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SAN FRANCISCO - TONIGHT!
FREEDOM NEXT TIME: AN EVENING WITH JOHN PILGER
Pilger will discuss his new book, Freedom Next Time
(Nation Books) and show his film Breaking the Silence:
Truth and Lies in the War on Terror. This film, set
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Washington, looks at President
Bush's "war on terror" and the "liberation" of countries
where bloodshed and repression continue. Followed
by audience dialogue and a book signing.
Wednesday, June 13- 7 PM
Doors open 6:00 PM
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (http://www.ybca.org/)
YBCA Theater
700 Howard St. at Third
$15 general, $5 students
A book signing of Freedom Next Time and other books
by John Pilger will follow the event.
Presented by The Center for Economic Research and
Social Change, The Nation Institute, and KPFA, with
support from the Wallace Global Fund.
For ticket information, call 415-978-2787 or order
online at http://www.ybca.org/. In person tickets
at YBCA Box office located inside the Galleries and
Forum Building, 701 Mission Street at Third.
(Hours: Tue, Wed, Fri, Sat & Sun: noon - 5 pm;
Thu: noon - 8 pm.)
For media inquiries, contact (212) 209-5407 or ruth@thenation.com.
For more information, email pilgersf@gmail.com
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PUT AN END TO WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS.
http://www.facesofwrongfulconviction.org/action.htm
Check it out!
http://www.deathpenalty.org/index.php?pid=Act&menu=1"
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) What Should the Anti-War Movement Do Now?
A Proposal from the ANSWER Coalition
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
[Please note: I endorse this call wholeheartedly and
encourage everyone to sign on! --Bonnie Weinstein, www.bauaw.org]
2) U.S. Strikes at Militants in Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/africa/03somalia.html?hp
3) Sweep at School Turns Up a Trove of Electronic Contraband
By JULIE BOSMAN
June 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/nyregion/01school.html
4) Poisonous Police Behavior
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 2, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
5) A Legal Debate in Guantánamo on Boy Fighters
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/us/03gitmo.html?hp
6) Cuba Releases Video of Castro
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 a.m. ET
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Cuba-Vietnam-Castro.html?hp
7) Fighting Continues in Lebanon Refugee Camp
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:24 a.m. ET
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Lebanon-Violence.html?hp
8) With Korea as Model, U.S. Ponders Long Role in Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/washington/03assess.html?ref=world
9) G-8 Protesters Clash With German Police
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2007
Filed at 11:44 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-G-8-Demonstration.html
10) Thousands Rally for Changes to Immigration Bill
By NEELA BANERJEE
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/washington/03rally.html?ref=us
11) Doctor Says Drug Maker Tried to Quash His Criticism of Avandia
By STEPHANIE SAUL
June 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/business/02drug.html
12) Coca-Cola and PepsiCo Agree to Curb Animal Tests
By BRENDA GOODMAN
May 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/business/31testing.html
13) Attacks on U.S. Troops in Iraq Grow in Lethality, Complexity
Bigger Bombs a Key Cause of May's High Death Toll
By Ann Scott Tyson and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 3, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/02/AR2007060201294.html?hpid=topnews
14) MEXICO: Educators march and declare they are on strike throughout the
country TeleSUR _ 6/01/2007 - 10:02 hours [Edited]
15) Cooperation between Vietnam and Venezuela Strengthened
Hugo Chavez received Nong Duc Manh,
head of the Vietnamese Communist Party
2007-06-01 | 12:34:06 EST
http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/
http://tinyurl.com/325xk4
16) JAZZ FANS DECRY EXCLUSION
Few African American musicians booked for Berkeley festival,
none on Yoshi's anniversary CD
Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/01/MNGVOQ5TTP1.DTL
17) The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
By Mahmood Mamdani
March 8, 2007
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/print/mamd01_.html
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1) What Should the Anti-War Movement Do Now?
A Proposal from the ANSWER Coalition
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
[Please note: I endorse this call wholeheartedly and
encourage everyone to sign on! --Bonnie Weinstein, www.bauaw.org]
It is an absolute responsibility of the anti-war movement
to make an honest and straightforward assessment of the
current situation and to craft a strategy that can really
make a difference. Every serious organization, and especially
those with the greatest mobilizing reach, must be asked
to avoid posturing, make an assessment and develop an
action plan that will change the political landscape
in a decisive way.
This document does not seek to address or detail the
political differences between organizations and groups.
They exist and they have been detailed often. At this
moment, there needs to be an effort at clear perspective
that focuses on one simple question: What will end the
war and occupation of Iraq and what should the US anti-
war movement do?
It is clear that the anti-war movement is not sufficiently
strong at the moment to bring this criminal and despised
war to an end. Every organization must ask why is this
so and most importantly what can be done to change the
situation immediately.
The first question to ask and answer is: Can a people's
movement in the United States overcome the commitment
of the White House, Congress and the Pentagon to authorize,
extend and finance the war and occupation in Iraq?
If you or your organization answers the question negatively
then the rest doesn’t really matter. Perhaps, individuals
can bear witness and continue to protest, but it will
be little more than an individual statement.
If the answer to the question is yes, however, we must
assess various factors and craft a strategy that will be
fundamentally different from the current path of the
anti-war movement.
Historically, wars come to an end either because one side
wins and one side loses, or the people rise in revolution
(usually as a result of a military defeat or pending defeat),
or both sides exhaust each other over a protracted period.
What is the military situation in Iraq? The US cannot
achieve military victory in Iraq. Its multiple opponents
in Iraq are not militarily strong enough to decisively
defeat the US military in the short term. If the Iraqi
population, however, were able to overcome sectarian
divisions introduced with the US occupation it is possible
that Iraq could witness a repeat of a nationwide uprising
such as the 1958 Revolution that drove the British military
out of Iraq. But the flames of division are being whipped
up every day and function as a deterrent to such a spontaneous
national uprising against the occupiers. Finally, the
US military is stretched thin but is clearly able to
continue the occupation for some time, and the anti-U.S.
opponents in Iraq are not exhausted yet by the protracted
conflict. If anything they are gathering strength and
energy as the occupation forces cannot take the strategic
initiative away from guerrilla forces.
Given this complex reality, or realities, we believe that
the U.S. antiwar movement must take strategic and bold
initiatives that change the political climate in this
country. To succeed, these initiatives must be based
on a correct assessment of where we are.
The ANSWER Coalition wants to offer its own brief assessment
of the political equation in the United States. We are
also offering a proposal to all of the major anti-war
coalitions and groups and to all of those organizations
that function on a local level
Assessment of the political situation as it regards
the Iraq war
1) The people of the country have turned decisively against
the continuation of the war. Most recognize that the war was
based on lies and most no longer believe the president and
the generals when they assure them that victory is still
possible.
2) The military situation is worsening rather than improving
in light of the so-called surge. The number of US war dead
in May 2007 spiked to the third highest month since the
initial invasion in 2003. The numbers of Iraqi dead is about
3,000 each month. Two million Iraqis have fled the country
and another two million are internal refugees.
3) The US is unable to secure its political control over
the region as is evident by what is happening in Lebanon,
Iran and Syria and its intensified destabilization campaign
towards the Palestinian people.
4) The Bush administration is increasingly isolated, at home
and abroad, because of its failure in Iraq and its inability
to regain the military initiative even with tens of thousands
of more troops. The Pentagon anticipates occupying Iraq for
decades, as it has Korea and other countries.
5) More and more U.S. soldiers, marines, veterans and the
families of service members are either disillusioned or
completely opposed to the continuation of the war and
occupation.
6) The Democratic-controlled Congress voted overwhelmingly
to extend and finance the war and occupation. The calculation
of the Democratic Party leadership and the vast majority
of its elected officials in Congress is based on avoiding
at all costs taking responsibility for a pullout from Iraq
which will be perceived as a defeat for the United States
in this strategic oil-rich region. They believe that they
can secure an electoral advantage in 2008 by having the war
drag on and have the public hold the Republicans responsible
for the war. Moreover, the Democratic Party is feeding from
the same corporate financing trough as the Republicans and
they share the Bush government’s broad objective of U.S.
domination in the Middle East. Congress, under the current
circumstances, is completely committed to not ending the war
in Iraq in the next two years and probably for much longer
than that.
Assessment of the weakness and strength of the antiwar
movement:
1) There have been a growing number of anti-war protests
on the national, regional and local level during the past
six months.
2) The antiwar protests are being joined and, in some
cases, initiated by the people who have not been involved
in past demonstrations.
3) A growing sentiment of opposition and disgust to the war,
occupation (and the politicians) is building among rank and
file service members and some officers.
4) A large amount of energy and activity was directed at
Congress with the hope that the Congress would heed their
constituents' desire to end the war. When the Congress
instead voted against its constituents and with Bush
to extend the war there was a huge wave of anger, frustration
and desperation but with few available or recognized channels
for effective action.
5) Although the antiwar sentiment is growing among the
general population, the size and intensity of the
demonstrations, protests and acts of resistance does
not at all measure up to the vast magnitude of feelings
against the Iraq war among the general population.
6) The single biggest reason for this dichotomy is the
fact that the anti-war movement is badly splintered rather
than working together or in a united fashion so as to marshal,
stimulate and mobilize a truly massive outpouring of the people.
Proposal to build a truly mass outpouring of the people
If every anti-war coalition and organization came together
on a particular day, and with enough advance notice, under
the simple demand End the War Now it would be easily possible
to mobilize one million people. The political mood in the
country exists to make this happen.
So as to facilitate the greatest degree of coordination between
organizations to build a massive outpouring, the ANSWER Coalition
is not unilaterally setting a date for this potentially million-
strong march and rally. However, we recommend holding it sometime
in November of 2007, or on March 22, 2008--the fifth anniversary
of the war." In order to have such a huge demonstration, enough
time must be given to allow the organizations and coalitions
to come together and for intensive national outreach and
organizing.
This period of time between now and the demonstration would
not be a period of quiet, it would be a time of intensifying
anti-war activity and education at the local and regional level
culminating in this mass action. Unfortunately, unless the
political relationship of forces changes inside the United
States or in Iraq, the war and occupation will continue
through November and beyond. We are proposing a specific
tactic that can contribute to shifting the equation.
The aim is not just one more demonstration but the largest
antiwar demonstration in US history.
A mobilization of one million people marching on Washington
DC would be the best possible trigger for an avalanche
of grassroots organizing throughout the country and among
service members and their families and veterans. It is time
for something bold and broad. Something that sends an
unmistakable message to the powers that be that the people
of the United States have entered the field of politics in
such a way as to become an irresistible force.
Each group and movement should maintain its political
independence. Each group can inscribe on its banners
a variety of slogans or ideas or demands but what will allow
us to unite for the largest mobilization of all the people
is the simple unifying demand. Whatever differences that
exist between groups, and there are many and they are important,
are not sufficient justification for preventing us from coming
together in a show of force that will change the direction
of this country. The lives of too many people, all victims
of a criminal war, are too precious for our movement to tolerate
anything that prevents us from reaching our potential
to end the war in Iraq. With determination, maturity and mutual
respect our diverse anti-war movement can unite.
We would like to hear from everyone in consideration of this
proposal. If you, your friends, or your organization support
the proposal for a unified mass demonstration aiming to bring
1 million people onto the streets of Washington DC, please
join with us and sign on, which you can do by clicking
this link or visiting http://www.answercoalition.org/.
This movement has grown strong because of its grassroots
base. Let’s hear from everyone who supports this exciting
possibility.
During the next week, people like you and thousands of others
can circulate this proposal, discuss it with your organization,
family and friends, and be part of the effort to make it
a reality. We look forward to hearing from you and working
together.
Proposal by the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism)
Coalition, May 31, 2007
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2) U.S. Strikes at Militants in Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
"On Saturday, Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman,
said in an e-mail message, 'This is a global war on terror
and the U.S. remains committed to reducing terrorist
capabilities when and where we find them.'”
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/world/africa/03somalia.html?hp
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 2 — American forces struck inside
Somalia on Friday, bombarding a mountainous area where
suspected militants were hiding out, Somali officials
said Saturday. It was the third known American strike
on Somali soil this year.
According to Somali security forces, an American warship
fired cruise missiles into the area after two boatloads
of heavily armed gunmen landed at Bargal, a small fishing
village on the north Somali coast, and then escaped into
the mountains.
Hassan Dahir, the vice president of Puntland, a semiautonomous
region of Somalia, said that eight Islamist militants
were killed, including one who was an American citizen,
according to documents found on his body.
Mr. Dahir also said that three American Special Operations
soldiers were on the ground, helping Somali security forces.
“Three Americans came into the mountains with us,”
Mr. Dahir said. “They are counterterrorism experts and
they are investigating the computers that the militants
were carrying.”
American officials declined to comment on this information.
But the operation Mr. Dahir described was congruent with an
attack in early January in which American forces bombed an
area in southern Somalia and then sent in a small contingent
of Special Forces soldiers to investigate the remains of
suspected militants. A few weeks later, American forces
struck again, trying to kill a militant Islamist leader.
On Saturday, Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman,
said in an e-mail message, “This is a global war on terror
and the U.S. remains committed to reducing terrorist
capabilities when and where we find them.”
The statement went on to say, “The very nature of some of
our operations, as well as the success of those operations,
is often predicated on our ability to work quietly with our
partners and allies.”
Mr. Dahir said the militants, thought to number around 15,
were from Somalia’s recently ousted Islamist administration
and that they had come by boat to northern Somalia in an
attempt to cross the Gulf of Aden and escape the country.
Among the eight killed, he said, were men from Eritrea,
Yemen, England and Sweden. He said that Somali officials
contacted American officers in Djibouti, where there is
a large American military base, after a gun battle on
Friday evening in which the militants wounded four Somali
security agents and then melted into the mountains. He
said that an American destroyer moored off Bargal fired
the cruise missiles into the area.
The strike fit a pattern of a broader American strategy
to hunt down Islamist militants in the Horn of Africa,
especially Al Qaeda operatives. American officials have
accused Islamist clerics in Somalia of sheltering Al Qaeda
agents, including the mastermind of the American Embassy
bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
American forces played an influential but behind-the-scenes
role in helping overthrow the Islamist movement that
controlled Somalia for six months last year. In late
December, Ethiopian troops, aided by American satellite
imagery and battlefield intelligence, routed Islamist forces.
That paved the way for Somalia’s internationally recognized
but weak transitional government to take loose control
of the capital, Mogadishu, for the first time.
Since then, American warships have been patrolling Somalia’s
1,880-mile coastline. American officials say that several
Qaeda suspects are still inside the country.
The attack on Friday punctured what had been a relatively
peaceful period for Somalia. Over the past several weeks,
life in Mogadishu, the scene of intense fighting in March
and April, has been improving, with policemen patrolling
neighborhoods and sanitation crews lifting enormous amounts
of garbage from the streets. The transitional government
said security was finally good enough to hold a major
reconciliation conference in mid-June, though there were
still some concerns about how to pay for the conference.
Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu.
Related:
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
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3) Sweep at School Turns Up a Trove of Electronic Contraband
By JULIE BOSMAN
June 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/nyregion/01school.html
When Olivia Lara-Gresty saw the metal detectors at the
entrance of Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side,
she turned around and ran home to ditch her contraband
before joining her sixth-grade class.
The cellphone police had arrived.
Not everyone was so savvy. The Police Department was there
to carry out a random sweep for prohibited items, requiring
all 900-plus students at the school to walk through metal
detectors before entering.
Their total haul included 404 cellphones, 69 iPods, 23 other
electronic devices, two knives and one imitation gun.
“People were crying,” said Samantha Haber, 14, an
eighth grader.
Officially, the X-ray scans are meant to catch dangerous
items. But since the unannounced sweeps began in April 2006,
they have mostly detected cellphones, infuriating parents
who see them as lifelines and have loudly opposed the checks.
The Education Department first banned “communication devices”
around 1988, when the electronic toy of choice was a beeper.
But the rule was not strictly enforced until last year,
when the Bloomberg administration took action to prohibit
cellphones in schools.
The sweep yesterday was one of the biggest so far since the
crackdown. An unannounced visit to a Queens school on
Wednesday yielded only 40 cellphones, 16 iPods and 33
unspecified electronic devices. The police collected only
83 cellphones during a sweep at a Bronx school a week ago,
but also took 37 items like headphones, batteries and can
openers — all forbidden.
According to rules set by Middle School 54’s principal,
Elana Elster, the items confiscated yesterday could be
picked up only by parents, and no earlier than Tuesday.
But she later amended those instructions in an e-mail
message to parents, saying that students could take home
the cellphones and other items at the end of the day
on Friday.
The initial instructions left hundreds of students leaving
school yesterday at a loss.
“I feel naked,” said Krystal Corchado, 15, an eighth grader
whose phone was seized. “I feel like I lost something very
important to me.”
Around the corner from the school, a group of six students
who had managed to hold onto their phones discussed their
narrow escapes.
Ian Newcomb pulled his blue Samsung phone from his pocket
to demonstrate how it evaded capture. “It’s nearly all
plastic, so the metal detectors didn’t pick it up,” he
said. “It was in my pocket the whole time.”
Maybe the metal detectors were not even turned on, suggested
Axel McFarland, 11. “They didn’t even beep,” he said.
One furious parent, Leslie Lyons, whose eighth-grade daughter
had taken Ms. Lyons’s cellphone to school, threatened to call
the police after exchanging a few sharp words with an assistant
principal. “I haven’t talked to our lawyer yet,” Ms. Lyons
said. “I’m filing a criminal complaint that they stole
my phone.”
Still, the high drama of the cellphone sweep appeared to provide
a few teachable moments. In one humanities class, the children
wrote strongly worded letters to Mr. Bloomberg, said David
Garfinkel, 12. Other students taped homemade signs reading
“No Phones, No School” to their backs in protest, said
Athena Buckley, a sixth grader.
Ms. Elster, the principal, stood wearily on the front steps
at 3:30 p.m., after the students had dispersed. “I’m not
going to talk,” she said, shaking her head.
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4) Poisonous Police Behavior
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 2, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp
You most likely have no idea of the abusive treatment that
students and teachers at many of New York City’s public
schools are enduring at the hands of overly aggressive
police officers and security aides assigned to the schools.
Students are being belittled, shouted at, cursed at,
intrusively searched and improperly touched by cops and
security aides who answer to the Police Department, not
school authorities. In many cases, the students are roughed
up, handcuffed, arrested and taken off to jail for behavior
that does not even begin to approach the criminal. Teachers
and administrators who have attempted to intervene on the
behalf of students have themselves been abused, and
in some cases arrested.
This poisonous police behavior is an extension into the
schools of the humiliating treatment cops have long been
doling out to youngsters — especially those who are black
or Latino — on the city’s streets.
In January, a 15-year-old girl at Samuel J. Tilden High
School in Brooklyn was manhandled for no discernible reason
by an armed police sergeant. The sergeant had grabbed her
book bag and ordered her into a school detention room. When
the girl replied, “That’s where I’m going,” the sergeant
is alleged to have pushed her. The girl then said she was
going to take down his name and badge number.
When she said that, according to a new study of police
practices in the public schools by the American Civil
Liberties Union, the sergeant jerked the girl’s left arm
behind her back at a painful angle. The girl’s right hand
slammed against a wall and she began to cry.
Students inside the room cried out in protest, but to no
avail. The girl was taken to the police station and given
a summons. That night the school’s assistant principal called
the girl’s home and apologized to her mother for the incident.
One morning last fall a large contingent of police officers
arrived unannounced at Wadleigh, a high school for the
performing arts in Harlem, to do a spot check for weapons
by herding students through portable metal detectors. One
of the students, the vice president of the school government
association, was afraid his cellphone would be confiscated
so he called his mother and asked her to come get it. He
waited outside the school for her to arrive.
When police officers approached him, he explained that his
mother was coming to meet him and would be there in just
a few minutes. The police, according to the report, called
him a smart-aleck, seized his cellphone, handcuffed him,
took him to the local stationhouse and put him in jail.
Unaware that her son had been arrested, the mother was frantic
when she couldn’t find him at the school. The charges against
the boy were later dropped.
There is nothing unusual about this type of activity. A math
teacher at the Urban Assembly Academy of History and Citizenship
rushed outside the school one day last fall when he heard that
a student was being assaulted. He saw a police officer slam
a boy against a car. Explaining that the boy was his student,
the teacher said, “He’s just a kid.”
According to the report, the police officer then hit and
shoved the teacher. People in a group that had gathered
cried out: “He’s a teacher! He’s a teacher!”
A second officer reportedly grabbed the teacher from behind
and threw him onto the sidewalk. The teacher’s head bounced
against the pavement. While on the ground, the teacher was
handcuffed as students and school staffers looked on. He
was arrested and taken off to jail.
The report, a must-read for anyone interested in the reality
of public school life in New York, is titled “Criminalizing
the Classroom” http://www.nyclu.org/policinginschools/
and was released jointly by the New York Civil
Liberties Union and the Racial Justice Program of the
national A.C.L.U.
“Girls,” the report said, “are particularly targeted for
intrusive searches. Girls whose underwire bras set off
metal detectors must lift up their shirts so (security
aides) can verify that they are not concealing metal
objects. Many girls reported that officers ordered
them to unbuckle and/or unzip their pants for the
purpose of verifying that the students were not
concealing cellphones.”
There is no excuse whatever for this systematic mistreatment
of New York City students. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is in
charge of the school system, and he and Commissioner Ray Kelly
run the Police Department. Parents across the city should
demand that they step in and bring this cruel madness
to an end.
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5) A Legal Debate in Guantánamo on Boy Fighters
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/us/03gitmo.html?hp
The facts of Omar Ahmed Khadr’s case are grim. The shrapnel from the grenade he is accused of throwing ripped through the skull of Sgt. First Class Christopher J. Speer, who was 28 when he died.
To American military prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is a committed Al Qaeda operative, spy and killer who must be held accountable for killing Sergeant Speer in 2002 and for other bloody acts he committed in Afghanistan.
But there is one fact that may not fit easily into the government’s portrait of Mr. Khadr: He was 15 at the time.
His age is at the center of a legal battle that is to begin tomorrow with an arraignment by a military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of Mr. Khadr, whom a range of legal experts describe as the first child fighter in decades to face war-crimes charges. It is a battle with implications as large as the growing ranks of child fighters around the world.
Defense lawyers argue that military prosecutors are violating international law by filing charges that date from events that occurred when Mr. Khadr was 15 or younger. Legal concepts that are still evolving, the lawyers say, require that countries treat child fighters as victims of warfare, rather than war criminals.
The military prosecutors say such notions may be “well-meaning and worthy,” but are irrelevant to the American military commissions at Guantánamo. Mr. Khadr is one of only three Guantánamo detainees to face charges under the law establishing the commissions, passed by Congress last year.
“International law,” the Justice Department asserted in a court filing in the case last week, “does not prohibit an individual under 18 from being prosecuted for war crimes.” Even so, prosecutors said that if they won a conviction, they would seek something less than a life term, given Mr. Khadr’s age. He is 20 now.
Whatever the outcome, his case seems destined to become a landmark, though some scholars say not enough attention has been given to its importance. “What is the precedent that we are setting with this unique step?” asked Peter W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about child fighters.
Mr. Khadr’s case offers a snapshot of relatively new questions surrounding the legal treatment of child fighters globally, though advocates for children have tended to focus less on young terrorists and more on children who fight in civil wars, like Ishmael Beah, whose best-selling memoir, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” recounts his bloody days as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war.
Mr. Khadr may not be the most sympathetic figure for those pressing for the more forgiving interpretation of international law. He was born in Canada to a family with such deep Al Qaeda ties that some newspapers there have called them Canada’s first family of terrorism.
He is the youngest detainee at Guantánamo Bay, nearly blind in one eye from injuries sustained during the July 2002 firefight in which Sergeant Speer was mortally wounded and another American soldier was severely injured. Last week, Mr. Khadr said he wanted to fire all of his American lawyers, and some of them said they understood why he might distrust Americans after five years at Guantánamo.
Still, they argue that war-crimes prosecutors should focus on the adults who press children into service, not on the children themselves. The charges against Mr. Khadr, they said in a recent court filing, cross a line in the treatment of children that no other country has crossed “in modern history.”
The prosecutors, they say, included in their charges acts that occurred when Mr. Khadr was younger than 10. Mr. Khadr “was subject to undue adult influences,” said Muneer I. Ahmad, an associate professor at the American University Washington College of Law, who has represented Mr. Khadr.
“If Omar had had his free choice,” Professor Ahmad said, “what he would have chosen to do is ride horses, play soccer and read Harry Potter books.”
It is an appeal to emotion that the prosecutors are likely to meet with their own. Sergeant Speer left a wife and two small children. His widow, Tabitha, said in an e-mail exchange with a reporter last week that Mr. Khadr’s youth entitled him to no special consideration.
“Given the opportunity, he would do it all over again,” she wrote. “He was trained to do exactly what he did, regardless of his age.”
To the prosecutors, Mr. Khadr is the essence of a young man who should be held to adult standards. American officials say his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces in 2003, was a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.
One of Mr. Khadr’s brothers is in a wheelchair as a result of that 2003 shootout; another told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “we are an Al Qaeda family.” Ahmed Khadr traveled internationally from Canada under the auspices of handling charity money for Muslims. In the mid-1990s, he was held for a time in Pakistan on suspicion of helping finance the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.
After he was released, the Khadrs and several of their six children moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they lived at times in the same compound as Osama bin Laden, officials have said. “All of the children were indoctrinated into the Al Qaeda way of thinking,” said the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis of the Air Force.
After Sept. 11, Mr. Khadr made deliberate choices to join Al Qaeda and eventually to kill Sergeant Speer, Colonel Davis said in a recent interview. “There is a difference,” Colonel Davis said, “between a 15-year-old who makes a spur-of-the-moment decision and someone who made a long-term choice.”
Captured bloody and bullet-riddled after the firefight that killed Sergeant Speer, Mr. Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since 2002. At least three other juveniles, perhaps as young as 12, were also held there for a time. But they were released in January 2004, the military said.
Mr. Khadr’s lawyers have said in court that he has been subject to physical and psychological torture that exploited his youth, another example of what they say is a violation of international principles that children be accorded special protections.
In legal filings, the lawyers have asserted, for example, that an interrogator at Guantánamo told Mr. Khadr when he was 17 that if he did not cooperate he would be sent to Egypt where he would be confronted by “Soldier No. 9,” a man who the interrogators said would be sent to rape him.
Asked about the accusations, a Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said they “may be raised by counsel during the course of the trial” but he would not discuss the specifics of the accusations. Commander Gordon added that detainees “have frequently made allegations of abuse while in detention in order to garner public support.”
In their filings, the prosecutors concede that some treaties require special treatment of children caught in warfare. Some of those treaties, they noted, have not been ratified by the United States, and others do not specifically ban prosecution of combatants who are 15 or older.
Some legal experts acknowledge that it is difficult to define precisely what international law requires in the treatment of child fighters. It is a fluid discipline, with few enforcement mechanisms, and there are inconsistent precedents and treaty provisions.
But even those who say there is no bar to the war crimes prosecutions of youthful fighters say the growing use of child fighters around the world means that Mr. Khadr’s case could become pivotal.
“More and more child soldiers are being recruited, and they are committing heinous crimes. This is an issue the international community is going to have to confront,” said Michael A. Newton, a former military prosecutor and expert on the law of war who teaches at Vanderbilt University Law School.
The two sides in the Khadr case interpret some international legal documents differently. One subject on which they differ is a treaty to which the United States is a party, a 2002 United Nations agreement dealing with child fighters.
The defense notes that the agreement requires countries to demobilize captured child fighters and to provide assistance for their physical and psychological recovery “and their social reintegration.”
The defense lawyers say that means sending them home. That would be inconsistent with the potential life term Mr. Khadr faces on charges of murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.
But government lawyers note that the child-soldier treaty does not expressly rule out war crimes prosecutions for juveniles. Another international child-soldier provision that has become a central issue in Mr. Khadr’s case is a law approved by the United Nations for the prosecution of war crimes after the Sierra Leone civil war in the 1990s. It specifically provides that “persons of 15 years of age” and older can be charged with war crimes.
Colonel Davis said that was a significant precedent. “If the United Nations has signed on to the principle that people who are 15 can be prosecuted for war crimes,” he said, “the notion that we’re blazing a new trail with Mr. Khadr is a false assumption.”
But the former chief war crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, David M. Crane, said in an interview that soon after he was appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations in 2002, he announced that he would not prosecute anyone under 18.
Mr. Crane, a former senior Pentagon legal official who is now a professor at Syracuse University Law School, said the Sierra Leone civil war included a catalogue of horrific acts by teenagers and children. But he said he concluded that warriors under 18 did not have the intellectual and emotional maturity to be prosecuted for war crimes.
“I called them as much victims as the people they raped, maimed and mutilated,” he said.
One person who has reached a different conclusion about the culpability of child fighters is Layne Morris, a housing administrator in a Salt Lake City suburb. Mr. Morris is a former Army Special Forces sergeant, who, like Mr. Khadr, is half-blind because of the firefight that day outside Khost, Afghanistan.
On a recent day, Mr. Morris remembered the stream of shots from AK-47s inside a compound a coalition patrol had surrounded. He remembered the hand grenades that kept coming over the wall. And he described the feeling of the shrapnel that took half his sight.
He said the battle did not unfold quickly, as it sometimes seems in the retelling. American forces surrounded the compound. And then they waited. Some women from the compound emerged and were allowed to leave, Mr. Morris said. A boy fighter would have had the chance to walk out of the gate, too, he said.
There were shots. And more waiting, as the Americans called for air support.
Anyone who was inside had a choice of fighting or surrendering, he said, including Mr. Khadr.
“There is just no way you can say this is a poor befuddled, brainwashed kid,” Mr. Morris said. “This is a kid who made a whole lot of decisions on his own.”
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6) Cuba Releases Video of Castro
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:26 a.m. ET
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Cuba-Vietnam-Castro.html?hp
HAVANA (AP) -- Fidel Castro looked stronger Sunday in the first images the government has released of him in months, showing him in a brief videotape and four photographs meeting with the visiting Vietnamese Communist Party chief.
In the video clip shown on state television, and four photographs of his two-hour meeting with Nong Duc Manh published Sunday in the Communist youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde, Castro appeared to be wearing the same red track suit with black and white trim that he wore in some of the past images released by the government.
In one photograph, the pair is seen sitting on rattan chairs and chatting, and in the other three they are standing, including one that shows them embracing.
The 80-year-old Castro has not been seen in public since he announced on July 31 that he had undergone emergency intestinal surgery and was temporarily ceding power to his brother Raul, the Defense Minister, who turns 76 on Sunday.
Castro's exact ailment and condition remain state secrets, but he is largely believed to suffer from diverticular disease, which forms sacs in the colon that can become inflamed and bleed.
In one of a new series of essays he has been writing during his convalescence, Castro said he had undergone numerous operations and the first one had not gone well, explaining why his recovery has been delayed.
Nevertheless, senior Cuban officials have repeatedly said Castro is on the mend and the government has occasionally released photographs and videotapes during his recovery.
The video was the the first of Castro released by the government since a meeting in Havana in late January with his friend and ally Hugo Chavez; the photos were the first released since he met with the Chinese Communist Party leader Wu Guanzheng in April.
The meeting between the Cuban and Vietnamese leaders was first reported by state television Saturday night on the regular news broadcast, but the images were not released until hours later.
The statement said Castro and Manh met for two hours, discussing themes ''of mutual interest and especially about Latin America and the Caribbean.''
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7) Fighting Continues in Lebanon Refugee Camp
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:24 a.m. ET
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Lebanon-Violence.html?hp
TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) -- Heavy gunfire rang out from inside a bombed out Palestinian refugee camp Sunday as the Lebanese army pounded Islamic militants holed up inside during the third day of a military offensive aimed at crushing the al-Qaida-inspired group.
Plumes of white and gray smoke rose from the Nahr el-Bared camp as the army bombarded Fatah Islam militants with heavy artillery shelling. The militants appeared to be retreating deeper inside the camp, but one of their leaders vowed the group would not surrender.
Tanks and artillery pounded Fatah Islam positions on the northern edge of Nahr el-Bared, located on the outskirts of this northern Lebanese port city, in a wide area concentrated around 10 buildings.
According to an Associated Press photographer near the camp, a Fatah Islam sniper could be seen moving from one destroyed building to another, as Lebanese troops bombarded the damaged structures from where he was shooting.
Lebanese security officials said a Fatah Islam militant was firing rocket-propelled grenades at army positions from the minaret of a mosque. It was not clear if the army was going to strike the minaret.
The Lebanese government has demanded the group surrender, saying it's the only way to end the attack. But Abu Hureira, Fatah Islam's deputy commander, rejected the government calls.
''This is not only impossible, this is unthinkable. Our blood is cheaper than handing over our weapons and surrendering,'' said Abu Hureira, a Lebanese whose real name is Shehab al-Qaddour, in a telephone interview with the AP.
The refusal to surrender came as militants said one of their top leaders had been killed in the fighting.
The Fatah Islam leader killed, Naim Deeb Ghali, who is also known as Abu Riad, was the third-in-command of the group, Lebanese security officials said.
Abu Hureira confirmed that Ghali was killed Friday, but would not say whether he was a senior Fatah Islam official, referring to him only as ''a brother.''
Sunday's army artillery fire appeared directed at militant positions deep inside the camp, indicating the military was advancing further inside.
There was no way to tell exactly how deep the army had advanced, because the area had been sealed off and journalists were kept away.
But as part of the intensifying assault, the army on Saturday added air power to the battle. A helicopter gunship was deployed for the first time since fighting began May 20, firing two missiles and strafing militant positions. The air attack was an apparent attempt to block an escape route to the Mediterranean Sea.
Four soldiers were killed and 10 wounded Saturday in the offensive aimed at uprooting the militant gunmen barricaded inside the camp on the outskirts of this Lebanese port city. Abu Hureira said six militants have been wounded since the offensive began Friday.
The casualties raised the army's deaths to 38 in two weeks. At least 20 civilians and about 60 militants have been killed, but casualties in the camp in the last two days were unknown because relief organizations were banned from entering.
In other the developments, the main road linking Tripoli with the province of Akkar and the Syrian border reopened Sunday for the first time since Friday. Vehicles were seen passing on the road that was closed for two days by Lebanese troops over fears of snipers.
A wounded Palestinian civilian also was seen being evacuated from the camp in a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance. The man, in his 50s, suffered head and shoulder injury, according to reporters on the scene.
Meanwhile, about 30 Palestinian and Lebanese women who came from the nearby Beddawi Palestinian refugee camp demonstrated at the southern entrance Nahr el-Bared to protest the army's shelling.
Lebanese security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to make statements to media, have said Nahr el-Bared had been strategically divided into three zones. The army was controlling one zone, the militants held another, while Palestinian civilians and guerrillas controlled the third and were refusing the militants sanctuary, they said.
The army alleged the armed militants had taken up positions in the camp mosques and humanitarian centers, holding civilians as ''human shields.'' It was not clear how the military knew this or how many Palestinians were used as human shields. The militants have denied the accusation.
Associated Press writers Sam F. Ghattas and Bassem Mroue in Beirut and Ahmed Mantash in Sidon contributed to this report.
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8) With Korea as Model, U.S. Ponders Long Role in Iraq
By DAVID E. SANGER
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/washington/03assess.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON, June 2 — For the first time, the Bush administration is beginning publicly to discuss basing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades to come, a subject so fraught with political landmines that officials are tiptoeing around the inevitable questions about what the United States’ long-term mission would be there.
President Bush has long talked about the need to maintain an American military presence in the region, without saying exactly where. Several visitors to the White House say that in private, he has sounded intrigued by what he calls the “Korea model,” a reference to the large American presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South.
But it was not until Wednesday that Mr. Bush’s spokesman, Tony Snow, publicly reached for the Korea example in talking about Iraq — setting off an analogy war between the White House and critics who charged that the administration was again disconnected from the realities of Iraq. He said Korea was one way to think about how America’s mission could evolve into an “over-the-horizon support role,” whenever American troops are no longer patrolling the streets of Baghdad.
The next day, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also mentioned Korea, saying that establishing a long-term American garrison there was a lot smarter than the handling of Vietnam, “where we just left lock, stock and barrel.” He added that “the idea is more a model of a mutually agreed arrangement whereby we have a long and enduring presence but under the consent of both parties and under certain conditions.”
Korea is an attractive analogy for the Bush White House for a host of reasons: a half-century later, South Korea is a raucous democracy and one of the world’s biggest economies. The North is a broken, isolated state, though one that, improbably, has not only survived for more than 50 years but has built a small nuclear arsenal.
But Korea is also the kind of analogy that stokes the fears of those who see Iraq leading to unending war. The model suggests a near-permanent presence in Iraq, though presumably with far fewer troops than the nearly 150,000 now in place.
In a Democratic-controlled Congress, which continues to press for a troop withdrawal deadline, talk of permanent bases is not welcome, though many Democrats acknowledge that the United States cannot simply leave Iraq in chaos. Nor is the idea popular in the Middle East, though some countries are desperate for a strategic counterweight to Iran’s growing power.
Critics on the left who have argued for years that the Iraq war was really about oil leap on such talk as evidence that the administration’s real agenda is to put its forces right on top of Iraq’s still-broken pipelines. Those who fear the next target is Iran — including the Iranians — will see the permanent bases as staging areas, in case the United States decides to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program and deal with the repercussions later.
And the analogy rankles analysts who believe the situation is far less similar to Korea than it is to Vietnam in the ’60s or Beirut in the ’80s, where American bases became the No. 1 targets, and a rallying call for extremists, in an endless guerrilla war.
“It’s not that Iraq isn’t vital,” said Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council of Foreign Relations, and one of the many experts organized by groups opposing Mr. Bush’s Iraq strategy to shoot back in the analogy war. “It’s just that Korea bears no resemblance to Iraq. There’s no strategy that can create victory.”
Historical analogy has been a problem for this administration since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. In the months before the invasion, there was talk of modeling a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq after the successful occupations of Japan and Germany. But even then, historians and analysts were warning against such comparisons, arguing that those were two cohesive societies that were exhausted by years of war and bore little resemblance to the fractured Iraqi society and its potential for internal violence.
The core problem with the Korea comparison, many experts on Asia note, is that when the war ended in 1953, there were bright lines drawn across the 38th Parallel, separating the warring parties. That hardened into the formal Demilitarized Zone, exactly the kind of division that the Bush administration has said it wants to avoid in Iraq.
And while there have been incursions across the Korean border over the years — a famous ax murder, underground invasion tunnels, a few commando raids by boat — those were mostly long ago. Nothing there has approached the Hobbesian state of chaos that is everyday life in Baghdad and Anbar Province.
Some of Mr. Bush’s critics see an effort to reach for any comparison other than Vietnam.
“If we can make this like Korea, then we have been successful,” said the Donald L. Kerrick, a retired general who spent 30 years in the military and has now emerged as one of a cadre of generals criticizing Mr. Bush’s strategy. He said that he did not believe the analogy fit.
Mr. Bush himself has made clear, while in Hanoi late last year for a summit meeting, that he believes America’s mistake in Vietnam was that it gave up too early. “We’ll succeed unless we quit” he told a small group of reporters who asked him what lessons he drew for Iraq. He declined to engage in deeper comparisons, including the fact that President Lyndon Johnson’s dire warnings about what would happen if the United States pulled out of Vietnam — that Communism would spread across Asia — never came to pass.
Administration officials and top military leaders declined to talk on the record about their long-term plans in Iraq. But when speaking on a not-for-attribution basis, they describe a fairly detailed concept. It calls for maintaining three or four major bases in the country, all well outside of the crowded urban areas where casualties have soared. They would include the base at Al Asad in Anbar Province, Balad Air Base about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and Tallil Air Base in the south.
“They are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner,” said one senior official deeply involved in the development of Iraq strategy. “And our mission would be very different — making sure that Al Qaeda doesn’t turn Iraq into a base the way it turned Afghanistan into one.”
A long-term presence is envisioned by many experts, and it has been raised as a possibility by the Baker-Hamilton Commission, whose report on Iraq has now been embraced by President Bush — five months after he all but dismissed its conclusions. But the problem, as one senior administration official acknowledged last week, is that there is little reason to believe that American bases will stop Iraq from being “the great jihadist training camp it is today.”
As in Korea, the bases may be an effort to prevent calamity and invasion. The question is whether, in the firestorm of Iraq, their contribution to security would outweigh their roles as symbols of occupation or targets of terrorism.
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9) G-8 Protesters Clash With German Police
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 2, 2007
Filed at 11:44 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-G-8-Demonstration.html
ROSTOCK, Germany (AP) -- Protesters with black hoods and bandanas covering their faces showered police with rocks and beer bottles Saturday, before the heavily armored officers drove them back with water cannon and tear gas during a rally against an upcoming Group of Eight summit.
Black smoke from burning cars mingled with the sting of tear gas in the harbor-front area of the northern German town of Rostock, where tens of thousands of people had marched peacefully to a concluding rally. The clashes broke out among hundreds of stone-throwing demonstrators and police on the edges of the crowd as the event neared its end.
Some 146 police were hurt, 25 of them seriously. Police said they made 17 arrests.
It was an unruly start to a week of rallies and other expected protests against the three-day G-8 summit beginning Wednesday in the fenced-off coastal resort of Heiligendamm, 14 miles from Rostock.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will host the leaders of Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, Canada and the U.S. for discussions on global warming, aid to Africa and the global economy. The summit, like past ones, is attracting protesters opposed to capitalism, globalization, the war in Iraq and the G-8 itself.
Police have surrounded the summit site with a seven-mile-long fence topped with barbed wire, and closed the surrounding waters and airspace, fearing terrorism or disorderly protests like the ones that marred at 2001 summit in Genoa, Italy, where police and protesters clashed for days and one demonstrator was killed. Protests near the fence have been banned.
In Rostock, the officially permitted demonstration began peacefully Saturday with two groups of marchers gathering at the waterfront. Clashes broke out near the end of the scheduled four-hour rally, as some people pried up paving stones and broke them into smaller pieces.
Eventually, five large green police trucks with twin water cannons mounted on top moved in to blast the rioters. A police car was destroyed and several parked cars burned, spreading black smoke over the area. Protesters also torched a large blue recycling bin.
Police spokesman Frank Scheulen estimated the number of violence-minded demonstrators at about 2,000. Police put the size of the demonstration at 25,000, while organizers said it was 80,000.
Werner Raetz, an anti-globalization activist with Attac, one of the organizing groups, distanced himself from the violence: ''There is no justification for these attacks.''
As for the demonstrations planned over the next few days, Raetz said both sides should try to get the ''emotional situation'' under control.
There are several camps in the area for protesters, and marches and other events are planned. Some protesters say they intend to try to block roads leading to the summit site.
Peter Mueller, who was among the demonstrators, had tears streaming from bloodshot eyes after the tear gas was released. ''As long as the police were in the background it was OK, but as soon as one took a step closer, it went out of control,'' he said.
He shrugged. ''What can you do? So ends the peaceful protest.''
The protest was organized by several dozen groups under the motto ''another world is possible.''
''The world shaped by the dominance of the G-8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction and barriers against migrants and refugees,'' organizers said in leaflets handed out on the streets.
On their Web site, organizers emphasized that they wanted a peaceful protest.
''There is no reason to be afraid to come to the big demonstration in Rostock,'' they said. ''We do not expect major problems with the police.''
Anti-globalization protests have plagued similar summits in recent years, especially meetings of the World Trade Organization. In 1999, 50,000 protesters shut down WTO sessions in Seattle as police fired tear gas and rubber bullets. There were some 600 arrests and $3 million in property damage.
At subsequent WTO meetings in Cancun, Mexico, and Hong Kong, smaller protests also disrupted meetings.
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10) Thousands Rally for Changes to Immigration Bill
By NEELA BANERJEE
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/washington/03rally.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON, June 2 — Thousands of immigrants and their supporters gathered on the west lawn of the Capitol on Saturday to urge the Senate to adopt legislation that would make it easier for illegal immigrants to become legal residents of the United States.
Braving the midday heat, the demonstrators, who were largely from the Washington area, streamed onto the lawn above the reflecting pool, waving American flags and carrying red, white and blue placards.
The rally was smaller than those held here and across the United States last year. But its organizers, the National Capital Immigrant Coalition, said it was the first step in a campaign to press senators to change key aspects of the immigration bill they are considering.
Congress has been on a weeklong recess and will be in session again on Monday. Before the break, the Senate began discussion of an immigration bill that, among other things, would levy a $5,000 fine on illegal immigrants who seek legal status, require guest workers to return home for one year for every two years worked in the United States, and give higher priority for legal status to well-educated immigrants, rather than to those who have family here.
Conservatives have dismissed the bill as amnesty for illegal immigrants. But immigrants’ rights supporters, like those at the rally,said provisions like the fine and the return clause were onerous barriers to legalization.
“I don’t expect to get a perfect bill, but the current legislation has serious flaws we think need to be fixed,” said Jaime Contreras, president of the immigration coalition’s board.
Most of the speakers addressed the crowd in Spanish and organizers encouraged demonstrators to sign postcards to members of Congress and to call their senators.
Some of those interviewed said they were naturalized citizens or legal residents who were closely following the debate and considered much of the pending bill unnecessarily punitive.
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11) Doctor Says Drug Maker Tried to Quash His Criticism of Avandia
By STEPHANIE SAUL
June 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/business/02drug.html
When a Congressional committee holds a hearing next Wednesday, the subject will be the safety of the diabetes drug Avandia and whether federal drug regulators have paid close enough attention to its potential risks.
But for one witness who is scheduled to appear, Dr. John B. Buse, a nationally noted diabetes specialist, the hearing will take a different turn, focusing on whether he was the target of an effort by the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline, to silence his criticism of the drug.
In a statement last night, Dr. Buse said his full story would be told at the hearing, including the account of how he was intimidated by Glaxo. But he said the company apologized and he later reported his concerns about the drug to the Food and Drug Administration.
“It was upsetting, but it was not life-altering,” Dr. Buse’s statement said. “I hold no ill will toward Glaxo or any of its employees.”
Congressional investigators have been looking into what they have called “very serious” claims that Avandia’s maker “silenced one or more medical professionals who attempted to speak out about the potential for cardiovascular problems with Avandia,” according to a letter to Glaxo last week from the Senate Finance Committee.
Glaxo denied yesterday that it made any effort to stifle a scientific discussion of its drug, used for Type 2 diabetes. Avandia is the company’s second-largest product with more than $3 billion in sales last year.
Dr. Buse has declined to discuss any details of his story, saying he wanted them to come out during sworn testimony. But one of his friends, a University of Michigan diabetes expert, Dr. Charles F. Burant, said that Dr. Buse had been troubled by the pressure he had received from Glaxo.
Dr. Burant said he was not familiar with specifics, but that the pressure had included Glaxo’s contacting the University of North Carolina medical school, where Dr. Buse was then on the faculty and is now the head of endocrinology.
Although Glaxo is based in London, it has major operations in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and the company’s foundation has donated millions of dollars to the University of North Carolina.
Dr. Buse, who is about to become the president of the American Diabetes Association, was an early and frequent critic of Avandia after it reached the market in 1999. In a March 2000 letter to the F.D.A., he said Avandia might raise patients’ risk of heart attacks, and he criticized the company’s marketing, saying it employed “blatant selective manipulation of data” to overstate the drug’s benefits and understate its risks.
The following year, after demanding that Glaxo strengthen the language on Avandia’s label describing its potential heart risks, the F.D.A. sent Glaxo a letter reprimanding the company for playing down those risks in discussions between sales representatives and undercover investigators at a medical conference.
Dr. Buse, meanwhile, had also raised his concerns about Avandia in speeches to other doctors. Avandia, an oral medication, is used for a patient population already at increased risk for heart disease.
More recent questions about Avandia’s potential risks, as outlined in a New England Journal of Medicine article last week, have prompted the Congressional hearing. The author of that article, Dr. Steven E. Nissen, a heart specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, has also been called to testify.
In an interview this week, Glaxo’s president of United States operations, Chris Viehbacher, acknowledged that the company was looking for any records that would shed light on the accusations that it tried to suppress Dr. Buse’s criticisms. Mr. Viehbacher said that the events occurred years ago and that the employee who was thought to have been involved had left the company.
In that interview, Mr. Viehbacher repeated Glaxo’s ’s contention that Avandia’s risks were in line with those of other diabetes medications.
Yesterday, in a written statement issued by a spokeswoman, Mary Anne Rhyne, the company said: “Discussions occurred with Dr. John Buse in 1999 and 2000 regarding his views on Avandia, and we had a scientific disagreement that was later resolved. We regret if, at any time, Dr. Buse felt the conduct of any GSK employee was contrary to the spirit of open, scientific debate regarding his views on Avandia.” The statement also said that the company “does not condone any efforts by GSK’s staff to limit an individual’s ability to discuss or publish adverse events related to Avandia.”
Dr. Buse’s friend, Dr. Burant, said in a telephone interview, “I never wrote a prescription for Avandia because of the heavy-handed way Glaxo treated John Buse.”
When Glaxo sales representatives have asked him why he was not prescribing Avandia, “I was very straight with them,” Dr. Burant recalled.
“When they were giving John a hard time, I just told them that if this is the way you’re going to treat people who are doing their usual scientific review of the product, it’s not the kind of company I’m going to support,” Dr. Burant said. “I just told them flat-out.”
When Dr. Buse addressed his concerns about Avandia to the F.D.A. in early 2000, he was one of several physicians who had been outspoken supporters of Rezulin, a diabetes drug that was taken off the market that year after being linked to liver disease. After viewing early data on Avandia, he said, he concluded that it might be just as hazardous as Rezulin, if for different reasons.
Dr. Buse has served as a consultant to Parke-Davis, the maker of Rezulin, as well as Takeda Pharmaceutical and Eli Lilly, which make a competing oral diabetes medication called Actos. In the past, however, he had also been a consultant for SmithKline Beecham, which merged with Glaxo Wellcome in 2000 to become GlaxoSmithKline.
In a recent interview, Dr. Buse identified himself as a member of a “gang of three” — a group of endocrinologists who raised early questions about Avandia after evidence that the drug had negative effects on fats in the blood and the emergence of signals that it increased the risk of heart attack.
Another member of the “gang,” according to Dr. Buse, was Dr. Anne L. Peters, a diabetes expert who runs a clinic for Los Angeles County and is affiliated with the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
In a recent interview, Dr. Peters said that she had previously received money from Glaxo as a speaker on behalf of Avandia, but had resigned because she was worried about the drug’s risks.
About five years ago, she said, she helped change the formulary — or list of preferred drugs — for Los Angeles County so that patients in her clinic would get prescriptions for Actos rather than Avandia.
“The Avandia people, it was just so surprising, they asked me what I wanted to keep Avandia on the formulary,” Dr. Peters said, recounting events that occurred sometime in the 2000-to-2002 period. “They asked me, “What can we give you that will have you keep it on the formulary?’ ”
Dr. Peters said that she asked the company to establish a database at the clinic that would track the outcomes of patients on both drugs.
When she asked for the database, which would have cost several thousand dollars, she said, a company representative replied: “That’s all you want? Other doctors ask to go to the Caribbean.”
Dr. Peters said that Glaxo representatives first asked her to write a proposal, then asked her to go to Philadelphia to meet with company officials before the database could be approved. She decided to purchase it herself.
“They wanted to give me everything but approve my request,” said Dr. Peters, who has served as an adviser or consultant to Takeda and Eli Lilly. During a recent interview, Dr. Buse said that although he was outspoken in criticism of Avandia in the early days, he now argues that the drug should remain on the market until Glaxo completes a large clinical trial, which the company says will answer questions about Avandia’s cardiovascular risk.
“A few times I was over the top, I just got carried away,” he said of his early warnings about Avandia. “The truth of the matter is, it was pretty much a statement of the facts with a little bit of imploring to not stick your head in the sand.”
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12) Coca-Cola and PepsiCo Agree to Curb Animal Tests
By BRENDA GOODMAN
May 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/business/31testing.html
ATLANTA, May 30 — Under pressure from animal rights advocates, two soft drink giants, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have agreed to stop directly financing research that uses animals to test or develop their products, except where such testing is required by law.
Researchers at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sought the assurances after discovering studies financed by the companies that used animals like rats and chimpanzees to test taste perception and, in some cases, to bolster support for promotional health claims.
PepsiCo said that it would stop directly financing animal experiments, including some it had financed through grants given to graduate students through its Gatorade Sports Science Institute.
Elaine Palmer, a spokeswoman for PepsiCo, said that while the company had never supported the idea of animal testing, “We had not been policing it, so that part is new.”
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the largest largest manufacturers to agree to the ban.
Coca-Cola also said that it would discontinue a grant given to a researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University who has been studying taste perception in rats, which share certain taste pathways with humans.
Representatives of Coca-Cola and the university declined to say how much financing the company was providing or to elaborate on what the ultimate application of the research might be.
A research associate at PETA, Shalin G. Gala, said, “We see these statements from Coke and Pepsi, massive global conglomerates, as the beginning of the end of all animal tests on food.”
Scientists conducting basic research in animal models have cautioned against PETA’s hard line, saying their work, which may have medical benefits, would not be possible in many cases without help from corporate sponsors.
“It’s very easy to characterize scientific research like this in a bad light,” said Dr. John A. DeSimone, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who had been working under the Coca-Cola grant. “To do medical research, you sometimes need an animal model.”
Not everyone agrees with Dr. DeSimone’s thinking, particularly when it involves tests on highly intelligent animals, as did a study involving a Coca-Cola scientist, financed by Nutrasweet, that cut open the faces of chimpanzees to study nerve impulses used in the perception of sweet tastes.
“I have never found chimpanzee work justifiable,” said Dr. Alan Goldberg, director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Goldberg said that over the last 30 years, advances in alternatives to animal models, many of which are usually more scientifically precise, have already reduced the number of lab animals in use by 50 percent.
“The bottom line for me is that I’d love to see animal studies disappear entirely,” Dr. Goldberg said. “In vitro models are cleaner.”
The two soft drink giants are the latest companies to respond to scrutiny by PETA, which has mounted a campaign to denounce animal testing practices in the beverage industry, an industry that, unlike cosmetics or pharmaceuticals, had largely been unpublicized in the animal testing arena.
In January, Roll International, the company that makes Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, agreed to cease tests on animals after PETA disclosed a 2005 study financed by the company that tested the juice to see if it might relieve artificially induced erectile dysfunction in rabbits.
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13) Attacks on U.S. Troops in Iraq Grow in Lethality, Complexity
Bigger Bombs a Key Cause of May's High Death Toll
By Ann Scott Tyson and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 3, 2007; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/02/AR2007060201294.html?hpid=topnews
As U.S. troops push more deeply into Baghdad and its volatile outskirts,
Iraqi insurgents are using increasingly sophisticated and lethal means
of attack, including bigger roadside bombs that are resulting in greater
numbers of American fatalities relative to the number of wounded.
Insurgents are deploying huge, deeply buried munitions set up to protect
their territory and mounting complex ambushes that demonstrate their
ability to respond rapidly to U.S. tactics. A new counterinsurgency
strategy has resulted in decreased civilian deaths in Baghdad but has
placed thousands of additional American troops at greater risk in small
outposts in the capital and other parts of the country.
"It is very clear that the number of attacks against U.S. forces is up"
and that they have grown more effective in Baghdad, especially in recent
weeks, said Maj. Gen. James E. Simmons, deputy commander for operations
in Iraq. At the same time, he said, attacks on Iraqi security forces
have declined slightly, citing figures that compare the period of
mid-February to mid-May to the preceding three months. "The attacks are
being directed at us and not against other people," he said.
May, with 127 American fatalities, was the third-deadliest month for
U.S. troops since the 2003 invasion. As in the conflict's two deadliest
months for U.S. troops -- 137 died in November 2004 and 135 in April of
that year -- the overarching cause of May's toll is the ongoing,
large-scale U.S. military operations. Simmons called the high U.S.
losses in May "a very painful and heart-wrenching experience."
The intensity of combat and the greater lethality of attacks on U.S.
troops is underscored by the lower ratio of wounded to killed for May,
which fell to about 4.8 to 1 -- compared with an average of 8 to 1 in
the Iraq conflict, according Pentagon data. "The closer you get to a
stand-up fight, the closer you're going to get to that 3-to-1 ratio"
that typified 2oth-century U.S. warfare, said John Pike, director of
Globalsecurity.org, a defense information Web site.
Simmons said that in May, the number of armor-piercing weapons known as
explosively formed projectiles roughly matched the April high of 65, and
the main source of increased U.S. deaths was "large and buried IEDs," or
improvised explosive devices.
U.S. deaths have risen sharply in some of Baghdad's outlying regions,
such as Diyala province, where Sunni and Shiite groups have escalated
sectarian violence and fought back hard against American forces moving
into their safe havens. "Extremists on both sides of this thing are
trying to make a statement by attacking U.S. troops," Simmons said.
The overall percentage of U.S. military fatalities caused by roadside
bombs had dipped from more than 60 percent late last year to 35 percent
in February. It then rose again to 70.9 percent in May, according to
research by the independent Web site icasualties.org. Gains in defeating
the bombs have not resulted in fewer deaths because the number of bombs
-- and the lethality of some types -- have increased, military officials
said.
Insurgents are also staging carefully planned, complex ambushes and
retaliatory attacks as they target U.S. troops, the officials said.
While few in number, these include direct assaults on U.S. military
outposts, ambushes in which American troops have been captured, and
complex attacks that use multiple weapons to strike more than one U.S.
target. For example, attackers will bomb a patrol and then target ground
forces or aircraft that come to its aid.
"We are starting to see more sophistication and training in their
attacks," said a senior military official in Baghdad. While the vast
majority of attacks are still relatively simple and involve a single
type of weapon, "clearly the trend is going in the wrong direction," he
said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized
to speak to reporters.
In an attack Monday in Diyala, for example, an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior
helicopter carrying two U.S. soldiers took heavy enemy fire during
combat and crashed in farmland southwest of the town of Abu Saydah,
about 40 miles north of Baghdad in a region where the Sunni extremist
group al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to establish a new stronghold.
The U.S. military scrambled Bradley Fighting Vehicles at Forward
Operating Base Normandy, 19 miles from the crash, for an urgent rescue.
But as the Quick Reaction Force rumbled through the rural terrain just a
mile and a half from the crash site, a huge roadside bomb hit a Bradley,
killing four soldiers and wounding another four, one mortally. Suddenly,
the rescue mission itself was in peril, and helicopters rushed to
evacuate the injured.
Other units pushed forward to the copter crash, recovering the bodies of
the pilots and killing three insurgents. But back at the Bradley bomb
site, where soldiers were clearing the wreckage, a second bomb exploded,
killing another U.S. soldier.
In all, eight U.S. troops died and three were wounded in the Memorial
Day incident, which contributed to May's toll.
Simmons said helicopter downings such as the one in Diyala reflect a
"thinking and adaptive enemy" that is refining its skills. "There is a
greater degree of training," he said. Moreover, he said that as in past
cases, insurgents may have placed the bombs that killed the ground
troops deliberately along routes leading to the copter, but said
military investigators have not confirmed that.
In a complex attack in Babil on May 12, a small, two-Humvee U.S. patrol
that was watching an area where insurgents often buried roadside bombs
came under insurgent observation. Insurgents got through a perimeter of
concertina wire, attacked the patrol with grenades, hustled captured
soldiers into a getaway car, then used bombs pre-positioned on both
sides of the approaching road to delay for about an hour other U.S.
forces coming to the patrol's rescue. Four soldiers were killed in the
assault, the body of another was found later, and two remain missing.
U.S. commanders have long warned that more casualties would probably
result from the increase of about 25,800 U.S. troops ordered by
President Bush in January. The increase has placed the troops in the
Baghdad region and the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province. These forces
have been stationed since February at small patrol bases in Baghdad
neighborhoods under a counterinsurgency strategy intended to pacify the
capital.
The 2004 spikes in American deaths resulted from major U.S. ground
offensives, such as the November 2004 campaign to retake the Sunni
stronghold of Fallujah. Today, the losses are occurring as large numbers
of U.S. troops disperse into Baghdad and other areas in an effort to
protect Iraqis.
Commanders credit U.S. military operations with sharply lowering
civilian deaths in Baghdad. The numbers of civilians killed and wounded
as well as sectarian murders have all fallen roughly 50 percent in
Baghdad in the 90 days ending in mid-May, compared with the previous
three months, Simmons said, despite what some military officials
described as a slight upturn in civilian deaths in May.
U.S. patrols and raids have also uncovered nearly 2,500 weapons caches
and killed or captured more than 20,000 insurgents, militia members and
other fighters nationwide since January. Among the enemy killed or
captured are more than 1,700 individual targets considered "high value,"
in what military officials and analysts say is an effort to eliminate
leaders of enemy cells in hopes they cannot quickly be replaced.
"Maybe this is the bloody period when we are doing the heavy fighting to
get at the bad actors so we can have a more peaceful future," said
Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution in
Washington.
But after lying low to a degree and watching U.S. tactics, fighters are
now responding and retaliating. "In February, all sides -- including
al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jaish al-Mahdi -- stepped back to take the measure of
the surge, and by late April and May, they stepped forward again and are
aggressively testing the resolve of U.S. forces," said Toby Dodge, an
Iraq expert at Queen Mary College University of London, using the Arabic
name of the Shiite Mahdi Army.
Military officials and analysts say the factors contributing to the
increased deaths will likely not ease soon. "We are looking at a very
nasty summer," Dodge said.
Anderson reported from Baghdad.
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14) MEXICO: Educators march and declare they are on strike throughout the
country TeleSUR _ 6/01/2007 - 10:02 hours [Edited]
Mexican teachers marched this Friday from different parts of the
country to repudiate the law of the Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios
Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado (ISSSTE); the teachers also
called a national strike, which will include more than 100,000 schools
in the entire country.
In the context of the national civic strike called by the Coordinadora
Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), teachers, civil
society, union representatives in Mexico, all carried out a march from
the four points of the capital and different regions of the country
today, to repuediate the law of the Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios
Sociales de los Trabajadores del Estado (ISSSTE).
The teachers consider that this law is detrimental to the benefits of
educational workers, primarily as it affects retirement.
Sabino Gutiérrez Márquez, a member of the Sindicato Nacional de
Trabajadores de la Educación, stated that teachers organizations in
Potosí in at least 10 of the 58 municipalities of the state would also
join the massive mobilization, which included teachers, union
representatives, civil society and other social groups. The march was
planned to arrive at the Zócalo in Mexico City.
Participants in one of the marches, called "the tired feet," also set
out for the Zócalo from the Plaza de la República, in the center of
Guadalajara, where they maintain a permanent encampment opposite the
offices of the ISSSTE, where dozens of families from various states
protested this week. The mobilization also planned to present a formal
complaint to the 96th Annual Conference of the International Labor
Organization, where the educators' union is denouncing the Mexican
state for this legislation, mainly because of its retirement provisions.
For his part, Daniel Avila, leader of the Political Council of the
CNTE, deplored support by the government of President Felipe Calderón
for approval of this law, which Avila described as a human rights'
violation.
As for the national teachers' strike, it is expected that 100,000
schools throughout Mexico will be affected. . . . In repudiation of
the new social security law covering government employees, last Monday
the Universidad Nacional Autónoma had a 12-hour strike, while
thousands of people marched in different parts of the capital.
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15) Cooperation between Vietnam and Venezuela Strengthened
Hugo Chavez received Nong Duc Manh,
head of the Vietnamese Communist Party
2007-06-01 | 12:34:06 EST
http://www.juventudrebelde.co.cu/
http://tinyurl.com/325xk4
CARACAS.- General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party Nong
Duc Manh arrives on Friday to Cuba after signing cooperation
agreements on energy and transportation in Venezuela.
According to the Vietnamese leader's own words, after having met in
Caracas with representative Cilia Flores, president of the Venezuelan
National Assembly, the two countries would also agree the setting up
of new joint projects for the exploration of Venezuelan oilfields and
the construction of a refinery in Vietnam.
Also in the agenda were agreements to establish joint ventures
devoted to the assembly of vehicles, motorcycles and other means of
transportation.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez met on Thursday with the Vietnamese
party leader in the Miraflores Palace, where -accompanied by their
delegations- analyzed the ties of cooperation and friendship between
the two countries, reported Radio Nacional.
At his arrival in Caracas, the Vietnamese communist leader said that
the people of his country have always supported the revolutionary
process led by President Hugo Chavez because of the way it defends
the independence and sovereignty of Venezuela. Nong Duc Manh also
analyzed ways of boosting of bilateral cooperation as the first
objective of his visit.
Chavez visited Hanoi, the capital of the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam, on July 30, 2006, in what was the first visit of a
Venezuelan president to Vietnam.
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16) JAZZ FANS DECRY EXCLUSION
Few African American musicians booked for Berkeley festival,
none on Yoshi's anniversary CD
Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 1, 2007
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/01/MNGVOQ5TTP1.DTL
When Yoshi's jazz club in Oakland released its much-anticipated 10-year anniversary CD last month, local jazz aficionados were outraged that no African American musicians were included.
The tension grew days later when the Bay Area's jazz community learned that the Berkeley Downtown Jazz Festival had invited only six African American musicians to perform at the five-day event in August.
Together, the two revelations upset musicians, club owners and fans, some of whom say racism is at play in the local jazz scene. Anna DeLeon, owner of Anna's Jazz Island in Berkeley, complained to organizers when she learned who was scheduled to play at her club during the festival.
"There were 17 musicians in four bands, and none were black," said DeLeon. "It is hard for me to imagine how this could happen, how they could not notice."
Word spread quickly as people voiced outrage via e-mail over a problem many said had been simmering for a long time. Jazz professionals met to plan a response. Club owners and musicians went on Doug Edwards' "Music of the World" show on KPFA-FM on May 19. A week later, Susan Muscarella, who books the jazz festival and runs Berkeley's Jazzschool, appeared on the same show to respond.
Muscarella says the situation is being overblown. She said she hasn't finished booking the festival but has so far confirmed four African American acts, and it was coincidence that none would perform at Anna's. Last year, 30 percent of festival performers were black, she said.
"These allegations are outrageous," Muscarella said. "Diversity has always been at the top of my list. I hold African American heritage in high esteem. But I do choose quality and not ethnicity alone."
Many artists said that holding black heritage in high esteem is not the point. Inviting six African American artists to a major jazz event that includes dozens of performers and excluding black artists from a selection of 10 performances at the East Bay's most prominent jazz venue is simply unacceptable, they said.
"It is like going to a Chinese restaurant and there are no Chinese people," said Howard Wiley, a local saxophonist. "It is very disheartening and sad, especially from Yoshi's, which calls itself the premiere jazz venue of the Bay Area.
"I mean, we are dealing with jazz and blues, not Hungarian folk music or the invention of computer programs."
Jazz grew out of the African American experience, and many historians call it the most significant contribution from the United States to the music world.
Well-known jazz artists, festival organizers and academics say the two incidents show how African Americans are being squeezed out of the art form more broadly.
"This is stemming from a much larger dynamic with regard to jazz and what is becoming a legitimized and institutionalized lack of inclusion of African Americans," said Glen Pearson, a music instructor at the College of Alameda and a full-time musician. "Jazz was once looked at as inferior music from an inferior culture, and now it has become embraced socially and academically, so there has been some revisionism."
Pearson said some music critics believe the African American roots of jazz and its black contributors are sometimes featured too heavily in education and portrayals of jazz, such as in Ken Burns' television documentary series. There were complaints that the PBS series, "Jazz," focused too much on African Americans, Pearson said.
"I am comfortable saying that every significant white contributor to jazz studied from someone of African American descent," Pearson said. "So for a world-class jazz venue to not include an African American performer in a 10-year tribute is just so sideways."
Over the years, countless prominent African Americans have performed at Yoshi's, including Joshua Redman, Branford Marsalis, Howard Wiley, Abbey Lincoln, Mulgrew Miller, Terence Blanchard, Marcus Shelby, McCoy Tyner, Shirley Horn and Elvin Jones.
Peter Williams, Yoshi's artistic director, said the exclusion was an oversight and that the club does not have the right to record all the performers that appear there.
"We apologize to anyone who feels slighted by the omission of African American artists on this project, as that was never our intention," he wrote in an e-mail to concerned supporters. "This compilation CD was meant to celebrate a milestone for us in the Bay Area and not necessarily meant to be a representation of all the artists and music styles ever played at our club."
DeLeon said she and others angry about the CD do not suspect that Yoshi's conspired to leave out African Americans; they are upset it happened without anyone noticing.
"The Bay Area is a jazz mecca, considered one of the top three or four markets in the country, so for its premiere venue to leave out African American artists is amazing," said Herve Ernest, executive director of SF Noir, an arts and culture organization that highlights African American contributions, and a co-founder of the North Beach Jazz Festival.
"From what I have perceived and what I've witnessed, there is a certain whitewashing of jazz both locally and nationally," Ernest said. "I think it is done from a marketing standpoint and is a response to the largely white audiences that patronize an establishment."
Ernest said one of the reasons he founded SF Noir was that he noticed the jazz festival audiences were 90 percent white, and he wanted to try to appeal to a more diverse crowd and put a stronger focus on black contributions to the art.
"It really gets me upset that people like Norah Jones (who is white and East Indian) get pushed through with heavy marketing when there are dozens of African American female jazz vocalists who, in my opinion, are 10 times better," he said. "I'm not sure if the exclusion is intended or an honest overlook, but we created jazz and we are still playing it, so we should not be overlooked."
Local jazz artists said they see the discussion as positive in that it is offering a chance to address an issue that has been stewing for some time. A desire to organize has been lacking, said local jazz singer Rhonda Benin, but now a number of musicians are ready to take action.
"It's an ongoing problem that was brought to a head by these two events," said Raymond Nat Turner, an Oakland-based jazz poet. "That set in motion a chain of e-mails and unleashed an energy that had been dormant for years.
"People who had not been communicating have started talking and networking," Turner said.
At a forum at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music last month, about 35 people discussed how better to support black-owned venues and artists and recruiting more African American children into the world of jazz.
"We are becoming the minority as Europeans and Caucasians take over," Turner said.
Those who attended the forum plan to meet again Sunday to develop a long-term strategy.
"This is an African American art form, and they are excluding the very people who created it and continue to play it," said Benin. "It's a travesty."
'Live at Yoshi's'
10th anniversary CD:
1 Turn Around
Marian McPartland
2 Doxy -- Joe Pass
3 Cherokee
Joey DeFrancesco
4 Lisa -- Poncho Sanchez
5 This Is Heaven to Me
Madeleine Peyroux
6 Autumn Leaves
Joey DeFrancesco
7 In a Sentimental Mood
Marian McPartland
8 What Is This Thing
Called Love? -- Joe Pass
9 Help the Poor
Robben Ford
0 Guaripumpe
Poncho Sanchez
Source: www.yoshis.com
E-mail Leslie Fulbright at lfulbright@sfchronicle.com.
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17) The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
By Mahmood Mamdani
March 8, 2007
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/print/mamd01_.html
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?
The most powerful mobilization in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as “Arabs” confront victims clearly identifiable as “Africans.”
A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under “a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel.” That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to “political or civilian” considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot—to kill—without permission from distant places: these are said to be “humanitarian” demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for “force as a first-resort response.” What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, “Out of Iraq and into Darfur.”
What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics—a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organized insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.
The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.
As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia—the Janjawiid—that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiraling violence would have to bring about power sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.
Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the U.S., the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with “a genocide alert” from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was “the first ever of its kind, issued by the U.S. Holocaust Museum.” The House of Representatives followed unanimously on June 24, 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.
The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on September 23, Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:
“Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and program of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.”
By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on “violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties,” and specifically to determine “whether or not acts of genocide have occurred.” Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on January 25, 2005, the commission concluded that “the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide... directly or through the militias under its control.” But the commission did find that the government’s violence was “deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians.” Indeed, “even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.” These acts, the commission concluded, “were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity” (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: “The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organized attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.”
At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces—namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement—which it held “responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes” (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of “crimes against humanity,” rebel movements were accused of “war crimes.” Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included “officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity.” The list named 51 individuals.
The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the “foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity,” i.e. mercenaries presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of “contractors.”
The journalist in the U.S. most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.
Kristof made six highly publicized trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of “ethnic cleansing:” “Sudan’s Arab rulers” had “forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages” (March 24, 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. “Right now,” he wrote on March 27, “the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.” He continued: “The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government” and “the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.” He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on May 29, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the effect that “at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease” but “if things go badly, half a million will die.”
The UN commission’s report was released on February 25, 2005. It confirmed “massive displacement” of persons (“more than a million” internally displaced and “more than 200,000” refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred” villages and hamlets as “irrefutable facts;” but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had “allegedly killed over 70,000 persons.” Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on February 23, 2005, he admitted that “the numbers are fuzzy.” Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as “a UN estimate,” to “independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000.” A warning followed: “and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.”
The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even U.S. officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organizations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on May 3, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had “Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide:” he had “also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000.” As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as “nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day.” In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on November 27, Kristof warned that “if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.” Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (June 16, 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (February 23, 2005). The number began once more to climb to “nearly 400,000” (May 3, 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (April 23, 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?
In the April 23 column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: “China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.” In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterized as “war crimes.” Would the logic of his April 23 column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of “underwriting” war crimes in Darfur?
Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (“race”) and, if not that, certainly in “culture.” This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.
Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticization of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.
The conflict in Darfur is highly politicized, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: “Arabs” are trying to eliminate “Africans.” But both “Arab” and “African” have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of “Arab.” Locally, “Arab” was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become “Arab” over time. This process, known as Arabization, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharization in Ethiopia and Swahilization on the East African coast. The third meaning of “Arab” was “privileged and exclusive;” it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabization with the spread of civilization and being Arab with descent.
“African,” in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an “African” was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic)—“African” as Bantu and “African” as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterization of the violence as “Arab” against “African” obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of “Arab” and “African:” a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticization, naturalization and, ultimately, demonization of the notion “Arab,” as against “African,” has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.
The depoliticization of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as “an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organizations;” among the organizers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.
To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organized and armed by neighboring governments; and the victims on both sides—Hema and Lendu—are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the U.S. is on Darfur and not on Kivu?
Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: “When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.” But instead of answering the question, Kristof—now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell—moved on: “And malaria annually kills one million to three million people—meaning that three years” deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.” And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: “We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special—not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.” That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias—many of them no more than child soldiers—were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur—but not the violence in Kivu—is named as genocide?
It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much “human suffering” as “human evil.” Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonize an enemy: genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticizing the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticized violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of “Arabs” killing “Africans.” Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacy in Sudan by demonizing entire communities.[*]
Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fiber to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: “Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?” Two years later he asked: “And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?” Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the “real blind spot” in the Muslim world, he said: “You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.”
If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the U.S. was also done by journalists. In, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with our Families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: “Early in his presidency, Mr. Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: ‘Not on my watch.’ But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.”
With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the U.S. failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war, which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.
What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the U.S. did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the U.S., just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the U.S. signaled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognizing that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.
The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny “Arabized” elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalized populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.
The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organized negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favors parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.
The camp of peace needs to come to a second realization: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a “civilizing mission.” Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonized—sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilizing them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unraveling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.
Footnotes
* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities “Arab” and “African.” The commissions report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted “Arab” against “African” was facile. “In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.” Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories “Arab” and “African:” “The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them” (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between “Arab” and “African.” On the one hand, “Arab” and “African” seem to have become political identities: “Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as ‘African’ and those supporting the government as the ‘Arabs.’ A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been ‘Arabized.’” On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: “The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.”
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His most recent book is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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The Dirty Water Underground
By GREGORY DICUM
OAKLAND, Calif.
May 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html
A Hot-Selling Weapon, an Inviting Target
By ANDREW PARK
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03rifle.html?ref=business
Surf’s Up, but the Water Is Brown
By MIREYA NAVARRO
June 3, 2007
Los Angeles
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/fashion/03beaches.html
When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?
By ELIZABETH WEIL
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html?hp
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/health/03docs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
Interview With Cindy Sheehan: "We'll Come Back Stronger"
"Prominent anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan tells NOW's David
Brancaccio that she plans to rest, spend time with her family,
and then continue her struggle against the Iraq war. "We're
going to pull back and regroup and figure out a better way
to come at this," Sheehan said in a NOW on the News web-
exclusive audio interview."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060107R.shtml
Pentagon IG Report Details Central Role
of Psychologists in Detainee
Interrogations and Abuse
Shrinks and the SERE Technique at Guantanamo
By STEPHEN SOLDZ
May 29, 2007
www.counterpunch.org
Inuit leader: stop expansion of Stansted airport
By Cahal Milmo
"One of the most prominent members of the Inuit community
will today plead for an end to the expansion of Stansted
Airport and deliver a devastating critique of the link
between Britain's cheap flights culture and the effects
of climate change on his people.
Aqqaluk Lynge will present evidence of the increasing
loss of Inuit villages and hunting grounds across the
Arctic. His testimony will be given to the public inquiry
opening today into plans to dramatically increase the
number of passengers using London's third airport."
Published: 30 May 2007
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2594163.ece
Andrew Sullivan: American interrogation techniques
borrowed from Nazis
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html
Overhaul of Immigration Law Could Reshape New York
By NINA BERNSTEIN
May 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/nyregion/30families.html?ref=nyregion
Los Angeles Police Chief Notes Failures of Command at Rally
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
May 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/us/30LAPD.html?ref=us
Mexico: Migrant Jumps to His Death in Immigration Sweep
By MARC LACEY
A raid by the authorities on a train carrying undocumented
Central American immigrants in southern Mexico ended in
tragedy on Monday as a man jumped to his death from
a moving rail car and a boy had his leg severed by the
train’s wheels. “We were all on top of the train when
the police began chasing us,” the boy, Luis Carlos
Hernández, 14, from Honduras, told The Associated Press
from a hospital in Veracruz, where he was recovering
from an amputated right leg. The unidentified man who
jumped fell onto the tracks and was decapitated, officials
said.
May 30, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/world/americas/30briefs-migrant.html
Site Pulled Calling Anti-War Advocates Terrorists
Anti-Abortion, Gay-Rights Groups Also Included
http://www.nbc6.net/news/13398523/detail.html?taf=ami
Stun gun use on mentally ill questioned
© 2007 The Associated Press
May 28, 2007, 12:28AM
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4840930.html
As Allies Turn Foe, Disillusion Rises in Some G.I.’s
By MICHAEL KAMBER
May 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/world/middleeast/28delta.html?ref=world
Wealthy Enclave Offers Windfall for Candidates
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
"GREENWICH, Conn., May 25 — Senator John McCain made his
pitch to this gilded shoreline suburb back in April.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts came on May 7,
followed one night later by former President Bill Clinton
on behalf of his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Last weekend, it was back-to-back appearances by Senator
Barack Obama, topped off on Sunday with a visit from
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor.
With the mansions along its winding back roads now awash
in hedge fund money, Greenwich has joined New York,
Los Angeles and Silicon Valley as must stops on the
presidential fund-raising tour, with prominent locals
now boasting of candidate scuff marks on their basketball
courts, Secret Service T-shirts in their closets and framed
pictures of their children with the candidates on their
mantels. For a town that has wealth and corporate clout
to spare, the fund-raisers fill a void: access to a potential
White House resident."
May 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/us/politics/28greenwich.html?hp
Site Pulled Calling Anti-War Advocates Terrorists
Anti-Abortion, Gay-Rights Groups Also Included
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- The Alabama Department of Homeland
Security has taken down a Web site it operated that
included gay rights, anti-war and anti-abortion organizations
in a list of groups that could include terrorists.
The site included the groups under a description of what
it called "single-issue extremists." The Web site says
such groups include people who feel they are trying to
create a better world.
The director of the department said his agency received
a number of calls and e-mails from people who said they
felt the site unfairly targeted certain people just
because of their beliefs. He said he plans to put the
Web site back on the Internet, but will no longer
identify specific types of groups.
POSTED: 10:27 pm EDT May 27, 2007
UPDATED: 10:28 pm EDT May 27, 2007
http://www.nbc6.net/news/13398523/detail.html?taf=ami
INTERVIEW: AS'AD ABUKHALIL ON THE NAHR AL-BARED SIEGE
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Lebanon, 24 May 2007
"Thousands of Palestinian refugees are fleeing from Nahr
al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon as five days of
fighting by the Lebanese army and a militant group known
as Fath al-Islam has left dozens of soldiers and fighters
and an unknown number of civilians dead. As the situation
of these Palestinian refugees worsens, 59 years after they
were first expelled from their homeland into Lebanon, the
world looks on in silence. Electronic Intifada co-founder
Ali Abunimah spoke with As'ad Abukhalil, the creator of
the Angry Arab News Service blog on the origins of Fath
al-Islam, the events that led to the violence and what it
means for Lebanon and the region."
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6945.shtml
US Show of Force in Gulf "Greatly Alarming"
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052607A.shtml
Federal agents arrest over 100 for immigration violations
in Missouri raid
Michael Sung
JURIST@law.pitt.edu
5/23/2007
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2007/05/federal-agents-arrest-over-100-for.php
Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Hurt at Pump
By JAD MOUAWAD
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/business/24refinery.html?ref=business
For the First Time, New York Links a Death to 9/11 Dust
By ANTHONY DePALMA
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/nyregion/24dust.html?ref=nyregion
$5 Million Settlement in Boot Camp Death
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., May 23 (AP) — The family of a teenager
who died after being roughed up by guards at a juvenile boot
camp last year will receive $5 million under a bill signed
Wednesday by Gov. Charlie Crist.
The teenager, Martin L. Anderson, 14, died in January 2006
shortly after being kneed and struck and having ammonia
tablets held to his nose at the military-style facility
run by the Bay County Sheriff’s Office in Panama City, Fla.
Mr. Crist and several lawmakers pushed for the settlement
this spring despite the Legislature’s general distaste
for claims measures.
The state has already paid Martin’s parents $200,000, the
most allowed by law without legislative approval. The bill
signed by Mr. Crist pays the remaining $4.8 million.
The sheriff’s office has separately settled with the Anderson
family for $2.4 million. Seven guards and a nurse employed
at the camp face manslaughter charges.
An initial autopsy said Martin died of complications from
sickle cell trait. But a second autopsy said the death
was caused by suffocation resulting from being forced
to inhale the ammonia.
Martin entered the camp for a probation violation for
trespassing at a school after he and his cousins were
charged with stealing their grandmother’s car.
May 24, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/24/us/24florida.html
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
http://electronicIntifada.net
ONGOING SPECIAL COVERAGE OF SIEGE OF LEBANON REFUGEE CAMP:
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/674.shtml
ONGOING SPECIAL COVERAGE OF RENEWED ISRAELI STRIKES ON GAZA:
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/672.shtml
Democrats Pull Troop Deadline From Iraq Bill
By CARL HULSE
May 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html?ref=world
Film Offers New Talking Points in Health Care Debate
By MILT FREUDENHEIM and LIZA KLAUSSMANN
May 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/business/media/22react.html?ref=business
Kentucky: Families Sue in Mine Blast
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The sole survivor of a mine explosion last year and relatives
of four of the five miners killed sued the coal company,
saying it had put production over safety. The suit cited
safety violations against the company, Kentucky Darby;
a supervisor, Ralph Napier; and Jericol Mining, which
provided management, planning, engineering and safety
training to the mine, Darby Mine No. 1. The plaintiffs
also seek damages against the manufacturer of the emergency
air packs that the victims used.
May 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/us/22brfs-FAMILIESSUEI_BRF.html
IRAQ: Educational standards plummet, say specialists
http://www.irinnews.org/PrintReport.aspx?ReportId=72168
Exclusive: Secret US plot to kill Al-Sadr
By Patrick Cockburn In Baghdad
Published: 21 May 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2565123.ece
What's Next in Iraq? Juan Cole Interviews Ali A. Allawi
"Will a surge of U.S. troops make
a difference in Iraq? How viable is
the current Iraqi government? Will
an American withdrawal lead to
all-out civil war?
May 25, 2007
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i38/38b00601.htm
Black Media Delegation Returns from Darfur
Final Call, News Report, Jehron Muhammad,
Posted: May 20, 2007
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=b4a5f713b944aebb26047375d0629bf7
Soldier’s Smallpox Inoculation Sickens Son
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
"A 2-year-old boy spent seven weeks in the hospital
and nearly died from a viral infection he got from
the smallpox vaccination his father received before
shipping out to Iraq, according to a government report
and the doctors who treated him."
May 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/health/18smallpox.html?ref=health
My Dear Fellow Species
By MARY JO MURPHY
"THE Origin of Species” is almost 150 — a fit survivor
of the science canon even if not everyone has seen fit
to jump from the Ark to the Beagle on the matter of
evolution (three Republican presidential candidates,
for example). But Darwin himself was slow to come to
his ideas, and slower still to disclose them to
a skeptical public. Last week, the Darwin Correspondence
Project, based at Cambridge University, put about 5,000
letters to and from Darwin, some of them previously
unpublished, online at darwinproject.ac.uk, with thousands
more to follow. The searchable database lets anyone track
the painstaking development of his research and thinking
— on all kinds of topics, personal and professional,
and with a huge array of correspondents." MARY JO MURPHY
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/weekinreview/20word.html?ref=science
The Closing of the University Commons
by Michael Perelman
May 19, 2007
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/perelman190507.html
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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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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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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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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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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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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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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