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TONIGHT!
Tues. Feb. 20, 7pm
ANSWER Activist Meeting
2489 Mission St. #30, (at 21st St.) near 24th St.
BART / #49, #14 MUNI, SF
Join us for a political analysis and discussion of the week’s
event related to the war in Iraq, U.S. imperialist aims and
other developments around the world. Get plugged into
organizing work for the March 18 Demonstration in San
Francisco. We will have March 18 postering teams going
out after the meeting. Get involved. Volunteers needed!
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You are invited to
Witness to War: Revisiting Vietnam in Contemporary Art
at the Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco State
University,
1600 Holloway Ave @ 19th Ave, SF
Open through March 15, 2007
Visit our website at:
http://www.sfsu.edu/~gallery/
Please join us. Spread the word, bring a friend!
Sat, Feb 24, 2:00 p.m.
Witness to War Artist Lecture – Daniel Joseph Martinez
Thurs, Mar 1, 1:00 p.m.
Witness to War Artist Panel Discussion
Sat, Mar 10, 1:00 p.m.
Artists Binh Danh, Thai Bui and Long Nguyen moderated
by art historian Boreth Ly.
Nguyen Dance Company
Dance Performance
Sat, Mar 10, 2:30 p.m.
West Coast Premiere of Documentary Film The Rain on
the River
Sat, Mar 10, 3:30 p.m.
Hope to see you there.
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STUDENT PETITION AGAINST THE WAR!
Thursday Feb. 22, 4:30-5:30 pm San Francisco Federal Building
Students from 55 schools iin the Bay Area have collected thousands
of signatures on a petition to Speaker Pelosi demanding that she and
Congress cut the military funding for the illegal and immoral
occupation of Iraq.
415-646-6469 revolutionyouthsf@gmail.com
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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Lynne Stewart/Michael Ratner/Pam Africa/Jeff Mackler
Tour Bay Area for Civil Liberties
"Fighting Back" for civil liberties & democratic rights
Defending Mumia Abu-Jamal: One court decision from
execution or new trial and freedom
"Fighting Back: No one shall be tortured, falsely imprisoned, or denied
basic democratic rights" is the theme of the upcoming February 23-28,
2007 San Francisco Bay Area tour of Lynne Stewart/Michael Ratner/
Pam Africa/Jeff Mackler
Sponsored by and a benefit for the Lynne Stewart Defense
Committee and the Northern California-based Mobilization
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the tour includes some eighteen
meetings, rallies, receptions and media events. (See tour
schedule below).
Michael Ratner, President of the New York-based Center for
Constitutional Rights, won an historic lawsuit against the Bush
Administration when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba detainees, imprisoned and tortured by
U.S. government interrogators, must be afforded access to U.S.
federal courts, that is, granted the right to habeas corpus.
This victory was essentially nullified soon after when the U.S.
Congress approved legislation legitimizing torture, but under
a new name. The same legislation effectively denied detainees
access to federal courts.
Ratner is currently in another battle to use the German court
system to file war crimes/torture charges against Donald Rumsfeld,
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and some eight other
U.S. officials responsible Abu Ghraib atrocities.
Lynne Stewart, 67, free on bail pending appeal of her conviction
on charges of "conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism," was granted
permission to travel to California by presiding District Court
Judge John Koeltl.
Koeltl shocked more than one legal observer by sentencing Stewart,
a lifelong civil rights and political prisoner attorney, to 28 months
in prison in the face of Probation Department and prosecution
recommendations that she be sentenced to thirty years.
Stewart was the lead attorney defending the Egyptian cleric, Shiek
Omar Abdel Rachman, who was convicted of conspiracy charges
to blow up federal monuments. Former U.S. Attorney General
Ramsey Clark and American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
head Abdeen Jabarra, were Stewart's co-counsels.
The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal:
Pam Africa and Jeff Mackler will join the tour in defense of
Mumia-Abu-Jamal, the award-winning African-American journalist
on Pennsylvania's death row for the past 25 years. Jamal's case
is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,
with the State of Pennsylvania seeking its third order for Mumia's
execution by lethal injection. In 1982, in a trial that has been
condemned by groups ranging from Amnesty International
and the NAACP to the European Parliament and the presidents
of France and South Africa, Jamal was convicted of murdering
a Philadelphia policeman. His defense team, headed by attorney
Robert R. Bryan, awaits oral arguments before the court in
a major battle that could lead to a new trial and Mumia's freedom.
The tour is co-sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild, the
Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Middle East Children's Alliance,
Vanguard Public Foundation, the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition,
and Pacifica Radio Station KPFA.
TOUR SCHEDULE:
Lynne Stewart/Michael Ratner/Pam Africa/Jeff Mackler Tour
(For details on all events, admission costs, or requests for
additional meetings call 415-255-1085)
Friday, Feb. 23:
10:30 am Oakland Press Conference
12:45 - 1:45 pm, Boalt Law School at UC
3 pm Berkeley KPFA;
5:30 pm, San Francisco Reception
7:30 pm SF Mass Rally,
both at, Women's Bldg.,
3543 18th St.
(between Valencia & Guerrero (near 16th St. BART).
Saturday, Feb. 24:
10 am Prison Radio SF Reception 415-648-4505
2 pm Marin Rally, College of Marin, Student Services Center (Cafeteria)
835 College Ave., Kentfield 415-302-9440
5:30 pm Berkeley Reception, Middle East Children's Alliance,
901 Parker at 7th, Berkeley, 510-548-0542
7:30 pm Berkeley Mass Rally,
King Middle School,
1781 Rose (near North Berkeley BART).
Sunday, Feb. 25:
1:00 pm, Palo Alto Reception,
Fireside Room,
2:00 pm Mass Rally,
both at Unitarian Universalist Church,
505 E. Charleston Rd., near Middlefield,
Palo Alto, 650-326-8837, peaceandjustice.org
Monday, Feb. 26:
10:30 am Gray Panther Reception 415-552-8800
12:30 pm, University of SF Law School,
Fulton at Stanyon, Kendrick Hall, 646-729-4303
5:30 pm Fresno Reception
7:00 pm Fresno Rally, 559-255-9492.
Tuesday, Feb 27:
5:30 pm Reception, Santa Rosa Peace and Justice Center, 707-569-9922
Wednesday, Feb. 28:
12:00 Noon, UC Davis School of Law,
Moot Courtroom, 734-972-1036
5:30 pm Sacramento Reception,
403 21st Street, Sacramento, 916-369-5510 jekeltner@aol.com
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SUPPORT ARMY SPC. AGUSTIN AGUAYO
Iraq War Veteran – Conscientious Objector
Imprisoned awaiting court martial for refusing to return to Iraq
COMMUNITY FUNDRAISER DINNER WITH HELGA AGUAYO,
AGUSTIN'S WIFE.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2007
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
War Memorial Veterans Building , 2nd Floor
401 Van Ness Avenue (across from City Hall), San Francisco
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MARCH ON THE PENTAGON
SATURDAY, MARCH 17
WASHINGTON, D.C .
Free Speech Victory! Permits Secured for Pentagon Demonstration
http://www.internationalanswer.org/
MARCH AND RALLY IN SAN FRANCISCO
SUNDAY, MARCH 18, 2007
(The annual St. Patrick's Day Parade is taking
place on Sat., March 17 in SF.)
ASSEMBLE 12:00 NOON
JUSTIN HERMAN PLAZA -
MARCH TO CIVIC CENTER
For more information:
http://www.actionsf.org/#local4
answer@actionsf.org
Phone: 415-821-6545
Fax: 415-821-5782
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Killers in the Classroom
By Dr. June Scorza Terpstra
"Their plan is to secure the oil, the diamonds, the gold, the water,
the guns, the drugs, and the bling for their masters, who they
hope will cut them in on the swag. They say that someone has
to be on top and they want to be on the side of the strong,
not the weak. Robbing Hoods, not Robin Hoods."
February 15, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17074.htm
2) Labour, community and academics launch
May Day Global Solidarity School in Cuba
April 28 to May 12 2007
16 February 2007
Please redistribute and post widely
Press contacts below
solidarityschool@vdlc.ca Email
www.solidarityschool.ca Web
3) Chavez calls on the working class
to put itself at the forefront of the revolution
By Euler Calzadilla and Jose Hernandez (CMR)
February 16, 2007
http://www.marxist.com/chavez-working-class-tforefront-revolution160207.htm
4) On to the Hard Part on Iraq
Editorial
February 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/opinion/17sat1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
5) They Are America
Editorial
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/opinion/18sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
6) Jailed 2 Years, Iraqi Tells of Abuse by Americans
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/middleeast/18bucca.html?ref=world
7) Expanding Power Puts Family of Venezuelan President
Under Increasing Scrutiny
By SIMON ROMERO
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/americas/18venez.html?ref=world
8) Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/weekinreview/18uchitelle.html
9) Mill Towns of Connecticut Lose Factories, and Way of Life
By JENNIFER MEDINA
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/nyregion/18factory.html?ref=nyregion
10) Blowback: Rule by decree is democratic
Venezuelan ambassador critiques Times coverage
of Hugo Chavez's dynamic social changes.
By Bernardo Alvarez
February 17, 2007
www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-alvarez17feb17,0,7094124.story?coll=la-opinion-center
11) Ground shifting under U.S. isolation of Cuba
Diverse interests and ordinary Americans, including exiles,
are increasingly pushing for normalized relations.
By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer
February 18, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-uscuba18feb18,1,3611700.story
12) Why isn't UFPJ supporting the March on the Pentagon?
From: "Larry Holmes"
Please sign on to this letter, and circulate it widely. Below are only
initial signers: Thanks.
[VIA Email...bw]
13) Chavez tries to woo Caribbean
Leftist calls for anti-imperialist unity, blasts NAFTA, promotes his agenda
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17208053/from/RS.2/
14) Moral Waivers and the Military
Editorial
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/opinion/20tues1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
15) Court Rejects $79.5 Million Tobacco Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:47 a.m. ET
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Scotus-Philip-Morris.html
16) North Africa Feared as Staging Ground for Terror
By CRAIG S. SMITH
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/africa/20tunisia.html?ref=world
17) Taliban Seize Rural District in Southwest as Police Flee
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/asia/20afghan.html?ref=world
18) Discontent in Guinea Nears Boiling Point
By LYDIA POLGREEN
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/africa/20guinea.html?ref=world
19) Pentagon to Fill Iraq Reconstruction Jobs Temporarily
By THOM SHANKER
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/middleeast/20military.html
20) Iraq’s Fading Grip on American Business
By DANIEL ALTMAN
Economic View
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18view.html
21) Genetic Tests Offer Promise, but Raise Questions, Too
By DENISE CARUSO
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18reframe.html
22) WHAT 'WAR ON TERROR'?
[Col. Writ. 2/7/07] Copyright 2007 Mumia Abu-Jamal
[VIA Email from Howard Keylor
howardkeylor@comcast.net ...bw]
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1) Killers in the Classroom
By Dr. June Scorza Terpstra
"Their plan is to secure the oil, the diamonds, the gold, the water,
the guns, the drugs, and the bling for their masters, who they
hope will cut them in on the swag. They say that someone has
to be on top and they want to be on the side of the strong,
not the weak. Robbing Hoods, not Robin Hoods."
February 15, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17074.htm
During a heated debate in a class I teach on social justice, several
US Marines who had done tours in Iraq told me that they had
"sacrificed" by “serving” in Iraq so that I could enjoy the freedom
to teach in the USA. Parroting their master’s slogan about
"fighting over there so we don’t have to fight over here”, these
students proudly proclaimed that they terrorized and killed
defenseless Iraqis. They intimated that their Arab victims are
nothing more to them than collateral damage, incidental
to their receipt of some money and an education.
A room full of students listened as a US Marine told of the
invasion of Baghdad and Falluja and how he killed innocent
Iraqis at a check point. He called them “collateral damage”
and said he had followed the “rules”. A Muslim-American
student in front of him said “I could slap you but then you
would kill me”. A young female Muslim student gasped
“I am a freshman; I never thought to hear of this in a class.
I feel sick, like I will pass out.”
I knew in that moment that this was what the future of teaching
about justice would include: teaching war criminals who sit
glaring at me with hatred for daring to speak the truth
of their atrocities and who, if paid to, would disappear,
torture and kill me. I wondered that night how long I really
have in this so called “free” country to teach my students
and to be with my children and grandchildren.
The American military and mercenary soldiers who “sacrificed”
their lives did not do so for the teacher’s freedom to teach the
truth about the so-called war on terror, or any of US history
for that matter. They sacrificed their lives, limbs and sanity
for money, some education and the thrills of the violence
for which they are socially bred. Sacrificing for the “bling
and booty” in Iraq or Afghanistan, The Philippines, Grenada,
Central America, Mexico, Somalia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan,
or any of the other numerous wars and invasions spanning
US history as an entity and beginning with their foundational
practice of killing the Indians and stealing their land.
Many of the classes that I teach now include students who
“served” in the US military and security corporations. There
are also many students who intend to join the US military
upon completion of a degree because with the degree they
get a bigger “sign on” bonus of ten to fifty thousand dollars.
Their position is supported by many of the student body,
who, vegetating according to the American Plan, believe they
should “support their troops”. The excuses that they give
for joining or intending to join the US military terrorist training
camps are first and foremost motivated by a desire for money.
One student proudly said that he is willing to kill for money,
a better standard of living and an education. Another student,
who had done two tours of duty to the Empire in Iraq, justified
killing and torture, citing the importance of staying on top
as the world’s number one super power so that his family
could have the highest standard of living and unlimited
access to the world’s oil supplies.
Yet another soldier-student said that there would always
be wars and someone had to do it. The”it” is killing, rape,
and plunder for profit. Some of the soldier-students agreed
that military terrorism was thrilling. Stopping and killing people
at checkpoints in order to maintain a comfortable lifestyle
in the USA was worth the risk of being killed or maimed.
Little did they know that the very education they would kill
for could include a course on social justice in which they
would be compelled to examine their motives, beliefs and
actions in an evil, illegal, immoral and unjust invasion and
occupation of a people who never hurt or harmed them
or any of their fellow citizens.
To be fair, in this week’s discussion in class there was some
mention that some of the student’s intentions had been
honorable at the time that they joined the military. They
wanted to “help other people”. A few woman students who
want to join the military commented that they would be
working to “free and defend” people here and abroad.
However, for the most part and by their own admission,
personal financial gain was their main focus in signing on.
Their bottom line was getting the money and their thrills
by joining and belonging to the biggest terrorist organization
in the world, the USA.
What appears to trouble the soldier student is that the rhetoric
of fighting for freedom and democracy is a lie that cannot
blanket the horror and guilt of their terrorism. They do
not want to hear that participation in invasion and occupation,
murder and pillaging, is logically inconsistent with any legitimate
concept of freedom or liberation. They know the greed
and programmed lust for violence that motivates them.
They expect that if they can make it out alive, they get some
money, a comfortable lifestyle and an education. Their plan
is to secure the oil, the diamonds, the gold, the water,
the guns, the drugs, and the bling for their masters, who
they hope will cut them in on the swag. They say that someone
has to be on top and they want to be on the side of the strong,
not the weak. Robbing Hoods, not Robin Hoods.
And now, here they sit in my course on social justice, terrorist
war criminals, wanting high paying “criminal justice” jobs
in a university Justice Studies program. They want approval,
appreciation and honors for terrorism, torture, and murder.
They want a university degree so they can get an even higher
salary terrorizing more people around the world with security
companies such as Blackwater or Halliburton. They want that
appropriately named “sheepskin” so they can join the CIA, FBI,
and other police and track down and terrorize US residents here.
These military and mercenary terrorist-students are trained
in terrorist training camps all under the USA, funded by American
taxpayers. In fact, people under the USA are “sacrificing” their
health care and their children’s educations while donating their
tax dollars to these terrorist training camps. These terrorist camps
train money hungry working class stiffs to murder, steal
and plunder for the power hungry US corporate war lords.
There is a saying that “if you do the crime, you do the time”.
My response is that “If you do the war crimes, you will do time
in hell, whether the hell of war trauma and shock, of diseases
such as those caused by depleted uranium, the old-fashioned
traditional hell, fire and brimstone assigned to malefactors…
or the hell of sitting in a social justice class and discovering
what the hell you are in hell for, or are about to be.
Please visit Dr Terpstras' website www.juneterpstra.com
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2) Labour, community and academics launch
May Day Global Solidarity School in Cuba
April 28 to May 12 2007
16 February 2007
Please redistribute and post widely
Press contacts below
solidarityschool@vdlc.ca Email
www.solidarityschool.ca Web
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
We extend a warm invitation to register for the historic first annual
Global Solidarity School taking place in Havana Cuba from April 28 to
May 12 2007. Please see our website www.solidarityschool.ca for details.
In the tradition of the World Social Forums, union education schools
and community organizing, we are combining these elements to create a
school for building social change -- bringing together students seeking
to build a better world.
As a student at the Global Solidarity School, you will meet with
international counterparts who care about the well being of our planet and
who seek to create progressive social changes necessary to ensure social
and environmental sustainability. Our classes allow you to examine
global issues and strategies for change in a creative and friendly
environment. Recognized activist educators and academics together with the
University of Havana's top foreign language staff and cultural experts lead
Global Solidarity School classes. See our course offerings on our
website.
GLOBAL SOLIDARITY SCHOOL COURSES
This is an extraordinary opportunity to travel for learning and life.
We want you to join us. Here is how to make it happen.
Register for one or two weeks. The tuition is $1,600 per week, which
includes accommodation, and educational trips (but does not include
airfare, transport to and from the airport, exit fees or visas).
* Week One -- Saturday 28 April to Saturday 05 May
* Week Two -- Saturday 05 May to Saturday 12 May
With any option you'll have the opportunity to connect with the people
of Cuba who are engaged at every level with the crucial issues of
economic, social and environmental stewardship in the Americas. You'll also
be engaged with North Americans who share similar perspectives and are
active in their home communities.
Here's what's included:
* Be part of May Day in Cuba: Participate up front as a respected
international guest in the world's largest gathering of labour. Join with
one million Cubans in what they describe as the Celebration of the Free
Peoples in the American Hemisphere.
* Stay for 8 days and 7 nights, (or 15 days and 14 nights) at the
stunning five-star Hotel Habana Libre. Situated only blocks away from the
famed Malecon (oceanfront walkway), the University of Havana, and the
city's cultural center, the Habana Libre is within walking distance of all
the best that the city has to offer in entertainment and cultural
venues. As well, you'll feast at the hotel's fabulous breakfast and dinner
buffets, and lounge at one of the best swimming pools in Havana.
* Take Spanish and Cuban cultural courses taught by Cuban professors at
the University of Havana.
* Participate in our courses on global issues and strategies for
building solidarity and leadership led by expert educators and movement
leaders from Canada and elsewhere.
* Learn how to perform and dance to Salsa, Son, Rumba and other popular
Cuban rhythms.
* Participate in afternoon tours led by professional Cuban guides and
translators to visit Havana's most important historic sites, plus visits
to artist's studios, museums, Afrocuban enclaves, and contemporary
Cuban cultural centers.
* Choose optional evening cultural events and you'll enjoy visits to
some of Cuba's best jazz clubs, an Afrocuban dance performance, cabaret
performances and other activities.
LEARNING FOR LIFE IS A DIFFERENT KIND OF HOLIDAY
* You'll meet and mix with everyday Cubans in ways tourists rarely
experience.
* You'll network and become lasting friends with progressive trade
unionists and community activists from across Canada, from around the
world, and in particular from Cuba.
* You'll collaborate with people who care about the planet and who work
to make it a better place for all.
Don't wait! Plan to participate. Book your vacation time now.
Register today in the first annual Global Solidarity School to
guarantee your participation in this historic event. Go to our website at:
www.solidarityschool.ca for all costs and details.
Welcoming you aboard!
In solidarity,
Bill Saunders
President Vancouver and District Labour Council
Global Solidarity School
Suite 140 - 111 Victoria Drive
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5L 4C4
877.687.3817 Toll free
604.874.9048 In Vancouver
604.254.0701 Facsimile
solidarityschool@vdlc.ca Email
www.solidarityschool.ca Web
Sponsors:
* CoDevelopment Canada
* Vancouver and District Labour Council
* Cuba Education Tours
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3) Chavez calls on the working class
to put itself at the forefront of the revolution
By Euler Calzadilla and Jose Hernandez (CMR)
February 16, 2007
http://www.marxist.com/chavez-working-class-tforefront-revolution160207.htm
In a meeting on Wednesday, February 14 with the retired
workers of the IVSS (Instituto Venezolano de los Seguros Sociales
- Venezuelan Institute of Social Security), in the Venezuela room
of the Circulo Militar, the President of the Bolivarian Republic
of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez declared (quoting Marx) that "the
workers cannot be turned into the slaves of work, into the
slaves of capital. Capital must be subordinated to the workers."
Reflecting upon this Chavez ordered a review of the 8-hour day,
as well as saying that the working day should be reduced
to allow the workers time for education. "I ask for the full
support of the working class and of the genuinely revolutionary
trade unions... I call upon the working class to once and for
all play its rightful role in this revolution."
Once again the president reiterated his call to the workers
to take concrete action through the trade unions. He had
already done this in the past with a call to the workers using
the slogan "factory closed, factory occupied". However, the
leaders of the various currents of the UNT did not know how
to take advantage of this opportunity. Instead of focusing
the debate on the question of organising the workers for the
occupation of factories and enterprises and demanding their
nationalization under workers' control, they focusing their
attention on the question of the internal elections and the
struggle around which current would control the leadership.
Chavez recently made another call in one his speeches on
"Alo Presidente". With these words he is telling the leadership
of the workers' movement that now is the time to act.
The leaders of all the tendencies of the workers' movement
have a great responsibility.
From the point of view of the CMR this is perfectly possible.
The leadership of the UNT must call a national meeting of all
the sectors of the workers' movement to discuss Socialism
of the 21st Century and the role of the working class in the
Bolivarian Revolution. A national day of factory occupations
must be organised, and workers' councils established, the
soul of which will be the trade unions. These councils must
be linked on a local, regional and national level, and must
be coordinated with the peasant, youth, and communal
councils.
These elements in Chavez's speech add to the much talked-
about wave of nationalisations of strategic companies
in the country. The Bolivarian government, facing the
intensification of the class struggle and the capitalist
sabotage of the economy, and in an increasingly open debate
about how to build the socialist state, has launched the
nationalisation of the energy and telecommunications
sector, which has woken up and animated the masses
in creating enormous expectations, intensifying the
struggle between reform and revolution.
It is certainly the time for the working class to play its role
in the revolution. For the working class, these steps are seen
as a step forward. The nationalisation of the energy and
telecommunications sectors must be accompanied by the
establishment of workers' control in the nationalised industries,
in order that the state bureaucracy cannot transform these
progressive measures into their opposite.
These measures are a step forward for the revolution, but only
a step. Now the revolution finds itself under the pressure
of the imperialists who threaten to sabotage the economy
through their lackeys, the Venezuelan capitalists. The only
way to defend the conquests of the revolution is to rely
on the workers.
In the same way and due to the shortage of some basic products
and supplies caused by the capitalist clique, Chavez affirmed
in the above cited speech that there is no justification for any
shortages. Through decree he has regulated the process of
commercialisation and called upon the communities and the
workers to organise themselves to denounce those who create
this type of situation in order that they can be nationalised.
"If you dare not respect the sale of those regulated products
you will be nationalised, even if I have to nationalise the whole
set-up and put it in the hands of the communal councils,"
explained the President.
Inevitably the bureaucrats and both the national and foreign
capitalists will boycott the companies under workers' control.
However, the workers who control the nationalised companies,
under cogestión, occupied, in struggle, etc. must work together
in an organised way in order to influence the political and
economic transformation of society.
To that end FRETECO must be an example to follow and be
supported by the workers' movement, which today President
Chavez has asked to play its role. The board is set. The work
of the revolutionaries is to intensify the political education
of the workers as well as to set in motion a plan of united action
to concentrate the forces of the revolution on the key points
necessary to the unify the workers' movement. We still need
to facilitate in this way the meeting of the working class and
its ideology. Patria socialismo o muerte venceremos!
(Fatherland, socialism or death, we shall prevail!)
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4) On to the Hard Part on Iraq
Editorial
February 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/opinion/17sat1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
President Bush lost touch long ago with Iraq’s political reality — not
to mention Americans’ anguish and disbelief at his mismanagement
of the war. So we welcome the House of Representatives’ long-overdue
attempt to shake some sense into Mr. Bush with a resolution opposing
his decision to send another 20,000 combat troops to fight this
disastrous war without any plan to end it.
Yet yesterday’s vote, in which 17 Republicans joined the Democrats
to produce a margin of 246 to 182, was the easy part. It takes
no great courage or creativity for a politician to express continuing
support for the troops and opposition to a vastly unpopular and
unpromising military escalation. Even if the Senate manages
to overcome its procedural self-hobbling and approve a similar
resolution, the war and the mismanagement will go on.
The next necessary steps will require harder thinking and harder
choices. Congress needs to do what Mr. Bush is refusing to do:
link further financing for the war to the performance of Iraq’s
Shiite-led government, which is making no serious effort
to rescue its country from civil war.
Congress needs to impose clear benchmarks and rigorous
timetables, insisting that the Iraqi government stop equivocating
and start disarming sectarian militias, adopt a formula to share
oil revenues equitably and end employment discrimination
against Sunni Arabs. Congress must be prepared to cut off
financing if the Iraqis refuse.
We fear that clever maneuvers like the one proposed by
Representative John Murtha, reportedly with the backing
of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to dress up a reduction in troop
strength as a “support the troops” measure won’t help contain
the war or make American troops safer. Mr. Murtha would link
this year’s war financing to the Pentagon’s adoption of new
deployment rules, including longer stretches from the battlefield
for returning troops, more specialized training and better
defensive equipment. That would let representatives cast
a politically safe vote for financing the war, while forcing
the Pentagon to gradually reduce the number of active duty
troops available to serve in Iraq.
This page has advocated many of the same reforms — but
not as a back-door way of forcing lower troop numbers in Iraq.
Congress’s overriding goal must be to find the most responsible
way to extricate American troops from what is becoming
an increasingly unwinnable war, while trying to contain
the suffering and minimizing the damage to American
interests in the region.
Instead of camouflaged troop squeezes, Congress needs
to grasp the problem straight on and do what the administration
won’t do. It must impose tough requirements and deadlines
on the Iraqi government, and link the future of all American
troops in Iraq to the timely achievement of these goals.
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5) They Are America
Editorial
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/opinion/18sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Almost a year ago, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers
and their families slipped out from the shadows of American life
and walked boldly in daylight through Los Angeles, Washington,
Chicago, New York and other cities. “We Are America,” their banners
cried. The crowds, determined but peaceful, swelled into an immense
sea. The nation was momentarily stunned.
A lot has happened since then. The country has summoned great
energy to confront the immigration problem, but most of it has
been misplaced, crudely and unevenly applied. It seeks not to
solve the conundrum of a broken immigration system, but to subdue,
in a million ways, the vulnerable men and women who are part of it.
Government at all levels is working to keep unwanted immigrants
in their place — on the other side of the border, in detention or
in fear, toiling silently in the underground economy without recourse
to the laws and protections the native-born expect.
The overwhelming impulse has been to get tough, and tough
we have gotten:
Border enforcement. What little the last Congress did about immigration
was focused on appeasing hard-line conservatives by appearing
to seal the border. President Bush’s new budget continues that
approach, seeking 3,000 more Border Patrol officers and another
$1 billion for a 700-mile fence, adding to the billions spent
to militarize the border since the 1990s. That still isn’t enough
to build the fence and it hasn’t controlled the illegal flow;
you need more visas and better workplace enforcement
to do that. It has directed much traffic into the remote Southwest
desert, making more immigrants vulnerable to smugglers
and leaving many people dead.
Federal raids. In December federal agents stormed a half-dozen
Swift meatpacking plants, rounding up hundreds of suspected
illegal immigrants and exposing the secret that is no secret:
America’s dirtiest, hardest jobs are done by people too desperate
to shun them and too afraid to complain. The raids have been
replicated in other states and industries, on day-labor street
corners and in homes from Connecticut to California. In immigrant
communities, the undercurrent of fear has been replaced by terror,
and employers are jittery, too. The immigration agency says
it singles out only fugitives in Operation Return to Sender,
but the sweeps are broad and panic is indiscriminate.
Local crackdowns. State, county and local officials have picked
up where they left off last year, introducing bills to get tough
on illegal immigrants. They cannot control federal policy, so they
try other ways to punish those they see as unfit neighbors,
to stifle their opportunities, extract money, expose them to legal
jeopardy and otherwise inflict suffering, in the deluded hope
that piling on miseries will make them disappear. In suburban
Long Island, where resentment over an influx of day laborers
has festered under a hapless and intolerant county government,
lawmakers are considering banning workers from county roadsides.
Texas legislators are mulling a bill to reject the 14th Amendment
and deny the benefits of citizenship to children born in this country
to undocumented parents. Local officials all over are trying
to deputize police officers as immigration agents, causing
overburdened police forces and prosecutors to bristle. Some
bills are symbolic, most are simply spiteful, and their effect
is a chaotic patchwork, not a sane national policy.
Gutted due process. Laws enacted a decade ago and tightened
after 9/11 distance even legal immigrants from the protection
of the law. Immigrants are routinely detained without bond,
denied access to lawyers, deported without appeal and punished
for one-time or minor infractions with a mechanistic ferocity
that precludes a judge’s discretion or mercy. Several of the
immigration bills that Congress has considered seek to heighten
the efficiency with which immigrants who run afoul of the
authorities can be railroaded out of the country. This gums
up another aspect of the legal system, which deals with refugees
and asylum seekers. A much tighter web for immigrants has been
erected, and it catches many blameless victims.
The web of suspicion. The Justice Department wants to expand
routine DNA collection to include detained illegal immigrants,
creating a vast new database that will sweep up hundreds
of thousands of innocent people. DNA, far more than fingerprints,
is a trove of deeply personal information. Its routine collection
from law-abiding citizens is considered an outrageous violation
of privacy rights. In the belief that illegal immigrants lack such
rights, DNA swabs and blood would be collected even if a detainee
is not suspected of a crime. This reinforces the notion that
immigrants should be treated as one huge class of criminal
suspects.
The bureaucratic trap. The federal bureaucracy, notorious for
backlogs and bad service, wants to charge more to immigrants
who want to become Americans — an average increase of 66 percent
in the price of visas and citizenship papers. Such steep and arbitrary
increases would create a means test for citizenship, an affront
to our national values.
The rise of hate. The Anti-Defamation League, acutely sensitive
to the presence of intolerance, has detected an increase in Ku Klux Klan
activity around the country, much of it focused on hatred of new
immigrants. This virus in the bloodstream usually erupts amid
national ferment and fear, and according to a report available
at www.adl.org, hate groups like the Klan have moved quickly
to exploit the simmering debate over immigration.
Hopelessly fixated on toughness, the immigration debate has lost
its balance, overlooking the humanity of the immigrant. There is
a starkly diminished understanding that hospitality for the stranger
is part of the American ethos, and that as much as we claim
to be a nation of immigrants, we have thwarted them at every
turn. We must do better.
The new year began with renewed optimism for the chances
of sensible immigration reform in Washington. The hope is justified,
but time is short and real change will still require boldness
and courage. Citizenship must be the key to reform. The idea
of an earned path to citizenship for illegal immigrants was missing
from President Bush’s State of the Union address this year, though
he has continued to say his usual favorable words about reform.
The new Democratic Congress and moderate Republicans cannot
be afraid to stand up to the anti-amnesty demagogues and lead
Mr. Bush to a solution.
Enforcement of laws cannot be ignored. Punish immigrants who
enter illegally, make them pay back taxes and fines, restrict their
ability to get work through deceit and false identities. But open
a path to their full inclusion in the life of this country.
The alternative — the path of immigrant exploitation, of harassment
without hope — will only repeat the ways the country has shamed
itself at countless points in its history.
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6) Jailed 2 Years, Iraqi Tells of Abuse by Americans
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/middleeast/18bucca.html?ref=world
DAMASCUS, Syria — In the early hours of Jan. 6, Laith al-Ani stood
in a jail near the Baghdad airport waiting to be released by the American
military after two years and three months in captivity.
He struggled to quell his hope. Other prisoners had gotten as far
as the gate only to be brought back inside, he said, and he feared
that would happen to him as punishment for letting his family
discuss his case with a reporter.
But as the morning light grew, the American guards moved
Mr. Ani, a 31-year-old father of two young children, methodically
toward freedom. They swapped his yellow prison suit for street
clothes, he said. They snipped off his white plastic identification
bracelet. They scanned his irises into their database.
Then, shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Ani said, he was brought to
a table for one last step. He was handed a form and asked t
o place a check mark next to the sentence that best described
how he had been treated:
“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read
the first option, in Arabic.
“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read
the second.
In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying
the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees
said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking
out of turn.
“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani,
who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him
what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,”
as if to say, Who knows?
“I thought if I don’t sign the first one I am not going to get
out of this place.”
Shoving the memories of his detention aside, he checked the
first box and minutes later was running through a cold rain
to his waiting parents. “My heart was beating so hard,”
he said. “You can’t believe how I cried.”
His mother, Intisar al-Ani, raised her arms in the air, palms
up, praising God. “It was like my soul going out, from my
happiness,” she recalled. “I hugged him hard, afraid the
Americans would take him away again.”
Just three weeks earlier, his last letter home — with its poetic
yearnings and a sketch of a caged pink heart — appeared
in The Times in one of a series of articles on Iraq’s troubled
detention and justice system.
After his release from the American-run jail, Camp Bucca,
Mr. Ani and other former detainees described the sprawling
complex of barracks in the southern desert near Kuwait
as a bleak place where guards casually used their stun guns
and exposed prisoners to long periods of extreme heat and
cold; where prisoners fought among themselves and extremist
elements tried to radicalize others; and where detainees often
responded to the harsh conditions with hunger strikes and,
at times, violent protests.
Through it all, Mr. Ani was never actually charged with a crime;
he said he was questioned only once during his more than
two years at the camp.
American detention officials acknowledged that guards used
electric devices called Tasers to control detainees, but they said
they did so rarely and only when the guards were physically
threatened. The officials said that detainees had several ways
to report abuse without repercussions, and that all claims were
investigated.
Officials declined to give specific details about why they had
detained Mr. Ani or why they had freed him.
“He was released because the board that reviewed his case
didn’t believe he any longer posed a threat,” said First Lt. Lea
Ann Fracasso, a spokeswoman for detention operations, in
a written answer to questions. “He was originally detained
as a security threat. I don’t have anything more.”
The Detention System
The American detention camps in Iraq now hold 15,500 prisoners,
more than at any time since the war began. The camps are filled
with people like Mr. Ani who are being held without charge and
without access to tribunals where their cases are reviewed,
the Times examination published last December found.
Mr. Ani, a women’s clothing merchant, said he was detained
in 2004 after American soldiers who were searching for weapons
in his six-family apartment building found an Iraqi military
uniform in the basement. His joy upon being released in January
was short-lived. Days later, he said, a Shiite militia ransacked
his home in Baghdad, looking to kill him. He hid, going from
house to house, until he could move his family out of Iraq.
Now he is among the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who have
taken refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan, where sectarian
rifts are springing up.
In one area of Damascus, Shiite refugees from Iraq have established
a mini version of Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood. Sunni
refugees, in turn, are forming their own enclaves. In interviews,
former detainees seethed with rage at the United States.
One, a 43-year-old man from Samarra, Iraq, said he was released
last year despite having fought American troops.
“I wish to go back to Iraq and fight against the Americans, God willing,”
vowed the man, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only
by his nom de guerre, Abu Abdulla, for fear of reprisal.
Mr. Ani has other priorities, still exhausted from his detention
and preoccupied with finding a permanent home. But he regularly
turns his television to a new station called Al Zawra, transfixed
by its running montage of videotaped attacks on American troops.
The station is owned by a Sunni, Meshaan al-Juburi, a former
Iraqi politician who was indicted last year on charges of embezzling
millions of American dollars; he denied the charges and returned
to Syria, where he lived before the war. The station has become
an information center for the Sunni insurgency and in the process
has exasperated American and Iraqi forces. In an interview at his
office here, Mr. Juburi said that he opposed Al Qaeda’s use
of suicide bombers to kill Iraqi civilians but was soliciting
support for Iraqis intent on killing American troops. When
the image of a roadside bomb blowing up an American Humvee
appears on the large flat screen on his office wall, his eyebrows
rise and he urges his visitors to watch, “This is a good one.”
A Nightmare Begins
Mr. Ani’s ordeal began on Oct. 14, 2004, when soldiers brought
him in for what he described as desultory questioning.
“ ‘Are you married? How many children? Sunni or Shiite? Which
mosque do you pray in?’ ” Mr. Ani said he was asked. “I said
I didn’t pray, and they said, ‘Are you not Muslim,’ and I said,
‘Yes, but I’m not praying and going to mosques.’ ”
“They never asked me about terrorism,” he said. “I’m a normal
person, just a usual man, and don’t have anything to do with
anyone who was fighting against the Americans.”
Mr. Ani spent a total of 44 days at two other American facilities
before being sent to Camp Bucca. In all, he said, he was questioned
just once at each site.
Mr. Ani said the electric prods were first used on him on the way
to Camp Bucca. “I was talking to someone next to me and they used
it,” he said, describing the device as black plastic with a yellow tip
and two iron prongs. He said the prods were commonly used on him
and other detainees as punishment.
“The whole body starts to shake and hurt,” he said. “And you lose
consciousness for a couple of seconds. One time they used it on
my tongue. One guard held me from the left and another on my
back and another used it against my tongue and for four or five
days I couldn’t eat.”
In a separate interview, the insurgent from Samarra said such
a device had been used on him for speaking out of turn. Ahmed
Majid al-Ghanem, 50, a former Baath Party official who was also
freed from Camp Bucca and is now living in Syria, said in a separate
interview that he witnessed the electric prods being used as
punishment on other detainees.
The Times interviewed Mr. Ani at his apartment in Damascus, the
Syrian capital, where he sat on a couch with his parents, wife and
children. When he demonstrated how he had been held for the
electric prod, his 4-year-old daughter, Al Budur, mimicked his
actions.
Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a detention system spokesman, said:
“Every use of less than lethal force, to include use of Tasers, is
formally reported by facility leadership, ensuring soldiers are in
accordance with proper use. Touching a Taser to someone’s
tongue is not one of the approved uses.”
Mr. Ani said guards treated him kindly when he arrived at the jail
on Nov. 20, 2004. He recalls being given soap, and, when his hands
cracked from the cold, a soldier bringing him lotion and socks.
But soon new guards came “who had had special thoughts,” he said.
“They were not allowing us to talk. They cut off the salt, gave
us food that was not fit for dogs. One guard named David sometimes
brought us outside to stay in the sun, or when it was cold. He also
didn’t respect our faith, telling us not to pray here, and when we
moved not to pray there.”
The detainees also began fighting among themselves. Those who
spoke to the American guards were ostracized. Long toilet lines
further raised tensions.
One day the guards searched a makeshift prayer area, Mr. Ani
said, “and they started to step on the Korans, which fell down.”
“A fight started,” he continued. “There was a huge demonstration.
The prisoners started to throw their shoes at the guards, and
we started to beat them with empty plastic bottles. The guards
shot at us with rubber bullets, but then prisoners were killed
and others were injured.”
A Pentagon statement at the time described such an incident
in January 2005, saying that four detainees were killed when
guards were compelled to use deadly force to quell the riot
and that it was set off by a search for contraband. Colonel
Curry said an investigation concluded that a detainee leader
had fabricated the Koran allegations to instigate violence.
Mr. Ani and other former detainees said there were frequent
demonstrations to protest various grievances. Mr. Ghanem said
he was released in late 2003 after hunger strikes forced camp
officials to review his case and those of others.
Detention officials said they were also fighting radicalization
at the camps and were trying to identify and isolate extremists.
Former detainees said in interviews that the influence of Islamic
extremists was still growing. At Camp Bucca, they said, hundreds
of men formed a group called the Brothers. Members shaved their
beards and otherwise masked their ideology so they would
be placed with other detainees.
Mr. Ani generally slept in a wooden barrackslike structure, with
a mattress on the ground and a nail on the wall for hanging clothes.
Once, when the guards found an improvised needle that he said
was used to repair clothes, he was taken to an isolated cell, where
he was kept for 24 days.
“You cannot see the difference between day and night,” he said.
“There was no opening, not even in the door.”
Colonel Curry said it was standard to discipline detainees when
they did not follow procedure.
Mr. Ani despaired of ever being released. His letter that was printed
in The Times ended with, “I hope I can be dust in the storms
of Bucca so that I can reach you.”
Dangers Beyond Jail
“I didn’t see any kind of solution for me,” Mr. Ani said after his release.
“The only solution was to die,” he said, his eyes welling with tears.
“I was hoping to die.”
In releasing Mr. Ani, the American military transferred him to Camp
Cropper in Baghdad and gave him $25, which he and his parents
used to hire a taxi. Along the way home, they had to dodge Shiite-
controlled checkpoints, and just days later, he said, he narrowly
escaped capture by a Shiite militia. Mr. Ani and other Iraqis say
they believe these militias have found a way to learn when Sunni
men are released from jail and then hunt and kill them.
Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, commander of American detainee
operations, said that he had heard such concerns and that he was
trying to alter the process of releasing detainees to improve their
safety.
Mr. Ani said that for him there was only one way to stay alive:
flee Iraq.
He said he was scared and puzzled about his next step. He said he
felt that he could not stay in Syria, if only because work was scarce.
But he must compete with other refugees for the attention
of another host country.
“Until now, I can’t sleep, really,” he said. “Whenever I hear something
noisy I stand up. I’m in a very bad psychological situation. I can’t stop
thinking of what we should do. I don’t have a future here. How should
we live?”
When his uncle put on Al Zawra, the satellite television station,
Mr. Ani turned to look at the scenes of Sunni children who had been
killed and the attacks on American soldiers.
“I am an Iraqi,” he said. “I love my country. Of course, everyone who
is an Iraqi at the moment, we are thinking how can we support
our country.”
“The United States through its actions made people hate
the Americans much more than before.”
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7) Expanding Power Puts Family of Venezuelan President
Under Increasing Scrutiny
By SIMON ROMERO
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/world/americas/18venez.html?ref=world
SABANETA, Venezuela, Feb. 13 — At the entrance to this dusty town
where Hugo Chávez was born in 1954, a billboard welcomes visitors
with a gleaming image of Mr. Chávez, the president, and the words,
“Cradle of the Revolution.”
Other billboards and posters throughout Sabaneta show Mr. Chávez
embracing his younger brother Aníbal, Sabaneta’s mayor, and his
father, Hugo de los Reyes Chávez, the governor of Barinas, the
surrounding state. Such reminders of the power amassed by
Mr. Chávez’s family have been ubiquitous here since he ascended
to the presidency eight years ago.
From a humble start in a dirt-floored adobe home that was bulldozed
to make way for a hamburger stand, the family’s widening political
clout has been increasingly scrutinized as critics call attention
to abuses of power and corruption charges throughout the institutions
now controlled by Mr. Chávez, including the National Assembly,
the Supreme Court and the federal bureaucracy. Revelations
of corruption under his family’s watch in Barinas and accusations
of nepotism have dogged Mr. Chávez even as he makes combating
such irregularities one of the priorities of his government.
“We call them the royal family of Barinas,” said Antonio Bastidas,
46, an opposition politician in Barinas who grew up playing baseball
and catching catfish with Mr. Chávez and his brothers. “They started
out with nothing and now call themselves revolutionaries, though
they are revolutionaries with all the best trappings of power.”
Mr. Bastidas and others in the political opposition in Barinas
have filed numerous complaints of corruption and mismanagement
against the administration of Mr. Chávez’s father, a retired primary-
school teacher universally known in Barinas as “maestro,” or professor.
Many of the accusations have languished in Venezuela’s byzantine
bureaucracy, while Mr. Chávez’s family and its supporters in Barinas
have repeatedly won strong victories in elections.
“I’m here because the people put me here,” Mayor Aníbal Chávez, 50,
said in an interview at his office, seated under portraits of the
president, the Caracas-born liberation hero Simón Bolívar and Jesus.
“We are recuperating our love of the fatherland, contrary to the policy
of the empire, which is to enslave us,” he said, referring to the
United States.
“Sabaneta is booming,” he said, listing state-financed projects
here like asphalt and tomato-processing plants and a huge
sugarcane-growing venture carried out with the assistance
of dozens of advisers flown in from Cuba. “I’m a dreamer, but
I believe we are transforming this municipality into something
greater.”
One effort intended to lift Sabaneta from obscurity, the Venezuelan-
Cuban sugarcane project, has been particularly embarrassing
for President Chávez. He became enraged last year after investigators
uncovered a $1.5 million embezzlement scheme at the sugar-
processing complex, which is named in honor of Ezequiel Zamora,
a general who fought in one of Venezuela’s bloody 19th-century
internal wars.
Investigators have not implicated any of Mr. Chávez’s five brothers
or his father in the scandal, though it unfolded shortly after Aníbal
was elected mayor and seven years into the administration of his
father, who has fended off corruption accusations almost since
his first election victory in 1998.
“May God forgive me for what I’m about to say, but in cases like
this, I swear to you, if I could order someone to be executed,
I would order him executed,” President Chávez said last year
when the scandal surfaced.
Mr. Chávez, who is twice divorced, vigilantly guards the privacy
of his children and former wives. A court fined an opposition
newspaper, Tal Cual, and an editorial writer this week for publishing
an editorial imagining a dialogue about political subjects between
Mr. Chávez and his youngest daughter, Rosinés. But his father and
siblings, all public figures in Barinas, have been open to scrutiny.
The family boasts not only a mayor and a governor, but also the
secretary of state for Barinas, a post created for the president’s
brother Argenis, who carries out many day-to-day functions
at the governor’s palace. Another brother, Adelis, is a senior
banker at Banco Sofitasa, which does brisk business with the
state government. Adelis also supervises the government’s
construction of a new soccer stadium in Barinas.
His brother Narciso, an English teacher who lived in Ohio for
several years, was accused of influence peddling in the state
government after he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Bolívar,
a municipality near Sabaneta. He was later placed in important
posts at Venezuela’s embassies in Canada and Cuba, where
he was put in charge of overseeing the various bilateral
agreements reached between Fidel Castro and Mr. Chávez.
Adán, the eldest brother of Mr. Chávez, who was the second-
born son, is perhaps the most influential of the president’s
brothers, serving as ambassador to Cuba, private secretary
to the president and, most recently, minister of education.
Adán, the president and Aníbal, the three oldest sons, are
in their 50s; the younger sons are in their 40s.
Residents of Barinas, a state of cattle ranches, palm trees
and pickup trucks that resembles stretches of South Texas,
are treated almost monthly to tales of largess within Mr. Chávez’s
family, some substantiated, and some not.
They point to the frequent trips to Cuba of their governor, Hugo
de los Reyes Chávez, for medical treatment, a luxury out of reach
for many Venezuelans. Through a spokesman, the governor
declined repeated requests for an interview.
The governor, who is in his 70s, has long been a fixture in state
politics in Barinas, where for decades he was a loyal organizer
for Copei, a conservative political party. From his schoolteacher
origins, he rose to become director of education programs for
Barinas during the early 1980s. Now he travels throughout Barinas
in a caravan of sport-utility vehicles led by a police escort,
a rarity in provincial Venezuela.
Opposition politicians here say that Mr. Chávez’s mother,
Elena, who also started as a teacher, exemplifies the family’s
rise to the nouveau riche class. She now appears in newspaper
photographs carrying her poodle, Coqui, and dressed in designer
outfits and gold jewelry. Her plastic surgeon, Bruno Pacillo, went
to the National Assembly in 2004 to complain that he was barred
from an elite Caracas social club, presumably because of his
connection to Mr. Chávez’s family.
Some claims that the family lives large off the state seem surreal.
For instance, the newspaper La Razón published a column last
month saying that Argenis, the secretary of state, had come into
possession of a gray bulletproof Hummer, one of several such
vehicles that can be seen roaming the streets of Sabaneta,
the state capital, these days.
The column said that the president, during a visit over the Christmas
holiday to the family’s ranch in Barinas, tried teaching Argenis
a lesson in revolutionary values by ramming the vehicle with
a tractor. An official in the Barinas state government who was
with the Chávez family over the holidays said the entire story
was “a lie.”
The family ranch near Sabaneta, called La Chavera, has been
a frequent source of scrutiny for the political opposition, which
contends that the family’s landholdings there and elsewhere
in Barinas have grown from a small area to more than 7,000
acres in the past eight years, according to “Hugo Chávez Without
His Uniform,” a biography of the president by Cristina Marcano
and Alberto Barrera Tyszka.
The governor, who has a salary of about $2,000 a month, has
emphatically denied any misappropriation of funds during his
administration. Investigations of corruption allegations in the
state Legislature were suspended after the president’s supporters
won all of the seats in the most recent election. The governor
appears to be tiring of the persistent criticism of his administration
in the local news media.
“Prepare yourselves,” the governor warned his critics in the media
and the political opposition in December after his son won
a re-election bid for president by a wide margin, “for what
is coming is going to be ugly.”
While a vocal opposition to the president and his family persists,
it is clear that many people in his hometown still adore him.
“Hugo was always a serious type of guy, but I never imagined he’d
go so far,” said Miguel Torres González, 55, a rancher and board
member of the state sugar complex in Sabaneta who grew up with
Mr. Chávez and his brothers.
“He always expressed his political philosophy as if he were writing
poetry,” said Mr. Torres, pointing to an flowery inscription in a book
given to him by Mr. Chávez in 1986 about Maisanta, a rebel
in Venezuela’s backlands whom the president says was his
great-grandfather. “We are extremely proud of him.”
Similarly, Pilar Becerra, 50, the owner of a store selling sewing
supplies near the spot where Mr. Chávez was born, rejected
claims that his family had grown too powerful, pointing to the
example set by the president of donating part of his salary
to a scholarship fund for poor students.
His supporters here, along with Aníbal, questioned Mr. Chávez’s
refusal to allow a museum to be built in his honor on the trash-
strewn lot where the family’s adobe house once stood.
“The love of the people for my brother is so strong,” Aníbal said
over cups of the sweet coffee that is a staple of almost any visit
here. “We’d like to honor him with this project, but he still doesn’t
want it.”
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8) Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/weekinreview/18uchitelle.html
THE North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted by Congress
14 years ago, held out an alluring promise: the agreement would
reduce illegal immigration from Mexico. Mexicans, the argument
went, would enjoy the prosperity and employment that the trade
agreement would undoubtedly generate — and not feel the need
to cross the border into the United States.
But today the number of illegal migrants has only continued to rise.
Why didn’t Nafta curb this immigration? The answer is complicated,
of course. But a major factor lies in the assumptions made in drafting
the trade agreement, assumptions about the way governments
would behave (that is, rationally) and the way markets would
respond (rationally, as well).
Neither happened, yet Nafta remains the model for trade agreements
with developing Latin countries, including the Central American Free
Trade Agreement, passed by Congress in 2005. Three more Nafta-like
agreements are now pending in Congress — with Panama, Columbia
and Peru.
When Nafta finally became a reality, on Jan. 1, 1994, American
investment flooded into Mexico, mostly to finance factories that
manufacture automobiles, appliances, TV sets, apparel and the
like. The expectation was that the Mexican government would
do its part by investing billions of dollars in roads, schooling,
sanitation, housing and other needs to accommodate the new
factories as they spread through the country.
It was more than an expectation. Many Mexican officials in the
government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari assured the
Clinton administration that the investment would take place,
and believed it themselves, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow
at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics
in Washington who campaigned for Nafta in the early 1990s.
“It just did not happen,” he said.
Absent that investment, foreign factories congregated in the
north, within 300 miles of the American border, where some
infrastructure already existed. “Monterrey is quite good,”
Mr. Hufbauer said, “but in a lot of other cities the infrastructure
is terrible, not even enough running water or electricity in poor
neighborhoods. People get temporary jobs, but that is all.”
Meanwhile, Mexican manufacturers, once protected by tariffs
on a host of products, were driven out of business as less expensive,
higher quality merchandise flowed into the country. Later, China, with
its even-cheaper labor, added to the pressure, luring away
manufacturers and jobs.
Indeed, despite the influx of foreign-owned factories, total
manufacturing employment in Mexico declined to 3.5 million
by 2004 from a high of 4.1 million in 2000, according to
a calculation of Robert A. Blecker, an American University
economist.
As relatively well-paying jobs disappeared, Mexico’s average wage
for production workers, already low, fell further behind the average
hourly pay of production workers in the United States, and Mexicans
responded by migrating.
“The main thing that would have stemmed the flow of people across
the border was a rapid increase in wages in Mexico,” said Dani Rodrik,
an economist and trade specialist at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School
of Government. “And that certainly has not happened.”
Something similar occurred in agriculture. The assumption was that
tens of thousands of farmers who cultivated corn would act “rationally”
and continue farming, even as less expensive corn imported from the
United States flooded the market. The farmers, it was assumed, would
switch to growing strawberries and vegetables — with some help from
foreign investment — and then export these crops to the United States.
Instead, the farmers exported themselves, partly because the Mexican
government decided to reduce tariffs on corn even faster than Nafta
required, according to Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the
University of California, Davis.
“We understood that the transition from corn to strawberries would
not be smooth,” Professor Martin said. “But we did not think there
would be almost no transition.”
A financial crisis also dashed expectations. One expectation was that
the Mexican economy, driven by Nafta, would grow rapidly, generating
jobs and keeping Mexicans home. The peso crisis of 1994-95, however,
provoked a steep recession, and while there was some big growth later,
the average annual growth rate over Nafta’s lifetime has been less
than 3 percent.
The financial crisis struck just months after Nafta came into existence,
undermining, early on, the Mexican government’s ability to spend
money on roads, education and other necessary government functions.
“We underestimated Mexico’s deficits in physical and human
infrastructure,” said J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University
of California, Berkeley, and a Treasury official in the Clinton
administration.
But, he says, without Nafta the migration would have been even
greater. For instance, he says, there would not have been as much
investment in the north of the country.
Finally, the steady flow of Mexicans to the United States has
produced a momentum of its own — what Jeffrey Passel,
a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Institute, calls a “network
effect,” in which young Mexicans travel to the United States
in growing numbers to join the growing number of family members
already here.
The upshot is that Mexican migration to the United States has risen
to 500,000 a year from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s, before
Nafta, Mr. Passel estimates. Roughly 80 percent to 85 percent
of immigrants are here illegally, he says.
The peso crisis, recession, the network effect — their impact may
have been beyond anyone’s control, but not the assumptions about
how the market and the government would act.
“We have indeed had one disappointment after another on this
score,” Mr. Rodrik said, noting that the same assumption about
government spending is part and parcel of the agreements, now
before Congress, with Columbia, Peru and Panama.
While there is opposition to these proposals, it is mainly from
Democrats who want a better safety net for American workers
who might be hurt.
The European Union, in contrast, assumes little about government
spending on the part of economically weaker nations joining it.
The union itself has hugely subsidized the improved services needed
by entering countries like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Poland,
rather than leave financing to the relatively meager resources
of entering countries.
The money is used not only for public investment, Mr. Rodrik noted,
but also to subsidize companies setting up operations in the new
countries and to support government budgets.
“I am not saying Nafta was a bad agreement,” Mr. Rodrik said.
“But more than a trade agreement is required for countries
to converge economically. And Nafta has been viewed
as a shortcut to convergence without having to do all the other stuff.”
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9) Mill Towns of Connecticut Lose Factories, and Way of Life
By JENNIFER MEDINA
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/nyregion/18factory.html?ref=nyregion
SEYMOUR, Conn. — Victor Silva, 50, has lived in Ansonia, a town just
south of here, all his life. He knew he would work in a factory,
smoothing out metal or loading trucks. He never expected getting
laid off three times as one struggling factory after another scaled
back or shut down entirely.
Now, he can recite the trajectory as if it were gospel.
First it was Seymour Specialty, which shut down after it could
not make a profit on sheet metal and brass. A sprawling supermarket
has since taken its place in the center of town.
He moved to Ansonia Copper and Brass, a bustling factory that
he thought would do well for decades. But four years ago
Mr. Silva was one of about 100 workers let go. A few weeks
ago, the company announced it would lay off 85 more employees.
Most recently, Mr. Silva came to the New Haven Copper Company,
which gave him a solid job for years. But next month, New Haven
Copper will shut its doors, making Mr. Silva and nearly 50 workers
the latest victims of Connecticut’s declining manufacturing industry.
“I am getting too old for this,” Mr. Silva told a couple of buddies
the other day, a whisper of exasperation in his voice. “I have to find
something that I can stick with. I need something stable.”
Mr. Silva’s story is a familiar one in towns across the central valley
of Connecticut as one locally owned manufacturing plant after
another closes, taking jobs that in many cases have been in the
same family for generations.
The state estimates that in the last decade alone, the manufacturing
economy has shrunk by nearly a fourth, to 193,900 people with
manufacturing jobs from 248,500. The ripples can be felt throughout
the region where shells of former factories dot the banks
of the Naugatuck River.
The local steel workers union has seen its membership shrink
to nearly half its size in the last decade, to 1,400 from 2,600.
Trade schools, where hard-working fathers sent their sons
to learn the family business, have been replaced by centers
for the elderly and office buildings.
And the local forklift repairman, who at one time had several
fleets working on dozens of machines a day, now considers
himself lucky to get a dozen machines in the shop in a week.
But the disappearance of the factories may do more to alter
the face of the local culture than it is doing to the area’s economy.
Some of the more enterprising towns have kept their economy
intact by taking advantage of city dwellers in search of weekend
getaway spots, second homes or even a new place to put down
roots.
The result has in many cases transformed vacant mills into
kitschy antique stores and quirky art shops. And some larger
towns — once the hubs of brass, copper and wire plants —
have steadily replaced their aging and abandoned factories
with strips of big box discount stores.
So it is in Seymour, a middle-class town of 15,000 midway
between New Haven and Waterbury.
New Haven Copper opened in 1848, three years before Seymour
was officially incorporated, and for decades it had its ups and downs
— at its height employing nearly 150 workers — as it was passed
from one wealthy businessman to another. But through the decades,
it cranked out material for devices that monitor underwater activity,
and later for cables that contain electrical wiring.
Today, city leaders hope to replace the copper plant in the center
of town with a restaurant or two and maybe a Target or a Kohl’s
or some other discount department store.
“Good, bad or indifferent, it’s just not going to be the same,”
said Robert J. Koskelowski, the first selectman of the town,
in a phrase he repeats often these days. “It’s not, and there’s
nothing we can do besides accept it and make the best of it.”
The economics behind the erosion of factories and the changing
face of Connecticut’s mill towns is relatively simple. As the cost
of material went up, conglomerates swooped in and bought out
the small shops. But in many cases manufacturing costs remained
too high to be competitive in a free-trade world, so the companies
chose to move their shops to the South or overseas.
In the face of this, Mr. Silva can sound utterly optimistic. He hopes
to get a job driving a long-haul rig, where he says he can earn more
than the $47,000 he made last year by working as much as 20 hours’
overtime a week.
Others are equally hopeful, partly because of money the state and
federal governments are giving laid-off workers for retraining. David
Freeman, a union leader at New Haven Copper, says he plans to use
the $23,000 he will receive to pay for classes in electronics.
“I’ll make more money, I’ll be fine,” Mr. Freeman said. “All these guys
will be fine. That’s not the point. That’s not the only thing.”
For Mr. Freeman and others like him, it is the changing lifestyle
that is most threatening.
As Mr. Freeman and Mr. Silva sit over a couple of light beers at Zois
Pizza across the street from New Haven Copper on South Main Street,
they spend just as much time complaining about having to find jobs
in a neighboring town as they do bemoaning the loss of jobs
to workers overseas.
“It used to be that my father and his father worked together,”
Mr. Freeman said, pointing to Mr. Silva. “So they knew what was
going on with us. They saw each other all time, they walked to work
and knew where to check on us. Now, we’ll probably have to drive
for an hour to get a job. And that means a guy in that town isn’t
going to get the job either. Nothing is simple anymore.”
Across town, Scott DeGeorge, 45, still lives simply. He walks
to the Housatonic Wire factory, where he is the last employee
in the plant these days.
His father and his grandfather worked in the same building, yet
he knows he will be the last generation in his family to work there.
“All the guys I worked with aren’t doing this anymore,” Mr. DeGeorge
said, looking down at his hands caked with grease. “They moved
to construction, service, whatever they could find. This is what
I knew I would do. It’s just what everybody did.”
Alex Budzinski, whose father started the business 36 years ago,
is selling the brick building, which will be converted into high-
priced condominiums for people from New York and other cities
in Connecticut eager to find a place in a safe, small town.
Yes, says Mr. Budzinski, who has seen the number of customers
plummet for more than a decade, it will be disappointing to see
another factory sentenced to the history books. But the numbers
— and the offer of millions of dollars — made the decision for him.
“We all kind of wake up, look around us and see how things are
changing,” he said. “First the textile plants were gone, then the
wires were gone. But that’s what happens, people move out,
people move in and the place changes.”
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10) Blowback: Rule by decree is democratic
Venezuelan ambassador critiques Times coverage
of Hugo Chavez's dynamic social changes.
By Bernardo Alvarez
February 17, 2007
www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-alvarez17feb17,0,7094124.story?coll=la-opinion-center
In your recent editorial, "Venezuela's Theoretical Democracy",
you compare President Hugo Chavez to a dictator while simultaneously
acknowledging that major democratic hallmarks have been
implemented under his administration. As Venezuela's ambassador
to the United States, I have spent much of my time attempting
to translate the benchmarks of our democracy to Washington
in the hopes that a thoughtful dialogue between our two nations
could be established, and with time, even flourish. Editorials such
as this one only serve to confuse the public by admitting, on the
one hand, that Venezuela is a democracy, while, on the other
hand, stating that our president, democratically elected with
63% of the popular vote, is comparable to Mussolini.
President Chavez, as you acknowledge, is not the only Venezuelan
president to be granted the power to pass laws by decree, referred
to in Venezuela as the 'enabling law.' This constitutional power,
granted in both the 1961 and 1999 constitutions, was also granted
in 1974 to President Carlos Andres Perez, in 1984 to President Jaime
Lusinchi, and to interim President Ramon Jose Velasquez in 1993.
European constitutions also include clauses for ruling by decree
in their constitutions. Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State
for Western Hemisphere Affairs even acknowledges that, "It's something
valid under the constitution... At the end of the day, it's not a question
for the United States or for other countries, but for Venezuela."
President Chavez has this power for only 18 months and can pass laws
in key areas aimed at weeding out corruption, increasing government
efficiency, and bringing more equality to our poorest citizens. These
laws can be modified or rescinded by the National Assembly at any
time and the population has the guaranteed right under our
constitution to nullify any of these laws through a national
referendum.
Unfortunately, your editorial reflects a misunderstanding that
is common place in Washington today. Instead of viewing the
dynamic social changes underway in Venezuela as authoritarian
simply because they do not fit into the neoliberal model
of development touted by the World Bank as the savior to all
of our ills, I invite you to take a more realistic approach when
analyzing Venezuela. The alternative economic and political
model that we have embarked upon, and which is supported
by the overwhelming majority of the population, is addressing
for the first time in our history the disparity between the rich
and the poor and articulating an alternative that creates
a space for the social, economic, and political empowerment
of those who have been historically excluded.
This is not the mark of dictatorial rule but rather a new way
of envisioning popular participation and democracy. Rather
than deciding the terms of development for the poor, we are
working alongside them to jointly create public services, social
programs, and public institutions that best serve our collective
needs.
Far from democracy being a "faint pulse" in Venezuela,
it is thriving and expanding to include not just a more vibrant
political democracy but also the economic democracy that
has so long eluded our people.
In a similar sense, we have long sought a good relationship
with the American people. Venezuela remains the United States'
second most important trading partner in Latin America and
has donated low cost heating oil to poor communities in the US
as part of our deep commitment to addressing economic disparity
around the world. By misinforming your readers, you stand in the
way of an honest and constructive dialog between our two nations.
Bernardo Alvarez is the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
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11) Ground shifting under U.S. isolation of Cuba
Diverse interests and ordinary Americans, including exiles,
are increasingly pushing for normalized relations.
By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer
February 18, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-uscuba18feb18,1,3611700.story
MIAMI - Opposition to restrictive U.S. policies on Cuba has been
mounting for more than a decade, but it may have reached critical
mass with recent power shifts in Havana and Washington.
With Democrats in control of Congress and 80-year-old Fidel Castro
having transferred power to his brother Raul while he recovers from a
grave illness, a course change may be ahead.
Polls suggest most Americans want better relations with the island.
Farm and energy interests would like to trade and invest in Cuba. A
raft of legislation to change trade and travel restrictions has been
introduced in Congress this session. Even many who have fled Cuba say
it's time to end the standoff.
"The majority of the Cuban community in Miami supports the betterment
of relations with Cuba, especially with regard to ending travel
restrictions," said Andres Gomez, a Miami free-speech activist.
"There is a will to be able to help relatives, even if we oppose
certain aspects of life on the island."
The committee aims to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of Cubans
who have arrived since 1980 and who reject the isolation strategy
adopted by exiles who fled after the 1959 revolution that brought
Fidel Castro to power.
Antonio Zamora, a Bay of Pigs veteran who has parted ways with
anti-Castro militants, has formed a group that is pursuing normalized
relations. "That we are not engaging with Cuba is very damaging to
our future and to the possible influence we can have in Cuba," Zamora
said.
Raul Castro has said Cuba would be open to talks on improving
relations, but the White House has spurned the offers.
"It's an ongoing missed opportunity," says Glenn Baker, Cuba policy
director at the World Security Institute think tank in Washington.
"If they're available for dialogue, getting together and talking,
even if they talk past each other for some of that time, I still
think it's a useful exercise."
President Bush would probably veto any measure to engage with Cuba,
but lawmakers and lobbyists believe there is sufficient support to
override a veto or attach policy changes to legislation Bush must
sign.
"Congress is energized. I think the various constituent groups are
energized," said Kirby Jones, a consultant on trade and business with
Cuba. Farmers want to sell more produce, oil companies want to
explore Cuba's gulf deposits, and the travel industry anticipates a
million U.S. visitors to Cuba the first year it is legal.
"What has changed is that we are in the majority - and by 'we,' it's
important to underscore that it's not Democrats or Republicans or
liberals or conservatives, but 'we' meaning those who would like to
see a change in policy," Jones said, noting that much of the
legislation proposed since Congress convened last month enjoyed
bipartisan support and could sidestep a veto.
The Cuba Reconciliation Act sponsored by Rep. Jose E. Serrano
(D-N.Y.) proposes to lift the 45-year-old trade embargo. Rep. Bill
Delahunt (D-Mass.) has submitted a bill to rescind restrictions on
Cuban Americans' visits to family on the island, now limited to once
every three years.
Also on the table are moves to allow any U.S. citizen to travel to
Cuba, to remove tight limits on money and goods Cuban Americans can
send to their families, and to ease the payment process for
agricultural sales to Cuba.
The barrier most likely to fall first, say Cuba-watchers, is the
limit on visits to parents, siblings and children. "It's a policy
that's reduced American influence on the island to almost nothing as
dramatic changes are occurring," Delahunt said.
"The crazies in Miami overplayed their hand when they put in that
once-every-three-years restriction. Nobody supports that," said
Albert Fox, a Tampa businessman who heads the Alliance for
Responsible Cuba Policy.
Though few see even the slightest flinch in the administration's
posture, Fox says Cuba policy has "dropped down a few notches" in
importance to a White House beset with bigger foreign policy
headaches. He predicts the U.S. Treasury Department, which licenses
travel to Cuba, will begin approving more applications.
Recent actions, though, confirm a status quo. The Treasury
Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control denied permission for a
U.S. cycling team to compete in Cuba this month. It refused to
license a humanitarian and educational mission planned for June. The
State Department recently nixed visas for Cuban academics to take
part in a University of Connecticut symposium on the post-Soviet era.
The Miami Herald editorial page, long a voice for militant
anti-Castro exiles, published an editorial that stated: "The U.S.
government is blowing its best chance to encourage a peaceful
transition in Cuba by holding fast to counterproductive restrictions
on travel to the island."
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) is working to get the travel ban lifted. He
says that more contact between Cubans and Americans will erode
misconceptions about U.S. life that the communist regime has
fostered.
U.S. citizens apparently want change too. In a recent Associated
Press-Ipsos survey, 62% wanted diplomatic relations restored with
Cuba; 40% said they would like to vacation there. A December Gallup
poll found similar sentiments.
Opportunities to get into Cuba's booming tourism and natural resource
markets are also driving the push for change. A bill exempting U.S.
oil exploration in Cuba from the embargo was submitted last year by
Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), and is expected to be brought before
the new Congress. The measure has bipartisan support and the backing
of the oil lobby.
A bill submitted by Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) aims to ease the
payment regimen for agricultural sales to Cuba, which have been legal
since 2000, but have been stifled by bureaucracy. USA Rice Federation
spokesman David Coia says there is potential for U.S. rice producers
to triple last year's $40 million in sales to Cuba if trade and
travel barriers are lifted.
Daniel P. Erikson, Caribbean analyst for the Inter-American Dialogue
think tank in Washington, says the exiles and the White House are
digging in because the scenario they planned for hasn't happened.
"The administration has spent all its time planning for the collapse
of communism. There's no Plan B," he said.
The five Cuban American members of Congress steering U.S. policy on
Cuba do not see a need to shift tactics. "The Castro brothers have
done nothing to merit better treatment by the generous spirit of the
American people," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.).
The State Department's Cuba transition coordinator, Caleb McCarry,
adds: "This is the time to maintain our policy and to continue to
press for genuine changes in Cuba."
carol.williams@latimes.com
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12) Why isn't UFPJ supporting the March on the Pentagon?
From: "Larry Holmes"
Please sign on to this letter, and circulate it widely. Below are only
initial signers: Thanks.
[VIA Email...bw]
Dear sisters and brothers in the leadership of United for Peace and Justice,
It is with deep concern, sincerity and hope that we the undersigned
appeal to you to cancel the protest that you have only recently
announced for March 18 in New York City, well after plans had been
announced for a D.C. mobilization, thus setting up misconceptions and
promoting confusion.
We urge you to support and work for a united mobilization in
Washington and use the power of your outreach to endorse and support
the march on the Pentagon on March 17 to mark the fourth anniversary
of the war.
Surely you must know that the activists in the antiwar movement view
your late announcement of a March 18 event as little more than a
deliberate attempt to undermine the long scheduled mobilization to
Washington and the Pentagon on Saturday, March 17; the talk already
going around is: "Why isn't UFPJ supporting the March on the Pentagon?
People do not see it as uniting.
The hard working rank and file activists of the antiwar movement, as
well as the millions of people who have come out to antiwar
demonstrations don't care which coalition calls the march, or what the
political differences are between the various coalitions, or about the
history of problems that the coalitions have had working together;what
they want is for us to march together, especially now.
Indeed, hardworking anti-war activists have attended all rallies
called by UFPJ as well as the other coalitions; therefore,
demonstrating a consistent expression of unity.We should then expect
nothing less from those who have taken leadership responsibility
within the US anti-war movement.
The broad array of forces that comprise the resistance to the Iraq
war, and new looming wars ie Iran expect the people in decision making
positions to take the high road, focus the peoples' energy on common,
united actions and pave the road together to strengthen our unity for
peace with justice.
Would it not be an enormous step forward, indeed a step towards
revitalizing the antiwar movement, if all
concerned abandoned the cynical infighting and
divisiveness that only serves to make the movement more fragmented,
and weak? UFPJ can make that possible, by calling on its supporters to
JOIN ONE LARGE AND STRONG ACTION IN WASHINGTON ON MARCH 17. Anything
short of that spreads more negativity than positive unity. Dear
friends, please take this appeal to heart and help unite us all on
March 17, 2007.
Sincerely,
Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor, Pan-African News Wire, Michigan Emergency
Committee Against War & Injustice
BAYAN USA
Brenda Stokely, Co-Convener New York Labor Against The War, Operation
Power, TONC, MWMM, MAY 1 Coalition
Comrade Shahid, Pakistan USA Freedom Forum
Charles Barron , New York City Councilmember
Chris Silvera, Secretary Treasurer, IBT Local 808, Million Worker
March Movement (MWMM), National Black Teamsters Caucus
Ellie Ommani, member, WESPAC, AIFC, NoWarWestchester, PNN
Eric Anders, Jersey City Peace Movement
Heather Cottin, LI Coalition for Immigrant Rights"
Jesse Lokahi Heiwa, Queer People Of Color Action
Larry Adams, Co-Convener New York Labor Against The War (NYCLAW)
Michael Letwin, Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War &
Former Member, UFPJ National and NYC steering committees
Saladin Muhammad, Member Black Workers For Justice
Teresa Gutierrez, New York Committee to Free the Cuban
Five
Troops Out Now Coalition
Vicente Alba –Panama, Activist
[I am adding my name to this list of endorsers of this letter:
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, www.bauaw.org]
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13) Chavez tries to woo Caribbean
Leftist calls for anti-imperialist unity, blasts NAFTA, promotes his agenda
The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17208053/from/RS.2/
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent - Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez on Saturday touted the fuel
facilities and public works projects his
government has built in the Caribbean in an
effort to make inroads in a region where the
United States has long been dominant.
The fiery leftist leader, on a tour of the
region, also called on Caribbean nations to join
his fight against U.S. hegemony.
„Down with U.S. imperialism! Long live the people
of this world. We must join together and we will
be free,‰ Chavez said at the site for a new
airport on St. Vincent. Venezuela and its close
ally Cuba have provided $200 million for the airport.
In a wide-ranging speech, Chavez blasted the
North American Free Trade Agreement, which
combines the markets of the United States, Canada
and Mexico, and promoted his socialist political
movement loosely based on the ideas of South
American independence hero Simon Bolivar.
The crowd, however, did not respond with applause
to the Venezuelan leader‚s vitriolic statements.
Earlier, Chavez unveiled a plaque on St. Vincent
marking where a fuel storage facility will be
built and visited a liquid natural gas facility
constructed under his Petrocaribe program.
Petrocaribe, an agreement between Venezuela and
14 Caribbean countries, offers deferred payments
and long-term financing for fuel shipments.
U.S. still key trading partner
Petrocaribe is widely seen as a bid by Chavez to
vie with the United States for influence in the
Caribbean. The United States is the biggest
trading partner of most countries in the region
and their largest market for tourism.
Many Caribbean countries are still buying oil
from elsewhere, including oil- and gas-rich
Trinidad and Tobago, where the prime minister has
resisted the Venezuelan initiative and traded
barbs with other regional leaders over the deal.
On Friday, Chavez visited the mountainous,
forested island of Dominica, where he addressed a
crowd at a new fuel storage tank built by
Venezuela, one of five facilities the oil-rich
nation has pledged to construct there.
Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit also
announced his government‚s acceptance of a
Venezuelan offer to build an oil refinery that
would process some 10,000 barrels a day.
„We shall make no apologies ... that President
Chavez is our friend and the people of Venezuela
are our friends,‰ Skerrit said to widespread applause.
Chavez assured Dominicans that the construction
of an oil refinery would not harm the ecology of
the island, which promotes itself as an
ecotourism destination. Conservationists have
objected to the plan, fearing the environmental impact.
„We did not come to pollute your country,‰ Chavez said.
Dominica ˜ one of the Caribbean‚s poorest
countries whose economy ˜ has also received
asphalt, university scholarships and $12 million
for housing through the Petrocaribe initiative.
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14) Moral Waivers and the Military
Editorial
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/opinion/20tues1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The Iraq war has plunged the Army into a vicious cycle of declining
standards. Multiple, extended tours of duty have sapped morale and
blighted recruiting. New plans for a larger overall force could reduce
pressures but would also mean that recruiters would have to meet
higher quotas.
To keep filling the ranks, the Army has had to keep lowering its
expectations. Diluting educational, aptitude and medical standards
has not been enough. Nor have larger enlistment bonuses plugged
the gap. So the Army has found itself recklessly expanding the
granting of “moral waivers,” which let people convicted of serious
misdemeanors and even some felonies enlist in its ranks.
Last year, such waivers were granted to 8,129 men and women
— or more than one out of every 10 new Army recruits. That
number is up 65 percent since 2003, the year President Bush
ordered the invasion of Iraq. In the last three years, more than
125,000 moral waivers have been granted by America’s four
military services.
Most of last year’s Army waivers were for serious misdemeanors,
like aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and vehicular homicide.
But around 900 — double the number in 2003 — were for felonies.
Worse, the Army does no systematic tracking of recruits with waivers
once it signs them up, and it does not always pay enough attention
to any adjustment problems. Without adequate monitoring and
counseling, handing out guns to people who have already committed
crimes poses a danger to the other soldiers they serve with and
to the innocent civilians they are supposed to protect.
There is a long and honorable history of young people who have
had minor scrapes with the law joining the military and successfully
turning their lives around. But those who have committed more
serious crimes, especially those involving weapons, vehicular
homicide or sexual abuse, should generally be denied moral
waivers. And those who do qualify for waivers should be monitored,
counseled and carefully supervised.
The fastest way to drop the rate of moral waivers would be for
the Army to rebuild its recently tarnished reputation among less
problematic young Americans. That will require an end to involuntarily
extended tours of duty and accelerated, multiple redeployments into
combat. The military is America’s face to much of the world.
It ought to present the best face of American youth.
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15) Court Rejects $79.5 Million Tobacco Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:47 a.m. ET
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Scotus-Philip-Morris.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court threw out a $79.5 million
punitive damages award to a smoker's widow Tuesday, a boon
to businesses seeking stricter limits on big-dollar jury verdicts.
The 5-4 ruling was a victory for Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris
USA, which contested an Oregon Supreme Court decision
upholding the verdict.
In the majority opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer,
the court said the verdict could not stand because the jury
in the case was not instructed that it could punish Philip Morris
only for the harm done to the plaintiff, not to other smokers
whose cases were not before it.
States must ''provide assurances that juries are not asking
the wrong question ... seeking, not simply to determine
reprehensibility, but also to punish for harm caused strangers,''
Breyer said.
The decision did not address whether the size of the award was
constitutionally excessive, as Philip Morris had asked.
Punitive damages are money intended to punish a defendant
for its behavior and to deter repetition.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony
Kennedy and David Souter, joined with Breyer.
Dissenting were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia,
John Paul Stevens and Clarence Thomas.
Mayola Williams sued Philip Morris for fraud on behalf of her
husband, a two-pack-a-day smoker of Marlboros for 45 years.
Jesse Williams died of lung cancer more than nine years ago.
Philip Morris makes Marlboros.
She argued the jury award was appropriate because it punishes
Philip Morris' misconduct for a decades-long ''massive market-
directed fraud'' that misled people into thinking cigarettes were
not dangerous or addictive.
Williams, according to his widow, never gave any credence to the
surgeon general's health warnings about smoking cigarettes
because tobacco companies insisted they were safe. Only after
falling sick did Williams tell his wife: ''Those darn cigarette
people finally did it. They were lying all the time.''
The cigarette maker, however, said a jury can punish the company
only for the harm done to Williams, not to other smokers. The jury
should have been told explicitly that other smokers, no matter how
tragic their stories, would have to prove their own cases,
the company said.
The Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers
and trade associations representing car and drug makers have
weighed in on behalf of tighter restrictions on damage awards.
The case also was watched closely as a test of whether the new
makeup of the Supreme Court would lead to changes in its prior
rulings limiting punitive damages.
Roberts and Alito, the two newest members, were in the majority
Tuesday, giving no hint of a change in the court's approach
to punitive damages.
The case is Philip Morris USA v. Williams, 05-1256.
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16) North Africa Feared as Staging Ground for Terror
By CRAIG S. SMITH
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/africa/20tunisia.html?ref=world
TUNIS — The plan, hatched for months in the arid mountains of North
Africa, was to attack the American and British Embassies here. It ended
in a series of gun battles in January that killed a dozen militants and
left two Tunisian security officers dead.
But the most disturbing aspect of the violence in this normally placid,
tourist-friendly nation is that it came from across the border in Algeria,
where an Islamic terrorist organization has vowed to unite radical
Islamic groups across North Africa.
Counterterrorism officials on three continents say the trouble
in Tunisia is the latest evidence that a brutal Algerian group
with a long history of violence is acting on its promise:
to organize extremists across North Africa and join the
remnants of Al Qaeda into a new international force for jihad.
[Last week, the group claimed responsibility for seven nearly
simultaneous bombings that destroyed police stations in towns
east of Algiers, the Algerian capital, killing six people.]
This article was prepared from interviews with American
government and military officials, French counterterrorism
officials, Italian counterterrorism prosecutors, Algerian
terrorism experts, Tunisian government officials and
a Tunisian attorney working with Islamists charged with
terrorist activities.
They say North Africa, with its vast, thinly governed stretches
of mountain and desert, could become an Afghanistan-like
terrorist hinterland within easy striking distance of Europe.
That is all the more alarming because of the deep roots that
North African communities have in Europe and the ease
of travel between the regions. For the United States, the
threat is also real because of visa-free travel to American
cities for most European passport holders.
The violent Algerian group the Salafist Group for Preaching
and Combat, known by its French initials G.S.P.C., has for
several years been under American watch.
“The G.S.P.C. has become a regional terrorist organization,
recruiting and operating in all of your countries — and beyond,”
Henry A. Crumpton, then the United States ambassador at large
for counterterrorism, said at a counterterrorism conference
in Algiers last year. “It is forging links with terrorist groups
in Morocco, Nigeria, Mauritania, Tunisia and elsewhere.”
Officials say the group is funneling North African fighters
to Iraq, but is also turning militants back toward their
home countries.
The ambitions of the group are particularly troubling to
counterterrorism officials on the watch for the re-emergence
of networks that were largely interrupted in the wake of the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While most estimates put the current
membership of the group in the hundreds, it has survived more
than a decade of Algerian government attempts to eradicate it.
It is now the best-organized and -financed terrorist group
in the region.
Last year, on the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks,
Al Qaeda chose the G.S.P.C. as its representative in North Africa.
In January, the group reciprocated by switching its name
to Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, claiming that the Qaeda
leader, Osama bin Laden, had ordered the change.
“Al Qaeda’s aim is for the G.S.P.C. to become a regional force,
not solely an Algerian one,” said the French counterterrorism
magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguière, in Paris. He calls the Algerian
group the biggest terrorist threat facing France today.
“We know from cases that we’re working on that the G.S.P.C.’s
mission is now to recruit people in Morocco and Tunisia, train
them and send them back to their countries of origin or Europe
to mount attacks,” he said.
The G.S.P.C. was created in 1998 as an offshoot of the Armed
Islamic Group, which along with other Islamist guerrilla forces
fought a brutal decade-long civil war after the Algerian military
canceled elections in early 1992 because an Islamist party
was poised to win.
In 2003, a G.S.P.C. leader in southern Algeria kidnapped
32 European tourists, some of whom were released for
a ransom of 5 million euros (about $6.5 million at current
exchange rates), paid by Germany.
Officials say the leader, Amari Saifi, bought weapons and recruited
fighters before the United States military helped corner and catch
him in 2004. He is now serving a life sentence in Algeria.
Change of Leadership
Since then, an even more radical leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel,
has taken over the group. The Algerian military says he cut his
teeth in the 1990s as a member of the Armed Islamic Group’s
feared Ahoual or “horror” company, blamed for some of the most
gruesome massacres of Algeria’s civil war.
He announced his arrival with a truck bomb at the country’s
most important electrical production facility in June 2004,
and focused on associating the group with Al Qaeda.
Links to the G.S.P.C. soon began appearing in terrorism cases
elsewhere in North Africa and in Europe.
In 2005, Moroccan authorities arrested a man named Anour
Majrar, and told Italy and France that he and two other
militants had visited G.S.P.C. leaders in Algeria earlier that year.
His interrogation led to arrests in Algeria, Italy and France,
where Mr. Majrar’s associates were quickly linked to an attempted
robbery of 5 million euros at an armored car depot in Beauvais,
north of Paris. A hole had been blown in a wall at the depot with
military-grade C4 plastic explosives, but it was not big enough
for the men to get through.
A later investigation turned up Kalashnikov assault rifles, French
Famas military assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, TNT
and two more pounds of C4. French counterterrorism officials
say the group was planning attacks on the Paris Metro, the city’s
Orly Airport, and the headquarters of the Direction de la Surveillance
du Territoire, France’s domestic intelligence agency.
Italian prosecutors say a related cell in Milan was planning attacks
on the city’s police headquarters and on the Basilica of San Petronio
in Bologna, whose 15th-century fresco depicts the Prophet
Muhammad in hell.
The G.S.P.C. or its members in Algeria appear to have become
a touchstone for groups suspected of being terror cells across
the region, in much the way that Qaeda representatives
in London were a decade ago.
Wiretaps, interrogation of terrorism suspects and recovered
documents suggest that the network has associates in France,
Italy, Turkey and even Greece, which is favored as an entry
point to Europe because of its relatively lax immigration
controls, counterterrorism officials say.
There had been hints that the North African groups were
planning more formal cooperation as far back as 2005, when
Moroccan intelligence authorities found messages sent by
Islamic militants to Osama bin Laden, according to European
counterintelligence officials.
Evidence of an Alliance
Indications that a cross-border alliance was under way came
in June 2005, when the G.S.P.C. attacked a military outpost
in Mauritania, killing 15 soldiers. The attackers fled into Mali,
according to the United States military.
Moroccan police officers raiding suspected Islamic militant
cells last summer also found documents discussing a union
between the G.S.P.C. and the Islamic Combatant Group
in Morocco, the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya and several
smaller Tunisian groups, intelligence officials say.
In September, Al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman
al-Zawahri, released a videotape in which he said that his
global terrorist network had joined forces with the G.S.P.C.
The video was followed by an unsettling increase in terrorist
attacks across the region, including one against Halliburton
employees in Algeria in December that left one Algerian dead
and nine people wounded.
But the strongest evidence yet of the G.S.P.C.’s North African
cross-border cooperation came in January when Tunisia
announced that it had killed 12 Islamic extremists and
captured 15 of them. Officials said that six of the extremists
had crossed into the country from Algeria.
Their 36-year-old leader, Lassad Sassi, was a former Tunisian
policeman who ran a terrorist cell in Milan until May 2001
before fleeing to Algeria, according to an Italian prosecutor,
Armando Spataro.
Mr. Sassi, now dead, is still listed as a defendant in a current
terrorism trial in Milan, which began before he died. He was
charged in absentia with providing military clothing and money
to the G.S.P.C. while financing and planning suicide bomb
attacks in Italy.
Tunisian officials say that Mr. Sassi and five other men — four
Tunisians and one Mauritanian — crossed the rugged border
from Algeria into Tunisia months ago.
They set up a base in the mountains of Djebel Terif, where
Mr. Sassi trained 20 other Tunisian men in the use of automatic
weapons and explosives.
A Trail of Violence
The decision to move against the group began when the police
in the Tunis suburb of Hammam Lif detained a young woman
in December who led them to a house where a gun battle left
two suspected terrorists dead, two officers wounded and two
other men in custody, a police officer involved said. His account
of the events could not be independently verified.
Another arrest led the police into the hills toward the training camp.
Three of the militants and a Tunisian Army captain were killed
during a chase through the mountains. Tunisian security forces
mounted a search in which 13 more men were arrested
and Mr. Sassi was killed.
The remnants of the group fled and members were later tracked
down and killed in another gun battle.
Tunisian officials have sought to play down the G.S.P.C. link, and
have said the recently dismantled group’s target was the West.
In fact, according to Samir Ben Amor, a Tunisian attorney who
defends many young Tunisian Islamists, more than 600 young
Tunisian Islamists have been arrested in the past two years —
more than 100 in the past two months — trying to make their
way to Iraq to fight the United States.
“It’s the same thing that we saw in Bosnia, Kosovo and above
all Afghanistan,” said Mr. Bruguière, the French magistrate.
“Al Qaeda’s objective is to create an operational link between
the groups in Iraq and the G.S.P.C.”
Tunisia is among the most vulnerable of the North African
countries, because its rigid repression of Islam has created
a well of resentment among religious youth, and its popularity
as a tourist destination for Europeans makes it a target.
Tunisian security forces found Google Earth satellite images
of the American and British Embassies as well as the names
of diplomats who worked in both buildings. But according
to the police officer involved in the case and journalists
in Tunisia, the targets also included hotels and nightclubs.
An attack on those sites would have dealt a heavy blow to
Tunisia’s tourist industry, one of the country’s most important
sources of foreign exchange. An April 2002 bombing
of a synagogue on the Tunisian tourist island of Djerba, for which
the G.S.P.C. claimed responsibility, helped sink the country’s
economic growth that year to its slowest rate in a decade.
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17) Taliban Seize Rural District in Southwest as Police Flee
By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/asia/20afghan.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 19 — Taliban insurgents seized control of
a district in southwestern Afghanistan on Monday as the Afghan police
abandoned their post and fled, officials said.
The district is the second to fall into Taliban hands this month,
and its capture underlines the precarious hold of the government
and NATO troops in the remote districts of southern Afghanistan.
The midmorning attack occurred in the Baqwa district of Farah
Province, where few NATO or Afghan troops are deployed. A small
number of American soldiers run a reconstruction team in the provincial
capital, but the districts are left to the local police, who lack staff
and weapons.
The police in Baqwa town warned their provincial headquarters
that the Taliban were advancing in such large numbers they could
not hold the district office, according to Baryalai Khan, the secretary
to the provincial police chief.
“At 11:30, we lost telephone and radio contact with our police
in Baqwa district, and it seems the district is in the hands of the Taliban,”
he said. “According to the people of the town, our policemen escaped
in different directions, and the Taliban are in the district, although
not in the center for fear of bombardment.”
“We don’t know if there are any casualties among our police,” he said.
“We have no contact with them.” Four policemen were killed and three
wounded by a remote-controlled mine in the same district on Sunday,
he added.
Taliban forces have often overrun district offices in the past, sacking
them and then usually leaving after a few hours. But this year they
have seized and held entire regions.
British NATO forces and Afghan troops, however, claimed success
in an attack over the weekend on a Taliban stronghold in Helmand
Province, just east of Farah.
The operation unfolded south of Gamsir and concentrated on three
major compounds, destroying a tunnel complex linking them.
“We were able to hit them hard in the largest deliberate operation
there has been down there, and disrupt their command and control,”
Lt. Col. Rory Bruce told Reuters on Monday from the British task
force headquarters.
He said that a “significant number” of enemy fighters had been killed,
but did not give a precise figure. There were no British casualties.
On Sunday, insurgents fired twice on a Canadian military convoy
moving at night through the southern city of Kandahar, a NATO
statement said. Two Afghans — a homeless man and a police officer
— were killed by the Canadians in the ensuing firefight, the statement
said. NATO said both shootings were under investigation.
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18) Discontent in Guinea Nears Boiling Point
By LYDIA POLGREEN
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/africa/20guinea.html?ref=world
CONAKRY, Guinea, Feb. 18 — For most Guineans, the last straw
came two months ago.
On Dec. 16, President Lansana Conté, went to a city jail to liberate
two of his close associates: Guinea’s wealthiest businessman and
a former top official of the central bank.
That the two had been locked up in the first place, on charges
of embezzling $2.6 million of public money, had come very much
as a surprise to the long-suffering Guinean people, who have
labored in abysmal poverty under the yoke of authoritarian rule
for their entire post-colonial history.
Typically such high-level theft went unpunished, if not unnoticed
by civil servants, farmers, laborers and students, most of whom
get by on less than a dollar a day.
But locking them up, then personally letting them go, was
going too far.
“He sent us a message,” said Antoine Bangoura, a secretary
struggling to live on his $30 a month government salary.
“The government doesn’t care about us. So we sent a message
back. We want change. Conté must go.”
Since that December day, Guinea has been racked by rising unrest.
Strikes, riots and a brutal military crackdown have killed scores
of people in the past month and crippled the country’s already
feeble economy. The president declared martial law on Feb. 12,
and the situation has reached a smoldering stalemate, with growing
calls for Mr. Conté to step down.
Across Africa, autocracy and one-party rule have slowly yielded
to open, multiparty democracy. Guinea, one of the last bastions
of one-man rule, now seems on the verge of insurrection. No one
knows what kind of change will come — a military coup, a people’s
uprising, a brutal civil war or some grim combination.
“We all want change,” said Jean-Marie Doré, leader of the Union
for the Progress of Guinea, an opposition political party.
“The question is how this change will come.”
On Sunday, the government eased a 6 p.m. to noon curfew,
allowing movement from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the tension on
the streets eased slightly after a week of martial law that had kept
most people indoors. But little progress has been made on talks
between the government and the labor unions. The government
has insisted that the strike must end before martial law is lifted,
while the unions say martial law must end before negotiations
can resume.
At one of Conakry’s two main hospitals, the fetid wards are full
of people shot and beaten by security forces during the brutal
crackdown. Siaka Konneh lay on a stretcher on the floor, his eyes
covered with bandages. He had been trying to deliver oxygen tanks
a week before when he got caught in a volley of gunfire.
“I hear the gunshot — pow! — and my two eyes had been closed,”
he said, speaking in the English patois he picked up during years
spent in neighboring Liberia. “I no see anything again.”
Mr. Konneh, who is 37 and supports six children, four of his own
and two of his dead brother’s, said he blamed the president for
his desperate situation and the country’s malaise.
“What he done is not good for we people,” he said. “That man
gone spoil my life. My children, who will feed them? I am just
praying God the man move.”
Aliou Talibé Diallo, a 22-year-old student, said a stray bullet
struck him as he slept, going through his knee and out his calf.
“We are against this regime,” he said, slumped on a mat in the
breezeway in the overflowing hospital ward. “See how they shoot
us. I am ready to go to the street and die to force this man
to leave this country.”
An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that security forces
were raiding and looting private homes in the Conakry suburbs,
and had killed at least 22 people since martial law was declared.
The turmoil has been a long time coming. Guinea was one of the
first countries in Africa to achieve independence, and its story gives
it a place of particular pride in Africa’s postcolonial history. The
country’s first president, a charismatic union leader named Sékou
Touré, became a hero of anti-imperialism when he, alone among
Francophone African leaders, rejected de Gaulle’s offer of permanent
union with France in 1958, declaring that Guinea preferred “poverty
in freedom to riches in slavery.”
Every Guinean schoolchild learns de Gaulle’s parting sneer —
“Adieu, la Guinée” — and the methodical destruction of files and
equipment, even the light bulbs, by departing French colonial
bureaucrats and businessmen. They left the country’s civil
administration and economy in tatters.
France cut Guinea off completely, and in its isolation the nation has
bred a deep suspicion of outsiders and a stubborn self-reliance.
But the same factors that have kept Guinea poor and isolated have
kept it relatively stable.
Mr. Touré’s anti-imperial stance gave Guinea a nationalist character
distinct from many of its neighbors. A ruthless and paranoid man
who saw plots against him everywhere, Mr. Touré squashed any
efforts to organize the population along ethnic lines, largely
preventing the kinds of ethnic schisms that have caused civil wars
in neighboring countries. He instituted socialist economic policies,
which proved disastrous, impoverishing and further isolating Guinea.
Mr. Conté seized power in 1984, after Mr. Touré died while being
treated for a heart ailment in Cleveland. By the end of the 1980’s,
Guinea had become a reliably pro-Western redoubt, drawing
investments in its rich trove of minerals, especially bauxite,
an aluminum ore, of which Guinea is one of the world’s largest
exporters.
But as investment grew so did corruption, and the feeling that
Guinea’s riches, so long locked in the earth, were being plundered
by rapacious politicians and international profiteers. People began
to agitate for more freedom. In 1993, Guinea held its first presidential
election, which Mr. Conté won, as well as subsequent votes in 1998
and 2003, but they have been considered neither free nor fair.
The main opposition parties boycotted the last presidential election.
As Mr. Conté’s health has faded — he is a heavy smoker and a diabetic,
and has flown to Western hospitals for urgent treatment several times
in recent years — the population has become more willing to act out
its displeasure with the government.
When he was taken to Switzerland late last year for treatment during
a national conference to discuss the country’s political future, people
were emboldened to take to the streets to demand change.
“Guineans are known to be able to really take on a lot without
complaint,” said Elizabeth Côté, who works with IFES, a nonpartisan
democracy-building organization with international financing that
has been trying to help Guinea’s political and social institutions map
out its future. “But when they are not taking it anymore and going into
the streets, I think they are really serious about it.”
But perhaps the greatest danger the crisis in Guinea poses is that it may
destabilize its fragile neighbors. Guinea has played a large but shadowy
role in the deadly dramas that have unfolded across West Africa in the
past decade. Investigations by the United Nations and human rights
organizations have found that as much as 80 percent of the weaponry
used in the brutal civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone were funneled
into the region by European and Iranian arms dealers through corrupt
Guinean officials.
West Africa is awash in illegal weapons from the region’s civil wars,
and many of them are believed to have ended up here. Thousands
of former rebel fighters are floating around the region, ready to fight
for the highest bidder.
Violent repression has been a favored tool of the Guinean state for
decades. The nonprofit international organization Freedom House,
which monitors political and economic freedoms, lists Guinea
as one of the least free countries in Africa.
Prof. Djibril Tamsir Niane, an acclaimed historian of West Africa
who has chronicled the winds of change across the region, said
in an interview at his home here that those winds might finally
be gusting across Guinea’s shores.
“There is the will for change,” Dr. Niane said. “The entire population
of Conakry was on the streets in January. It is the beginning
of a new era.”
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19) Pentagon to Fill Iraq Reconstruction Jobs Temporarily
By THOM SHANKER
February 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/world/middleeast/20military.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 — The Pentagon and State Department have
worked out a deal to send a small number of military personnel
and Defense Department civilians to Iraq for several months until
Foreign Service officers and State Department contract workers
with specialized skills can fill those jobs, senior officials said
Monday.
The internal administration discussions over filling the posts
had exposed tensions between the military and civilian agencies
over how to share responsibilities in carrying out President Bush’s
new strategy for stabilizing and rebuilding Iraq — in particular,
how to fill hazardous positions in new provincial reconstruction
teams.
The State Department had asked the Pentagon to come up with
military personnel or civilians to fill about one-third of the 350
new State Department jobs in Iraq. While the numbers involved
are relatively small, the debate raised larger issues of whether
the government was properly organized to carry out a long-term
occupation of a country like Iraq.
The State Department’s written request for military personnel
to fill some of the positions temporarily, received in late January,
was met with frustration by a number of senior Pentagon officials
and military officers.
But last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates agreed to the
State Department request. About 120 military personnel
or Pentagon civilians will fill the jobs for up to four months,
according to three senior officials who were briefed on the
discussions.
The officials said the stopgap measure would give the State
Department time to identify Foreign Service officers to serve in
political and economic development jobs in Iraq and to use new
Congressional financing to hire people with technical skills that
are not routinely part of diplomatic missions overseas.
The officials said the jobs included industrial development
specialists, public health advisers, engineers, veterinarians,
agricultural experts and lawyers who specialize in creating
or enhancing judicial institutions.
While those skills are not a standard part of the diplomatic corps,
they are found among active duty military and reserve personnel.
It is those people who will be asked to step in temporarily.
“We are moving forward to try and fill many if not all of those
positions, and can certainly manage it for 60, 90 or 120 days,”
a senior Defense Department official said.
Another senior Pentagon official said, “Rather than waiting
for the funding and contracting process, we want to push
the envelope to get the provincial reconstruction teams
running as rapidly as we can.”
Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have not
publicly discussed the specifics of the agreement. But they
met at the State Department last week, and Ms. Rice spoke
in positive terms of cooperation between the departments.
“This is one of several meetings that the secretary and I have
been holding and will continue to hold on major issues that
Defense and State are confronting together in the global war
on terror,” Ms. Rice said at the time. “It gives us a chance
to get the people who are really responsible for managing
these issues on a day-to-day basis together with us to solve
the problems that we face and to take advantage of the
opportunity.”
The president’s new strategy calls for the State Department
to step up its efforts in Iraq, by doubling to 20 the number
of provincial reconstruction teams. That increase would be
in tandem with the deployment of 21,500 more troops
to Baghdad and Anbar Province to the west.
“We need to put more energy into government at lower levels,
at the provincial level and, in some cases, at the municipal level,”
a senior Defense Department official said.
Another official said the additional provincial reconstruction teams,
to be managed by State Department personnel, would not focus on
“brick and mortar” construction, but on “trying to reconstruct
governmental capacity — the ability for the Iraqi government
at all levels to effectively deliver services.”
The State Department-run reconstruction teams will rely on military
personnel for security and to escort convoys, Pentagon and State
Department officials said. Striking a balance between assigning
troops to day-to-day combat missions versus providing security
for nonmilitary efforts has caused some tensions in the past.
At the core of the debate is a clash of cultures, civilian and military,
and assessments of the mission. Many in the military have said
that while administration officials routinely speak of the United
States as “a nation at war,” by far the bulk of the mission is being
carried by those in uniform, while the rest of the government
is not on a similar war footing.
But across the civilian agencies, which have only a fraction
of the Pentagon’s personnel and budget, government workers
say the question is whether a few hundred unarmed civilians
spread across Iraq can make a significant difference in promoting
democracy and reconstruction in the middle of a war zone,
when more than 130,000 troops are not succeeding in that task.
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20) Iraq’s Fading Grip on American Business
By DANIEL ALTMAN
Economic View
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18view.html
WHAT will happen to the American economy if Washington pulls
the troops out of Iraq? What will happen if it doesn’t? The answer
to both of these questions may be, not a heck of a lot. Where the
war was once the dominating factor in mainstream economic
prognostication, lately it has become little more than a tragic
sideshow.
In the United States, the most direct economic effect of the war
is on the federal budget, which has added hundreds of billions
of dollars in military and reconstruction spending in the last few
years. According to basic economic theory, that extra spending
should stimulate the economy by creating new demand for goods
and services.
But the situation isn’t that simple. It’s possible that money spent
on the war could have been used for more productive investments
instead — scientific research, for example. The net effect of the
war, in that case, would have been to hinder economic growth.
And while military spending might be stimulative, it might also
be pushing up interest rates by increasing the government’s
borrowing, as well as raising the nation’s eventual need for
taxes to repay those debts.
If the economic effect of the extra spending has been unclear,
there is also no guarantee that military spending would fall
if the troops came home. David R. Scruggs, a senior fellow
in defense industrial initiatives at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, says the Army is in urgent need of repairs
and refitting for its equipment, especially armored vehicles.
Those costs will eventually have to be paid.
“We’ve got some historically high rates of inoperable vehicles
right now, and battle damage is only part of it,” Mr. Scruggs
said. “We’ve underfunded the depots and the industry to fix
this stuff. It may seem improbable given the amount of money
we’ve been spending in the last few years, but the money hasn’t
gone into fixing old stuff. It’s gone into fighting the war and
buying new stuff. We’re not going to have the new stuff
for several years, and we need to fix the old stuff so that
in the interim, we’ll have something.”
Mr. Scruggs also said that in a comparison with earlier large-
scale engagements, the share of spending going into salaries,
food and amenities for the troops in Iraq was substantially
higher — and that many of those costs would continue even
if the troops came home. The all-volunteer Army, now fighting
a prolonged conflict for the first time, is more expensive than
a conscripted one, he said; today’s force has to compete with
other professions to recruit workers, and it’s also seeking out
highly skilled and highly educated soldiers.
Aside from its effect on the budget, of course, the war has also
had an impact on the price of oil. Before the war began, the
direst predictions about its economic costs centered around
$100-a-barrel crude. Oil prices have indeed risen, but it is
not clear how much the war is responsible — and, thus, how
much those prices would fall if the situation in Iraq changed.
A series of discrete events have helped to keep prices high.
Spikes have come as a reaction to sabotage in the former Soviet
Union, to guerrilla warfare in Nigeria, even to domestic legislation
on fuel additives. Deeper factors like growth in developing
countries and belligerence in Venezuela and Iran have also
raised long-term average prices. Because Iraq wasn’t selling
its full production capacity of oil on international markets before
the war, the current shortfall in production hasn’t hurt all that much.
“If we pull out and we get a more peaceful situation in Iraq,
we might get more oil out of the place,” said Philip K. Verleger Jr.,
an energy economist based in Aspen, Colo. He added that the only
risk of a significant disruption in the oil supply would be if “the
situation in Iran blows up,” drawing the region into a larger conflict.
The story is similar in financial markets. Stock and bond prices
respond to oil prices, as well as to worries about budget deficits,
long-term security risks and a host of other issues. Lately,
however, Iraq hasn’t been much of a hot topic.
Shital Patel, an economist at Morgan Stanley, surveys her bank’s
analysts to assess the economic climate and challenges in the
nation’s various industries. “In reading a lot of people’s reports
outside of defense, aerospace and energy, I haven’t seen too
much mention of Iraq,” she said. “No one’s really mentioned
it at all as a risk. We ask how business conditions will be six
months out, and no one’s commented on Iraq there.”
Companies were not always so unconcerned, she said. In the
March 2003 version of her survey, half of Morgan Stanley’s
analysts said the war in Iraq — which had just begun —
was weakening business conditions.
THE duration of the war has also led to indifference in consumer
behavior. Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board,
a business group in New York, said consumer confidence
in the economy would not be affected much by either an
improvement or a worsening of the situation in Iraq.
“Iraq is ‘over there,’ and ‘over there’ is outside of our peripheral
vision,” he said. “It tinges the picture to some extent, but what’s
happening to jobs, what’s happening to income, what’s happening
to mortgage and credit rates — those are things which are of far
more immediacy to the consumer.” The war can affect those things,
he said, but only “tangentially and incrementally.”
One area where a peaceful conclusion to the war in Iraq could
make a big difference is the value of the dollar. Currency trading,
you could argue, responds to some of the most ephemeral but
also all-encompassing national factors.
“If President Bush just says that he needs to continue with his
program, the market’s not going to react to that,” said Kathy Lien,
chief strategist at Dailyfx.com, a subsidiary of Forex Capital Markets,
a currency broker in New York. “However, if we do have a complete
troop withdrawal, that would be taken very positively for the U.S. dollar.
Internationally, peace in Iraq and peace in general are also positive
for the U.S. dollar.” And that’s a comforting thought.
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21) Genetic Tests Offer Promise, but Raise Questions, Too
By DENISE CARUSO
February 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18reframe.html
A GROWING industry is hoping to spin gold from DNA’s double
helixes by using ultrasensitive genetic tests to personalize medical
treatment for cancer, lupus and other diseases.
These molecular diagnostic tests can give doctors more detailed
information than ever about their patients. Genetic information
can help them decide whether their lymphoma patients would
respond better to surgery, chemotherapy or radiation treatment;
make more accurate diagnoses of abnormal cells or tissues;
and more readily detect serious autoimmune disorders.
What’s more, the development of genetic tests has given academic
researchers the tools to begin establishing causal links between
common bacteria and viruses — streptococcus, say, or influenza
— and diseases like autism, cervical cancer, Type 1 diabetes,
schizophrenia and even obsessive-compulsive disorder.
More than 1,000 genetic tests are available clinically, and
hundreds more are available to researchers. Despite the
tremendous promise of these tests, there is growing concern
among researchers and patient advocates about how consistently
their claims match reality. How accurate are they at finding potential
genetic problems? Are different tests for different conditions
equally reliable? And how tight is the connection between
a genetic trait and a specific illness?
Some researchers say they believe that the practical relevance
of many tests has been oversold. Over the last two decades,
for example, there has been a steady stream of news about
researchers discovering “the gene” that links people to diabetes,
Alzheimer’s, obesity, schizophrenia, depression and many
other afflictions.
Yet most of those hard-wired gene-disease links — as many
as 95 percent of them, according to one British study published
in 2003 — don’t hold up to closer scrutiny. Instead, follow-up
studies find that if there is any measurable genetic link to these
common diseases, it results from the more complex interactions
of many genes with one another, as well as with the environment.
According to the Human Genome Project, this state of affairs
is particularly troubling, considering that a few companies have
started marketing genetic tests directly to the public — sometimes
claiming their kits not only test for disease, but can also customize
medicine, vitamins and diet to an individual’s genetic makeup.
There is no independent review or government oversight
of the validity of these tests, particularly those available
to consumers through their doctors. No agency yet has
the formal responsibility to make sure that genetic tests
can produce correct answers reliably over time — or, more
important, that there is even a relationship between a particular
genetic variation and a person’s health.
Companies that spend millions of dollars and years establishing
the clinical utility of their products can find themselves competing
in the marketplace with “a company with a couple of genes it ran
on 30 samples,” as one frustrated industry executive put it.
Add to this mix the relentless churn of new, often conflicting
scientific information about the role of genetics in disease —
and the life-or-death nature of the medical decisions that
doctors and patients might make, based on results of genetic
tests. On what basis should we decide whether these tests
are worth getting our hopes up?
“Advances in technology change the types of questions
researchers can ask,” said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a doctor and
professor of epidemiology, neurology and pathology
at Columbia University.
“New tools for detecting and discovering pathogens, new
sample collections and new research models will allow us
to head off future outbreaks of infectious disease and to
meet the challenges at the intersections between gene and
the environment,” Dr. Lipkin added. “But technology is like
a car with a lot of horsepower. If you point it in the wrong
direction, you can run people over.”
Dr. Lipkin is director of the Jerome L. and Dawn Greene
Infectious Disease Laboratory and scientific director of the
Northeast Biodefense Center at Columbia. For many years
he has been a significant player in the worlds of infectious
disease and biodefense, and is recognized for his interest
and skill in developing tools for discovering pathogens and
the relationships between pathogens and disease.
Because they are developed and used primarily for research,
not clinical practice, genetic tests developed by scientists like
Dr. Lipkin are not subject to oversight. But neither are the
1,000 or so commercial genetic tests available to consumers
through medical professionals.
Commercial laboratories do not have to negotiate any formal
approval process before offering a new genetic test, “and
government requirements to ensure that genetic testing
laboratories are getting the right answers to patients are
minimal,” according to an issue brief by the Genetics and
Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University last September.
What’s more, the center added, there is no government
requirement that a test must “actually relate to a particular
disease or risk of disease” in order to be sold.
At least one agency is trying to forge such requirements. The
Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological
Health held a public meeting on Feb. 8 to discuss guidelines
to regulate the safety and effectiveness of a type of test called
in-vitro diagnostic multivariate index assays.
One such test is Mammaprint, sold by Agendia, a Dutch company.
Mammaprint, which was the first product approved by the F.D.A.
under draft guidelines, measures the activity of 70 genes in
a cancer tumor after a surgeon removes it from a patient’s breast.
It then calculates a score that estimates the risk of the cancer
spreading to another part of the patient’s body.
Given the treatment decisions that will be made based on the results
of tests like Mammaprint, there is a critical need to assure doctors
and patients that the tests are as accurate and clinically valid
as possible.
Yet news coverage of the F.D.A. meeting indicated that agency
representatives got an earful from angry diagnostics manufacturers,
denouncing the F.D.A.’s draft guidelines. They complained that
the guidance was confusing, untenable and a “disincentive
to innovation,” and even suggested that the F.D.A. had no legal
authority to regulate these particular tests as “devices.”
Instead, they want these in-vitro diagnostic multivariate index
assays to be subject to the same rules as “homebrew” tests
developed by individual labs. These tests are regulated today
by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a Health
and Human Services agency separate from the F.D.A.
Under H.H.S. guidelines, called Clinical Laboratory Improvement
Amendments, tests developed by individual labs do not require
regulatory review. What’s more, the guidelines require only technical
proficiency; they do not require labs to prove their tests are clinically
valid, said Dr. Daniel G. Schultz, director of the F.D.A.’s Center
for Devices and Radiological Health.
He said in-vitro diagnostic multivariate index assays “are based
on algorithms that don’t permit even a well-trained physician
to really understand whether or not the results are accurate and
meaningful or not.”
“If that technology purports to tell an individual whether or not the
type of ovarian or breast or colon cancer is or isn’t likely to recur,
and would or wouldn’t require additional therapy — well, we think
there needs to be somebody looking at the testing that was done
to create those algorithms,” Dr. Schultz said. “No one else is doing
that, and if we don’t do it, no one else is going to.”
Despite numerous calls by government advisory bodies and expert
committees over six years to do so, the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services have yet to develop special rules for labs
conducting genetic tests. Last September, the Genetics and Public
Policy Center filed a citizens petition with several other public
interest groups, arguing that the centers’ refusal to address
the issue violates the law.
NEVERTHELESS, Sharon F. Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance,
said the F.D.A. guidelines should be withdrawn and formal rules
approved, an action that would take several years to complete.
In the interim, diagnostics makers would be free to offer whatever
products they wanted under the H.H.S.’s “laboratory improvement”
guidelines.
No one can blame diagnostics makers for wanting the freedom
to develop a new and obviously important market, and as
a society we should find every way possible to support their
investment in expanding their knowledge and developing these
new and powerful technologies.
But genetic tests lead people to make life-changing decisions:
To undergo surgery, or not. To take, or not take, a drug with
potentially significant side effects or benefits. To bear a child
or terminate a pregnancy.
It is difficult to see either the economic benefit or the ethical
wisdom of allowing genetic testing to move forward without
even the most basic protections for patients and physicians
who will rely on them.
Denise Caruso is executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute,
which studies collaborative problem-solving.
E-mail: dcaruso@nytimes.com.
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22) WHAT 'WAR ON TERROR'?
[Col. Writ. 2/7/07] Copyright 2007 Mumia Abu-Jamal
[VIA Email from Howard Keylor
howardkeylor@comcast.net ...bw]
Have you ever thought (but were afraid to admit) that there really
wasn't such a thing as a 'war on terror?'
Well, worry no more.
England's top prosecutor has set the record straight.
Britain's director of public prosecutions, Ken McDonald, gave a speech
in late January to the nation's Criminal Bar Association. In words
that few U.S. figures of such stature could ever muster, McDonald
told the assembly:
"On the streets of London, *there is no such thing as a 'war on terror'*,
just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'."
McDonald, who heads the Crown Prosecution Service, warned of the
"fear-driven and inappropriate response" of the nation's political
and legal community, which could threaten the fairness of trials
and due process of law.
McDonald added:
"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war.
It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the
winning of justice for those damaged by the infringement."*
How utterly refreshing! Leave it to the Brits to stick a pin into
the U.S. balloon of the 'war on terror.'
Presidents love to sell the war metaphor to support their
prerogatives to accrue more power than their predecessors.
Every war sets the stage for the strengthening of the nation's
executive power.
That's what McDonald meant when he referred to 'fear-driven
responses.'
It may begin in Britain, but it won't end there.
That's because neither wisdom nor common sense can be
segregated behind borders.
That's because fear doesn't last forever.
Generations ago, during World War II, thousands of Japanese-
Americans, men, women, and babies, were placed in concentration
camps all across the country -- based purely on fear and racist
projections.
Today, people look back at that era with embarrassment and deep
misgivings. There was no real, honest basis for this kind
of treatment of such citizens.
It took decades, but presidents have condemned such treatment,
and reparations (albeit quite modest) were made to survivors
of that social tragedy.
Today, a host of errors and evils accompany the so-called 'war on
terror.' The president has tried to sell the Iraq debacle as 'the central
front' of this war, but fewer and *fewer* Americans are buying it.
And while politicians insist on swearing their false fealty to it
(even though they don't believe in it, but are afraid to do so, lest
they be marked as 'soft'), public opinion polls show most folks
are echoing the views of a British prosecutor.
False pretexts -- false wars. With millions of people refugees,
hundreds of thousands dead, land and lives ravaged by American
maniacs, and their imperial subjects.
Americans hear 'war and on terror' today, and turn to American Idol.
That's because they know -- in their innards -- that it's a crock.
The time will come when we look back, and may dare to smile.
Copyright 2007 Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Source: *Asheville Global Report, No. 420, Feb. 1-7, 2007, p. 15.]
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23) Interview with the Ricardo Alarcón, President of the Cuban
La Vanguardia - Barcelona
Monday, February 19, 2007
International
This came to me without the URL.
Spanish original posted along
with English translation here:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1137.html
Parliament "I think we‚ll see Fidel again at close
quarters" An important man in the highest echelons of Fidel
Castro‚s Cuba, he has held that position since 1993.
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, 69, has been presiding over the
Cuban Parliament since 1993. A Doctor of Philosophy and
Arts, he was Cuba‚s ambassador to the United Nations from
1966 to 1978, when he was appointed Deputy President of the
General Assembly. He has also been in charge of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is deemed an important man
in the highest echelons of Fidel Castro‚s Cuba.
Q: For the last six months Fidel Castro has stayed out of
the presidency because of his illness. What has changed?
A: Well, he has not exactly stayed out...
Q: Or away from it.
A: That‚s more like it. The thing is, we don‚t see him as
much as we used to. One of Fidel‚s habits is to keep a
firm, direct grip on many issues. It‚s his style. That
physical absence has been the main change. When something
happens, say, a hurricane, he‚s been there, and not only at
meetings where damages are assessed on paper. Of course, he
can‚t do that now that he‚s recovering from surgery, but I
assure you he‚s still on top of every important matter.
Like Raúl Castro has said, he spends a lot of time glued to
the phone he‚s got by his side.
Q: Does he ever call you?
A: We have talked over the phone a few times, but he
concentrates mostly on Vice-President Carlos Lage and
Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez. Lage [Economics] is quite
methodical and capable of conveying the main points
briefly. So is Felipe when it comes to international
events, a sensitive issue always in the center of Fidel‚s
attention.
Q: So what has changed in Cuba?
A: Neither society nor politics nor our basic directions
have changed. Most noticeable perhaps is the Cuban people‚s
reaction to Fidel‚s proclamation on July 31 (temporary
delegation of powers to Raúl), which puts paid to so much
speculation overseas; a mature, even-tempered, supportive
reaction amid their sorrow, of course, which confirms the
great unity of Cuban society and the strength of its
institutions.
Q: And what can and can‚t change, either now or after
Fidel?
A: Each person is unique and irreplaceable. We change all
the time, that‚s what life is about. Some people retire,
some die, others grow up... and everyone makes a mark. In
the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet model and
its terrible blow on the Cuban economy as the U.S.
strengthened its blockade, the end of Cuban socialism was
announced with an excessive, unjustified fanfare: Cuba had
to correct its course and bet on an assumed winning ticket.
Yet, what are we talking about today? Look around you. The
allegedly winning choice is bankrupt all over Latin
America. Now the trend is to get closer to what Cuba has
meant. Everywhere there‚s fierce criticism of the
capitalist model, and people are looking for alternative
formulas: the 21st century socialism, or better said,
socialisms. Defending the neo-liberal model here is all but
a joke; no one is asking Cuba to do what Latin America does
less and less. You have to be out of your mind to be
willing to preserve the world ridden with the ecological
disaster as described by Al Gore, who almost became
president of the U.S.
Q: Is Fidel‚s return to direct, daily command to be
expected?
A: His recovery is going well. He‚s the one acting with
caution because of his hopeless addiction to the truth and
deep-seated contempt for deception. He‚s always reminding
us that his situation is delicate and complex, though he‚s
been forced to admit to be doing fine. I‚m confident that
he will not only keep managing our key issues as he is now,
but we will be seeing him again at close quarters.
Q: As much as before?
A: That would be only natural, but without spending so many
hours everywhere and paying visits. I‚m 11 years his
junior, and seeing his work capacity has made me feel
exhausted and amazed. I won‚t dare say he will adopt a more
discreet, moderate position, for I might make a fool of
myself. But he‚s very capable of surprising us all.
Q: Raúl Castro has a different style and a reputation for
being more pragmatic than Fidel.
A: It‚s another style that Cubans know too. He‚s
straightforward and unassuming, and reluctant to be center
stage, which makes a change. He likes to get to the point
and aim for the solution rather than elaborate too much and
get muddled up in discussions. I remember, though, that at
first Raúl was the extremist, radical, communist one. Now
he turns out to be the pragmatic and restrained one. So, he
was also a pragmatist then and a radical now.
Q: What do you think about the hypotheses of reforms in
Cuba according to the Chinese or Vietnamese model?
A: We‚re not Chinese. There are things about the Chinese
experience that could prove very useful, but also the other
way around. The idea of a single model is no longer a
choice among intelligent socialists. It‚s in the West where
some people still harbor that foolish idea.
Q: Are you afraid that corruption may put a damper on
Cuba‚s likely reforms or its evolution?
A: Fidel said the enemy would never defeat the Revolution,
for we‚re the only ones who could destroy it. And
corruption is a key issue here. It‚s a universal
phenomenon, but not as strong in Cuba as it is in other
countries. Nevertheless, that could be our final outcome.
Unlike the case of a capitalist country, corruption makes a
socialist country less so, and works against the idea of a
socially supportive environment which the United Nations
Economic Commission for Latin America labeled the mechanism
that curbed the adverse consequences of introducing a
market economy. The doses of capitalism we‚ve had to
swallow are not the only cause of corruption, but it‚s one
of the reasons, together with material scarcity.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire
By Chalmers Johnson
http://www.alternet.org/story/47998
"I Swore to Uphold the Constitution. Instead, I Disgraced It"
Vermont Legislature Says Bring Them Home Now!
By JAMES MARC LEAS
February 16, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/leas02162007.html
The giant Anglo-Dutch oil group Shell has signed a long-awaited
$800m deal with Iran to develop two offshore oil fields.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/the_economy/519688.stm
Kids get Addicted to WarSan Francisco's high school students
to study a different kind of schoolbook
By Amanda Witherell
http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=2785
Fed Chief Sees a Rate Rise if Inflation Rears Its Head
By REUTERS
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/business/16fed.html
Hershey Cutting Work Force 12%
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
Hershey will close more than a third of its assembly lines and eliminate
12 percent of its work force after sales fell for the first time in 3 ½ years,
the company said yesterday.
The company, whose products include Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s
peanut butter cups, will cut 1,500 jobs over the next three years and
start production at a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico. The reductions
will cost as much as $575 million before taxes, the company said.
Hershey, which is based in Hershey, Pa., lost market share last year
to Mars, the maker of Snickers, and last month reported a fourth-
quarter sales decline of 0.7 percent.
Hershey’s United States market share fell to 42.5 percent in the
13 weeks through Dec. 24, from 43.5 percent at the end of the
fourth quarter of 2005, according to Information Resources. Mars’s
share rose to 25.9 percent, from 24.2 percent. The data excludes
sales to Wal-Mart Stores.
When the plan is completed, Hershey expects 80 percent of its
production to be in the United States and Canada.
Shares of Hershey rose 80 cents, or 1.6 percent, to $52.10 on
the New York Stock Exchange.
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/business/16hershey.html
Radio Station Cries 'Enough' -- Won't Quote From Certain News Stories
Relying on Unnamed Officials
By Greg Mitchell
Published: February 13, 2007 10:55 PM ET
http://www.editorandpublisher.com
FOCUS | Murtha Is Democrats' Face in Iraq Debate
"By mid-March, Democratic Congressman John Murtha will offer
legislation that he says would set such stringent rules on combat
deployments that Bush would have no choice but to begin
bringing troops home."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021707Z.shtml
FOCUS | The Forgotten Families
"Her daughter was killed by a bomb in Iraq. Eight months later,
Susan Jaenke is both grief-stricken and strapped - behind
on her mortgage, backed up on her bills and shut out of the
$100,000 government death benefit that her daughter thought
she had left her. The problem is that Jaenke is not a wife, not
a husband, but instead grandmother to the 9-year-old her
daughter left behind. For the Jaenkes and others like them,
the toll of war can be especially complex: They face not only
the anguish of losing a son or daughter but also the emotional,
legal and financial difficulties of putting the pieces back together
for a grandchild."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021707Y.shtml
Space lasers detect big lakes under Antarctic ice
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lasers beamed from space have detected
what researchers have long suspected: big sloshing lakes
of water underneath Antarctic ice."
February 16, 2007
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0C6BA56676353996DFF5EFB2B7789E1E
Cable to expand Cuba‘s internet capacity
Ely Times, NV - February 16
Staff and agencies
By John RIce / Associated Press writer
HAVANA - A new undersea fiber-optic cable from Cuba to Venezuela
should be finished within two years, a Venezuelan communications
official said Thursday, dramatically expanding Cuba‘s internet
and telephone capacity.
That‘s well over 1,000 times the capacity of Cuba‘s current satellite-
based internet link, which was listed as 65 megabytes per second
on upload and 124 megabytes a second on download by Cuban
Communications Minister Ramiro Valdes.
"It‘s a very important project, not only for Venezuela and Cuba,
it‘s for all Latin American countries," Duran said during an interview
at an informatics convention.
Cuba has one of the region‘s lowest rates of internet usage.
Officials say that is because the current bandwidth restrictions
and U.S. threats against foreign suppliers of technology to Cuba
force them to give priority to schools, researchers and essential
businesses. Critics have accused the government of restricting
internet access to limit Cubans‘ exposure to criticism
or information from abroad.
[VIA Email from Howard Keylor howardkeylor@comcast.net ...bw]
Guest workers allege slavery locally
Published: Thursday, February 15, 2007 7:06 PM CST
http://www.sulphurdailynews.com/articles/2007/02/16/news/news.txt
1,000 Dogs and Cats Killed After Outbreak at Shelter
By STEVE FRIESS
"Ms. Gale said her organization had been operating the shelter
like a rescue operation and had not been euthanizing enough
animals to keep the space safe and sanitary for the adoptable
ones. From now on, she said, unadoptable animals will be
euthanized after 72 hours at the shelter, as the Humane
Society recommends."
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/us/16animals.html?ref=us
Democrats in State Capitols Push Antiwar Resolutions
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/us/16pressure.html?ref=us
Pressing Allies, President Warns of Afghan Battle
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
"WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 — President Bush warned on Thursday that
he expected “fierce fighting” to flare in Afghanistan this spring,
and he pressed NATO allies to provide a bigger and more aggressive
force to guard against a resurgence by the Taliban and Al Qaeda
that could threaten the fragile Afghan state."
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/washington/16prexy.html?ref=world
Israel Begins Running Web Cameras at Contested Excavation Site
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/world/middleeast/16jerusalem.html
House Passes Iraq Resolution With 17 Votes From G.O.P.
By DAVID STOUT
"WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 — After four days of emotional debate over
the extent of presidential powers in wartime and the proper role
of Congress, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution
today denouncing President Bush’s plan to send more American
troops to Iraq.
The 246 to 182 vote in favor of the non-binding but nevertheless
important measure set the stage for a crucial Senate debate
on Saturday on how to debate the administration’s Iraq policy,
or indeed whether it should be debated at all."
February 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/world/middleeast/16cnd-cong.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Not in our name: campaign launched against Trident
Exclusive: Leading figures from politics, religion,
the arts and the military demand halt to replacement
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
"A powerful coalition of 100 scientists, lawyers, church leaders,
actors, writers and MPs is today demanding a halt to the rush
by Tony Blair towards a replacement for Britain's Trident
nuclear weapon system."
Published: 15 February 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article2271662.ece
Illinois: Mayor Added to Torture Suit
By LIBBY SANDER
Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago was added as a defendant
to a federal civil lawsuit accusing city officials of covering up
torture of dozens of criminal suspects by police officers on the
South Side in the 1970s and 1980s. Mr. Daley, who is seeking
his sixth term as mayor in an election on Feb. 27, was Cook
County’s top prosecutor in the early 1980s when some of the
most serious incidents of brutality are alleged to have taken
place. The lawsuit is one of several filed in federal court in
recent years on behalf of men claiming that police officers
tortured them into giving false confessions.
February 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/us/15brfs-DALEY.html
Tennessee: Death Certificates in Abortions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
A state representative introduced legislation that would
require death certificates for aborted fetuses, which would
be likely to create public records identifying women who
have abortions. The representative, Stacey Campfield,
a Republican, predicted the bill would pass in the Republican
-controlled Senate but would face difficulties in the Democratic
-controlled House. “At least we would see how many lives are
being ended out there by abortions,” Mr. Campfield said.
The number of abortions reported to the state Office of Vital
Records is already publicly available. Representative Rob Briley,
a Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
called Mr. Campfield’s proposal “the most preposterous
bill I’ve seen” in an eight-year legislative career.
February 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/us/15brfs-DEATHCERTIFI_BRF.html
Bush Declares Iran’s Arms Role in Iraq Is Certain
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MARC SANTORA
February 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/world/middleeast/15prexy.html?ref=world
U.S., Britain fare poorly in children survey
UNICEF ranks the well-being of youngsters in 21 developed countries.
By Maggie Farley, Times Staff Writer
February 15, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-children15feb15,0,5374235.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Troops Sweep 3 Shiite Areas in Baghdad Push
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAMIEN CAVE
"Thousands of American troops in armored Stryker vehicles swarmed
through three mostly Shiite neighborhoods of northeastern Baghdad
today, encountering little resistance, in what commanders described
as the first major sweep of the new security plan for the capital.
The push into Shaab, Bayda and Ur, on the northern edge of Sadr City,
comes one day after the top Iraqi general claimed broad powers
to search, detain and move residents from their homes. It was the
largest of several operations carried out today, as American and
Iraqi government forces step up their efforts to halt the bloody
violence in Baghdad."
February 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/world/middleeast/14cnd-iraq.html?hp&ex=1171515600&en=58dfc2399c6d3bbb&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Greatest Generation Learns About Great Safe Sex
By COREY KILGANNON
"The sex educators had news for this class of 40 people in their 70s
and 80s, just in time for Valentine’s Day: Older folks are friskier
than ever, and it’s never too late to learn about safe sex."
February 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/nyregion/14sex.html
Bush Says Iran Is Source of Deadly Bombs
By DAVID STOUT and BRIAN KNOWLTON
"WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 -- President Bush said today he is certain
that elements of the Iranian government are supplying deadly
roadside bombs that kill American troops in Iraq, even if the
innermost circle of the government is not involved."
February 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/world/middleeast/14cnd-prexy.html?hp&ex=1171515600&en=d557534b5b57740b&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Chrysler to Cut 13,000 Jobs in Overhaul
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
February 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/business/15chrysler.html?hp&ex=1171515600&en=f457622105238783&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Army Giving More Waivers in Recruiting
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
February 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/us/14military.html?hp&ex=1171515600&en=d763ab40cba3657d&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Chrysler to Cut 13,000 Jobs in North America
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021407A.shtml
In Gaza, Circles of Hell
Jen Marlowe
February 12, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070226/marlowe
How Gaza Offends Us All
By Jennifer Loewenstein
"What a terrible shame it is that Gazans have not yet attained the status of
human in the eyes of the Western powers, for the resistance there will
continue to be an enigma until this changes. For now, however, the slaughter will
continue unabated."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17050.htm
Just like life under Pinochet:
"The Palestinians' lives under the occupation are reminiscent of the lives
of Chile's citizens under the dictatorship," says Chilean Judge Juan Guzman,
who is visiting Israel, last week. "
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824148.html
Norman Finkelstein on the Tehran Holocaust Conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YemOW3lVoAI
Robert Fisk: Lebanon slides towards civil war as anniversary
of Hariri's murder looms
Published: 14 February 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2268090.ece
Preserving perches for wild parrots
City would take responsibility for favored aging
cypresses under S.F. supervisor's plan
Charlie Goodyear, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/14/MNGEVO4DQJ1.DTL
Freedom Rider: Medical Apartheid
by Black Agenda Report Editor and Senior Columnist Margaret Kimberley
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=75
Public Housing Residents Take Back Their Homes
February 10 was a historic day in New Orleans. Residents of the
C.J. Pete public housing development moved back into their homes,
which the government had slated for demolition.
February 11, 2007
http://www.peoplesorganizing.org/breaking_news.html
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SCROLL DOWN TO READ:
EVENT ANNOUNCEMENTS (IN FULL DETAIL)
GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
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EVENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
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LYNNE STEWART AND MICHAEL RATNER IN BAY AREA
FEBRUARY 23-25 (Lynne and her husband Ralph will
stay on several more days. Stay tuned for complete
schedule of events.)
Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart,
I am pleased to announce that Lynne Stewart and Michael Ratner have
just accepted our invitation to tour the Bay Area. The confirmed
dates are February 23-25, 2007. Lynne, accompanied by her husband
Ralph Poynter, will stay on several more days for additional meetings.
In solidarity,
Jeff Mackler,
West Coast Coordinator, Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
Co-Coordinator, Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
O: 415-255-1080
Cell: 510-387-7714
H: 510-268-9429
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May Day 2007
National Mobilization to Support Immigrant Workers!
Web: http://www.MayDay2007.net
National Immigrant Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support Immigrant Rights!
webpage: http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail: info@ImmigrantSolidarity.org
New York: (212)330-8172
Los Angeles: (213)403-0131
Washington D.C.: (202)595-8990
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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URGENT APPEAL TO SAVE IRAQ'S ACADEMICS.
Call for action to save Iraq's Academics
A little known aspect of the tragedy engulfing Iraq is the systematic
liquidation of the country's academics. Even according to conservative
estimates, over 250 educators have been assassinated, and many
hundreds more have disappeared. With thousands fleeing the country
in fear for their lives, not only is Iraq undergoing a major brain drain,
the secular middle class - which has refused to be co-opted by the
US occupation - is being decimated, with far-reaching consequences
for the future of Iraq.
http://www.brussellstribunal.org/
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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ENDORSE THE A.N.S.W.E.R. CALL TO ACTION
March 17-18, 2007
GLOBAL DAYS OF ACTION ON THE
4TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WAR!
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?
SURVEY_ID=3400&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&JServSessionIdr011=
k7a3443r73.app8a
http://answer.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_homepage
Please circulate widely
www.answercoalition.org
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
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