Help "welcome" Tony Blair to Oakland, Tuesday, October 23, 8:00 pm to 9:30 pm
Paramount Theater, conveniently located just north of 20th and Broadway (and just one block from the 19th Street BART)
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Greetings of IMANI (FAITH) Fellow Activists and Truthseekers:
May this message find you and your extended families in the best of spirit and health.
I realize many of you are busy organizing for the righteous march on the 27th of October. WE greatly appreciate your continuing efforts. However, here's some additional news for your information and consideration of mass action. Former prime minister and new "statesman" Tony Blair of England--the unconvicted mass murderer, perpetrator of numerous crimes against humanity and close co-hort of the fascist Cheney-Bush regime--will be speaking in Oakland on this coming Tuesday evening. He is scheduled to address an audience at the Paramount Theater from 8:00 pm to 9:30 pm on the 23rd of October. The theater is conveniently located just north of 20th and Broadway (and just one block from the 19th Street BART). Tickets range from $75 upwards for those who want to go inside. Hope to see you all there (outside).
Keep up your righteous work. Please forward to your lists. Asante (thanks).
Justice, Peace, Love and Continued Blessings,
Brother Jahahara Amen-RA Alkebulan-Ma'at
Oakland, CA
Stop the War(s) at Home and Abroad!
Freedom, Amnesty and Restitution for All Our Imprisoned and Exiled Leaders!
REPARATIONS NOW for Afrikan and Indigenous People!
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STOP THE WAR NOW! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
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Dear antiwar activist,
Can you help? Volunteers are needed for the October 27th End the War Now! demonstration.
Over 150 groups have already endorsed the protest. On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will add its own endorsement and will declare October 27th „End the War in Iraq Day.‰ One YouTube video supporting the National Mobilization (at http://youtube.com/watch?v=76lZC_o95gE
While we expect a lot of protesters, we need more people to volunteer for Day of Event tasks. If you haven‚t done so already, please take a moment to complete the form at http://www.oct27sf.org/dotnetnuke/Volunteer/tabid/58/Default.aspx
If your group has endorsed the demonstration, please send an e-mail message to your members telling them about our volunteer needs and directing them to this web page. Finally, if you have friends or family members who may be willing to help out, please also encourage them to get in touch with us by filling out the volunteer form. Anyone who can volunteer should try to arrive at the Civic Center by 9am and come to the coalition table near the main stage.
Please let us know by e-mail to oct27sf@gmail.com
if you can help,or if you can help recruit some volunteers.
Thanks again. See you on the 27th!
Carole Seligman
On behalf of the October 27th Coalition ˆ San Francisco
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Ink-Stained Marx
by JAMES LEDBETTER
[from the November 5, 2007 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/ledbetter
2) Kurds Protest Turkish Vote on Iraq
By SEBNEM ARSU and SABRINA TAVERNISE
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/world/19turkey.html?ref=world
3) Stalled Health Tests Leave Storm Trailers in Limbo
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/us/18fema.html?ref=us
4) Birth Control Allowed at Maine Middle School
By JOEL ELLIOTT
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/us/18portland.html?ref=us
5) Virginia County Votes to Deny Services to Illegal Immigrants
By IAN URBINA and MARIA NEWMAN
October 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17prison-cnd.html?ref=us
6) New York State Not Doing Enough to Prevent Wrongful Convictions, Report Says
By FERNANDA SANTOS
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/nyregion/18dna.html?ref=us
7) None Dare Call It Child Care
"Right now, the only parents who routinely get serious child-care assistance from the government are extremely poor mothers in welfare-to-work programs. Even for them, the waiting lists tend to be ridiculously long. In many states, once the woman actually gets a job, she loses the day care. Middle-class families get zip, even though a decent private child care program costs $12,000 a year in some parts of the country."
By GAIL COLLINS
Op-Ed Columnist
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/opinion/18collins.html?hp
8) Security Contractors Shoot at Taxi, Wounding 3 Iraqis
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html?ref=world
9) New Coast Guard Task in Arctic’s Warming Seas
By MATTHEW L. WALD and ANDREW C. REVKIN
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19arctic.html?ref=us
10) Schools in Several States Report Staph Infections, and Deaths Raise the Alarm
By IAN URBINA
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19staph.html?ref=us
11) Texas toxic town lures industry while residents wheeze
Saturday, October 20, 2007 7:15 PM CDT
By Monica Rhor
Associated Press
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2007/10/20/news/doc4717e42f62035601237837.txt
12) Tighter Border Delays Re-entry by U.S. Citizens
By JULIA PRESTON
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/us/21border.html?hp
13) The Future Is Drying Up
By JOE GERTNER
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?ref=magazine
14) In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
By TIM GOLDEN
May 20, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html
15) U.S. Says Iraq Raid Kills 49 Militants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:36 a.m. ET
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?ref=world
16) Soft Spot for the South Bronx
By ANNE BARNARD
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/nyregion/21citgo.html?ref=nyregion
17) Priests Protesting Torture Jailed
By Bill Quigley
10/18/07 "ICH
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18584.htm
18) Bush asks for $46 billion more for wars
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 48 minutes ago
October 22, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071022/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_war_spending_21
19) No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity
By LESLIE EATON
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/22cnd-holyland.html?hp
20) Gone Baby Gone
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?hp
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1) Ink-Stained Marx
by JAMES LEDBETTER
[from the November 5, 2007 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/ledbetter
Karl Marx did his best writing on deadline.
Commissioned by the Communist League in mid-1847 to write a "profession
of faith," Marx and Engels procrastinated, traveled, experimented with
form and might never have written the manifesto of the Communist Party
if not for a sternly worded letter from the league ordering them to
deliver the document by February 1, 1848.
A few all-nighters later, Marx produced a stirring document that by now
has been read by tens of millions of people. Far fewer realize that
regular deadline commentary provided Marx with the closest thing he ever
had to actual employment. From 1852 to 1862 he was a regular London
correspondent for the New York Tribune. All told, Marx contributed
almost 500 columns to the Tribune (about a quarter of which were
actually written by Engels). Marx's newspaper writing takes up nearly
seven volumes of the fifty-volume Collected Works of Marx and
Engels--more than Capital and indeed more than any of Marx's works
published in book form.
The Tribune was in some ways a logical place for Marx's journalism. The
paper was founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley as a crusading organ of
progressive causes with a pronounced American and Christian flavor; one
contemporary writer described the paper's political stance as
"Anti-Slavery, Anti-War, Anti-Rum, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Seduction,
Anti-Grogshops, Anti-Brothels, Anti-Gambling Houses." During Marx's
tenure as a correspondent, the Tribune was the largest newspaper in the
world, reaching more than 200,000 readers.
At the same time, there was probably no publication in the world that
would have been a perfect fit for Marx's cantankerous prose and
personality. Even when Marx wrote in English, his strident Germanic tone
dominated. His analysis was so unsparingly radical that at times the
Tribune felt the need to distance itself from its fulminating London
correspondent; introducing one of his 1853 essays, for example, the
editors wrote, "Mr. Marx has very decided opinions of his own, with some
of which we are far from agreeing," but then conceded that "those who do
not read his letters neglect one of the most instructive sources of
information on the greatest questions of current European politics."
And the ambivalence was mutual--to put it mildly. At times Marx viewed
newspaper writing as just one more form of capitalist exploitation.
"It's truly nauseating," he wrote to Engels in 1857, "that one should be
condemned to count it a blessing when taken aboard by a blotting-paper
vendor such as this. To crush up bones, grind them and make them into
soup like paupers in the workhouse--that is what the political work to
which one is condemned in large measure in a concern like this boils
down to." Yet Marx was proud when his work attracted attention. In
November 1857, he predicted that the Bank of England would have to be
suspended, a prophecy the New York Times labeled "simply absurd"; when
the bank was suspended in early December, he boasted to Engels about his
"gratifying" scoop. Moreover, as some modern Marxist scholars have
noted, Marx's newspaper articles--far from impeding his book-length
work--enhanced it by providing him raw material he could then revisit in
a fuller context.
Marx's dispatches do not fall into any category that would be familiar
to today's reader. He did essentially nothing that could be labeled
original reporting, which is hardly surprising; his relations with
government authorities were tenuous and the restrictions on his travel
were substantial. Instead Marx crafted his dispatches using the same
tools he relied on for his books: the materials available to him in the
reading room of the British Museum, including history books, government
reports and foreign newspapers. He also incorporated private letters
sent to him by political allies across Europe. Although he always
insisted on placing unfolding events in the context of hundreds of years
of history, Marx was diligent about making his newspaper columns as
up-to-date as possible. Thus dozens of columns between 1853 and 1856
were essentially battle-by-battle analyses of the unfolding Crimean War.
These columns drew extensively on European newspaper dispatches that
Marx's American readers could not easily have found themselves, as well
as on Engels's formidable knowledge of military history and tactics.
Another category of article involved Marx trying to find the local
insurrection that might spark the revolution across Europe he believed
to be imminent. Probably no single historical moment shaped his
political thinking as much as the events of 1848. Not only did the
energy of those revolutions fuel the rhetoric of the Communist
Manifesto; their eventual crushing by the likes of Louis Napoleon forced
Marx to deepen his analysis of state and economic power. Sprinkled
throughout his articles are remarkably detailed analyses of later
insurrections in Greece, Spain and Italy.
Perhaps Marx's most "Marxist" articles were those dealing with the opium
trade in China and India and slavery in America. These were the open
sores of imperialism, and Marx railed against them repeatedly and
loudly. In his view the British government and the East India Company
had deliberately encouraged opium addiction among the Chinese population
purely for financial gain. Similarly, the British textile industry
depended heavily on American cotton, leading the British ruling classes
to repeatedly turn a blind eye to the conditions of slavery in the
American South, all the while preaching to the world the virtues of
"free trade."
Thus, in a typical 1853 passage about the British role in India, Marx
wrote, "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois
civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where
it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked."
While such rhetoric may be predictable, there are constant surprises
throughout Marx's newspaper writing. He could be scathingly ironic, as
in an 1853 essay attacking the antislavery philanthropy sponsored by the
Duchess of Sutherland, whose family, Marx pointed out, systematically
forced thousands of Scots from their ancestral homes in the early 1800s.
He could render a tale of starvation as persuasively and movingly as any
tabloid journalist. And despite the intellectual groundwork that Marx's
theories provided for what would later be called state socialism, Marx
could be witheringly skeptical of the absurd extension of state power,
as in an 1858 essay titled "Project for the Regulation of the Price of
Bread in France."
Marx's Tribune columns were as sweeping, provocative and challenging as
the rest of his writing. While Marx is remembered as a philosopher,
economist and political theorist, it is long past time to try to
understand him as a journalist.
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2) Kurds Protest Turkish Vote on Iraq
By SEBNEM ARSU and SABRINA TAVERNISE
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/world/19turkey.html?ref=world
ISTANBUL, Oct. 18 — Thousands of Kurds in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil marched today to call for peaceful dialogue with Turkey and to protest its Parliament’s approval a day earlier of a measure authorizing troops to cross into northern Iraq to confront Kurdish rebels.
The marchers insisted on resistance to any military incursion from Turkey, Reuters reported.
At the same time, the Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, said Iraq wanted the Kurdish rebels to leave northern Iraq as soon as possible, according to Reuters.
The Wednesday vote sent an angry message to the Baghdad government and its Washington sponsor. But Turkey, a member of NATO, made it clear that it would not immediately carry out the resolution, and today Mr. Zebari said he did not expect military action anytime soon, according to Reuters.
A senior Turkish government official, Egemen Bagis, said that Turkey hoped for “full cooperation” from both Iraq and the United States in its efforts against Turkish rebels.
In a written statement, he said: “If Baghdad is unable to lead anti-terror efforts, then for operational reasons, the responsibility of eradicating these armed elements lies on the northern Iraqi leadership. The U.S. as the dominant political and military power in Iraq can coordinate all these efforts. Once these terror elements are removed, Turkish-Iraqi cooperation will prosper to new heights, and Turkish-U.S. alliance will gain a new momentum.”
The 507-to-19 vote on Wednesday was the culmination of months of frustration here with the United States, which has criticized Kurdish rebels who attack Turkey from Iraq but has failed to get its Kurdish allies in Iraq to act against them. President Bush on Wednesday reiterated American wishes for a diplomatic solution.
According to the state-run Anatolian News Agency, Mehmet Ali Sahin, the Turkish justice minister, said today in reference to Mr. Bush’s comments: “If events allowed by the motion take place, it will be done in accordance with international law. Those who criticize us in regards with the motion, should explain what they’re looking for in Afghanistan. Turkey applies the same international law that granted the right and authority to those who entered in Afghanistan in connection with some organizations with which they had linked the attacks on twin towers. Therefore, nobody has the right to say anything.”
The vote to authorize sending troops, which Turkish officials say gives them up to a year to take action, was, in essence, a blunt request for the United States to acknowledge Turkey’s status as an important ally in a troubled and complex region.
“We’re at a point that our patience has run out,” said Cemil Cicek, a government spokesman and a member of Turkey’s Special Council Combating Terrorism. With Turkey central to oil transportation in the region, United States crude oil futures soared to an all-time high of $89 a barrel on Wednesday, Reuters reported, though prices later dropped.
The vote came as relations between the countries were strained by a House committee’s passage last week of a bill calling the World War I-era mass killing of Armenians an act of genocide. In a nod to Turkey’s importance as an ally in Iraq, Congressional leaders began to back away on Wednesday from a commitment to hold a vote on that bill.
“We are at a defining moment in Turkish-American relations,” said Morton Abramowitz, the American ambassador to Turkey during the Persian Gulf war of 1991, commenting on the Turkish vote. “This is a very big warning sign to the Americans and to the Iraqi Kurds.”
Security experts here and in the United States agreed that Turkey was unlikely to cross the United States with a full-scale military operation. Still, the government is closer than it has been in years to military action of some sort, embarrassed into acting by a public angry over mounting deaths and what is seen as American inaction.
More than two dozen Turks, some of them civilians, have been killed in cross-border rebel attacks in the past several weeks, and the powerful Turkish military which, unlike the government, has long been pressing for action, is fanning public anger.
Along Turkey’s border with Iraq on Wednesday, Gen. Ilker Basbug, commander of the Turkish land forces, told villagers in Besagac that the killing of 12 Turks in late September by Kurdish rebels was “a crime against humanity,” according to Turkey’s official Anatolian News Agency.
“We share your grief,” he said.
The vote in Turkey drew responses from the leaders of three countries — the United States, Syria and Iraq — and set off a flurry of diplomacy as officials in several countries worked strenuously to avert military action.
“We are making it very clear to Turkey that we don’t think it is in their interests to send troops into Iraq,” Mr. Bush said. “There’s a better way to deal with the issue than having the Turks send massive troops into the country.”
He said Turkish troops were already in Iraq, a reference to the small number of soldiers based at observation posts near the border, which is loosely controlled by Iraqi Kurdish forces but is largely porous. The United States does not have troops stationed there, but it controls the airspace.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, in a 30-minute phone conversation on Wednesday with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said, “Let’s do whatever is necessary together,” the Anatolian News Agency said.
But Turkish officials say that recent diplomatic efforts have failed. Turkey signed a security agreement with Iraq in September, but since then, killings by Kurdish rebels, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as the P.K.K., have only risen.
“The government has been bringing the P.K.K. issue in at every high-level meeting with the U.S., but we have achieved nothing in the last five years,” said Egeman Bagis, a lawmaker and Erdogan adviser. “The Armenian resolution has come as the last straw of the disappointment.”
He and others argue that Turkey supports the United States in fighting its war on militancy in Iraq — 70 percent of American air cargo for Iraq travels through Turkey — but that the Americans have not reciprocated, even though they formally occupy the area in question.
Once considered a dutiful follower of United States policies, Turkey no longer shies away from talks with world leaders the United States opposes. Turkey signed a preliminary agreement on buying natural gas from Iran, a deal harshly criticized by the Bush administration last month.
The response to Wednesday’s vote underscored that new independence, with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, an antagonist of the United States with his own Kurdish minority, weighing in on the issue after official meetings in Ankara, the Turkish capital.
“We certainly support and back the decisions by the Turkish government in combat against terror and terror activities,” Mr. Assad said.
He also took a swipe at the Bush administration: “It is important to note that the powers that have invaded Iraq are those primarily responsible for the terror activities and attacks because they control the country.”
The vote places Mr. Erdogan in a delicate position. He was skeptical of the Turkish military’s desire for offensive action last spring, but he is now advocating it himself in what Turkish political analysts characterized as a last-ditch effort to press the United States and its closest allies in Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds, to act.
As the policy grinds forward, Mr. Erdogan may find himself making decisions that go against Turkey’s own interests in the region. Mr. Abramowitz cited Incirlik, the American air base in southern Turkey, as an example. Taking away American access to the base, one potential consequence of Turkish anger over American policy, would undermine Turkey’s interest in keeping Iraq intact, he said.
Turkey has not carried out a raid into Iraq since the American invasion in 2003, and it is uncertain what type of operation Turkey would choose. It made several large-scale raids in the 1990s, under a deal with Saddam Hussein, most recently in 1997 with more than 40,000 troops, but security experts said a small commando strike was more likely.
But what happens next depends more on the United States and its Iraqi Kurdish allies, Mr. Abramowitz said. Mr. Erdogan will try to leverage the new permission to press them into action.
The consequences of a large-scale raid would be severe. Turkey is seeking acceptance into the European Union, a bid that would probably be seriously harmed if it invaded. The northern Kurdish region in Iraq is a bright spot for the United States in its enterprise there, with a booming economy, bustling with Turkish companies, and a functioning political system.
Mr. Bagis said there would be no offensive if action was taken against Kurdish rebels in the northern region and if Congress dropped the Armenian genocide bill.
Sebnem Arsu reported from Istanbul, and Sabrina Tavernise from Amman, Jordan.
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3) Stalled Health Tests Leave Storm Trailers in Limbo
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/us/18fema.html?ref=us
Three months after the Federal Emergency Management Agency halted the sale of travel trailers to survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over possible risks from formaldehyde and promised a health study, none of the 56,000 occupied units have been tested.
“It is inexcusable that 19 months after the first questions were raised, testing of occupied trailers has yet to begin,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
At a Congressional hearing on the trailers in July, R. David Paulison, FEMA’s administrator, said the agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “are scheduled to begin Phase 1 of the study in the Gulf Coast next week.”
But the first teams did not reach New Orleans and Mississippi until the end of September, and then began only a baseline assessment of unoccupied trailers, laying the groundwork for the full-scale study, said a C.D.C. spokeswoman in Atlanta, Bernadette Burden.
One result of the delay in the testing is that the agency has postponed a plan to charge rent on the trailers beginning in March. The rent was intended to encourage people displaced by the hurricanes to move into nonsubsidized housing.
Before sales were halted over the safety questions, 10,839 of the trailers were auctioned off by the General Services Administration and 819 more were sold directly to occupants by the emergency agency from July 2006 to July 2007, raising potential liability issues.
“It’s different now,” an agency spokeswoman, Mary Margaret Walker, said. “The idea of asking people to pay rent for units with health concerns doesn’t seem to make sense.” She said the change had not been announced.
This week, the agency announced a program of relocation subsidies, up to $4,000 a household, to encourage storm victims to return home to the Gulf states or seek permanent housing elsewhere.
But problems with the trailers have dealt further setbacks to self-sufficiency efforts: 4,110 people living in FEMA trailers have asked to be relocated because of health concerns, the agency said. Among these, 771 have been moved to alternative housing, 546 have been given rent subsidies to live elsewhere and 83 have been moved back into hotels and motels at government expense.
The mixed signals have confounded storm victims like Tom and Linda Pieri of Livingston, Tex., who have spent the last 21 months with their two dogs and, on occasion, their grown son, in a 12-by-32 foot Mallard trailer that the agency provided after their East Texas house was wrecked by Hurricane Rita in 2005.
Disabled and living on Social Security, the Pieris said they had made “a handshake deal” to buy their trailer for $300 in August, only to have FEMA withdraw the offer, leaving them facing ruinous rent charges — or so they feared.
The program that the emergency agency now says it has withdrawn would have charged the Pieris $50 a month in March, $100 in April and $50 more each month until the rent hit a ceiling of $600 a month. The charges would have varied according to the occupants’ means. But Mr. Pieri, 60, a former prison laundry manager injured in a work accident in 2001, said the rent would have been prohibitive on the couple’s combined Social Security payments of $1,700 a month.
“I just want to keep a roof over my head, and my wife’s head,” he said.
At the height of relief efforts after the 2005 storms, the emergency agency was providing 134,502 trailers of various sizes up to mobile homes.
The number of trailers still deployed was 55,785, Ms. Walker said. The agency paid about $10,000 each for the trailers, from eight manufacturers, she said.
Kathy Munson, a spokeswoman for one of the suppliers, Fleetwood Enterprises in Riverside, Calif., said dealers commonly aired out the trailers before selling them, which dissipated the formaldehyde. “FEMA ordered so many, they were at staging areas all sealed up and not aired out, and that causes fumes to get worse,” Ms. Munson said.
Charles Green, a C.D.C. spokesman, said that testing was expected to start at the end of this month or early November in at least 300 occupied trailers in Mississippi and 300 in Louisiana. Teams will spend about an hour in each trailer using a portable pump to take air samples. The occupants would also be asked questions about pets, smoking habits and the use of pesticides.
The Environmental Protection Agency lists formaldehyde as a colorless, pungent gas released by building materials and household items, including paint, draperies and pressed wood products. It can cause burning of the eyes, nausea and asthma attacks. It has been shown to cause cancer in animals and, the environmental agency said, “may cause cancer in humans.”
Formaldehyde has become a special concern in trailers, especially when they are new and unventilated, Mr. Paulison told the House oversight committee. The Department of Housing and Urban Development sets formaldehyde limits in manufactured housing, but not trailers.
The Pieris said formaldehyde was not of great concern. Both chain-smoke cigarettes despite asthma and pulmonary problems and, in Mrs. Pieri’s case, breast cancer and a mastectomy several years ago. “I know, we’re dumb,” Mr. Pieri said, adding that he had tried every possible anti-tobacco treatment.
In any case, he said, they were committed to keeping their trailer. Their house, which they bought for $27,000 in 2000 with $1,000 down and a mortgage of $301 a month, needed $32,000 in repairs, Mr. Pieri said, and the $5,300 FEMA had provided was barely enough to fix the roof.
FEMA offered them $411 a month to find housing elsewhere but the cheapest apartment in the area was $600, he said.
“Even if I can find another place,” he said, looking at his damaged house spilling moldy furniture and clothes, “everything we own is right there.”
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4) Birth Control Allowed at Maine Middle School
By JOEL ELLIOTT
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/us/18portland.html?ref=us
PORTLAND, Me., Oct. 17 — The Portland school board on Wednesday approved a measure allowing middle-school students to gain access to prescription birth control medications without notifying parents.
The proposal, from the Portland Division of Public Health, calls for the independently operated health care center at King Middle School to provide a variety of services to students, including immunizations and physical checkups in addition to birth-control medications and counseling for sexually transmitted diseases, said Lisa Belanger, an administrator for Portland’s student health centers.
All but two members of the 12-person committee voted to approve the plan.
The school principal, Mike McCarthy, said about 5 of the school’s 500 students had identified themselves as being sexually active.
Health care professionals at the clinic advised the committee that the proposal was necessary in order for the clinic to serve students who were engaging in risky behavior.
The conference room at the Wednesday night meeting was packed with parents, students and television cameras as school board committee members discussed the issue and heard testimony from experts and residents.
“It has been shown, over and over again, that this does not increase sexual activity,” said Pat Patterson, the medical director of School-Based Health Centers.
Reaction was mixed.
“This is really a violation of parents’ rights,” Peter Doyle, a Portland resident, told the committee. “If there were a constitutional challenge, you guys would be at risk of a lawsuit.”
Others argued for approval.
“Not every child is getting the guidance needed to keep them safe,” said Richard Veilleux, who said his child attends King Middle School. “This is about giving kids who are sexually active the tools that they need.”
According to the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care, about 30 percent of the 1,700 school-based health centers in the United States provide birth control to students, Dr. Patterson said.
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5) Virginia County Votes to Deny Services to Illegal Immigrants
By IAN URBINA and MARIA NEWMAN
October 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/17prison-cnd.html?ref=us
A Virginia state panel yesterday rejected a controversial proposal to create the country’s first state-run facility where illegal immigrants arrested for certain crimes could be held while awaiting trial or until federal officials deport them.
In Prince William County, supervisors unanimously voted early this morning — after a 12-hour, emotionally charged debate — to move forward with a plan to deny certain county services to illegal immigrants and to direct the police to enforce immigration laws.
The two moves are part of a wave of actions taken by local and state authorities here that has made Virginia a testing ground for some of the strictest policies in the nation to curb illegal immigration.
“Residents of our state are really frustrated when an illegal alien commits a crime and that person is let go after serving time, and we’re trying to correct that problem,” said State Senator Ken Stolle, Republican of Virginia Beach, who is chairman of the panel that acted on yesterday, the Illegal Immigration Task Force of the State Crime Commission. “These measures are not targeting all immigrants, just those who commit crimes.”
The state panel, while rejecting the proposal to create the separate facility to hold illegal immigrants, instead recommended that the state provide additional money so local officials could build more jail space to house immigrants awaiting deportation. It also called on local jail officials to check the immigration status of all inmates and deny bail to most illegal immigrants who committed crimes.
The proposals in Virginia are further indications of how state and local officials are getting ahead of the federal government on the immigration issue and sometimes pushing measures that federal officials are unwilling or unable to support for legal, logistical or financial reasons.
In addition to those two actions, state lawmakers this year submitted a proposal for a $10,000 fine for employers who hired illegal immigrants and to revoke the business licenses of anyone in the state convicted of hiring illegal immigrants. In 2003, the state was the first to pass a measure making it a crime to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses.
But they have not gone uncontested by immigrant rights groups and legal rights organizations who say that the measures will not pass legal challenges.
Tim Freilich, the legal director of the Virginia Justice Center, a nonprofit legal services organization, said the Prince William measure approved today “is an unfortunate bit of political grandstanding leading up the election on Nov. 6.”
“It sends a terribly divisive message to all residents,” he said. “It’s an embarrassment for Virginia. More than 10 percent of Virginians were born outside of the United States.”
The Prince William measure attracted about 1,200 people last night, the largest crowd anyone had ever seen there, as lawmakers considered how to curb services for illegal immigrants. News reports said the crowd was almost evenly split between supporters and opponents of the measure, a sign of how it has hit a nerve in communities that are facing a growing immigrant population. It was also a sign of how emboldened immigrants and their advocates have become in the year or so since Congressional proposals to deal with the immigration issue have drawn huge national rallies.
Some of the speakers included immigrants and their children, who argued that the measure would amount to little more than racial profiling that would target anyone who looked Hispanic, according to news reports.
The final resolution, which was passed with a unanimous vote at about 2:30 a.m., was slightly watered down from the original version, which was proposed by Supervisor John T. Stirrup.
“Illegal immigration is causing economic hardship and lawlessness in this county,” Mr. Stirrup wrote in his original resolution.
The final measure would improve cooperation with the federal immigration authorities and direct the police to check the immigration status of anyone accused of breaking the law if the officer suspects that person is an illegal immigrant. It would deny certain county services to illegal immigrants, including drug counseling, some elderly services and business licenses.
One of the biggest champions of the measure was the board of supervisor’s chairman, Corey Stewart, who has made immigration his cornerstone issue as he and all the supervisors face reelection next month.
“Prince William County and other localities have had to pick up the slack for what the federal government has failed to do,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview seen on his Web site.
“We are ground zero in this debate on immigration,” he said. “We’ve got a responsibility to do it right.”
The measure is already facing a legal challenge, as have several other similar efforts by other municipalities, by groups saying it violates a constitutional right to equal protection.
How it will be financed is also up in the air, especially as the county is facing a revenue shortfall of $10 million in the next fiscal year. County officials told supervisors the measure would cost $14.2 million to implement. Supervisors early this morning committed $325,000 toward the measure, saying they would find the balance later.
Much of the cost of the proposal would come in training police officers in the fine points of federal immigration laws, and in setting up ways to work more closely with the federal authorities. The county’s police chief, Charlie T. Deane, has already warned officials that they are limited in what they can do.
“We have a community that expects us to do wonders,” Mr. Dean told them at recent meeting. “I’m here to tell you that no matter how much money you give me, we’re not going to be able to solve that problem ourselves.”
In Virginia, local jail officials keep only about 25 percent of the money that federal immigration officials pay per bed for illegal immigrants waiting to be deported, with the rest going to the state. The state panel that voted yesterday called for that amount to be increased to 100 percent and to increase the amount the state provided to counties to build new facilities. This extra revenue would enable local jail officials to add jail beds for illegal immigrants and eliminate the need for a centralized facility.
But immigration advocates say they worry that toughening immigration enforcement would have a chilling effect on crime victims and witnesses who may be in the country illegally, and they questioned whether increasing the amount of money available to county officials would create a financial incentive to round up people who are suspected of being illegal immigrants.
“Even without any new measures, this chilling effect is a problem,” said Jeanne L. Smoot, director of public policy for Tahirih Justice Center, an advocacy group in Falls Church, Va., for battered women, adding that women were more than twice as likely not to report violence against them if they were illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants who are arrested are currently placed in local jails, federal facilities or private prisons, and once they finish their sentences, those convicted of nonviolent offenses are often released because federal immigration officials say they lack the resources to detain them.
Last year, the state police in Virginia notified federal immigration officials of about 12,000 illegal immigrants in their jails. But the federal officials only picked up about 690, according to state officials.
State Delegate David B. Albo, the Fairfax County Republican who is co-chairman of the state immigration task force, said that Virginia had an estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants.
Hope Amezquita, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, testified before the task force that the proposal to deny bail to virtually all illegal immigrants accused of committing crimes might be unconstitutional.
It would create a whole class of people who are exempted from due process, Ms. Amezquita said, adding that the Constitution guaranteed that each criminal defendant, regardless of status, get an individualized review of their case.
Before the panel’s recommendations can be adopted, the Crime Commission, the General Assembly and the governor must act on them.
Critics say the proposals are being driven by politics in a year when all 140 seats of the General Assembly are up for election.
“In Washington, here in the state Capitol, and even here in this building, illegal immigration is a debating exercise,” William Campenni, 67, a retired engineer, said at the task force hearing. “In towns like my Herndon, it is a drive-by shooting, a D.U.I. fatality, a drug turf battle, a serial killing sniper, a deteriorating neighborhood.”
Mr. Campenni added that though he had never been a victim of crime at the hands of an illegal immigrant, his wife was afraid to go to areas of their town that she used to visit regularly.
Mr. Albo said that illegal immigrants who committed violent crimes or felonies usually received sentences of more than a year, which gave federal immigration officials enough time to process their deportation. But illegal immigrants convicted of lesser charges, like drunken driving or domestic violence, are often released on bond and never return for their court date, or serve just days or weeks and are released.
The panel wants to hold most illegal immigrants and release them on bail only if lawyers can prove they are not a flight risk.
Asked why he had abandoned his idea of creating a centralized facility, Mr. Stolle said that countless people had told him the idea sounded too much like “a concentration camp” for immigrants.
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6) New York State Not Doing Enough to Prevent Wrongful Convictions, Report Says
By FERNANDA SANTOS
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/nyregion/18dna.html?ref=us
Although more convicts have been exonerated by DNA evidence in New York than in most other states, New York is one of only a few states across the nation that have not enacted comprehensive legislative reforms to prevent wrongful convictions, according to a report by a high-profile legal clinic scheduled to be released today.
Since 1989, when DNA evidence was first used to free an innocent person, there have been 23 exonerations in New York, the report said, placing it behind just Texas and Illinois, which have had 29 and 27 exonerations, respectively. Nationwide, 208 people have been exonerated through DNA evidence.
The report sheds a harsh light on what it calls the state’s lackluster record of instituting rules intended to prevent wrongful convictions. For example, it says that although false confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in New York, the state does not require law enforcement agencies to record interrogations, a requirement in nine other states.
“Not only has there been political opposition to enacting strong reform in New York State, but regrettably, too many key figures in law enforcement have played the pitiful role of old dogs unwilling to learn new tricks,” said Peter J. Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, a legal clinic based at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, , which prepared the report.
The clinic is the nation’s leader in securing exonerations for the wrongfully convicted.
Currently, law enforcement agencies in only two counties in the state, Broome and Schenectady, videotape at least portions of custodial interrogations — as part of a pilot program run by the New York State Bar Association. Across the country, 500 local law enforcement agencies require full or partial recording of interrogations, the report says.
Twenty-two states have laws requiring the preservation of crime-scene evidence like semen and saliva samples, which are frequently used for DNA analysis. But in New York, there is no such law, and forensic evidence is often lost, destroyed or misplaced, delaying or defeating attempts by those who were wrongfully convicted to prove their innocence, the report said. In addition, six states, including Illinois, have established independent bodies — commonly known as innocence commissions — to review wrongful convictions, identify what caused them and propose procedural and legislative changes to keep such errors from happening again, the report said.
In 10 of New York’s wrongful convictions other criminals were identified, in most cases someone who committed other crimes while innocent people served time in prison in their place, Mr. Neufeld said.
“Clearly, the cost to society for allowing these real perpetrators to remain at liberty is incalculable,” he added.
The State Assembly passed a package of bills this year that included measures requiring interrogations to be videotaped and forensic evidence to be preserved and cataloged in a more orderly way.
The bills would also clarify existing law to make clear that judges have the authority to order comparisons between evidence used against a defendant and evidence stored in DNA and fingerprint databases. Gov. Eliot Spitzer introduced a competing package, which the Senate approved but the Assembly did not, saying the governor’s proposed reforms did not go far enough. Negotiations stalled, and the legislative bodies were unable to reconcile their differences.
Christine Anderson, a spokeswoman for Governor Spitzer, said the governor would not comment on the Innocence Project report until it was officially released.
Craig J. Miller, a spokesman for Republican Senator Dale M. Volker, who represents several counties in western New York and is chairman of the Senate Codes Committee, which plays a significant role in shaping the state’s criminal laws, said the Senate was not “inherently opposed” to reforms suggested by the Assembly, “but the devil is in the details.”
He added, “A lot of these reforms are going to cost a lot of money, so considering that the state is looking at a deficit in the coming fiscal year, we’re going to be looking at difficult choices.
“These are great ideas, but we need to carefully vet them out, flesh them out, see how much they’re going to cost and act appropriately,” Mr. Miller said.
Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol, a Brooklyn Democrat who sponsored the Assembly’s package, said, “You cannot put a value” on correcting verdicts “that led to an innocent person losing a chunk of time of his life and languishing in prison.”
Mr. Lentol added, “In modern society, we should be interested that only the guilty pay for crimes.”
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7) None Dare Call It Child Care
"Right now, the only parents who routinely get serious child-care assistance from the government are extremely poor mothers in welfare-to-work programs. Even for them, the waiting lists tend to be ridiculously long. In many states, once the woman actually gets a job, she loses the day care. Middle-class families get zip, even though a decent private child care program costs $12,000 a year in some parts of the country."
By GAIL COLLINS
Op-Ed Columnist
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/opinion/18collins.html?hp
In the last presidential candidate debate, Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked whether this country would ever get back to the days when a young guy could come out of high school, get an industrial job “and provide for a family with a middle-class income and his spouse wouldn’t have to work.”
Given the fact that more than two-thirds of American mothers have been working outside the home since the 1980s, Matthews could just as easily have demanded to know when we’ll get back to using manual typewriters and rotary phones.
Still, it might have been a great conversation-starter. While it’s becoming virtually impossible to support a middle-class American family on one parent’s salary, we never hear political discussion about the repercussions. In a two-hour debate that focused on job-related issues, the Republican presidential candidates managed to mention the Smoot-Hawley tariff and trade relations with Peru but not a word about child care for America’s working parents. John McCain, who was on the receiving end of Matthews’s question, chose instead to focus on the fact that “50,000 Americans now make their living off eBay,” that the tax code is “eminently unfair” and that Congress wastes too much money studying of the DNA of Montana bears.
We live in a country where quality child care is controversial. It was one of the very first issues to be swift-boated by social conservatives. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive child care bill that was vetoed by Richard Nixon. The next time the bill came up, members were flooded with mail accusing them of being anti-family communists who wanted to let kids sue their parents if they were forced to go to church. It scared the heck out of everybody.
Right now, the only parents who routinely get serious child-care assistance from the government are extremely poor mothers in welfare-to-work programs. Even for them, the waiting lists tend to be ridiculously long. In many states, once the woman actually gets a job, she loses the day care. Middle-class families get zip, even though a decent private child care program costs $12,000 a year in some parts of the country.
The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, or Naccrra, (this is an area replete with extraordinary people organized into groups with impossible names) says that in some states the average annual price of care was larger than the entire median income of a single parent with two children. For child care workers, the average wage is $8.78 an hour. It’s one of the worst-paying career tracks in the country. A preschool teacher with a postgraduate degree and years of experience can make $30,000 a year. You need certification in this country to be a butcher, a barber or a manicurist, but only 12 states require any training to take care of children. Only three require comprehensive background checks. In Iowa, there are 591 child care programs to every one inspector. California inspects child care centers once every five years.
“You have a work force that makes $8.78 an hour. They have no training. They have not been background checked, and we’ve put them in with children who don’t have the verbal skills to even tell somebody that they’re being treated badly,” said Linda Smith, the executive director of Naccrra. “What is wrong with a country that thinks that’s O.K.?”
We aren’t going to solve the problem during this presidential contest, but it is absolutely nuts that it isn’t a topic of discussion — or even election-year pandering. The Democratic candidates for president happily come together to tell organized labor about their unquenchable desire to have a union member as secretary of labor. The Republican candidates flock to assure the National Rifle Association about their dedication to Americans’ constitutional right to carry concealed weapons in churches. But you do not see anybody racing off to romance child care advocates.
The only candidate who talks about child care all the time is Chris Dodd of Connecticut. He has been the issue’s champion of the Senate forever. People who work in the field know he’s their guy, but it’s hard to see what good it does him out on the campaign trail. “They aren’t inclined to be the kind of people who engage in the political process,” he admitted. “They don’t have the money.”
This is Hillary Clinton’s Women’s Week. On Tuesday, she gave a major speech on working mothers in New Hampshire, with stories about her struggles when Chelsea was a baby, a grab-bag of Clintonian mini-ideas (encourage telecommuting, give awards to family-friendly businesses) and a middle-sized proposal to expand family leave. Yesterday, she was in the company of some adorable 2- and 3-year-olds, speaking out for a bill on child care workers that has little chance of passage and would make almost no difference even if it did. Clinton most certainly gets it, but she wasn’t prepared to get any closer to the problems of working parents than a plan to help them stay home from work.
At least she mentioned the subject.
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8) Security Contractors Shoot at Taxi, Wounding 3 Iraqis
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/world/middleeast/19iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD, Oct. 18 — A man lost his eye and two other people were wounded when private security contractors fired into a crowded taxi as it approached their convoy of sport utility vehicles in northern Iraq on Thursday.
The incident came less than two weeks after a shooting by another company killed two women in a taxicab here, and just over a month after guards with the private American security company Blackwater USA killed 17 people in a Baghdad square.
The shootings on Thursday took place when security guards working for the British company Erinys International were escorting employees of the United States Army Corps of Engineers on a highway east of Kirkuk. The guards said that a car approached “at a high rate of speed,” according to a statement issued by the Corps of Engineers. When efforts to warn it off failed, the contractors fired into the vehicle, the statement said.
One of the occupants of the car, who was interviewed from a hospital bed in Kirkuk, said that after they fired, the security contractors pointed their guns at the car to discourage those inside from climbing out. The guards then drove away without offering medical help, said the man, Zairak Nori Qadir, whose right eye was hit by a bullet.
“They fired on us, and we never threatened them,” Mr. Qadir said. “They shot us and didn’t let us release ourselves from the car until they escaped and left us covered in blood.”
“Those are savages and criminals and killers,” he said.
A man who answered the phone at Erinys’s Middle East headquarters in Dubai referred questions to the Corps of Engineers. In its statement, the Army Corps said it would appoint an officer to investigate the shooting. “No further details are available at this time,” the statement said.
The incident carried the potential to inflame Iraqi opinion about the operations of private security contractors who travel Iraq’s roads in heavily armed convoys but are immune from Iraqi law.
Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has demanded that Blackwater leave the country in the wake of the September shooting in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The dispute threatens to undermine United States reconstruction efforts here as civilian employees of the American government travel with private security rather than military protection.
Also on Thursday, thousands of Kurds marched in cities in northern Iraq to protest a decision by Turkey’s Parliament to authorize military incursions against Kurdish separatist rebel bases in Iraq, a threat that could introduce a new military dimension to the Iraq war in the country’s north.
About 12,000 people marched in the cities of Erbil and Dahok, calling on the semiautonomous government in the Kurdish region to resist any Turkish military attacks. Marchers also expressed solidarity with the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and many European countries.
“We defend Kurdistan with our souls, and I won’t allow the Turkish troops to stain our beloved land,” said Jara Rikani, a high school student at the march in Dahok.
The popular support among Kurds for the Workers’ Party makes this multisided standoff in northern Iraq even more fraught. If Turkey attacked, the situation would pose a quandary for the United States.
The United States formally opposes the rebel group, but taking action against it would alienate the Kurds, who are America’s natural allies in Iraq. Yet Turkey is an American ally in NATO, and much of the air cargo for the American war effort in Iraq passes through Turkey. The dominant ground forces in the Iraqi Kurdish region are an irregular militia, the pesh merga; the United States controls the airspace.
The stated position of the regional government is that the rebel group should not use Kurdish territory as a staging area for attacks into Turkey, but the government has said the rebel bases are in areas beyond its control.
According to the Turkish military, between 2,800 and 3,100 rebels from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party operate from bases along the mountainous border.
In Baghdad on Thursday, a dispute intensified over which branch of government had the authority to sign death warrants as three top officials from the government of Saddam Hussein await hanging.
They include Ali Hassan al-Majid, who is known as Chemical Ali for ordering poison gas attacks on the Kurds in the 1980s. A United States Embassy spokesman said that Mr. Majid, who is in American military custody, would not be handed over to the Iraqi government for execution until the matter is settled between the offices of the president and the prime minister.
Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Kirkuk, Basra and Dahok.
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9) New Coast Guard Task in Arctic’s Warming Seas
By MATTHEW L. WALD and ANDREW C. REVKIN
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19arctic.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — For most of human history, the Arctic Ocean has been an ice-locked frontier. But now, in one of the most concrete signs of the effect of a warming climate on government operations, the Coast Guard is planning its first operating base there as a way of dealing with the cruise ships and the tankers that are already beginning to ply Arctic waters.
With increasingly long seasons of open water in the region, the Coast Guard has also begun discussions with the Russians about controlling anticipated ship traffic through the Bering Strait, which until now has been crossed mainly by ice-breaking research vessels and native seal and walrus hunters.
The Coast Guard says its base, which would probably be near the United States’ northernmost town, Barrow, Alaska, on the North Slope coast, would be seasonal and would initially have just a helicopter equipped for cold-weather operations and several small boats.
But given continued warming, that small base, which could be in place by next spring, would be expanded later to help speed responses to oil spills from tankers that the Coast Guard believes could eventually carry shipments from Scandinavia to Asia through the Bering Strait. Such a long-hoped-for polar route would cut 5,000 miles or more from a journey that would otherwise entail passage through the Panama Canal or the Suez.
The Coast Guard is also concerned about being able to respond to emergencies involving cruise ships, which are already starting to operate in summers in parts of the Arctic Ocean.
And in yet a further kind of new activity abetted by warming seas, Royal Dutch Shell is preparing for exploratory oil drilling off Alaska’s Arctic coast beginning next year.
“I’m not sure I’m qualified to talk about the scientific issues related to global warming,” the Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad W. Allen, said in an interview. “All we know is we have an operating environment we’re responsible for, and it’s changing.”
The commander of the Coast Guard’s Alaska district, Rear Adm. Arthur E. Brooks, said in a telephone interview that the expansion of open water as summer sea ice pulls back means that “almost everything the U.S. does will be doable in the Arctic, we think.”
A new survey by American oceanographers of the seafloor north of Alaska, completed last month aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, provides fresh evidence that the United States has much at stake in the region. The sonar studies found hints that thousands of square miles of additional seafloor could potentially be under American control. That floor might yield important deposits of oil, gas or minerals in coming decades, government studies have concluded.
So far did the sea ice pull back this summer that the expedition was able to scan the bottom several hundred miles farther north than in previous surveys, said the project’s director, Larry Mayer, an oceanographer at the University of New Hampshire. The team found long sloping extensions 200 miles beyond previous estimates.
Though more surveys will be needed to firm up any American claim, countries have a right to expand their control of seabed resources well beyond the continental shelves bordering their coasts if they can find such sloping extensions. That right is guaranteed by the United Nations Law of the Sea treaty, which, after years of fights in Congress, the United States appears poised to ratify. The treaty has the support of President Bush, but ratification requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate.
Senior State Department officials say the United States has to become more involved in the region, and are urging other countries to cooperate to encourage international trade through the Far North.
“Having a safe, secure and reliable Arctic shipping regime is vital to the proper development of Arctic resources, especially now given the extent of Arctic ice retreat we witnessed this past summer,” Assistant Secretary of State Daniel S. Sullivan said Monday at an international conference in Anchorage. “We can have such a regime only through cooperation, not competition, among Arctic nations. Denial of passage through international waterways, even though they may be territorial waters, and burdensome transit requirements will not benefit any nation in the long run.”
The change in Arctic sea and ice conditions has indeed been remarkable, as one stark example demonstrates. The Coast Guard recently produced a video commemorating the transit of the Northwest Passage in the summer of 1957 by three cutters that became icebound, forcing the crews to dynamite the ice to free themselves. Now open water is the norm in summers along many Arctic coasts.
The resulting increase in Arctic activity will mean a greater need for search and rescue capabilities and for environmental protection, Coast Guard officials say. In fact, Admiral Allen says ship traffic could turn the Bering Strait into a choke point like the Strait of Gibraltar.
Environmentalists view the Coast Guard’s interest with dismay about what it suggests for the future of a fragile environment, but also with some relief.
“We should be taking a hard look as a nation at what do we need to do to adequately protect the environment, faced with that kind of massive change in risk,” said Pamela A. Miller, the Arctic coordinator at the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, in Fairbanks.
Mead Treadwell, an Anchorage businessman who is chairman of the Arctic Research Commission, created by Congress to advise the government on scientific and other issues in the region, said the Coast Guard’s new plans were only fair.
“It is high time that our coastline in the north enjoyed the same protections other states’ coastal residents have from the Coast Guard,” he said. “The Arctic may be warming, but there’s no indication that conditions at sea are getting any safer.”
Matthew L. Wald reported from Washington, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.
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10) Schools in Several States Report Staph Infections, and Deaths Raise the Alarm
By IAN URBINA
October 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/us/19staph.html?ref=us
SANDY SPRING, Md., Oct. 18 — When the football players here at Sherwood High School were not getting the message about washing their uniforms and using only their own jerseys, the school nurse paid a surprise visit to the locker room. She brought along a baseball bat.
“Don’t make me use this,” the nurse, Jenny Jones, said, pointing out that seven players on the team had already contracted a deadly drug-resistant strain of bacteria this year. “Start washing your hands,” she said. “I mean it.”
School officials around the country have been scrambling this week to scrub locker rooms, reassure parents and impress upon students the importance of good hygiene. The heightened alarm comes in response to a federal report indicating that the bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, are responsible for more deaths in the United States each year than AIDS.
MRSA (pronounced MEER-suh) is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to penicillin or related antibiotics, though it can be treated with other drugs. The infection can be spread by sharing items, like a towel or a piece of sports equipment that has been used by an infected person, or through skin-to-skin contact with an open wound.
On Wednesday and Thursday, scores of schools were closed and events were canceled in Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia as cleaning crews disinfected buses, lockers and classrooms. More closings are planned on Friday.
School officials in Mississippi, New Hampshire and Virginia reported student deaths within the past two weeks from the bacteria, while officials in at least four other states reported cases of students being infected.
The federal report, written by doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that nearly 19,000 people had died in the United States in 2005 after an invasive MRSA infection. The study also suggested that such infections might be twice as common as previously thought.
This week, health officials began reporting a growing number of cases in schools, gyms and day care centers, and not just in nursing homes and hospitals, as has often been the case in the past.
Nicole Coffin, a spokeswoman at the centers, said that while the results of the study are striking, it is important to realize that about 85 percent of the infections reported from the bacteria were in health care settings.
“MRSA in the community is typically a mild skin infection that rarely becomes life-threatening,” she said, adding that even when it does become more severe, the death rates for this type of infection are low.
Here in Sandy Spring, students seem to be getting the message that they need to take extra care.
“I think they’re taking it seriously now,” William Gregory, the principal at Sherwood High School, said of members of the football team. “She is pretty emphatic,” he said, pointing to Ms. Jones. “But the students are also seeing the reports of deaths, and that has reminded them.”
He added that as he visits locker rooms now, the tell-tale stench is gone from athletes’ uniforms, and students are calling him and the nurse diligently when cuts do not seem to be healing.
Elsewhere in the state, more than two dozen staph infections have been reported by four Anne Arundel County high schools over the past three weeks. County officials sent letters to parents explaining that crews have been scrubbing schools with hospital-grade disinfectant.
Ashton Bonds was one of the rare cases of a death from MRSA contracted outside a health care facility. Mr. Bonds, a 17-year-old football player from Staunton River High School in Moneta, Va., died Monday from the bacteria.
“He put up a fight,” said Veronica Bonds, Ashton’s mother. “He was strong. I just think he was just tired, too.”
In response to the death, students throughout the county protested what they called unsanitary conditions in their school buildings.
Although school officials have observed that the bacteria mostly affect student athletes, cases have been reported in children of elementary school age as well.
“I worry about her getting sick anyway, but I don’t want her to catch something that will make her very, very ill,” said Kelli Stammen about her 2-year-old daughter, who attends city-sponsored recreation and library classes in Grove City, Ohio, where a 17-year-old high school student was put in intensive care unit in September with a staph infection.
The C.D.C. study found that 27 percent of all invasive MRSA infections originated in hospitals, while 58 percent began outside of a hospital but in patients with some recent exposure to the health care system.
The remaining 15 percent of invasive MRSA cases originated in the community without any apparent health care risk factor.
Bob Driehaus contributed reporting from Cincinnati.
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11) Texas toxic town lures industry while residents wheeze
Saturday, October 20, 2007 7:15 PM CDT
By Monica Rhor
Associated Press
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2007/10/20/news/doc4717e42f62035601237837.txt
PORT ARTHUR, Texas -- There is a quiet battle for the future of this industrial town, one of America’s most polluted places.
On one side is ex-mayor Oscar Ortiz, who in the waning days of his administration worried about one thing.
But it wasn’t the toxic chemicals that spew from petrochemical plants, the town’s richest landowners, through the windows of its poorest residents.
What rattled white-maned, barrel-chested Ortiz, who ran Port Arthur for nine years, was that someday the petrochemical plants would go away.
“The only money here in the city of Port Arthur that amounts to anything comes from industry, from petrochemical companies,” said Ortiz, leaning back in his chair in an office decorated with framed photographs of refineries. “If industry goes away, people might as well go away too because there’ll be no money. That’s the continued salvation of this city.”
Hilton Kelley, like Ortiz born and raised in Port Arthur, is the opposition.
Kelley does worry about the toxic chemicals, the foul-smelling air and the west side residents who suffer from asthma, respiratory ailments, skin irritations and cancer. As the city’s most visible environmental activist, Kelley has long campaigned for more restrictions on industrial construction and stricter monitoring of plant emissions.
“I grew up smelling the SO2 (sulfur dioxide) smell, the chemicals. I remember seeing little kids with sores on their legs, with mucus running in August. It’s ridiculous what we’ve had to deal with,” says Kelley, a former actor with the sonorous voice of a radio announcer. “We’re not trying to shut doors of industry. We’re just trying to push these guys to do what’s right.”
Ortiz calls Kelley an alarmist who likes to “stir things up” in the minority community Kelley accuses Ortiz of sacrificing the community’s welfare in exchange for slim tax revenue from the plants.
One man represents Port Arthur the way it has always been; the other symbolizes a growing call for change.
But change, especially in a place like Port Arthur, never comes easily.
“This city is not going to change. It is a refinery town — tomorrow, next year, 100 years from now. It will always be a petro-chemical area,” says Ortiz.
And if its residents are getting sick from the pollution?
Well, says Ortiz: “We’ve all got to die of something.”
Port Arthur, located next to the Louisiana line, sits in a corridor routinely ranked as one of the country’s most polluted regions. Texas and Louisiana are home to five oil refineries considered among the nation’s 10 worst offenders in releasing toxic air pollutants, emitting 8.5 million pounds of toxins together in 2002.
Yet even here, Port Arthur stands out.
Its skyline is framed by the smokestacks and knotted steel pipes of the refineries and chemical plants clustered along the edges of the town. Flares from the plants glow red against the night sky, as incinerated chemicals filter into the air.
The smell of rotten eggs and sulphur hangs stubbornly over the apartments and shotgun houses on the west side. Port Arthur, population 57,000, is on the EPA’s list of cities with dangerous ozone levels, and the state has flagged its excessive levels of benzene.
Many cities along the Texas Gulf Coast are dotted with refineries. But the companies’ high tax bills are used to improve schools, create green space and bulk up city coffers. Port Arthur waives most property taxes to lure industry.
Eric Shaeffer, a former EPA official who runs the Environmental Integrity Project in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit advocacy group, has written two studies on pollution in Port Arthur. “It’s one of the worst I’ve seen,” he said.
The Veolia Environmental Services plant in Port Arthur recently started incinerating nearly 2 million gallons of VX hydrolysate, the wastewater byproduct of a deadly nerve gas agent.
Besides the pollution the state and EPA allow as part of the cost of doing business, the plants spew more toxins during “upset events” — unpermitted releases caused by lightning strikes, human error, startups and shutdowns.
Plant officials cite statistics showing steady progress in reducing some emissions, but Shaeffer cites a continuing hazard.
“When you get releases, it really hits people right in the chest,” said Shaeffer. “It’s one thing to be driving past the plants on the highway. It’s another thing for kids to be out on the swing sets when there’s a release.”
Jordan, 5, and Justin, 7, play on the swings at Carver Terrace, the public housing project they live in next door to refineries run by Motiva and Valero that produce half a million barrels of oil a day and belch thousands of pounds of pollutants into the air.
Jordan’s lungs are so weakened from a lifelong battle with asthma and bronchitis that he can’t shout or call for help like other children, says their mother, LaShauna Green.
He must inhale medicine every four hours through a plastic mask that swamps his chubby face. Every two hours, he must take one of seven prescription drugs that keep his air passages from tightening.
Justin struggles to breathe after climbing just one flight of stairs.
Those troubles vanished when the Green family left the area for a year following 2005’s Hurricane Rita. But two days after their return to Carver Terrace, Justin was rushed to a hospital twice in one day with respiratory attacks.
“When you start getting this kind of toxic chemical soup, we don’t really know what the combination of all these things are doing,” said Debra Morris, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who studied Port Arthur-area pollution.
Texas oil was first discovered near Port Arthur. For decades, the region nurtured industrial build-up with generous tax abatements. In return, the companies would promise to pay later and to create local jobs.
Ortiz defends the incentives as the only way to keep his city alive.
“The one main substance that keeps the city floating is the refineries,” he said.
Refineries and chemical plants contribute about 67 percent of the city’s budget through some taxes, Ortiz said. Still, without the abatements the city would have collected tens of millions of dollars more.
The city of Port Arthur has at least 28 tax-abatement deals with refineries and chemical plants. Surrounding Jefferson County has at least six, including with Motiva, Total, and Valero, which will pay no property taxes for the first two years of a nine-year contract, and then pay 10 percent of the taxes it would owe for the next seven.
Motiva will pay no taxes on a $3.5 billion expansion project for the next three years. Total taxes rise to $4.16 million by 2012.
Jeff Branick, assistant to Jefferson County executive Ron Walker, says the Motiva expansion is expected to create thousands of temporary construction jobs and 300 permanent jobs; Valero’s project is expected to create 40 to 65 jobs, he said.
“It’s going to be pumping a whole lot of money into the local economy,” Branick said. “It creates hotel-motel tax revenue and will be attracting people from the outside who will be coming here to work and renting houses.”
Ortiz also points to a new development on Pleasure Island, a resort with golf courses, new hotels and bustling shopping centers springing up on the city’s south side. All, says Ortiz, spurred by the growth of the industrial complexes.
However, that prosperity bypassed Port Arthur’s predominantly black west side and central city neighborhoods where singer Janis Joplin and sports legend Babe Zaharias were raised.
“This town is like a forgotten grandmother. It helped nourish the growth of the area, now all the wealth is moving (out),” said Kelley. “It’s not fair to leave this entire community unnourished.”
Despite the development, Port Arthur is not as prosperous as other refinery towns. Its median household income is two-thirds the Texas average; its homes are valued at less than half the state average. Port Arthur public high school students pass the test required for graduation at about half the state rate.
By comparison, the Houston suburb of Deer Park — home to its own refinery row — collects more taxes from its petrochemical complex. Before the state equalized school funding, its school district was nearly the richest in the state. The median home price is 25 percent higher than the state average and its median household income is 30 percent above the state average.
Both cities have roughly the same percentage of residents in chemical or construction fields.
Kelley is not the only one raising questions about how things are done in Port Arthur.
Some city officials have also started to question the benefits of the tax abatement deals.
In most, companies promise to “give Port Arthur residents a fair opportunity to apply for employment” but don’t require jobs go to city residents. One company’s pledge to use local labor and contractors defined “local” as covering a nine-county region.
Councilman Michael Sinegal says he frequently hears from residents who say they have been rejected for jobs at the plants. Overall unemployment here is about 6 percent, while among blacks it’s 14 percent, he said; the state rate is 4 percent.
“The bottom line is that the people of Port Arthur are getting the negative byproduct from the plants, but should be getting an abundance of positive byproduct,” Sinegal said.
Valero said the refinery has hired 161 people since Jan. 1, 2005. About 20 percent live in Port Arthur.
The city council recently ordered a study on contractors’ hiring practices so it can devise a monitoring plan.
“We’ve let the community down,” Sinegal said.
In late August, a group of 28 state lawmakers joined Kelley and others in urging Texas Gov. Rick Perry to block further shipments of VX hydrolysate to Port Arthur. Perry declined to intervene.
The latest assessment by state environmental regulators of Port Arthur showed that benzene had dropped to acceptable levels for the first time since 2000. Valero officials said they reduced emissions by more than 82 percent between 1996 and 2005, and had reduced “upset” emissions by 98 percent. Residents, however, still suffer higher rates of progressive pulmonary diseases than people elsewhere in the state.
Last year, Motiva agreed to give $3.5 million to help fund medical care, air monitors and a revitalization program for Port Arthur’s west side community. The agreement was part of a settlement with Kelley’s Community In-Power Development Association, after it challenged the plant’s expansion.
And, 50 years after Carver Terrace was built, the Port Arthur Housing Authority plans to demolish the units and move residents to new homes throughout the city.
Was Carver Terrace’s proximity to the refinery the authority’s prime motivation? No, said authority chief Cele Quesada. “Of course, in the back of everyone’s mind, there is awareness that we are on the fenceline. We would rather see a green area here than 180 families.”
The likely buyer? Motiva Enterprises.
Kelley, who was born in Apartment 1202-E in Carver Terrace, commented: “When you appeal to the conscience of man, how these things are impacting our children, you can get them to see our point. But a lot of the times, the bottom line still wins.”
Copyright © 2007, Pantagraph Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
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12) Tighter Border Delays Re-entry by U.S. Citizens
By JULIA PRESTON
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/us/21border.html?hp
EL PASO — United States border agents have stepped up scrutiny of Americans returning home from Mexico, slowing commerce and creating delays at border crossings not seen since the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The increased enforcement is in part a dress rehearsal for new rules, scheduled to take effect in January, that will require Americans to show a passport or other proof of citizenship to enter the United States. The requirements were approved by Congress as part of antiterrorism legislation in 2004.
Border officials said agents along the southern border were asking more returning United States citizens to show a photo identity document. At the same time, agents are increasing the frequency of what they call queries, where they check a traveler’s information against law enforcement, immigration and antiterror databases.
The new policy is a big shift after decades when Americans arrived at land border crossings, declared they were citizens and were waved on through. Since the authorities began ramping up enforcement in August, wait times at border stations in Texas have often stretched to two hours or more, discouraging visitors and shoppers and upsetting local business.
The delays could remain a fact of life across the southern border for the next few years, border officials said, at least until new security technology and expanded entry stations are installed and until Americans get used to being checked and questioned like foreigners. Last year 234 million travelers entered the United States through land border crossings from Mexico.
W. Ralph Basham, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, the agency that manages the borders, said longer waits had resulted from added security measures at border stations that in many cases were aging, outmoded and facing surging traffic. Saying the new document checks were a “security imperative,” Mr. Basham called on border cities, which own many of the crossing bridges, to invest in expanding the entry points.
In the meantime, Mr. Basham said, “A safer border is well worth the wait.”
Wait times of up to three hours have also been reported over the past few months at crossings from eastern Canada. Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, who held a series of town meetings with border officials about the lines, said low staffing at border stations was the primary cause there.
The longer lines along the Mexico border have been especially unsettling here in El Paso, a humming border city long comfortable in its marriage to Ciudad Juárez, the bigger and rowdier Mexican metropolis on the other bank of the Rio Grande. Lines of cars and pedestrians at sunrise on the four border bridges here are a routine for tens of thousands of people, including many United States citizens, coming from Mexico on their way to school, work and shopping.
“International bridge wait times continue to escalate, causing frustration and concern in my district and across the nation,” wrote El Paso’s congressman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat, in a letter this month to the House Committee on Homeland Security in which he called for a hearing on the matter.
One crosser who said she had struggled with the lines was Wilda Laboy, a 37-year-old American citizen who works in Juárez but is studying for her high school equivalency in El Paso.
“I arrive late, and they don’t let me in,” said Ms. Laboy as she waited to be checked through the Paso del Norte bridge crossing here. “I miss classes.”
Many families that straddle the border are feeling the strain. Border trade groups say the long lines caught them by surprise and are disrupting economic ties vital to both sides of the border.
“We are Americans who live at the border, with our economy and livelihood that depend on moving efficiently back and forth,” said Maria Luisa O’Connell, president of the Border Trade Alliance, which represents businesses all along the border with Mexico. “Now suddenly we have measures that make it less efficient but don’t make us any safer.”
Richard Cortez, the mayor of McAllen, another Texas border town that saw long lines this summer, said the waits had slowed some of the 45,000 trailer trucks that passed the border there each month.
“There’s a misconception that border communities care only about ourselves and our own local businesses,” Mr. Cortez said by telephone. “Our border crossings affect trade across the United States.”
Of $332 billion in trade last year between the United States and Mexico, this country’s third-largest trading partner, more than 80 percent of it moved across the border by truck.
Starting Jan. 31, American citizens returning home by land will have to present either a passport, or a citizenship document like a birth certificate together with a government-issued identity card with a photograph. The requirement is the next phase of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which Congress adopted in a 2004 bill that enacted recommendations of the commission that examined the Sept. 11 attacks. It is intended to improve antiterror intelligence by gathering a record of everyone entering the United States.
So far the new inspections are not systematic enough to yield measurable results.
The passport requirement has been in effect since January for most citizens returning to the United States by air, and it had a rocky debut because many Americans without passports rushed to apply for one. Passport processing backlogs overwhelmed the State Department, which was forced to relax the requirement during the months of June, July, August and September. That experience has created anxiety among many people who cross at land stations as they anticipate the next phase.
Also in August, border officials said, the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive designed to unify inspection procedures for all the border agencies under its umbrella. It set an eventual goal, with no fixed deadline, for agents to conduct a database query for every person crossing the border.
As a result, queries by agents of both American and foreign border crossers increased. At many older border stations, including El Paso, agents have to enter some queries manually, taking minutes that quickly mount up to hours when thousands of cars and people are waiting in line.
Luis Garcia, the El Paso field director for Customs and Border Protection, said the new policy demanded a change of culture.
“These two communities are very interlinked, not only by trade and commerce, but by family, religion, education,” Mr. Garcia said, standing at the base of the Paso del Norte border bridge as pedestrians streamed by, heading for downtown El Paso. “When a person leaves El Paso to go to Juárez, it’s like going across the street. They don’t consider it leaving the country,” he said.
On an average day, some 21,000 pedestrians cross from Juárez on the Paso del Norte bridge, one of El Paso’s four entryways. Mr. Garcia installed a canopy over the walkway, and water fountains and overhead mist-makers at the checkpoint to cool weary walkers on sweltering days.
As the lines into El Paso swelled in mid-August, Mr. Garcia said, he issued a memorandum directing his agents to gauge vehicle lines in deciding how many travelers to query. If lines were over an hour, agents should run a query only for the driver, unless something about the vehicle aroused their suspicions.
But Mr. Garcia said he did not have great flexibility to speed the lines. “One thing I can tell you up front, as director in El Paso, I will not compromise security for facilitation,” he said.
Border groups say they support tougher security measures but want the border authorities to back them up with increased staff levels and technology to avoid slowing commerce.
Funds for the Border Patrol, which scouts the border between entry points for illegal immigrants, increased by 70 percent since 2005 to $3 billion. By contrast, financing for border station agents, who processed nearly 300 million travelers entering the country legally by land last year, rose by 30 percent since 2005, to $2.1 billion.
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13) The Future Is Drying Up
By JOE GERTNER
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?ref=magazine
Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.
The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”
A few weeks after his testimony, I flew to Boulder to meet with Udall, and we spent a day driving switchback roads high in the Rockies in his old Subaru. It had been a wet season on the east slope of the Rockies, but the farther west we went, the drier it became. Udall wanted to show me some of the local reservoirs and water systems that were built over the past century, so I could get a sense of their complexity as well as their vulnerability. As he put it, he wants to connect the disparate members of the water economy in a way that has never really been done before, so that utility executives, scientists, environmentalists, business leaders, farmers and politicians can begin discussing how to cope with the inevitable shortages of fresh water. In the American West, whose huge economy and political power derive from the ability of 20th-century engineers to conquer rivers like the Colorado and establish a reliable water supply, the prospect that there will be less water in the future, rather than the same amount, is unnerving. “We have a very short period of time here to get people educated on what this means,” Udall told me as we drove through the mountains. “Then once that occurs, perhaps we can start talking about how do we deal with it.”
Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city — the 60th-largest in the United States — that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city’s viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, “We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that’s turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands.” Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.
I asked if he had enough water for that many people. “Oh, no,” he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.
Binney and I got together outside Dillon, a village in the Colorado Rockies 75 miles from Aurora and just a few miles west of the Continental Divide. We met in a small parking lot beside Dillon Reservoir, which sits at the bottom of a bowl of snow-capped mountains. Binney, a thickset 54-year-old with dark red hair and a fair complexion, had driven up in a large S.U.V. He still carries a strong accent from his native New Zealand, and in conversation he comes across as less a utility manager than a polymath with the combined savvy of an engineer, an economist and a politician. As we moved to a picnic table, Binney told me that we were looking at Denver’s water, not Aurora’s, and that it would eventually travel 70 miles through tunnels under the mountains to Denver’s taps. He admitted that he would love to have this water, which is pure snowmelt. To people in his job, snowmelt is the best source of water because it requires little chemical treatment to bring it up to federal drinking standards. But this water wasn’t available. Denver got here before him. And in Colorado, like most Western states, the rights to water follow a bloodline back to whoever got to it first.
One way to view the history of the American West is as a series of important moments in exploration or migration; another is to consider it, as Binney does, in terms of its water. In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built — “heroic man-over-nature” achievements, in Binney’s words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam — which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead — the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. “They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity,” Binney says. “Now we’ve gotten to the end of that era.” At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, he pointed out, the region’s population is expected to keep booming. California’s Department of Finance recently predicted that there will be 60 million Californians by midcentury, up from 36 million today. “In Colorado, we’re sitting at a little under five million people now, on our way to eight million people,” Binney said. Western settlers, who apportioned the region’s water long ago, never could have foreseen the thirst of its cities. Nor, he said, could they have anticipated our environmental mandates to keep water “in stream” for the benefit of fish and wildlife, as well as for rafters and kayakers.
The West’s predicament, though, isn’t just a matter of limited capacity, bigger populations and environmental regulations. It’s also a distributional one. Seventy-five years ago, cities like Denver made claims on — and from the state of Colorado received rights to — water in the mountains; those cities in turn built reservoirs for their water. As a result, older cities have access to more surface water (that is, water that comes from rivers and streams) than newer cities like Aurora, which have been forced to purchase existing water rights from farmers and mining companies. Towns that rely on groundwater (water pumped from deep underground) face an even bigger disadvantage. Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.
The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. “The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,” Binney explained. As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not. “There’s no magical locked box of water that we can turn to,” Binney says of cities like Aurora, “so it’s going to have to come from an existing use.” Because the supply of water in the West can’t really change, water managers spend their time looking for ways to adjust its allocation in their favor.
Binney knew all this back in 2002, when he took the job in Aurora after a long career at an engineering firm. Over the course of a century, the city had established a reasonable water supply. About a quarter of its water is piped in from the Colorado River basin about 70 miles away; another quarter is taken from reservoirs in the Arkansas River basin far to the south. The rest comes from the South Platte, a lazy, meandering river that runs north through Aurora on its way toward Nebraska. Binney says he believes that a city like his needs at least five years of water in storage in case of drought; his first year there turned out to be one of the worst years for water managers in recorded history, and the town’s reservoirs dropped to 26 percent of capacity, meaning Aurora had at most nine months of reserves and could not endure another dry spring. During the summer and fall, Binney focused on both supply and demand. He negotiated with neighboring towns to buy water and accelerated a program to pay local farmers to fallow their fields so the city could lease their water rights. Meanwhile, the town asked residents to limit their showers and had water cops enforce new rules against lawn sprinklers. (“It’s interesting how many people were watering lawns in the middle of the night,” Binney said.)
Water use in the United States varies widely by region, influenced by climate, neighborhood density and landscaping, among other things. In the West, Los Angelenos use about 125 gallons per person per day in their homes, compared with 114 for Tucson residents. Binney’s customers generally use about 160 gallons per person per day. “In the depths of the drought,” he said, “we got down to about 123 gallons.”
Part of the cruelty of a Western drought is that a water manager never knows if it will last 1 year or 10. In 2002, Binney was at the earliest stages of what has since become a nearly continuous dry spell. Though he couldn’t see that at the time, he realized Aurora faced a permanent state of emergency if it didn’t boost its water supplies. But how? One option was to try to buy water rights in the mountains (most likely from farmers who were looking to quit agriculture), then build a new reservoir and a long supply line to Aurora. Obvious hurdles included environmental and political resistance, as well as an engineering difficulty: water is heavy, far heavier than oil, and incompressible; a system to move it long distances (especially if it involves tunneling through mountains or pumping water over them) can cost billions. Binney figured that without the help of the federal government, which has largely gotten out of the Western dam-and-reservoir-building business, Aurora would be unwise to pursue such a project. Even if the money could be raised, building a system would take decades. Aurora needed a solution within five years.
Another practice, sometimes used in Europe, is to drill wells alongside a river and pull river water up though them, using the gravel of the riverbank as a natural filter — sort of like digging a hole in the sand near the ocean’s edge as it fills from below. Half of Aurora’s water rights were on the South Platte already; the city also pours its treated wastewater back into the river, as do other cities in the Denver metro area. This gives the South Platte a steady, dependable flow. Binney and the township reasoned that they could conceivably, and legally, go some 20 or 30 miles downstream on the South Platte, buy agricultural land near the river, install wells there and retrieve their wastewater. Thus they could create a system whereby Aurora would use South Platte water; send it to a treatment plant that would discharge it back into the river; go downstream to recapture water from the same river; then pump it back to the city for purification and further use. The process would repeat, ad infinitum. Aurora would use its share of South Platte water “to extinction,” in the argot of water managers. A drop of the South Platte used by an Aurora resident would find its way back to the city’s taps as a half-drop in 45 to 60 days, a quarter-drop 45 to 60 days after that and so on. For every drop the town used from the South Platte, over time it would almost — as all the fractional drops added up — get another.
Many towns have a supply that includes previously treated water. The water from the Mississippi River, for instance, is reused many times by municipalities as it flows southward. But as far as Binney knew, no municipality in the United States had built the kind of closed loop that Aurora envisioned. Water from wells in the South Platte would taste different, because of its mineral and organic content, so Binney’s engineers would have to make it mimic mountain snowmelt. More delicate challenges involved selling local taxpayers on authorizing a project, marketed to them as “Prairie Waters,” that would capitalize on their own wastewater. The system, which meant building a 34-mile-long pipeline from the downstream South Platte riverbanks to a treatment facility in Aurora, would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive municipal infrastructure projects in the country.
When Binney and I chatted at the reservoir outside Dillon, he had already finished discussions with Moody’s and Fitch, the bond-rating agencies whose evaluations would help the town finance the project. Groundbreaking, which would be the next occasion we would see each other, was still a month away. “What we’re doing now is trading high levels of treatment and purification for building tunnels and chasing whatever remaining snowmelt there is in the hills, which I think isn’t a wise investment for the city,” he told me. “I would expect that what we’re going to do is the blueprint for a lot of cities in California, Arizona, Nevada — even the Carolinas and the Gulf states. They’re all going to be doing this in the future.”
Water managers in the West tend to think in terms of “acre-feet.” One acre-foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Colorado families for one year. When measurements of the Colorado River began near Lee’s Ferry in the early 1920s, the region happened to be in the midst of an extremely wet series of years, and the river was famously misjudged to have an average flow of 17 million acre-feet per year — when in fact its average flow would often prove to be significantly less. Part of the legacy of that misjudgment is that the seven states that divided the water in the 1920s entered into a legal partnership that created unrealistic expectations about the river’s capacity. But there is another, lesser-known legacy too. As the 20th century progressed, many water managers came to believe that the 1950s, which included the most severe drought years since measurement of the river began, were the marker for a worst-case situation.
But recent studies of tree rings, in which academics drill core samples from the oldest Ponderosa pines or Douglas firs they can find in order to determine moisture levels hundreds of years ago, indicate that the dry times of the 1950s were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts. The latest research effort, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in late May, identified the existence of an epochal Southwestern megadrought that, if it recurred, would prove calamitous.
When Binney and I met at Dillon Reservoir, he brought graphs of Colorado River flows that go back nearly a thousand years. “There was this one in the 1150s,” he said, tracing a jagged line downward with his finger. “They think that’s when the Anasazi Indians were forced out. We see drought cycles here that can go up to 60 years of below-average precipitation.” What that would mean today, he said, is that states would have to make a sudden choice between agriculture and people, which would lead to bruising political debates and an unavoidable blow to the former. Binney says that as much as he believes that some farmers’ water is ultimately destined for the cities anyway, a big jolt like this would be tragic. “You hope you never get to that point,” he told me, “where you force those kinds of discussions, because they will change for hundreds of years the way that people live in the Western U.S. If you have to switch off agriculture, it’s not like you can get back into it readily. It took decades for the agricultural industry to establish itself. It may never come back.”
An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time. Or perhaps they already have. This coming spring, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report identifying areas of the world most at risk of droughts and floods as the earth warms. Fresh-water shortages are already a global concern, especially in China, India and Africa. But the I.P.C.C., which along with Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for its work on global-warming issues, will note that many problem zones are located within the United States, including California (where the Sierra Nevada snowpack is threatened) and the Colorado River basin. These assessments follow on the heels of a number of recent studies that analyze mountain snowpack and future Colorado River flows. Almost without exception, recent climate models envision reductions that range from the modest to the catastrophic by the second half of this century. One study in particular, by Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid, suggests the region is already “past peak water,” a milestone that means the river’s water supply will now forever trend downward.
Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter. According to Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory who published a study on the Southwest last spring, more rain and snow will fall in those regions closer to the poles and more precipitation is likely to fall during sporadic, intense storms rather than from smaller, more frequent storms. But many subtropical regions closer to the equator will dry out. The models analyzed by Seager, which focus on regional climate rather than Colorado River flows, show that the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations. More alarming, perhaps, is that the models do not only concern the coming decades; they also address the present. “You know, it’s like, O.K., there’s trouble in the future, but how near in the future does it set in?” he told me. “In this case, it appears that it’s happening right now.” When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”
Climate models tend to be more accurate at predicting temperature than precipitation. Still, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “something is happening,” as Peter Binney gently puts it. Everyone I spoke with in the West has noticed — less snow, earlier spring melts, warmer nights. Los Angeles this year went 150 days without a measurable rainfall. One afternoon in Boulder, I spent some time with Roger Pulwarty, a highly regarded climatologist at the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. Pulwarty, who has spent the past few years assessing adaptive solutions to a long drought, has a light sense of humor and an air of optimism about him, but he acknowledged that the big picture is worrisome. Even if the precipitation in the West does not decrease, higher temperatures by themselves create huge complications. Snowmelt runoff decreases. The immense reservoirs lose far more water to evaporation. Meanwhile, demand increases because crops are thirstier. Yet importing water from other river basins becomes more difficult, because those basins may face shortages, too.
“You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”
Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime. Already, warmer temperatures have brought on an outbreak of pine beetles that are destroying pine forests; Pulwarty wonders how many tourists will want to visit a state full of dead trees. “A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis. “We’re at the point of crisis on the Colorado,” Pulwarty concluded. “And it’s at this point that we decide, O.K., which way are we going to go?”
It is all but imposible to look into the future of the Western states without calling on Pat Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Mulroy has no real counterpart on the East Coast; her nearest analog might be Robert Moses, the notorious New York City planner who built massive infrastructure projects and who almost always found a way around institutional obstructions and financing constraints. She is arguably the most influential and outspoken water manager in the country — a “woman without fear,” as Pulwarty describes her. Pulwarty and Peter Binney respect her willingness to challenge historical water-sharing agreements that, in Mulroy’s view, no longer suit the modern West (meaning they don’t suit Las Vegas). According to Binney, however, Nevada’s scant resources give Mulroy little choice. She has to keep her city from drying out. That makes hers the most difficult job in the water business, he told me.
Las Vegas is almost certainly more vulnerable to water shortages than any metro area in the country. Partly that’s a result of the city’s explosive growth. But the state of Nevada has the historical misfortune of receiving a smaller share of Colorado River water (300,000 acre-feet annually) than the other six states with which it signed a water-sharing compact in the 1920s. That modest share, stored in Lake Mead along with water destined for Southern California, Arizona and northern Mexico, now means everything to Las Vegas. I traveled to Lake Mead on a 99-degree day last June. The narrow, 110-mile-long lake, which at full capacity holds 28 million acre-feet of water (making it the largest reservoir in the United States), was at 49 percent of capacity. When riding into the valley and glimpsing it from afar — an astonishing slash of blue in the desert — my guide for the day, Bronson Mack of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, remarked that he had never seen it so low. The white bathtub ring on the sides of the canyon that marks the level of full capacity was visible about 100 feet above the water. “I have a photograph of my mother on her honeymoon, standing in front of the lake,” Mack, a Las Vegas native, said. That was in 1970. “It was almost that low, but not quite.”
Over the past year, it has become conceivable that the lake could eventually drop below the level of the water authority’s intake pipes, the straws that suck the water out for the Las Vegas Valley. The authority recently hired an engineering firm to drill through several miles of rock and create a deeper intake pipe near the bottom of the lake. To say the project is being fast-tracked is an understatement. The day after visiting Lake Mead, I met with Mulroy in her Las Vegas office. “We have everything in line to get it running by 2012,” she said of the new intake. But she added that she is looking to cut as much time off construction as possible. Building the new intake is a race against the clock, or rather a race against a lake that keeps going down, down, down.
Mulroy is not gambling the entire future of Las Vegas on this project. One catchphrase of the water trade is that water flows uphill toward money, which is another way of saying that a city with ample funds can, at least theoretically, augment its supplies indefinitely. In a tight water market like that of the West, this isn’t an absolute truth, but in many instances money can move rivers. The trade-off is that new water tends to be of lower quality (requiring more expensive purification) or far away (requiring more expensive transport). Thanks to Las Vegas’s growth — the metro area is now at 1.8 million people — cost is currently no object. The city’s cash reserves have made it possible for Mulroy to pay Arizona $330 million for water she can use in emergencies and to plan a controversial multibillion-dollar pipeline to east-central Nevada, where the water authority has identified groundwater it wants to extract and transport. Wealth allows for the additional possibility of a sophisticated trading scheme whereby Las Vegas might pay for a desalination plant on the Pacific Coast that would transform seawater into potable water for use in California and Mexico. In exchange, Nevada could get a portion of their Colorado River water in Lake Mead.
So money does make a kind of sustainability possible for Las Vegas. On the other hand, buying water is quite unlike buying anything else. At the moment, water doesn’t really function like a private good; its value, which Peter Binney calls “infinite,” is often only vaguely related to its price, which can vary from 50 cents an acre-foot (what Mulroy pays to take water from Lake Mead) to $12,000 an acre-foot (the most Binney has paid farmers in Colorado for their rights). Moreover, water is so necessary to human life, and hence so heavily subsidized and regulated, that it can’t really be bought and sold freely across state lines. (Enron tried to start a water market called Azurix in the late 1990s, only to see it fail spectacularly.) The more successful water markets have instead been local, like one in the late 1980s in California, where farmers agreed to reduce their water use and sell the savings to a state water bank. Mulroy and Binney each told me they think a true free-market water exchange would create too many winners and losers. “What you would have is affluent communities being able to buy the lifeblood right out from under those that are less well heeled,” Mulroy said. More practical, in her mind, would be a regional market that gives states, cities and farmers greater freedom to strike mutually beneficial agreements, but with protections so that municipalities aren’t pitted against one another.
More-efficient water markets might ease shortages, but they can’t replace a big city’s principal source. What if, I asked Mulroy, Lake Mead drained nearly to the bottom? Even if drought conditions ease over the next year or two, several people I spoke with think the odds are greater that Lake Powell, the 27-million-acre-foot reservoir that supplies Lake Mead, will drop to unusable levels before it ever fills again. Mulroy didn’t immediately dismiss the possibility; she is certain that the reduced circumstances of the two big Western reservoirs are tied to global warming and that Las Vegas is this country’s first victim of climate change. An empty Lake Mead, she began, would mean there is nothing in Lake Powell.
“It’s well outside probabilities,” she said — but it could happen. “In that case, it’s not just a Las Vegas problem. You have three entire states wiped out: Arizona, California and Nevada. Because you can’t replace those volumes with desalted ocean water.” What seems more likely, she said, is that the legal framework governing the Colorado River would preclude such a dire turn of events. Recently, the states that use the Colorado reached a tentative agreement that guarantees Lake Mead will remain partly full under current conditions, even if upstream users have to cut back their withdrawals as a result. The deal supplements a more fundamental understanding that dates to the 1920s. If the river is failing to carry a certain, guaranteed volume of water to Lee’s Ferry, which is just below Lake Powell, the river’s lower-basin states (Nevada, Arizona and California) can legally force the upper-basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) to reduce or stop their water withdrawals. This contingency, known as a “compact call,” sets the lower-basin states against the upper, but it has never occurred; it is deeply feared by many water managers, because it would ravage the fragile relationship among states and almost certainly lead to a scrum of lawsuits. Yet, last year water managers in Colorado began meeting for the first time to discuss the possibility. In our conversations, Mulroy denied that there would be a compact call, but she pointed out that Las Vegas’s groundwater and desalination plans were going ahead anyway for precautionary reasons.
I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. Mulroy bristled. “This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years,” she replied. “Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, ‘Not here,’ ‘No growth here,’ ‘There’s too many people here already.’ For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done.” Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: “We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.” Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. “The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert,” Mulroy said. “If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle.” That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the West’s new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.
The first impulse when confronted with the West’s water problems may be to wonder how, as scarcity becomes more acute, the region will engineer its way back to health. What can be built, what can technology accomplish, to ease any shortages? Yet this is almost certainly the wrong way to think about the situation. To be sure, construction projects like a pipeline from east-central Nevada could help Las Vegas. But the larger difficulty facing Pat Mulroy and Peter Binney, as they describe it, is re-engineering the culture and conventions of the West before it becomes too late. Whether or not there is enough water in the region for, say, the next 30 or 50 years isn’t necessarily a question with a yes-or-no answer. The water managers I spoke with believe the total volume of available water could be great enough to sustain the cities, many farms and perhaps the natural flow of the area’s rivers. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that if things continue as they have — with so much water going to agriculture; with conservation only beginning to take hold among residents, industry and farmers; with supplies diminishing slowly but steadily as the Earth warms; with the population growing faster than anywhere else in the United States; and with some of our most economically vital states constricted by antique water agreements — the region will become a topography of crisis and perhaps catastrophe. This is an old prophecy, dating back more than a century to one of the original American explorers of the West, John Wesley Powell, who doubted the territory could support large populations and intense development. (Powell presciently argued that river basins, not arbitrary mapmakers, should determine the boundaries of the Western states, in order to avoid inevitable conflicts over water.) An earlier explorer, J. C. Ives, visited the present location of Hoover Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, in 1857. The desiccated landscape was “valueless,” Ives reported. “There is nothing there to do but leave.”
Roger Pulwarty, for his part, rejects the notion of environmental determinism. Nature, in other words, isn’t inexorably pushing the region into a grim, suffering century. Things can be done. Redoubling efforts to prevent further climate change, Pulwarty says, is one place to start; another is getting the states that share the Colorado River to reach cooperative arrangements, as they have begun to discuss, for coping with long-term droughts. Other parts of the solution are less obvious. To Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues, whether we can adapt to a drier future depends on whether we can rethink the functions, and value, of fresh water. Can we can do the same things using less of it? How we use our water, Gleick believes, is considerably more complex than it appears. First of all, there are consumptive and nonconsumptive uses of water. Consumptive use, roughly speaking, refers to water taken from a reservoir that cannot be recovered. “It’s embedded in a product like a liter of Coca-Cola, or it’s contaminated so badly we can’t reuse it,” Gleick says. In agriculture, the vast majority of water use is also consumptive, because it evaporates or transpires from crops into the atmosphere. Evaporated water may fall as rain 1,000 miles away — that’s how Earth’s water cycle works — but it is gone locally. A similar consumptive process characterizes the water we put on our lawns or gardens: it mostly disappears. Meanwhile, most of the water used by metropolitan areas is nonconsumptive. It goes down the drain and empties into nearby rivers, like Colorado’s South Platte, as treated wastewater.
Gleick calls the Colorado River “the most complicated water system in the world,” and he isn’t convinced it will be easy, or practical, to change the laws that govern its usage. “But I think it’s less hard to change how we use water,” he says. He accepts that climate change is confronting the West with serious problems. (He was also one of the country’s first scientists, in the mid-1980s, to point out that reductions in mountain snowpack could present huge challenges.) He makes a persuasive case, however, that there are immense opportunities — even in cities like Las Vegas, which has made strides in conservation — to reduce both consumptive and nonconsumptive demand for water. These include installing more low-flow home appliances and adopting more efficient irrigation methods. And they include economic tools too: for example, many municipalities have reduced consumption by making water more expensive (the more you use, the higher your per-gallon rate). The United States uses less water than it did 25 years ago, Gleick points out: “We haven’t even paid too much attention to it, and we’ve accomplished this.” To go further, he says he believes we could alter not only demand but also supply. “Treated wastewater isn’t a liability, it’s an asset,” he says. We don’t need potable water to flush our toilets or water our lawns. “One might say that’s a ridiculous use of potable water. In fact, I might say that. But that’s the way we’ve set it up. And that’s going to change, that’s got to change, in this century.”
Among Colorado’s water managers, Peter Binney’s Prairie Waters project is considered both innovative and important not on account of its technology but because it seems to mark a new era of finding water sources in the drying West. It also proves that the next generation’s water will not come cheap, or come easy. In late July, I went to Aurora to meet up again with Binney. It was the groundbreaking day for Prairie Waters, which had been on the local television news: Binney and several other officials grinned for the cameras and signed a section of six-foot steel pipe, the same kind that would transport water from the South Platte wells to the Aurora treatment facility. That evening, Binney and I had dinner together at a steakhouse in an Aurora shopping mall. When he remarked that we may have exceeded what he calls the “carrying capacity” of the West, I asked him whether our desert civilizations could last. Binney seemed dubious. “Not the way we’ve got it set up,” he said. “We’ve decoupled land use from water use. Water is the limiting resource in the West. I think we need to match them back together again.” There was a decent amount of water out there, he went on to explain, but it was a false presumption that it could sustain all the farms, all the cities, all the rivers. Something will have to give. It was also wrong to assume, he said, that cities could continue to grow without experiencing something akin to a religious awakening about the scarcity of water. Soon, he predicted, we would talk about our “water footprint” just as we now talk about our carbon footprint.
Indeed, any conversations about the one will in short order expand to include the other, Binney went on to say. Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.
Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.
Similar energy challenges face other plans. In past years, various schemes have arisen to move water from Canada or the Great Lakes to arid parts of the United States. Beyond the environmental implications and construction costs (probably hundreds of billions of dollars), such continental-scale plumbing would require stupendous amounts of electricity. And yet, fears that such plans will resurface in a drier, more populous world are partly behind current efforts by the Great Lakes states to certify a pact that protects their fresh water from outside exploitation.
Just pumping water from the Prairie Waters site to Aurora will cost a small fortune. Binney told me this the day after the groundbreaking, as we drove north from Aurora to the site. Along the 45-minute journey, Binney narrated where his pipeline would go — along the edge of the highway here, over in that field there and so on. Eventually we turned off the highway and onto a small country road, and Binney slowed down so I could take in the surroundings. “Here’s where you see it all coming together and all of it coming into conflict,” he told me. To him, it was a perfect tableau of the West in the 21st century. There was a housing development on one side of the road and fields of irrigated crops on the other. Farther ahead was a gravel pit, a remnant of the old Colorado mineral-extraction economy.
He drove on, and soon we turned onto a dirt road that bisected some open fields. We rumbled along for a quarter mile or so, spewing dust and passing over the South Platte in the process. Binney parked by a wire fence near a sign marking it as Aurora property. We got out of the truck, hopped over a locked gate and walked into a farm field.
For miles along the highway, we passed barren acreage that formerly grew winter wheat but was now slated for new houses. The land we stood on once grew corn, but tangles of weeds covered it now. As we walked, Binney explained that the collection wells on the South Platte would soon be dug a few hundred yards away; that water would be pumped into collection basins on this field, where sand and gravel would purify it further. Then it would be pumped back to the chemical treatment plants in Aurora before being piped to residents. “We’re standing 34 miles from there,” Binney said.
It was a location as ordinary as I could have imagined, an empty place, far from anything, and yet Binney saw it as something else. Earlier, when we crossed over the gravel banks of the South Platte, I found the river disappointing: broad and shallow, dun-colored and slow-moving, its unimpressive flow somehow incorporating water Aurora had already used upstream. James Michener, in writing about this region years ago, was dead-on in calling it “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river.” Still, the South Platte was dependable. It was also Aurora’s lifeline, buying the city 20 or 30 years of time. “What I really like about it,” Binney said, smiling as we walked from the field back to his truck, “is that it’s wet.”
Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for the magazine.
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14) In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
By TIM GOLDEN
May 20, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html
Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.
The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.
"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"
At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
Like a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse. The harsh treatment, which has resulted in criminal charges against seven soldiers, went well beyond the two deaths.
In some instances, testimony shows, it was directed or carried out by interrogators to extract information. In others, it was punishment meted out by military police guards. Sometimes, the torment seems to have been driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both.
In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.
The Times obtained a copy of the file from a person involved in the investigation who was critical of the methods used at Bagram and the military's response to the deaths.
Although incidents of prisoner abuse at Bagram in 2002, including some details of the two men's deaths, have been previously reported, American officials have characterized them as isolated problems that were thoroughly investigated. And many of the officers and soldiers interviewed in the Dilawar investigation said the large majority of detainees at Bagram were compliant and reasonably well treated.
"What we have learned through the course of all these investigations is that there were people who clearly violated anyone's standard for humane treatment," said the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Larry Di Rita. "We're finding some cases that were not close calls."
Yet the Bagram file includes ample testimony that harsh treatment by some interrogators was routine and that guards could strike shackled detainees with virtual impunity. Prisoners considered important or troublesome were also handcuffed and chained to the ceilings and doors of their cells, sometimes for long periods, an action Army prosecutors recently classified as criminal assault.
Some of the mistreatment was quite obvious, the file suggests. Senior officers frequently toured the detention center, and several of them acknowledged seeing prisoners chained up for punishment or to deprive them of sleep. Shortly before the two deaths, observers from the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically complained to the military authorities at Bagram about the shackling of prisoners in "fixed positions," documents show.
Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar's death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army's criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were "remarkably similar" to those used at Bagram.
Last October, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.
So far, only the seven soldiers have been charged, including four last week. No one has been convicted in either death. Two Army interrogators were also reprimanded, a military spokesman said. Most of those who could still face legal action have denied wrongdoing, either in statements to investigators or in comments to a reporter.
"The whole situation is unfair," Sgt. Selena M. Salcedo, a former Bagram interrogator who was charged with assaulting Mr. Dilawar, dereliction of duty and lying to investigators, said in a telephone interview. "It's all going to come out when everything is said and done."
With most of the legal action pending, the story of abuses at Bagram remains incomplete. But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.
Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were "in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques."
The Interrogators
In the summer of 2002, the military detention center at Bagram, about 40 miles north of Kabul, stood as a hulking reminder of the Americans' improvised hold over Afghanistan.
Built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop for the operations base they established after their intervention in the country in 1979, the building had survived the ensuing wars as a battered relic - a long, squat, concrete block with rusted metal sheets where the windows had once been.
Retrofitted with five large wire pens and a half dozen plywood isolation cells, the building became the Bagram Collection Point, a clearinghouse for prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The B.C.P., as soldiers called it, typically held between 40 and 80 detainees while they were interrogated and screened for possible shipment to the Pentagon's longer-term detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking reservists were added from the Utah National Guard.
Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever questioned actual prisoners.
What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. "There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation" like the one at Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.
Nor were the rules of engagement very clear. The platoon had the standard interrogations guide, Army Field Manual 34-52, and an order from the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to treat prisoners "humanely," and when possible, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But with President Bush's final determination in February 2002 that the Conventions did not apply to the conflict with Al Qaeda and that Taliban fighters would not be accorded the rights of prisoners of war, the interrogators believed they "could deviate slightly from the rules," said one of the Utah reservists, Sgt. James A. Leahy.
"There was the Geneva Conventions for enemy prisoners of war, but nothing for terrorists," Sergeant Leahy told Army investigators. And the detainees, senior intelligence officers said, were to be considered terrorists until proved otherwise.
The deviations included the use of "safety positions" or "stress positions" that would make the detainees uncomfortable but not necessarily hurt them - kneeling on the ground, for instance, or sitting in a "chair" position against the wall. The new platoon was also trained in sleep deprivation, which the previous unit had generally limited to 24 hours or less, insisting that the interrogator remain awake with the prisoner to avoid pushing the limits of humane treatment.
But as the 519th interrogators settled into their jobs, they set their own procedures for sleep deprivation. They decided on 32 to 36 hours as the optimal time to keep prisoners awake and eliminated the practice of staying up themselves, one former interrogator, Eric LaHammer, said in an interview.
The interrogators worked from a menu of basic tactics to gain a prisoner's cooperation, from the "friendly" approach, to good cop-bad cop routines, to the threat of long-term imprisonment. But some less-experienced interrogators came to rely on the method known in the military as "Fear Up Harsh," or what one soldier referred to as "the screaming technique."
Sergeant Loring, then 27, tried with limited success to wean those interrogators off that approach, which typically involved yelling and throwing chairs. Mr. Leahy said the sergeant "put the brakes on when certain approaches got out of hand." But he could also be dismissive of tactics he considered too soft, several soldiers told investigators, and gave some of the most aggressive interrogators wide latitude. (Efforts to locate Mr. Loring, who has left the military, were unsuccessful.)
"We sometimes developed a rapport with detainees, and Sergeant Loring would sit us down and remind us that these were evil people and talk about 9/11 and they weren't our friends and could not be trusted," Mr. Leahy said.
Specialist Damien M. Corsetti, a tall, bearded interrogator sometimes called "Monster" -he had the nickname tattooed in Italian across his stomach, other soldiers said - was often chosen to intimidate new detainees. Specialist Corsetti, they said, would glower and yell at the arrivals as they stood chained to an overhead pole or lay face down on the floor of a holding room. (A military police K-9 unit often brought growling dogs to walk among the new prisoners for similar effect, documents show.)
"The other interrogators would use his reputation," said one interrogator, Specialist Eric H. Barclais. "They would tell the detainee, 'If you don't cooperate, we'll have to get Monster, and he won't be as nice.' " Another soldier told investigators that Sergeant Loring lightheartedly referred to Specialist Corsetti, then 23, as "the King of Torture."
A Saudi detainee who was interviewed by Army investigators last June at Guantánamo said Specialist Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation at Bagram, held it against the prisoner's face and threatened to rape him, excerpts from the man's statement show.
Last fall, the investigators cited probable cause to charge Specialist Corsetti with assault, maltreatment of a prisoner and indecent acts in the incident; he has not been charged. At Abu Ghraib, he was also one of three members of the 519th who were fined and demoted for forcing an Iraqi woman to strip during questioning, another interrogator said. A spokesman at Fort Bragg said Specialist Corsetti would not comment.
In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by a new military police unit that was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly reservists from the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission, members of the unit said.
The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix, N.J., and some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further training. That instruction included an overview of "pressure-point control tactics" and notably the "common peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.
The M.P.'s said they were never told that peroneal strikes were not part of Army doctrine. Nor did most of them hear one of the former police officers tell a fellow soldier during the training that he would never use such strikes because they would "tear up" a prisoner's legs.
But once in Afghanistan, members of the 377th found that the usual rules did not seem to apply. The peroneal strike quickly became a basic weapon of the M.P. arsenal. "That was kind of like an accepted thing; you could knee somebody in the leg," former Sgt. Thomas V. Curtis told the investigators.
A few weeks into the company's tour, Specialist Jeremy M. Callaway overheard another guard boasting about having beaten a detainee who had spit on him. Specialist Callaway also told investigators that other soldiers had congratulated the guard "for not taking any" from a detainee.
One captain nicknamed members of the Third Platoon "the Testosterone Gang." Several were devout bodybuilders. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, a group of the soldiers decorated their tent with a Confederate flag, one soldier said.
Some of the same M.P.'s took a particular interest in an emotionally disturbed Afghan detainee who was known to eat his feces and mutilate himself with concertina wire. The soldiers kneed the man repeatedly in the legs and, at one point, chained him with his arms straight up in the air, Specialist Callaway told investigators. They also nicknamed him "Timmy," after a disabled child in the animated television series "South Park." One of the guards who beat the prisoner also taught him to screech like the cartoon character, Specialist Callaway said.
Eventually, the man was sent home.
The Defiant Detainee
The detainee known as Person Under Control No. 412 was a portly, well-groomed Afghan named Habibullah. Some American officials identified him as "Mullah" Habibullah, a brother of a former Taliban commander from the southern Afghan province of Oruzgan.
He stood out from the scraggly guerrillas and villagers whom the Bagram interrogators typically saw. "He had a piercing gaze and was very confident," the provost marshal in charge of the M.P.'s, Maj. Bobby R. Atwell, recalled.
Documents from the investigation suggest that Mr. Habibullah was captured by an Afghan warlord on Nov. 28, 2002, and delivered to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives two days later. His well-being at that point is a matter of dispute. The doctor who examined him on arrival at Bagram reported him in good health. But the intelligence operations chief, Lt. Col. John W. Loffert Jr., later told Army investigators, "He was already in bad condition when he arrived."
What is clear is that Mr. Habibullah was identified at Bagram as an important prisoner and an unusually sharp-tongued and insubordinate one.
One of the 377th's Third Platoon sergeants, Alan J. Driver Jr., told investigators that Mr. Habibullah rose up after a rectal examination and kneed him in the groin. The guard said he grabbed the prisoner by the head and yelled in his face. Mr. Habibullah then "became combative," Sergeant Driver said, and had to be subdued by three guards and led away in an armlock.
He was then confined in one of the 9-foot by 7-foot isolation cells, which the M.P. commander, Capt. Christopher M. Beiring, later described as a standard procedure. "There was a policy that detainees were hooded, shackled and isolated for at least the first 24 hours, sometimes 72 hours of captivity," he told investigators.
While the guards kept some prisoners awake by yelling or poking at them or banging on their cell doors, Mr. Habibullah was shackled by the wrists to the wire ceiling over his cell, soldiers said.
On his second day, Dec. 1, the prisoner was "uncooperative" again, this time with Specialist Willie V. Brand. The guard, who has since been charged with assault and other crimes, told investigators he had delivered three peroneal strikes in response. The next day, Specialist Brand said, he had to knee the prisoner again. Other blows followed.
A lawyer for Specialist Brand, John P. Galligan, said there was no criminal intent by his client to hurt any detainee. "At the time, my client was acting consistently with the standard operating procedure that was in place at the Bagram facility."
The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were assigned no interpreters of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when they could and relied on prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate for them.
When the detainees were beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was often "because they have no idea what the M.P. is saying."
By the morning of Dec. 2, witnesses told the investigators, Mr. Habibullah was coughing and complaining of chest pains. He limped into the interrogation room in shackles, his right leg stiff and his right foot swollen. The lead interrogator, Sergeant Leahy, let him sit on the floor because he could not bend his knees and sit in a chair.
The interpreter who was on hand, Ebrahim Baerde, said the interrogators had kept their distance that day "because he was spitting up a lot of phlegm."
"They were laughing and making fun of him, saying it was 'gross' or 'nasty,' " Mr. Baerde said.
Though battered, Mr. Habibullah was unbowed.
"Once they asked him if he wanted to spend the rest of his life in handcuffs," Mr. Baerde said. "His response was, 'Yes, don't they look good on me?' "
By Dec. 3, Mr. Habibullah's reputation for defiance seemed to make him an open target. One M.P. said he had given him five peroneal strikes for being "noncompliant and combative." Another gave him three or four more for being "combative and noncompliant." Some guards later asserted that he had been hurt trying to escape.
When Sgt. James P. Boland saw Mr. Habibullah on Dec. 3, he was in one of the isolation cells, tethered to the ceiling by two sets of handcuffs and a chain around his waist. His body was slumped forward, held up by the chains.
Sergeant Boland told the investigators he had entered the cell with two other guards, Specialists Anthony M. Morden and Brian E. Cammack. (All three have been charged with assault and other crimes.) One of them pulled off the prisoner's black hood. His head was slumped to one side, his tongue sticking out. Specialist Cammack said he had put some bread on Mr. Habibullah's tongue. Another soldier put an apple in the prisoner's hand; it fell to the floor.
When Specialist Cammack turned back toward the prisoner, he said in one statement, Mr. Habibullah's spit hit his chest. Later, Specialist Cammack acknowledged, "I'm not sure if he spit at me." But at the time, he exploded, yelling, "Don't ever spit on me again!" and kneeing the prisoner sharply in the thigh, "maybe a couple" of times. Mr. Habibullah's limp body swayed back and forth in the chains.
When Sergeant Boland returned to the cell some 20 minutes later, he said, Mr. Habibullah was not moving and had no pulse. Finally, the prisoner was unchained and laid out on the floor of his cell.
The guard who Specialist Cammack said had counseled him back in New Jersey about the dangers of peroneal strikes found him in the room where Mr. Habibullah lay, his body already cold.
"Specialist Cammack appeared very distraught," Specialist William Bohl told an investigator. The soldier "was running about the room hysterically."
An M.P. was sent to wake one of the medics.
"What are you getting me for?" the medic, Specialist Robert S. Melone, responded, telling him to call an ambulance instead.
When another medic finally arrived, he found Mr. Habibullah on the floor, his arms outstretched, his eyes and mouth open.
"It looked like he had been dead for a while, and it looked like nobody cared," the medic, Staff Sgt. Rodney D. Glass, recalled.
Not all of the guards were indifferent, their statements show. But if Mr. Habibullah's death shocked some of them, it did not lead to major changes in the detention center's operation.
Military police guards were assigned to be present during interrogations to help prevent mistreatment. The provost marshal, Major Atwell, told investigators he had already instructed the commander of the M.P. company, Captain Beiring, to stop chaining prisoners to the ceiling. Others said they never received such an order.
Senior officers later told investigators that they had been unaware of any serious abuses at the B.C.P. But the first sergeant of the 377th, Betty J. Jones, told investigators that the use of standing restraints, sleep deprivation and peroneal strikes was readily apparent.
"Everyone that is anyone went through the facility at one time or another," she said.
Major Atwell said the death "did not cause an enormous amount of concern 'cause it appeared natural."
In fact, Mr. Habibullah's autopsy, completed on Dec. 8, showed bruises or abrasions on his chest, arms and head. There were deep contusions on his calves, knees and thighs. His left calf was marked by what appeared to have been the sole of a boot.
His death was attributed to a blood clot, probably caused by the severe injuries to his legs, which traveled to his heart and blocked the blood flow to his lungs.
The Shy Detainee
On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.
Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.
Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.
"He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.
On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.
At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.
Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar's family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)
The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.
Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.
"They did lots and lots of bad things to me," said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker from Khost. "I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk."
For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. "He could not breathe," said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar's passengers.
Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.
When one of the First Platoon M.P.'s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar's cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.
"He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Specialist Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny."
Other Third Platoon M.P.'s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.
It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,' " he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."
In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.'s had delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.
Many M.P.'s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar's injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar's orange prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.
"I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing restraints," the soldier told investigators. "Over a certain time period, I noticed it was the size of a fist."
As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise.
"He had constantly been screaming, 'Release me; I don't want to be here,' and things like that," said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul Ahad Wardak.
The Interrogation
On Dec. 8, Mr. Dilawar was taken for his fourth interrogation. It quickly turned hostile.
The 21-year-old lead interrogator, Specialist Glendale C. Walls II, later contended that Mr. Dilawar was evasive. "Some holes came up, and we wanted him to answer us truthfully," he said. The other interrogator, Sergeant Salcedo, complained that the prisoner was smiling, not answering questions, and refusing to stay kneeling on the ground or sitting against the wall.
The interpreter who was present, Ahmad Ahmadzai, recalled the encounter differently to investigators.
The interrogators, Mr. Ahmadzai said, accused Mr. Dilawar of launching the rockets that had hit the American base. He denied that. While kneeling on the ground, he was unable to hold his cuffed hands above his head as instructed, prompting Sergeant Salcedo to slap them back up whenever they began to drop.
"Selena berated him for being weak and questioned him about being a man, which was very insulting because of his heritage," Mr. Ahmadzai said.
When Mr. Dilawar was unable to sit in the chair position against the wall because of his battered legs, the two interrogators grabbed him by the shirt and repeatedly shoved him back against the wall.
"This went on for 10 or 15 minutes," the interpreter said. "He was so tired he couldn't get up."
"They stood him up, and at one point Selena stepped on his bare foot with her boot and grabbed him by his beard and pulled him towards her," he went on. "Once Selena kicked Dilawar in the groin, private areas, with her right foot. She was standing some distance from him, and she stepped back and kicked him.
"About the first 10 minutes, I think, they were actually questioning him, after that it was pushing, shoving, kicking and shouting at him," Mr. Ahmadzai said. "There was no interrogation going on."
The session ended, he said, with Sergeant Salcedo instructing the M.P.'s to keep Mr. Dilawar chained to the ceiling until the next shift came on.
The next morning, Mr. Dilawar began yelling again. At around noon, the M.P.'s called over another of the interpreters, Mr. Baerde, to try to quiet Mr. Dilawar down.
"I told him, 'Look, please, if you want to be able to sit down and be released from shackles, you just need to be quiet for one more hour."
"He told me that if he was in shackles another hour, he would die," Mr. Baerde said.
Half an hour later, Mr. Baerde returned to the cell. Mr. Dilawar's hands hung limply from the cuffs, and his head, covered by the black hood, slumped forward.
"He wanted me to get a doctor, and said that he needed 'a shot,' " Mr. Baerde recalled. "He said that he didn't feel good. He said that his legs were hurting."
Mr. Baerde translated Mr. Dilawar's plea to one of the guards. The soldier took the prisoner's hand and pressed down on his fingernails to check his circulation.
"He's O.K.," Mr. Baerde quoted the M.P. as saying. "He's just trying to get out of his restraints."
By the time Mr. Dilawar was brought in for his final interrogation in the first hours of the next day, Dec. 10, he appeared exhausted and was babbling that his wife had died. He also told the interrogators that he had been beaten by the guards.
"But we didn't pursue that," said Mr. Baryalai, the interpreter.
Specialist Walls was again the lead interrogator. But his more aggressive partner, Specialist Claus, quickly took over, Mr. Baryalai said.
"Josh had a rule that the detainee had to look at him, not me," the interpreter told investigators. "He gave him three chances, and then he grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him towards him, across the table, slamming his chest into the table front."
When Mr. Dilawar was unable to kneel, the interpreter said, the interrogators pulled him to his feet and pushed him against the wall. Told to assume a stress position, the prisoner leaned his head against the wall and began to fall asleep.
"It looked to me like Dilawar was trying to cooperate, but he couldn't physically perform the tasks," Mr. Baryalai said.
Finally, Specialist Walls grabbed the prisoner and "shook him harshly," the interpreter said, telling him that if he failed to cooperate, he would be shipped to a prison in the United States, where he would be "treated like a woman, by the other men" and face the wrath of criminals who "would be very angry with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks." (Specialist Walls was charged last week with assault, maltreatment and failure to obey a lawful order; Specialist Claus was charged with assault, maltreatment and lying to investigators. Each man declined to comment.)
A third military intelligence specialist who spoke some Pashto, Staff Sgt. W. Christopher Yonushonis, had questioned Mr. Dilawar earlier and had arranged with Specialist Claus to take over when he was done. Instead, the sergeant arrived at the interrogation room to find a large puddle of water on the floor, a wet spot on Mr. Dilawar's shirt and Specialist Claus standing behind the detainee, twisting up the back of the hood that covered the prisoner's head.
"I had the impression that Josh was actually holding the detainee upright by pulling on the hood," he said. "I was furious at this point because I had seen Josh tighten the hood of another detainee the week before. This behavior seemed completely gratuitous and unrelated to intelligence collection."
"What the hell happened with that water?" Sergeant Yonushonis said he had demanded.
"We had to make sure he stayed hydrated," he said Specialist Claus had responded.
The next morning, Sergeant Yonushonis went to the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Sergeant Loring, to report the incident. Mr. Dilawar, however, was already dead.
The Post-Mortem
The findings of Mr. Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what caused his heart to fail was "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities." Similar injuries contributed to Mr. Habibullah's death.
One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Specialist Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had basically been pulpified."
"I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," added Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the coroner, and a major at that time.
After the second death, several of the 519th Battalion's interrogators were temporarily removed from their posts. A medic was assigned to the detention center to work night shifts. On orders from the Bagram intelligence chief, interrogators were prohibited from any physical contact with the detainees. Chaining prisoners to any fixed object was also banned, and the use of stress positions was curtailed.
In February, an American military official disclosed that the Afghan guerrilla commander whose men had arrested Mr. Dilawar and his passengers had himself been detained. The commander, Jan Baz Khan, was suspected of attacking Camp Salerno himself and then turning over innocent "suspects" to the Americans in a ploy to win their trust, the military official said.
The three passengers in Mr. Dilawar's taxi were sent home from Guantánamo in March 2004, 15 months after their capture, with letters saying they posed "no threat" to American forces.
They were later visited by Mr. Dilawar's parents, who begged them to explain what had happened to their son. But the men said they could not bring themselves to recount the details.
"I told them he had a bed," said Mr. Parkhudin. "I said the Americans were very nice because he had a heart problem."
In late August of last year, shortly before the Army completed its inquiry into the deaths, Sergeant Yonushonis, who was stationed in Germany, went at his own initiative to see an agent of the Criminal Investigation Command. Until then, he had never been interviewed.
"I expected to be contacted at some point by investigators in this case," he said. "I was living a few doors down from the interrogation room, and I had been one of the last to see this detainee alive."
Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said.
He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."
Ruhallah Khapalwak, Carlotta Gall and David Rohde contributed reporting for this article, and Alain Delaqueriere assisted with research.
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15) U.S. Says Iraq Raid Kills 49 Militants
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:36 a.m. ET
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD (AP) -- U.S. forces backed by airstrikes raided Sadr City, Baghdad's main Shiite district, killing 49 militants on Sunday as they targeted a militia leader accused in high-profile kidnappings, the military said. Iraqi officials said women and children were among the dead.
The Iraqi reports followed other recent claims of civilian deaths as a result of U.S. military action or shootings by private Western security teams protecting American diplomats and aid groups. The military said it was not know of any civilians killed.
Tensions also rose in northern Iraq after separatist Kurdish rebels ambushed a military unit near Turkey's border with Iraq, killing at least 12 soldiers. Turkey's government has threatened to take action against the rebels based in northern Iraq if the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq does not stop the Kurdish attacks on Turkish forces.
Hours after the ambush, an Iraqi army officer from the border guard forces, Col. Hussein Rashid, said Turkish forces fired about 15 artillery shells toward Kurdish villages in the border area in northern Iraq. But there were no casualties.
In Sadr City, the U.S. military said ''an estimated 49 criminals'' were killed in three separate engagements during a raid targeting a suspected rogue Shiite militia leader specializing in kidnapping operations for which he sought funding from Iran.
U.S. troops returned fire after coming under sustained attack from automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades from nearby buildings as they began to raid a series of buildings in the district, according to a statement, which added that some 33 militants were killed in the firefight. Ground forces then called in airstrikes, which killed some six militants.
The U.S. troops were then attacked by a roadside bomb and continued heavy fire as they left the area, killing another 10 combatants in subsequent clashes.
''All total, coalition forces estimate that 49 criminals were killed in three separate engagements during this operation. Ground forces reported they were unaware of any innocent civilians being killed as a result of this operation,'' the military said in the updated statement.
Iraqi police and hospital officials put the death toll at at least 13 and said a woman and three children were among the dead from the pre-dawn raid in the sprawling district. They said 52 people were injured.
Associated Press photos showed the bodies of two toddlers, one with a gouged face, swaddled in blankets on the floor of the morgue. Relatives said they were killed when helicopter gunfire hit their house as they slept. Their shirts were pulled up, exposing their abdomens. A diaper showed above the waistband of the shorts of one of the boys.
Several houses, cars and shops were damaged in the fighting, which witnesses said lasted two hours.
Iraqis have routinely claimed civilians were killed as U.S.-led forces stepped up raids to try to root out extremists in Sadr City and other Shiite strongholds as part of an 8-month-old security operation to quell sectarian violence.
But the reported death toll in Sunday's strike was among the largest.
On Aug. 8, the U.S. military said 32 suspected militants were killed and 12 captured in an operation targeting a ring believed to be smuggling armor-piercing roadside bombs from Iran. Iraqi police and witnesses claimed nine civilians, including two women, were killed in that raid.
The sweeps into Sadr City have sent a strong message that U.S. forces plan no letup on suspected Shiite militia cells despite risks of upsetting the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and its efforts at closer cooperation with Shiite heavyweight Iran.
An Iraqi military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, said the government would ask the military for an explanation about Sunday's raid and stressed the need to avoid civilian deaths everywhere.
The government has had mixed reactions to the raids and airstrikes, particularly when they target Sunni extremists.
U.S. troops backed by attack aircraft also killed 19 suspected insurgents and 15 civilians, including nine children, in an operation Oct. 11 targeting al-Qaida in Iraq leaders northwest of Baghdad.
In that case, al-Maliki's government said the killings of the 15 women and children were a ''sorrowful matter,'' but added that civilian deaths are unavoidable in the fight against al-Qaida.
Relatives gathered at Sadr City's Imam Ali hospital as the emergency room was overwhelmed with bloodied victims and the dead were placed in caskets covered by Iraqi flags.
An initial military statement e-mailed to The Associated Press said the raids were targeting ''criminals believed to be responsible for the kidnapping of coalition soldiers in November 2006 and May 2007.''
However a later release said only that U.S. troops, acting on intelligence, raided a number of buildings in an operation targeting a rogue Shiite militia leader specializing in Iranian-funded kidnappings.
The military said it was targeting a member of a breakaway faction of the Mahdi Army militia that is nominally loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. The anti-American cleric has called on his fighters to stand down.
At the Imam Ali hospital, a local resident who goes by the name Abu Fatmah said his neighbor's 14-year-old son, Saif Alwan, was killed while sleeping on the roof. Fatmah said many of the casualties were people sleeping on the roof to seek relief from the hot weather and lack of electricity.
''Saif was killed by an airstrike and what is his guilt? Is he from the Mahdi Army? He is a poor student,'' Abu Fatmah said.
An uncle of 2-year-old Ali Hamid said the boy was killed and his parents seriously wounded when heavy gunfire from a helicopter struck the wall and windows of their house as they slept indoors.
APTN video showed a U.S. helicopter flying over the area while black smoke rose into the sky.
Other footage showed three bloodied boys sitting on hospital tables and an elderly man being treated for a head wound.
Mourners tied wooden coffins onto the tops of minivans with the plume of smoking rising in the background.
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16) Soft Spot for the South Bronx
By ANNE BARNARD
October 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/nyregion/21citgo.html?ref=nyregion
Henry Lajara is mapping out where to install a rain barrel in his manicured South Bronx backyard, to show his neighbors how they can channel storm water to feed their gardens and keep runoff from flushing sewage into the Bronx River.
Lenard Ramsook, 20, glides down that river in a wooden boat, teaching local high school students how to row. He shows them the ospreys and leaping fish that share the estuary with concrete plants and expressway bridges, making the point that environmentalism is not just for the rich.
Across the South Bronx, residents are beginning cooperatives to create jobs and tend to their communities’ social needs and physical health. One will recycle demolition debris. Another sells fruit and vegetables. A third will provide child care for working families.
Behind all these projects is a man who has called President Bush “the devil,” embraced Iran’s firebrand leader as a fellow crusader against “the U.S. empire,” and vowed to help the poor and disenfranchised everywhere, even — or, perhaps, especially — in the world’s most powerful country.
That man, Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, began his love affair with the Bronx during a visit in 2005. Since then, he and his socialist government have funneled millions of dollars of aid to the South Bronx, home to New York’s poorest Congressional district, through Citgo Petroleum, the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.
It is an unlikely flow of largess, from an oil-rich South American country where much of the population lives in poverty to one of the neediest pockets in the seat of American capitalism.
Citgo started its outreach in 2005 with a 40 percent discount on heating oil for poor households and expanded it in August to finance social and economic development. The company has committed to donating $3.6 million over the next three years to nine Bronx initiatives that would use the money to create jobs, foster community empowerment and clean up the urban environment.
The program has made Mr. Chávez the talk of the South Bronx.
“He came in here and took over — like a Spanish Napoleon!” Lucy Martinez said.
Ms. Martinez, 57, said Mr. Chávez has helped the needy residents she meets while working the front desk at Nos Quedamos, a nonprofit community development corporation. But she knows, too, that his philanthropy has chafed some American politicians.
Patrice White-McGleese, 37, an employment counselor who saved $160 to $300 a month during the past two winters through the discounted oil program, said she knows why Mr. Chávez’s actions have rankled.
“It’s a sore point because it took what most people would consider a third world nation to help the U.S.,” she said. “Which is kind of a slap in the face because we’re supposed to be one of the superpowers; why can’t we help our own?”
Some people in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, have the same question for their own government, said Leopoldo López, mayor of the downtown district of Chacao and a leader of the Venezuelan opposition.
“Why is the government giving away money to the richest city in the world?” he asked.
Mr. López said Mr. Chávez should first tend to the needs of Venezuelans who lack shelter, sewage and drinking water.
He said Mr. Chávez was giving the money to the Bronx to win support around the world while distracting attention from his moves to crack down on the opposition at home.
So the program has made Bronx residents, who are trying to solve the most local of problems, party to a global dispute. They are caught between Mr. Chávez, who markets his populist platform as a counterweight to the worldwide influence of the United States, and the Bush administration, which contends that Mr. Chávez’s stress on racial and economic equality masks a dictatorship-in-the-making.
Mr. Chávez began clashing with Venezuela’s corporate leaders and the United States shortly after being elected in 1998. In 2002, military officers staged a coup to oust him. The Bush administration quickly recognized the new government. But Mr. Chávez returned to office days later after a wave of street protests, and he accused the United States of aiding the coup.
He turned his attentions to the Bronx in the fall of 2005, when he visited South Bronx community organizers with Representative José E. Serrano, the Democrat who represents the district. Those meetings led to the discounted heating oil program.
By the winter of 2006-7, the program had doubled to deliver 100 million gallons to 1.2 million people from Alaska to Vermont. Citgo said it expected to supply 110 million gallons this winter.
Some recipients bridled in September 2006, when Mr. Chávez stepped up to a United Nations podium — one that President Bush had used the day before — and declared that he smelled traces of “the devil.”
“It smells of sulfur still today,” Mr. Chávez added.
Said Mr. Serrano: “Was it tacky? Yes.” But, he said, Mr. Chávez was just being emotional.
Meanwhile, Citgo and Venezuelan officials made follow-up visits to the Bronx. During one of them, Mrs. White-McGleese said she wanted to thank Venezuelans for their generosity. Within weeks, in April 2006, she and 62 people who had received the discounted oil were on a plane to Caracas as Mr. Chávez’s guests.
A band met them at the airport. They watched an African-Venezuelan dance performance. And they visited Mr. Chávez at Miraflores Palace, the president’s official residence. A few of the American guests — including Pamela Babb, a vice president of the Mount Hope Housing Company, a nonprofit group that provides low-income housing in the Bronx — appeared on Mr. Chávez’s weekly television show.
“It was pomp and circumstance,” said Ms. Babb, 47.
She said she remained suspicious of Mr. Chávez’s efforts to expand his presidential powers. (“I question that,” she said.) And a Mount Hope tenant, Lenice Footman, noticed children playing in garbage on Caracas’s streets and came away “grateful for what we have.”
But many of them were impressed when a Philadelphia woman told Mr. Chávez of the lack of jobs and services in her neighborhood and the Venezuelan leader declared it was time to aid development in poor United States communities.
“And all these ministers started writing things down,” Ms. Babb said. “It shows you what happens when a visionary person starts to do something. And I was there.”
Ms. Babb said Citgo officials visit the Bronx more often than the other corporate donors she works with. They have asked community groups what kinds of grants they need, awarding one to Mount Hope for a child care cooperative. And they celebrated with the locals in Hunts Point Riverside Park over Venezuelan food — arepas and carne mechada — and Latin American music.
The Citgo donations are a tiny percentage of its annual budget. It does not have to disclose financial statements because it is not a publicly traded company. Citgo, which sold 25.1 billion gallons of petroleum products last year, estimates that last winter’s oil program cost it $80 million, according to a Citgo document provided by Bernardo Alvarez Herrera, the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States.
That is about the same amount that Exxon Mobil — the largest publicly traded oil company, with roughly 10 times the revenue of Citgo — reported spending on philanthropy in the United States in 2006.
“We are not trying to impose,” Mr. Alvarez said, “or to intervene in the politics here.”
United States petroleum industry officials are not happy, however, with Citgo’s program.
It is “designed to embarrass us,” Larry Goldstein, the president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, an industry-supported analysis group in New York, said when it was launched in 2005.
“It’s not designed to help poor people,” he said. “Chávez is astute, clever, with a major political agenda, largely to get under our skin, and he does that everywhere and anywhere he can.”
On the ground, Citgo’s money seems to come without strings — or even much branding.
At Rocking the Boat, the Bronx River education program, Mr. Ramsook, who left behind a fisherman’s life when he moved to the Bronx from Trinidad, said he could not place Mr. Chávez’s name. “It sounds familiar,” he said. He was more enthusiastic about taking seniors from Bronx Guild High School on the water to learn the history of the river.
“There’s no sharks, right?” asked Shawnisha Roebuck, 19, as she settled into the stern. On shore, an iron claw lifted metal scraps from one pile to another. But on the river, gulls stalked the banks, and the movements of small fish made the water flicker. An osprey plunged to the water, but came up empty.
Citgo’s $210,000, three-year grant has allowed the group to expand the high school program and hold free Saturday rowing lessons that have drawn 500 people since August.
A $230,000 grant is helping Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice build rain barrels, plant rooftop vegetation and reshape gutters to feed sidewalk trees. And the South Bronx Food Co-operative will use its $49,000 to open a storefront to sell affordable produce.
Anna Vincenty of Nos Quedamos, who is working on a program to improve the diets of elderly residents, said she takes Mr. Chávez’s good will, like she does with all politicians, with a grain of salt.
“He says he wants to help people over here,” she said. Yet her Venezuelan friends have told her that “some of the people over there are afraid of him.”
On the other hand, she said, in the United States, “one of the most generous countries in the whole world,” pervasive inequality is on display.
But no matter what one thinks of Mr. Chávez, she said: “If your child is cold and hungry and someone offers to help, do you care if it’s Moe or Larry or Curly? I don’t think so.”
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17) Priests Protesting Torture Jailed
By Bill Quigley
10/18/07 "ICH
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18584.htm
" -- -- Louis Vitale, 75, a Franciscan priest, and Steve Kelly, 58, a Jesuit priest, were each sentenced to five months in federal prison for attempting to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Both priests were taken directly into jail from the courtroom after sentencing.
Fort Huachuca is the headquarters of military intelligence in the U.S. and the place where military and civilian interrogators are taught how to extract information from prisoners. The priests attempted to deliver their letter to Major General Barbara Fast, commander of Fort Huachuca. Fast was previously the head of all military intelligence in Iraq during the atrocities of Abu Ghraib.
The priests were arrested while kneeling in prayer halfway up the driveway to Fort Huachuca in November 2006. Both priests were charged with trespass on a military base and resisting orders of an officer to stop.
In a pre-trial heating, the priests attempted to introduce evidence of torture, murder, and gross violations of human rights in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at Guantanamo. The priests offered investigative reports from the FBI, the US Army, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Physicians for Social Responsibility documenting hundreds of incidents of human rights violations. Despite increasing evidence of the use of torture by U.S. forces sanctioned by President Bush and others, the federal court in Tucson refused to allow any evidence of torture, the legality of the invasion of Iraq, or international law to be a part of the trial.
Outside the courthouse, before the judge ordered them to prison, the priests explained their actions: „The real crime here has always been the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca and the practice of torture around the world. We tried to deliver a letter asking that the teaching of torture be stopped and were arrested. We tried to put the evidence of torture on full and honest display in the courthouse and were denied. We were prepared to put on evidence about the widespread use of torture and human rights abuses committed during interrogations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in Iraq and Afhganistan. This evidence was gathered by the military itself and by governmental and human rights investigations.‰
Fr. Vitale, a longtime justice and peace activist in San Francisco and Nevada, said: „Because the court will not allow the truth of torture to be a part of our trial, we plead no contest. We are uninterested in a court hearing limited to who was walking where and how many steps it was to the gate. History will judge whether silencing the facts of torture is just or not. Far too many people have died because of our national silence about torture. Far too many of our young people in the military have been permanently damaged after following orders to torture and violate the human rights of other humans.‰
Fr. Kelly, who walked to the gates of Guantanamo with the Catholic Worker group in December of 2005, concluded: „We will keep trying to stop the teaching and practice of torture whether we are sent to jail or out. We have done our part for now. Now it is up to every woman and man of conscience to do their part to stop the injustice of torture.‰
The priests were prompted to protest by continuing revelations about the practice of torture by U.S. military and intelligence officers. The priests were also deeply concerned after learning of the suicide in Iraq of a young, devout female military interrogator in Iraq, Alyssa Peterson of Arizona, shortly after arriving in Iraq. Peterson was reported to be horrified by the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Investigation also revealed that Fort Huachuca was the source of infamous „torture manuals‰ distributed to hundreds of Latin American graduates of the U.S. Army School of Americas at Fort Benning, GA. Demonstrations against the teaching of torture at Fort Huachuca have been occurring for the past several years each November and are scheduled again for November 16 and 17 this year.
Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill can be reached at Quigley@loyno.edu .
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18) Bush asks for $46 billion more for wars
By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 48 minutes ago
October 22, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071022/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_war_spending_21
WASHINGTON - President Bush asked Congress on Monday for another $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and finance other national security needs. "We must provide our troops with the help and support they need to get the job done," Bush said.
The figure brings to $196.4 billion the total requested by the administration for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for the budget year that started Oct. 1. It includes $189.3 billion for the Defense Department, $6.9 billion for the State Department and $200 million for other agencies.
To date, Congress has already provided more than $455 billion for the Iraq war, with stepped-up military operations running about $10 billion a month. The war has claimed the lives of more than 3,830 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians.
Bush made his request in the Roosevelt Room after meeting in the Oval Office with leaders of veterans service organizations, a fallen Marine's family and military personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The White House originally asked for $141.7 billion for the Pentagon to prosecute the Iraq and Afghanistan missions and asked for $5.3 billion more in July. The latest request includes $42.3 billion more for the Pentagon — already revealed in summary last month — and is accompanied by a modified State Department request bringing that agency's total for the 2008 budget year to almost $7 billion.
Bush said any member of Congress who wants to see success in Iraq, and see U.S. troops return home, should strongly support the request.
"I know some in Congress are against the war and are seeking ways to demonstrate that opposition," Bush said. "I recognize their position and they should make their views heard. But they ought to make sure our troops have what it takes to succeed. Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington, D.C."
Democrats were not swayed.
"We've been fighting for America's priorities while the president continues investing only in his failed war strategy — and wants us to come up with another $200 billion and just sign off on it?" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "President Bush should not expect Congress to rubber stamp his latest supplemental request. We're not going to do that."
The State Department is requesting $550 million to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, $375 million for the West Bank and Gaza and $239 million for diplomatic costs in Iraq.
Top House lawmakers have already announced that they do not plan to act on Bush's request until next year, though they anticipate providing interim funds when completing a separate defense funding bill this fall. Bush asked lawmakers to approve the request before the holidays.
"We must provide our troops with the help and support they need to get the job done," Bush said. "Parts of this war are complicated, but one part is not, and that is America should do what it takes to support our troops and protect our people."
Congress already has approved more than $5 billion for new vehicles whose V-shaped undercarriages provide much better protection against mines and roadside bombs. It's likely that Congress will quickly grant $11 billion more to deliver more than 7,000 of the vehicles.
The delays in submitting the remaining war funding request were in part due to unease among congressional Republicans about receiving it during the veto override battle involving a popular bill reauthorizing a children's health insurance program.
The request also includes $724 million for U.N. peacekeeping efforts in the war-torn Darfur region in Sudan, $106 million in fuel oil or comparable assistance to North Korea as a reward for the rogue nation's promises to cease its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Another $350 million would go to fight famine in Africa.
For the Pentagon, the latest request includes:
- $1 billion for military construction projects, including improvements at airfields and other U.S. bases in Iraq.
- $1 billion to expand the Iraqi security forces.
- $1 billion to train National Guard units.
All told, the $189.3 billion Pentagon request for 2008 includes:
- $77 billion for military operations and maintenance.
- $30.5 billion for to protect U.S. forces from roadside bombs, snipers, and other threats.
- $46.5 billion to repair and replace equipment that has been damaged or destroyed in combat or worn out in harsh conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report in Washington.
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19) No Convictions in Trial Against Muslim Charity
By LESLIE EATON
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/22cnd-holyland.html?hp
DALLAS, Oct. 22 —A federal jury today failed to convict any of the former leaders of a Muslim charity who were charged with financing Middle Eastern terrorists, and the judge declared a mistrial on almost all of the charges.
The case, involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, is the government’s largest and most complex legal effort to shut down what it contends is American financing for terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Even though the investigation began more than a decade ago, the trial was being closely watched by legal experts who saw it as test of anti-terrorism laws and tactics adopted by the government after the Sept. 11 attacks, including laws that allow it to freeze assets of groups it says are aiding terrorist organizations.
David D. Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, said the jury’s verdict called into question the government’s tactics of using secret evidence to freeze a charity’s assets. When, at trial, “they have to put their evidence on the table, they can’t convict anyone of anything,” he said. “It suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.” Prosecutors were trying to show that the charity, based in a Dallas suburb, was not simply trying to help poor Palestinians, as Holy Land officials said, but was in fact an arm of the radical Islamic group Hamas; the 36 charges included conspiracy, money laundering and providing financial support to a foreign terrorist organization.
The case involved more than a decade of investigation, almost two months of testimony — including some from Israeli intelligence agents using pseudonyms — and mounds of documents, wiretap transcripts and even videotapes dug up in a backyard in Virginia.
But after more than 19 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted one of the five individual defendants of all but one charge, on which it deadlocked. Most jury members also appeared ready to acquit two other defendants of most charges, and failed to reach a verdict on the two principal organizers and on the foundation itself, which had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the government froze its assets in late 2001.
The decision today is “a stunning setback for the government, there’s no other way of looking at it,” said Matthew D. Orwig, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal here who was, until recently, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.
“This is a message, a two-by-four in the middle of the forehead,” Mr. Orwig said. “If this doesn’t get their attention, they are just in complete denial,” he said of Justice Department officials.
The outcome of the trial emerged during a morning of confusion for jurors and those on both sides of the case, after Chief Judge A. Joe Fish read the verdict, which the jury had reached on Oct. 18 but which had been sealed because the judge was out of town.
In it, the jury said it failed to reach a decision on any of the charges against the charity and two of its main organizers, but acquitted three defendants on almost all counts.
But in an unusual development, when the judge polled the jurors, three members said that verdict did not represent their views. He sent them off deliberate again; after about 40 minutes, they returned and said they could not continue.
In the end, one defendant, Mohammed el-Mezain, was acquitted all on charges but one involving conspiracy, on which the jury failed to reach a verdict.
The five individual defendants in the case, all former officials of or volunteers for the foundation, faced as many as 36 counts apiece. Between the lengthy jury instructions and the verdict form, the packet given to the jurors “looks like the phone book for a small city,” the judge had said.
In the course of the trial, prosecutors said that the Holy Land Foundation functioned as an arm of Hamas, the radical Palestinian group that has sponsored suicide bombings in Israel. The government did not allege that the foundation’s money paid directly for attacks, but rather that the money — more than $12 million — which had been sent to charities controlled by Hamas, had increased public support for Hamas and had helped it recruit terrorists and spread its ideology.
Lawyers for the defendants told the jury that their clients did not support terrorism; rather, the defense said, they were humanitarians trying to lessen suffering among impoverished Palestinians. Though their clients might have expressed support for Hamas, the defense argued, they did so before the United States government designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1995.
One defendant, Mufid Abdulqader, is the half-brother of Khalid Mishal, a Hamas leader who has been designated as a terrorist by the United States government. Another Hamas official and designated terrorist, Mousa abu Marzook, is married to a cousin of the former chairman of Holy Land, Ghassan Elashi, a defendant in the case; last year, Mr. Elashi was sentenced to almost seven years in prison for having financial dealings with Mr. Marzook and for violating export laws.
The jury has been out since Sept. 19, although their deliberations were slowed by the replacement of one juror on Sept. 26. Judge Fish did not reveal why he replaced the juror with an alternate, nor did he disclose the contents of several early notes the jury sent him.
On Oct. 3, the jury sent the judge another note indicating that one panel member was refusing to vote; Judge Fish read them what is known as an Allen charge, stressing their responsibility to try to reach a verdict.
The case has been highly controversial among many Muslim Americans, who believe that their charitable efforts, required by their religion, are being unfairly singled out. During the trial, protesters gathered across the street from the federal courthouse here, holding signs with slogans like, “Prosecuting Islamic Charities is a Homeland Insecurity.”
“It’s an extremely expansive statute to begin with, and the prosecution’s interpretation in this case is the most expansive I’ve seen yet,” David D. Cole, an expert on constitutional law at Georgetown University in Washington, said before the mistrial was declared.
Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York.
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20) Gone Baby Gone
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
October 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?hp
It pains me to say this, but this time Alan Greenspan is right about housing.
Mr. Greenspan was wrong in 2004, when he sang the praises of adjustable-rate mortgages. He was wrong in 2005, when he dismissed the idea that there was a national housing bubble, suggesting that at most there was some “froth” in the market. He was wrong last fall, when he suggested that the worst of the housing slump was behind us. (Housing starts have fallen 30 percent since then.)
But his latest pronouncement — that the market rescue plan being pushed by Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, is likely to make things worse rather than better — looks all too accurate.
To understand why, we need to talk about the nature of the mess.
First of all, as I could have told you — actually, I did — there was indeed a huge national housing bubble.
What even those of us who realized that there was a bubble didn’t appreciate, however, was how much of a threat the bursting of that bubble would pose to financial markets.
Today, when a bank makes a home loan, it doesn’t hold on to it. Instead, it quickly sells the mortgage off to financial engineers, who chop up, repackage and resell home loans pretty much the way supermarkets chop up, repackage and resell meat.
It’s a business model that depends on trust. You don’t know anything about the cows that contributed body parts to your package of ground beef, so you have to trust the supermarket when it assures you that the beef is U.S.D.A. prime. You don’t know anything about the subprime mortgage loans that were sliced, diced and pureed to produce that mortgage-backed security, so you have to trust the seller — and the rating agency — when it assures you that it’s a AAA investment.
But in the case of housing-related investments, investors’ trust was betrayed. Supposedly safe investments suddenly turned into junk bonds when the housing bubble burst. High profits reported by hedge funds — profits that were reflected in huge payments to the fund managers — turn out to have been based on wishful thinking.
Thus, when two hedge funds run by Ralph Cioffi of Bear Stearns imploded last summer, it came as a huge shock to many investors, and helped trigger a market panic. But a recent BusinessWeek report shows that the funds were a disaster waiting to happen. The funds borrowed huge amounts, and invested the proceeds in questionable mortgage-backed securities.
Even worse, “more than 60 percent of their net worth was tied up in exotic securities whose reported value was estimated by Cioffi’s own team.” We’re profitable because we say we are — just trust us. That hasn’t ever caused problems, has it?
Stories like this have led to a crisis of confidence. The current yield on one-month U.S. government bills is only 3.41 percent, an amazingly low number, and a sign that people are parking their money in government debt because they don’t trust private borrowers. And the result is a shortage of liquidity — the ability to raise cash — that is greatly damaging the economy.
Which brings us to the rescue plan proposed by a group of large banks, with Mr. Paulson’s backing.
Right now the bleeding edge of the crisis in confidence involves worries that there may be large losses hidden inside so-called “structured investment vehicles” — basically hedge funds that borrow from the public and invest the proceeds in mortgage-backed securities. The new plan would create a “super-fund,” the Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, which would seek to restore confidence by, um, borrowing from the public and investing the proceeds in mortgage-backed securities.
The plan, in other words, looks like an attempt to solve the problem with smoke and mirrors.
That might work if there were no good reason for investors to be worried. But in this case, investors have very good reasons to worry: the bursting of the housing bubble means that someone, somewhere, has to accept several trillion dollars in losses. A significant part of these losses will fall on mortgage-backed securities. And given this reality, the “conduit” looks like a really bad idea.
I’d put it like this: Investors aren’t putting their money to work because they don’t know where the bad debts are. And when investors need clarity, the last thing you want to be doing is pumping out more smoke.
Mr. Greenspan’s take, expressed in an interview with the magazine Emerging Markets, seems broadly similar. “If you believe some form of artificial non-market force is propping up the market,” he said, “you don’t believe the market price has exhausted itself.”
Translated: this rescue scheme could be seen as an attempt to hide the bad debts everyone knows are out there, and as a result could delay any return of trust to the markets.
Alan Greenspan is making sense.
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Britain: New Claim for Sovereignty in Antarctica
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Europe
Britain plans to submit a claim to the United Nations to extend its Antarctic territory by 386,000 square miles, the Foreign Office said. Argentina wants some of it, and its foreign minister said his country was working on its own presentation. May 13, 2009, is the deadline for countries to stake their claims in what some experts are describing as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history.
October 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/world/europe/18briefs-claim.html?ref=world
California: Veto of 3 Criminal Justice Bills
By SOLOMON MOORE
Bucking a national trend toward stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed bills that would have explored new eyewitness identification guidelines, required electronic recordings of police interrogations and mandated corroboration of jailhouse informant testimony. Mr. Schwarzenegger cited his concern that the three bills would hamper local law enforcement authorities, a contention shared by several state police and prosecutor associations. The proposals had been recommended by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a bipartisan body of police officials, prosecutors and defense lawyers charged by the State Senate to address the most common causes of wrongful convictions and recommend changes in criminal justice procedures.
October 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16brfs-VETOOF3CRIMI_BRF.html?ref=us
Illinois: Chicagoans May Have to Dig Deeper
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Chicagoans would have to spend 10 cents more on a bottle of water, pay higher property taxes and spend more for liquor under Mayor Richard M. Daley’s proposed budget for next year. Also financing Mr. Daley’s $5.4 billion budget are higher water and sewer fees and more expensive vehicle stickers for people driving large vehicles, $120 a vehicle sticker, up from $90. Mr. Daley announced his budget to aldermen, calling it a last resort to ask taxpayers for more money. His budget closes a $196 million deficit and avoids service cuts and layoffs. Budget hearings will be held, and a city spending plan will require a vote by aldermen.
Midwest
October 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/us/11brfs-CHICAGO.html?ref=us
Wisconsin Iraq vet returns medals to Rumsfeld
By David Solnit, Courage to Resist / Army of None Project.
"I swore an oath to protect the constitution ... not to become a pawn in your New American Century."
September 26, 2007
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Madison, Wisconsin--Joshua Gaines, who served a year long tour in Iraq in 2004 to 2005 with the Army Reserve, returned his Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal and National Defense Service Medal to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today by mail as dozens of supporters look on.
Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages
By ADAM LIPTAK
September 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/business/27cnd-verizon.html?ref=us
Manhattan: Slain Soldier to Receive Citizenship
A soldier from Washington Heights who was killed while serving with the Army’s Second Infantry Division in Iraq is to receive citizenship posthumously on Monday, immigration officials said in a statement yesterday. The soldier, Cpl. Juan Alcántara, 22, left, was one of four soldiers killed in an explosion as they searched a house in Baquba on Aug. 6. Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, will speak at a ceremony at the City University Great Hall in Manhattan and present a certificate to Corporal Alcántara’s family. The corporal was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in Washington Heights, Mr. Rangel’s office said.
September 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/nyregion/14mbrfs-SOLDIER.html?ref=nyregion
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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USLAW Endorses September 15 Antiwar Demonstration in Washington, DC
USLAW Leadership Urges Labor Turnout
to Demand End to Occupation in Iraq, Hands Off Iraqi Oil
By a referendum ballot of members of the Steering Committee of U.S. Labor Against the War, USLAW is now officially on record endorsing and encouraging participation in the antiwar demonstration called by the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in Washington, DC on September 15. The demonstration is timed to coincide with a Congressional vote scheduled in late September on a new Defense Department appropriation that will fund the Iraq War through the end of Bush's term in office.
U.S. Labor Against the War
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/
Stop the Iraq Oil Law
http://www.petitiononline.com/iraqoil/petition.html
2007 Iraq Labor Solidarity Tour
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?list=type&type=103
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FREE THE JENA SIX
http://www.mmmhouston.net/loc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114&Itemid=66
This is a modern day lynching"--Marcus Jones, father of Mychal Bell
WRITE LETTERS TO:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
FAX: (318) 992-8701
WE NEED 400 LETTERS SENT BEFORE MYCHAL BELL'S SENTENCING DATE ON JULY 31ST. THEY ARE ALL INNOCENT!
Sign the NAACP's Online Petition to the Governor of Louisiana and Attorney General
http://www.naacp.org/get-involved/activism/petitions/jena-6/index.php
JOIN THE MASS PROTEST IN SUPPORT OF
MYCHAL BELL & THE JENA 6
WHERE: JENA COURTHOUSE in Louisiana
WHEN: TUESDAY, JULY 31ST
TIME: 9:00AM
THE HOUSTON MMM MINISTRY OF JUSTICE IS ORGANIZING A CARAVAN TO JOIN FORCES WITH THE JENA 6 FAMILIES, THE COLOR OF CHANGE, LOCs, AND OTHER ORGANIZATIONS ON THE STEPS OF THE COURTHOUSE THAT DAY TO DEMAND JUSTICE!
ALL INTERESTED IN GOING TO THE RALLY CALL:
HOUSTON RESIDENTS: 832.258.2480
ministryofjustice@mmmhouston.net
BATON ROUGE RESIDENTS: 225.806.3326
MONROE RESIDENTS: 318.801.0513
JENA RESIDENTS: 318.419.6441
Send Donations to the Jena 6 Defense Fund:
Jena 6 Defense Committee
P.O. Box 2798
Jena, Louisiana 71342
BACKGROUND TO THE JENA SIX:
Young Black males the target of small-town racism
By Jesse Muhammad
Staff Writer
"JENA, La. (FinalCall.com) - Marcus Jones, the father of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell, pulls out a box full of letters from countless major colleges and universities in America who are trying to recruit his son. Mr. Jones, with hurt in his voice, says, “He had so much going for him. My son is innocent and they have done him wrong.”
An all-White jury convicted Mr. Bell of two felonies—aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery—and faces up to 22 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 31. Five other young Black males are also awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight: Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15. Together, this group has come to be known as the “Jena 6.”
Updated Jul 22, 2007
FOR FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_3753.shtml
My Letter to Judge Mauffray:
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
P.O. BOX 1890
JENA, LOUISIANA 71342
RE: THE JENA SIX
Dear Judge Mauffray,
I am appalled to learn of the conviction of 16-year-old Jena High School football star Mychal Bell and the arrest of five other young Black men who are awaiting their day in court for alleged attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder charges evolving from a school fight. These young men, Mychal Bell, 16; Robert Bailey, 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; Bryant Purvis, 17; and Jesse Beard, 15, who have come to be known as the “Jena 6” have the support of thousands of people around the country who want to see them free and back in school.
Clearly, two different standards are in place in Jena—one standard for white students who go free even though they did, indeed, make a death threat against Black students—the hanging of nooses from a tree that only white students are allowed to sit under—and another set of rules for those that defended themselves against these threats. The nooses were hung after Black students dared to sit in the shade of that “white only” tree!
If the court is sincerely interested in justice, it will drop the charges against all of these six students, reinstate them back into school and insist that the school teach the white students how wrong they were and still are for their racist attitudes and violent threats! It is the duty of the schools to uphold the constitution and the bill of rights. A hanging noose or burning cross is just like a punch in the face or worse so says the Supreme Court! Further, it is an act of vigilantism and has no place in a “democracy”.
The criminal here is white racism, not a few young men involved in a fistfight!
I am a 62-year-old white woman who grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Fistfights among teenagers—as you certainly must know yourself—are a right of passage. Please don’t tell me you have never gotten into one. Even I picked a few fights with a few girls outside of school for no good reason. (We soon, in fact, became fast friends.) Children are not just smaller sized adults. They are children and go through this. The fistfight is normal and expected behavior that adults can use to educate children about the negative effect of the use of violence to solve disputes. That is what adults are supposed to do.
Hanging nooses in a tree because you hate Black people is not normal at all! It is a deep sickness that our schools and courts are responsible for unless they educate and act against it. This means you must overturn the conviction of Mychal Bell and drop the cases against Robert Bailey, Theo Shaw, Carwin Jones, Bryant Purvis, and Jesse Beard.
It also means you must take responsibility to educate white teachers, administrators, students and their families against racism and order them to refrain from their racist behavior from here on out—and make sure it is carried out!
You are supposed to defend the students who want to share the shade of a leafy green tree not persecute them—that is the real crime that has been committed here!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War
www.bauaw.org
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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Youtube interview with the DuPage County Activists Who Were Arrested for Bannering
You can watch an interview with the two DuPage County antiwar activists
who arrested after bannering over the expressway online at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DuPageFight4Freedom
Please help spread the word about this interview, and if you haven't
already done so, please contact the DuPage County State's attorney, Joe
Birkett, to demand that the charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah
Heartfield be dropped. The contact information for Birkett is:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Please forward this information far and wide.
My Letter:
Joseph E. Birkett, State's Attorney
503 N. County Farm Road
Wheaton, IL 60187
Phone: (630) 407-8000
Fax: (630) 407-8151
Email: stsattn@dupageco.org
Dear State's Attorney Birkett,
The news of the arrest of Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield is getting out far and wide. Their arrest is outrageous! Not only should all charges be dropped against Jeff and Sarah, but a clear directive should be given to Police Departments everywhere that this kind of harassment of those who wish to practice free speech will not be tolerated.
The arrest of Jeff and Sarah was the crime. The display of their message was an act of heroism!
We demand you drop all charges against Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Heartfield NOW!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, www.bauaw.org, San Francisco, California
415-824-8730
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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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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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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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.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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