilian Qaddafi sympathizers were seenchasing rebel forces in nonmilitary vehicles like sedans and trucks, accompanied by Libyan troops, according to American military officers.
The increasing murkiness of the battlefield, as the freewheeling rebels advance and retreat and as fighters from both sides mingle among civilians, has prompted NATO members to issue new “rules of engagement” spelling out when the coalition may attack units on the ground in the name of protecting civilians.
It was unclear how the rules are changing — especially on the critical questions surrounding NATO’s mandate and whether it extends to protecting rebels who are no longer simply defending civilian populated areas like Benghazi, but are instead are themselves on the offensive.
“This is a challenge,” said a senior alliance military officer. “The problem of discriminating between combatant and civilian is never easy, and it is compounded when you have Libyan regime forces fighting irregular forces, like the rebel militias, in urban areas populated by civilians.”
Oana Lungescu, the senior NATO spokeswoman, emphasized that NATO was taking action because Qaddafi’s forces were attacking Libyan civilians, including shelling cities with artillery. She said that if the rebels do likewise, the organization will move to stop them, too, because the United Nations Security Council resolution “applies to both sides.”
“Our goal, as mandated by the U.N., is to protect civilians against attacks or threats of attack, so those who target civilians will also be targets for our forces, because that resolution will be applied across the board,” she said.
But it is no simple matter to follow that logic.
“Qaddafi is trying to take advantage of this mixing of combatants and noncombatants to deter NATO from striking,” said one Obama administration official who was briefed on the intelligence reports.
Even though rebel forces were in retreat on Wednesday, the civil war has seen repeated advances and retreats by both sides, and that is expected to continue. The highest concern is not how to deal with fighters who are loyal to the regime, but how NATO would respond to rebels firing on a town of Qaddafi sympathizers, like Surt.
Calls by some NATO members to provide heavier weapons to the rebels suggest that these worries will only intensify.
The deliberations about where to draw the line, going on at the highest levels of allied nations and among senior officials across the Obama administration, show how an intervention to stop a potential massacre is evolving into a much more complex, and perhaps open-ended, role in policing the Libyan chaos.
The situation is as complicated legally as it is militarily. The United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized a no-flight zone and other steps in Libya makes no distinction between pro-rebel and pro-Qaddafi civilians.
Senior legal advisers to the military campaign say that unarmed civilians, whether living in towns or fleeing the fighting, are clearly meant to be protected by the United Nations resolution, while opposition forces taking an active part in combat away from cities are currently seen as falling outside of its protection. But one such official acknowledged that there are other situations that are much less clear.
Noncombatants and the various shades of opposition, resistance and rebellion “are so intermixed that it is not feasible to discern where the boundary between the civilians and opposition forces lie,” the official said. “There are also those civilians entitled to protection that may be armed in order to protect their families, homes, businesses, and communities. Other civilians may join the rebels at certain stages, becoming armed combatants, and then decide to return home for whatever reason, thus transitioning back to civilian non-combatants.”
At times when the rebels are gaining ground, the allies fear that the rebels will inevitably try to take loyalist cities by force, and could end up endangering or even killing civilians there. That is what prompted the coalition’s warnings to the rebels, administration officials said.
The specifics of the warnings — like when they were conveyed, who delivered them, and to which rebel leaders — remained unclear.
The traditional laws of war distinguish between combatants, who may be lawfully attacked, and civilians, who generally must be protected. Civilians who pick up weapons and join in fighting can be lawfully attacked as long as they are directly participating in hostilities.
But the laws of war are vague about how to categorize internal rebels, rather than external enemies. And the recognized government of a country — even an internationally despised one like the Qaddafi regime — is generally seen to have a right to use force to put down an armed insurrection, said David Glazier, a professor of national-security law at Loyola Law School-Los Angeles.
“I don’t know that we have distinguished between civilians who are truly nonparticipants in the conflict and who no one has any right to attack, and those civilians who have taken up arms in revolt against the government and so are legitimate targets,” Mr. Glazier saided. “This is all poorly defined. It really is all about politics, and not at all about law.”
On March 21, in a briefing with reporters, Tom Donilon, the national security advisor to President Obama, appeared not to distinguish between armed rebels and other citizens of Libya who opposed the Qaddafi government.
“They are citizens of Libya, and they are civilians,” he said, referring to the rebels. “They’re not military forces under the direction and control of Qaddafi.”
But that same day, General Carter Ham, the head of United States Africa Command, said that opposition forces with heavier weaponry would not qualify for protection the way civilians would, and he acknowledged that “it’s not a clear distinction, because we’re not talking about a regular military force — it’s a very problematic situation.”
“These are situations that brief much better at a headquarters than they do in the cockpit of an aircraft,” General Ham said, adding that “if it’s a situation where it’s unclear that it is civilians who may be being attacked, then those air crews are under instruction to be very cautious and not apply military force, again, unless they are convinced that doing so would be consistent with their mission to protect civilians.”
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