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Bay Area United Against War Activists
Save 20% on George Bernard Shaw’s anti-war masterpiece: HEARTBREAK HOUSE
August 31—September 8
Artist, socialist, feminist, anti-war activist, vegetarian, freethinker, street-corner orator, and all-around raconteur, if there’s one man who belongs in Berkeley, it’s George Bernard Shaw. Heartbreak House—his hilarious portrayal of a civilization on the edge of decline—was his response to the actions of World War I. And Berkeley Rep is thrilled to kick off its 40th birthday celebration with a timely take on this comic masterwork.
We’re celebrating our 40th birthday all season long with reduced prices from just $27—and Supporters of Bay Area United Against War save 20% on tickets for available performances August 31—September 8. Plus, save even more when you purchase three or more plays!
Purchase tickets online and use promo code 2746.
Click berkeleyrep.org/bayareaunited to learn about “Free Speech” events at the Theatre before your show, more about the play, and details about your discount.
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Stop Government Attacks
Against the Anti-War Movement!
Take Action to Defend Free Speech
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?JServSessionIdr004=k763kwy604.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=205
In an unprecedented action, the ANSWER Coalition today received citations fining the organization $10,000 for the placement of posters announcing the September 15 March on Washington DC. The fines come after a campaign led by FOX news calling for the DC government to take action against those putting up posters for the September 15 demonstration.
They have told us that we have 72 hours to remove every poster, or the fines will go into effect. Tens of thousands of dollars in additional fines are expected in the coming days. Bush’s Interior Department is threatening similar actions against ANSWER. The September 15 posters are legal and conform to city regulations. We will not allow the government's intimidation tactics to slow our outreach or silence the antiwar movement.
We can stop this effort to repress the antiwar movement with your help.
This is part of a systematic effort to disrupt the organizing for the September 15 Mass March that is timed to coincide with the report of General Petraeus and the debate in Congress on the Iraq war.
Iraq war veterans and their families will lead this dramatic march from the White House to the Congress on September 15. The last thing the government wants is to see the streets of Washington DC fill up with throngs of anti-war protesters right in the middle of the debate. But we will not be stopped. Organizing for this demonstration is taking place in cities and towns throughout the country. Buses and car caravans are coming from 90 cities and towns.
Please send a letter today to Washington DC Mayor (Adrian M. Fenty) and to the Director of DC Department of Public Works (William O. Howland, Jr.) demanding an end to the fines, harassment and repression of the anti-war movement. We have a right to publicize the September 15 March. Fining the anti-war movement tens of thousands of dollars for putting up Free Speech-protected literature makes a mockery out of the First Amendment.
Take Action!
The best way to take action is to call the Director of Department of Public Works, William O. Howland, Jr. at 202-673-6833, and the Mayor of DC, Adrian Fenty, at 202-724-8876. You can also send a letter or fax by clicking this link.
We'd suggest saying something along the lines of: "I am writing to protest the fines levied against the ANSWER Coalition for putting up posters for the September 15th March on Washington. The government does not fine politicians who put up campaign posters, or commercial and business interests that plaster Washington, DC with posters. It is outrageous that the city, in concert with FOXNews, are attempting to suppress the antiwar movement. Stop the harassment. Stop the fines."
Let us know how your phone conversations go by emailing us.
http://www.pephost.org/site/News2?JServSessionIdr004=ot6fi9zau1.app2a&page=NewsArticle&id=8575&news_iv_ctrl=1636
Bonnie Weinstein's letter:
I am writing to protest the fines levied against the ANSWER Coalition for putting up posters for the September 15th March on Washington. The government does not fine politicians who put up campaign posters, or commercial and business interests that plaster Washington, DC with posters. It is outrageous that the city, in concert with FOXNews, are attempting to suppress the antiwar movement. Stop the harassment. Stop the fines.
Postering and flyering are the only avenues open to those who can't afford billions of dollars worth of advertising and this has been true historically. Ever since the first person marked a sign in a tree or a rock wall.
Would you also fine Sylvia Pankhurst and the Suffragettes?
Exactly how is it legal to plaster the communities with election posters as long as you pay to have it posted, but it's not legal if people post it themselves for free?
Could it be that the wealthy one percent of the population want to control what the other 99 percent of us hear and see—to the extent that we, the overwhelming majority, will be fined if we express our unity and solidarity against the war and demand that the war end NOW?
Great human strides such as woman's suffrage and civil rights have been fought in the streets through mass demonstrations, postering and flyering. Why? Because these things had to be won by the people in the streets by the only means at their disposal.
Postering and flyering are protected under free speech and freedom of expression.
This form of grass roots expression is performed by church groups, people who have lost their pets, people having garage sales—for all kinds of reasons—people offering services, etc. This is an established mode of mass communication for those who can't pay for it commercially.
Fining the ANSWER coalition for posting notice of a mass-supported demonstration September 15 in Washington, D.C. is unconstitutional and a violation of the free speech of the majority who oppose this war!
Stop the fines! Free speech is FREE!
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein
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Help Save Kenneth Foster—An Innocent Man on Texas Death Row
http://www.freekenneth.com/index.htm
Number of Executions by State and Region Since 1976
(Texas tops the list with more than three times the executions than any other State in the U.S. at 398 out of 1,089 total executions. The next highest execution rate is Virginia, with 98; Oklahoma, 85; Missouri, 66; Florida, 64; California is sixteenth on the list at 13 executions since 1976—the most recent being Tookie Williams in 2006.) Get the full stats at:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=8&did=186
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September 15: A showdown march from the White House to Congress in Washington DC
North/Central California "End the War Now" March
Saturday, October 27, 2007, 11am, San Francisco Civic Center Plaza
Momentum is building for Oct. 27 and beyond.
Here is a schedule of coalition meetings coming up:
Sat. Aug. 18, 11am - Program Commitee Meeting - 2489 Mission St., Rm. 24
Tues. Aug. 21, 6:30pm - Oct 27 Steering Committee Meeting - IFPTE Local
21 - 1182 Market Street (near 8th st.) near Civic Center BART, also it
is usually easy to park in the area at that time of the day.
Wednesday, September 12, 7:00pm - Oct. 27 Coalition Youth and Student Organizing Meeting - 2489 Mission St., Rm. 28
Help build for a massive, united march and rally in San Francisco Oct. 27 to End the War NOW.
This action is sponsored by a broad coalition of groups in the Bay Area. A list will be forthcoming—we are all united on this one and, hopefully in the future.
Funds are urgently needed for all the material—posters, flyers, stickers and buttons, etc.—to get the word out! Make your tax-deductible donation to:
Progress Unity Fund/Oct. 27
and mail to:
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-821-6545
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
To get more information on meeting times or distribution dates call or drop into the ANSWER office at the above address.
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
415-821-6545
(Call to check meeting and event schedules.)
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:32 p.m. ET
August 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-War-Adviser.html
2) World’s Best Medical Care?
NYT Editorial
August 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/opinion/12sun1.html?hp
3) Losing the Advantage
How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad
By DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER
August 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?hp
4) Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq
Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis
Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday August 12, 2007
Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147052,00.html
5) The Mercenary Revolution
Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities
By Jeremy Scahill
Counterpunch
August 13, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/scahill08132007.html
6) Wrong Way Out of Iraq
NYT Editorial
August 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/opinion/13mon1.html?hp
7) The War Against Ward Churchill
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
August 4, 2007
prisonradio.org
8) U.S. May Provide Billions to Mexico to Fight Drug Cartels
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
August 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/world/americas/14mexico.html
9) Prosecutors Turn to Padilla for Closing Arguments
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
August 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/us/14padilla.html?ref=us
10) August 8th -- Again
[col. writ. 8/8/07] (c)
Mumia Abu-Jamal
From: Howard Keylor
howardkeylor@comcast.net
11) Prison Women On Farms - Ready To Harvest
By MARGIE WOOD
The Pueblo Chieftain
Sunday, August 12, 2007
http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1186898467/3
12) U.S. weighs labeling Iran Guard "terrorist": NYT
Reuters
Wednesday, August 15, 2007; 12:41 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/15/AR2007081500081.html
13) U.S. Set to Declare Iran Guards Terrorists
By HELENE COOPER and JIM RUTENBERG
August 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/world/middleeast/15cnd-diplo.html?hp
14) Stink Tanks
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
August 9, 2007
prisonradio.org
15) Parents Warned Cough Medicines Imperil Infants
By GARDINER HARRIS
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/health/16cough.html?hp
16) Push by Chávez to Abandon Term Limits on Presidency
By SIMON ROMERO
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/world/americas/16venez.html?ref=world
17) Muslim Groups Oppose a List of ‘Co-Conspirators’
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/us/16charity.html?ref=us
18) Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
"MENDACITY
Mendacity, mendacity, it makes the world go round.
A politician makes a speech and never hears the sound.
The campaign trail winds on and on in towns from coast to coast.
The winner ain't the one who's straight, but he who lies the most.
Now voting rights in this fair land we know are not denied.
But if I tried in certain states, from tree tops I'd be tied.
Mendacity, mendacity, it seems its everywhere.
But try and tell the truth, and most folks scream 'Not Fair'"
Incomplete: 30 seconds from MENDACITY can be heard here:
http://tinyurl.com/2y7sgx
By PETER KEEPNEWS
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/arts/music/16cnd-roach.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
19) Workouts, Not Bailouts
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
August 17, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?hp
20)The Padilla Conviction
NYT Editorial
August 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/opinion/17fri1.html?hp
RELATED:
Re: "A fair and impartial jury" in the Padilla case:
Padilla Trial: Festive July 4th Jurors or Runaway Jury?
by Greg McNeal
"Over at the Southern District of Florida blog (Hat tip to OK at VC ) David Markus details some interesting wardrobe choices in the Padilla trial.
Apparently on July 3rd all of the jurors showed up dressed in patriotic colors. 'Row one in red. Row two in white. And row three in blue.' The jury has dressed up before— having all dressed in black (except one juror) and also having shown up with all the men dressed in blue and all the women dressed in pink."
July 7, 2007
http://aidpblog.org/2007/07/04/padilla-trial-festive-july-4th-jurors-or-runaway-jury/
21) Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
August 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/world/middleeast/17israel.html?ref=world
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1) Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:32 p.m. ET
August 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-War-Adviser.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush's new war adviser said Friday.
''I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,'' Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio's ''All Things Considered.''
''And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another,'' Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.
President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a ''major policy shift'' and Bush has made it clear that he doesn't think it's necessary.
''The president's position is that the all volunteer military meets the needs of the country and there is no discussion of a draft. General Lute made that point as well,'' National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
In the interview, Lute also said that ''Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well.''
Still, he said the repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan affect not only the troops but their families, who can influence whether a service member decides to stay in the military.
''There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families,'' he said. ''And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions.''
The military conducted a draft during the Civil War and both world wars and between 1948 and 1973. The Selective Service System, re-established in 1980, maintains a registry of 18-year-old men.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has called for reinstating the draft as a way to end the Iraq war.
Bush picked Lute in mid-May as a deputy national security adviser with responsibility for ensuring efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are coordinated with policymakers in Washington. Lute, an active-duty general, was chosen after several retired generals turned down the job.
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2) World’s Best Medical Care?
NYT Editorial
August 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/opinion/12sun1.html?hp
Many Americans are under the delusion that we have “the best health care system in the world,” as President Bush sees it, or provide the “best medical care in the world,” as Rudolph Giuliani declared last week. That may be true at many top medical centers. But the disturbing truth is that this country lags well behind other advanced nations in delivering timely and effective care.
Michael Moore struck a nerve in his new documentary, “Sicko,” when he extolled the virtues of the government-run health care systems in France, England, Canada and even Cuba while deploring the failures of the largely private insurance system in this country. There is no question that Mr. Moore overstated his case by making foreign systems look almost flawless. But there is a growing body of evidence that, by an array of pertinent yardsticks, the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care.
Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report, issued in May, ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light.
Insurance coverage. All other major industrialized nations provide universal health coverage, and most of them have comprehensive benefit packages with no cost-sharing by the patients. The United States, to its shame, has some 45 million people without health insurance and many more millions who have poor coverage. Although the president has blithely said that these people can always get treatment in an emergency room, many studies have shown that people without insurance postpone treatment until a minor illness becomes worse, harming their own health and imposing greater costs.
Access. Citizens abroad often face long waits before they can get to see a specialist or undergo elective surgery. Americans typically get prompter attention, although Germany does better. The real barriers here are the costs facing low-income people without insurance or with skimpy coverage. But even Americans with above-average incomes find it more difficult than their counterparts abroad to get care on nights or weekends without going to an emergency room, and many report having to wait six days or more for an appointment with their own doctors.
Fairness. The United States ranks dead last on almost all measures of equity because we have the greatest disparity in the quality of care given to richer and poorer citizens. Americans with below-average incomes are much less likely than their counterparts in other industrialized nations to see a doctor when sick, to fill prescriptions or to get needed tests and follow-up care.
Healthy lives. We have known for years that America has a high infant mortality rate, so it is no surprise that we rank last among 23 nations by that yardstick. But the problem is much broader. We rank near the bottom in healthy life expectancy at age 60, and 15th among 19 countries in deaths from a wide range of illnesses that would not have been fatal if treated with timely and effective care. The good news is that we have done a better job than other industrialized nations in reducing smoking. The bad news is that our obesity epidemic is the worst in the world.
Quality. In a comparison with five other countries, the Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States first in providing the “right care” for a given condition as defined by standard clinical guidelines and gave it especially high marks for preventive care, like Pap smears and mammograms to detect early-stage cancers, and blood tests and cholesterol checks for hypertensive patients. But we scored poorly in coordinating the care of chronically ill patients, in protecting the safety of patients, and in meeting their needs and preferences, which drove our overall quality rating down to last place. American doctors and hospitals kill patients through surgical and medical mistakes more often than their counterparts in other industrialized nations.
Life and death. In a comparison of five countries, the United States had the best survival rate for breast cancer, second best for cervical cancer and childhood leukemia, worst for kidney transplants, and almost-worst for liver transplants and colorectal cancer. In an eight-country comparison, the United States ranked last in years of potential life lost to circulatory diseases, respiratory diseases and diabetes and had the second highest death rate from bronchitis, asthma and emphysema. Although several factors can affect these results, it seems likely that the quality of care delivered was a significant contributor.
Patient satisfaction. Despite the declarations of their political leaders, many Americans hold surprisingly negative views of their health care system. Polls in Europe and North America seven to nine years ago found that only 40 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s health care system, placing us 14th out of 17 countries. In recent Commonwealth Fund surveys of five countries, American attitudes stand out as the most negative, with a third of the adults surveyed calling for rebuilding the entire system, compared with only 13 percent who feel that way in Britain and 14 percent in Canada.
That may be because Americans face higher out-of-pocket costs than citizens elsewhere, are less apt to have a long-term doctor, less able to see a doctor on the same day when sick, and less apt to get their questions answered or receive clear instructions from a doctor. On the other hand, Gallup polls in recent years have shown that three-quarters of the respondents in the United States, in Canada and in Britain rate their personal care as excellent or good, so it could be hard to motivate these people for the wholesale change sought by the disaffected.
Use of information technology. Shockingly, despite our vaunted prowess in computers, software and the Internet, much of our health care system is still operating in the dark ages of paper records and handwritten scrawls. American primary care doctors lag years behind doctors in other advanced nations in adopting electronic medical records or prescribing medications electronically. This makes it harder to coordinate care, spot errors and adhere to standard clinical guidelines.
Top-of-the-line care. Despite our poor showing in many international comparisons, it is doubtful that many Americans, faced with a life-threatening illness, would rather be treated elsewhere. We tend to think that our very best medical centers are the best in the world. But whether this is a realistic assessment or merely a cultural preference for the home team is difficult to say. Only when better measures of clinical excellence are developed will discerning medical shoppers know for sure who is the best of the best.
With health care emerging as a major issue in the presidential campaign and in Congress, it will be important to get beyond empty boasts that this country has “the best health care system in the world” and turn instead to fixing its very real defects. The main goal should be to reduce the huge number of uninsured, who are a major reason for our poor standing globally. But there is also plenty of room to improve our coordination of care, our use of computerized records, communications between doctors and patients, and dozens of other factors that impair the quality of care. The world’s most powerful economy should be able to provide a health care system that really is the best.
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3) Losing the Advantage
How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad
By DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER
August 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?hp
Two years after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph — a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.
With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”
“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear.”
But that skepticism had never taken hold in Washington. Since the 2001 war, American intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports.
The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.
Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.
Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.
They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”
President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.
Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan’s myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America’s trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration’s handpicked president, for a large international force. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.
When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Mr. Bush promised a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study. Washington has spent an average of $3.4 billion a year reconstructing Afghanistan, less than half of what it has spent in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The White House contends that the troop level in Afghanistan was increased when needed and that it now stands at 23,500. But a senior American commander said that even as the military force grew last year, he was surprised to discover that “I could count on the fingers of one or two hands the number of U.S. government agricultural experts” in Afghanistan, where 80 percent of the economy is agricultural. A $300 million project authorized by Congress for small businesses was never financed.
Underlying many of the decisions, officials say, was a misapprehension about what Americans would find on the ground in Afghanistan. “The perception was that Afghans hated foreigners and that the Iraqis would welcome us,” said James Dobbins, the administration’s former special envoy for Afghanistan. “The reverse turned out to be the case.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended the administration’s policy, saying, “I don’t buy the argument that Afghanistan was starved of resources.” Yet she said: “I don’t think the U.S. government had what it needed for reconstructing a country. We did it ad hoc in the Balkans, and then in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq.”
In interviews, three former American ambassadors to Afghanistan were more critical of Washington’s record.
“I said from the get-go that we didn’t have enough money and we didn’t have enough soldiers,” said Robert P. Finn, who was the ambassador in 2002 and 2003. “I’m saying the same thing six years later.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, who was the next ambassador and is now the American ambassador to the United Nations, said, “I do think that state-building and nation-building, we came to that reluctantly,” adding that “I think more could have been done earlier on these issues.”
And Ronald E. Neumann, who replaced Mr. Khalilzad in Kabul, said, “The idea that we could just hunt terrorists and we didn’t have to do nation-building, and we could just leave it alone, that was a large mistake.”
A Big Promise, Unfulfilled
After months of arguing unsuccessfully for a far larger effort in Afghanistan, Mr. Dobbins received an unexpected call in April 2002. Mr. Bush, he was told, was planning to proclaim America’s commitment to rebuild Afghanistan.
“I got a call from the White House speech writers saying they were writing a speech and did I see any reason not to cite the Marshall Plan,” Mr. Dobbins recalled, referring to the American rebuilding of postwar Europe. “I said, ‘No, I saw no objections’, so they put it in the speech.”
On April 17, Mr. Bush traveled to the Virginia Military Institute, where Gen. George C. Marshall trained a century ago. “Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives for individual human beings,” Mr. Bush said, calling Marshall’s work “a beacon to light the path that we, too, must follow.”
Mr. Bush had belittled “nation building” while campaigning for president 18 months earlier. But aware that Afghans had felt abandoned before, including by his father’s administration after the Soviets left in 1989, he vowed to avoid the syndrome of “initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure.
“We’re not going to repeat that mistake,” he said. “We’re tough, we’re determined, we’re relentless. We will stay until the mission is done.”
The speech, which received faint notice in the United States, fueled expectations in Afghanistan and bolstered Mr. Karzai’s stature before an Afghan grand council meeting in June 2002 at which Mr. Karzai was formally chosen to lead the government.
Yet privately, some senior officials, including Mr. Rumsfeld, were concerned that Afghanistan was a morass where the United States could achieve little, according to administration officials involved in the debate.
Within hours of the president’s speech, Mr. Rumsfeld announced his own approach at a Pentagon news conference.
“The last thing you’re going to hear from this podium is someone thinking they know how Afghanistan ought to organize itself,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure it out. They’re going to have to grab ahold of that thing and do something. And we’re there to help.”
But the help was slow in coming. Despite Mr. Bush’s promise in Virginia, in the months that followed his April speech, no detailed reconstruction plan emerged from the administration. Some senior administration officials lay the blame on the National Security Council, which is charged with making sure the president’s foreign policy is carried out.
The stagnation reflected tension within the administration over how large a role the United States should play in stabilizing a country after toppling its government, former officials say.
After the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Mr. Powell and Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, argued in confidential sessions that if the United States now lost Afghanistan, America’s image would be damaged, officials said. In a February 2002 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Mr. Powell proposed that American troops join the small international peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul and help Mr. Karzai extend his influence beyond the capital.
Mr. Powell said in an interview that his model was the 1989 invasion of Panama, where American troops spread out across the country after ousting the Noriega government. “The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police or other means,” he said.
Richard N. Haass, a former director of policy planning at the State Department, said informal talks with European officials had led him to believe that a force of 20,000 to 40,000 peacekeepers could be recruited, half from Europe, half from the United States.
But Mr. Rumsfeld contended that European countries were unwilling to contribute more troops, said Douglas J. Feith, then the Pentagon’s under secretary for policy. He said Mr. Rumsfeld felt that sending American troops would reduce pressure on Europeans to contribute, and could provoke Afghans’ historic resistance to invaders and divert American forces from hunting terrorists. Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment.
Some officials said they also feared confusion if European forces viewed the task as peacekeeping while the American military saw its job as fighting terrorists. Ms. Rice, despite having argued for fully backing the new Karzai government, took a middle position, leaving the issue unresolved. “I felt that we needed more forces, but there was a real problem, which you continue to see to this day, with the dual role,” she said.
Ultimately, Mr. Powell’s proposal died. “The president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security staff, all of them were skeptical of an ambitious project in Afghanistan,” Mr. Haass said. “I didn’t see support.”
Mr. Dobbins, the former special envoy, said Mr. Powell “seemed resigned.”
“I said this wasn’t going to be fully satisfactory,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s the best we could do.’ ”
In the end, the United States deployed 8,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2002, with orders to hunt Taliban and Qaeda members, and not to engage in peacekeeping or reconstruction. The 4,000-member international peacekeeping force did not venture beyond Kabul.
As an alternative, officials hatched a loosely organized plan for Afghans to secure the country themselves. The United States would train a 70,000-member army. Japan would disarm some 100,000 militia fighters. Britain would mount an antinarcotics program. Italy would carry out changes in the judiciary. And Germany would train a 62,000-member police force.
But that meant no one was in overall command, officials now say. Many holes emerged in the American effort.
There were so few State Department or Pentagon civil affairs officials that 13 teams of C.I.A. operatives, whose main job was to hunt terrorists and the Taliban, were asked to stay in remote corners of Afghanistan to coordinate political efforts, said John E. McLaughlin, who was deputy director and then acting director of the agency. “It took us quite awhile to get them regrouped in the southeast for counterterrorism,” he said of the C.I.A. teams.
Sixteen months after the president’s 2002 speech, the United States Agency for International Development, the government’s main foreign development arm, had seven full-time staffers and 35 full-time contract staff members in Afghanistan, most of them Afghans, according to a government audit. Sixty-one agency positions were vacant.
“It was state-building on the cheap, it was a duct tape approach,” recalled Said T. Jawad, Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff at the time and Afghanistan’s current ambassador to Washington. “It was fixing things that were broken, not a strategic approach.”
A Shift of Resources to Iraq
In October 2002, Robert Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence center, visited the new Kuwait City headquarters of Lt. Gen David McKiernan, who was already planning the Iraq invasion. Meeting in a sheet metal warehouse, Mr. Grenier asked General McKiernan what his intelligence needs would be in Iraq. The answer was simple. “They wanted as much as they could get,” Mr. Grenier said.
Throughout late 2002 and early 2003, Mr. Grenier said in an interview, “the best experienced, most qualified people who we had been using in Afghanistan shifted over to Iraq,” including the agency’s most skilled counterterrorism specialists and Middle East and paramilitary operatives.
That reduced the United States’ influence over powerful Afghan warlords who were refusing to turn over to the central government tens of millions of dollars they had collected as customs payments at border crossings.
While the C.I.A. replaced officers shifted to Iraq, Mr. Grenier said, it did so with younger agents, who lacked the knowledge and influence of the veterans. “I think we could have done a lot more on the Afghan side if we had more experienced folks,” he said.
A former senior official of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which was running both wars, said that as the Iraq planning sped up, the military’s covert Special Mission Units, like Delta Force and Navy Seals Team Six, shifted to Iraq from Afghanistan.
So did aerial surveillance “platforms” like the Predator, a remotely piloted spy plane armed with Hellfire missiles that had been effective at identifying targets in the mountains of Afghanistan. Predators were not shifted directly from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to the former official, but as new Predators were produced, they went to Iraq.
“We were economizing in Afghanistan,” said the former official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The marginal return for one more platform in Afghanistan is so much greater than for one more in Iraq.”
The shift in priorities became apparent to Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon’s former comptroller, as planning for the Iraq war was in high gear in the fall of 2002. Mr. Rumsfeld asked him to serve as the Pentagon’s reconstruction coordinator in Afghanistan. It was an odd role for the comptroller, whose primary task is managing the Pentagon’s $400 billion a year budget.
“The fact that they went to the comptroller to do something like that was in part a function of their growing preoccupation with Iraq,” said Mr. Zakheim, who left the administration in 2004. “They needed somebody, given that the top tier was covering Iraq.”
In an interview, President Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, insisted that there was no diversion of resources from Afghanistan, and he cited recently declassified statistics to show that troop levels in Afghanistan rose at crucial moments — like the 2004 Afghan election — even after the Iraq war began.
But the former Central Command official said: “If we were not in Iraq, we would have double or triple the number of Predators across Afghanistan, looking for Taliban and peering into the tribal areas. We’d have the ‘black’ Special Forces you most need to conduct precision operations. We’d have more C.I.A.”
“We’re simply in a world of limited resources, and those resources are in Iraq,” the former official added. “Anyone who tells you differently is blowing smoke.”
A Piecemeal Operation
As White House officials put together plans in the spring of 2003 for President Bush to land on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq, the Pentagon decided to make a similar, if less dramatic, announcement for Afghanistan.
On May 1, hours before Mr. Bush stood beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner, Mr. Rumsfeld appeared at a news conference with Mr. Karzai in Kabul’s threadbare 19th-century presidential palace. “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities,” he said. “The bulk of the country today is permissive, it’s secure.”
The Afghanistan announcement was largely lost in the spectacle of Mr. Bush’s speech. But the predictions of stability proved no less detached from events on the ground.
Three weeks later, Afghan government workers who had not been paid for months held street demonstrations in Kabul. An exasperated Mr. Karzai publicly threatened to resign and announced that his government had run out of money because warlords were hoarding the customs revenues. “There is no money in the government treasury,” Mr. Karzai said.
At the same time, the American-led training of a new Afghan Army was proving far more difficult than officials in Washington had expected. The new force, plagued by high desertion rates, had only 2,000 soldiers. The Germans’ effort to train police officers was off to an even slower start, and the British-led counternarcotics effort was dwarfed by an explosion in the poppy crop. Already, small groups of Taliban fighters had slipped back over the border from Pakistan and killed aid workers, stalling reconstruction in the south.
A senior White House official said in a recent interview that in retrospect, putting different countries in charge of different operations was a mistake. “We piecemealed it,” he said. “One of the problems is when everybody has a piece, everybody’s piece is made third and fourth priority. Nobody’s piece is first priority. Stuff didn’t get done.”
A month after his announcement in Kabul, Mr. Rumsfeld’s aides presented a strategy to the White House aimed at weakening warlords and engaging in state-building in Afghanistan. In some ways, it was the approach Mr. Rumsfeld had rejected right after the invasion.
Pentagon officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld’s views began to shift after a December 2002 briefing by Marin Strmecki, an Afghanistan expert at the Smith Richardson Foundation, who argued that Afghanistan was not ungovernable and that it could be turned into a moderate, Muslim force in the region.
Mr. Strmecki said that the United States needed to help Afghans create credible national institutions and that Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group and historically the Taliban’s base of support, needed a more prominent role in the government. Mr. Rumsfeld, according to aides, was impressed by Mr. Strmecki’s emphasis on training Afghans to run their own government and hired him.
Then another personnel change helped alter Afghanistan policy. Mr. Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who was a senior National Security Council official and a special envoy to Iraq exiles, was appointed ambassador to Afghanistan.
Mr. Khalilzad said he accepted the job after Mr. Bush promised to greatly expand resources in Afghanistan. “We had gotten the president to a significant increase,” Mr. Khalilzad recalled.
A leading neo-conservative, Mr. Khalilzad could get Ms. Rice or — if need be — Mr. Bush on the phone. He had been a counselor to Mr. Rumsfeld and had worked for Dick Cheney when Mr. Cheney was the first President Bush’s defense secretary. “Zal could get things done,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a former American military commander in Afghanistan.
When Mr. Khalilzad arrived in Kabul on Thanksgiving 2003, he brought nearly $2 billion — twice the amount of the previous year — as well as a new military strategy and private experts to intensifying rebuilding.
They started a reconstruction plan dubbed “accelerating success” that involved the kind of nation-building once dismissed by the administration. General Barno expanded “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” to build schools, roads and wells and to win the “hearts and minds” of Afghans. The teams amounted to a much smaller version of the force that Mr. Powell had proposed 18 months earlier.
By January 2004, Afghanistan had reached a compromise on a new Afghan Constitution. With American backing, Mr. Karzai weakened several warlords. In October 2004, Mr. Karzai, who had been appointed president, was elected. At the same time, NATO countries steadily sent more troops to Afghanistan, and soon Mr. Rumsfeld, needing for troops for Iraq, proposed that NATO take over security for all of Afghanistan.
By spring 2005, Afghanistan seemed to be moving toward the success Mr. Bush had promised. But then, fearing that Iraq was spinning out of control, the White House asked Mr. Khalilzad to become ambassador to Baghdad.
A Lingering Threat
Before departing Afghanistan, Mr. Khalilzad fought a final battle within the administration. It revealed divisions within the American government over Pakistan’s role in aiding the Taliban, a delicate subject as the administration tried to coax Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to cooperate.
In an interview on Afghan television, Mr. Khalilzad noted that Pakistani journalists had recently interviewed a senior Taliban commander in Pakistan. He questioned Pakistan’s claim that it did not know the whereabouts of senior Taliban commanders — a form of skepticism discouraged in Washington, where the administration’s line had always been that General Musharraf was doing everything he could.
“If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country, which has nuclear bombs, and a lot of security and military forces, not find them?” Mr. Khalilzad asked.
Pakistani officials publicly denounced Mr. Khalilzad’s comments and denied that they were harboring Taliban leaders. But Mr. Khalilzad had also exposed the growing rift between American officials in Kabul and those in Islamabad.
Mr. Grenier said that when he was the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad the issue of fugitive Taliban leaders was repeatedly raised with senior Pakistani intelligence officials in 2002. “The results were just not there,” he recalled. “And it was quite clear to me that it wasn’t just bad luck.”
Pakistani had backed the Taliban throughout the 1990s as a counterweight to an alliance of northern Afghan commanders backed by India, Pakistan’s bitter rival. Pakistani officials also distrusted Mr. Karzai.
Deciding that the Pakistanis would not act on the Taliban, Mr. Grenier said he had urged them to focus on arresting Qaeda members, who he said were far more of a threat to the United States.
“From our perspective at the time, the Taliban was a spent force,” he said, adding, “We were very much focused on Al Qaeda and didn’t want to distract the Pakistanis from that.”
But Mr. Khalilzad, American military officials and others in the administration argued that the Taliban were crossing from Pakistan into Afghanistan and killing American troops and aid workers. “Colleagues in Washington at various levels did not recognize that there was the problem of sanctuary and that this was important,” Mr. Khalilzad said.
But it was not until 2006, after ordering a study on Afghanistan’s future, that Mr. Bush strenuously pressed General Musharraf on the Taliban. Later, Mr. Bush told his aides he worried that “old school ties” between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban endured, despite the general’s assurances. The Pakistanis, one senior American commander said, were “hedging their bets.”
“They’re not sure that we are staying,” he added. “And if we are gone, the Taliban is their next best option” to remain influential in Afghanistan.
As 2005 ended, the Taliban leaders remained in hiding in Pakistan, waiting for an opportunity to cross the border. Soon, they would find one.
To Afghans, a Fickle Effort
In September 2005, NATO defense ministers gathered in Berlin to complete plans for NATO troops to take over security in Afghanistan’s volatile south. It was the most ambitious “out of area” operations in NATO history, and across Europe, leaders worried about getting support from their countries. Then, American military officials dropped a bombshell.
The Pentagon, they said, was considering withdrawing up to 3,000 troops from Afghanistan, roughly 20 percent of total American forces.
NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said he had protested to Mr. Rumsfeld that a partial American withdrawal would discourage others from sending troops.
In the end, the planned troop reduction was abandoned, but chiefly because the American ground commander at the time, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, concluded that the Taliban were returning and that he needed to shift troops to the east to try to stop them. But the announcement had sent a signal of a wavering American commitment.
“The Afghan people still doubt our staying power,” General Eikenberry said. “They have seen the world walk away from them before.”
To sell their new missions at home, British, Dutch and Canadian officials portrayed deployments to Afghanistan as safe, and better than sending troops to Iraq. Germany and Italy prevented their forces from being sent on combat missions in volatile areas. Those regions were to be left to the Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch.
Three months after announcing the proposed troop withdrawal, the White House Office of Management and Budget cut aid to Afghanistan by a third.
Ms. Rice said that much of the money allocated to Afghanistan the previous year had not been spent. “There was an absorption problem,” she said.
Mr. Neumann, then the ambassador, said he had argued against the decision.
Even so, American assistance to Afghanistan dropped by 38 percent, from $4.3 billion in fiscal 2005 to $3.1 billion in fiscal 2006, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.
By February 2006, Mr. Neumann had come to the conclusion that the Taliban were planning a spring offensive, and he sent a cable to his superiors.
“I had a feeling that the view was too rosy in Washington,” recalled Mr. Neumann, who retired from the State Department in June. “I was concerned.”
Mr. Neumann’s cable proved prophetic. In the spring of 2006, the Taliban carried out their largest offensive since 2001, attacking British, Canadian and Dutch troops in southern Afghanistan.
Hundreds of Taliban swarmed into the south, setting up checkpoints, assassinating officials and burning schools. Suicide bombings quintupled to 136. Roadside bombings doubled. All told, 191 American and NATO troops died in 2006, a 20 percent increase over the 2005 toll. For the first time, it became nearly as dangerous, statistically, to serve as an American in Afghanistan as in Iraq.
Mr. Neumann said that while suicide bombers came from Pakistan, most Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan were Afghans. Captured insurgents said they had taken up arms because a local governor favored a rival tribe, corrupt officials provided no services or their families needed money.
After cutting assistance in 2006, the United States plans to provide $9 billion in aid to Afghanistan in 2007, twice the amount of any year since 2001.
Despite warnings about the Taliban’s resurgence from Mr. Neumann, Mr. Khalilzad and military officials, Ms. Rice said, “there was no doubt that people were surprised that the Taliban was able to regroup and come back in a large, well-organized force.”
Divisions Over Strategy
In July 2006, NATO formally took responsibility for security throughout Afghanistan. To Americans and Europeans, NATO is the vaunted alliance that won the cold war. To Afghans it is little more than a strange, new acronym. And NATO and the Americans are divided over strategy.
The disagreement is evident on the wall of the office of Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the commander of the 35,000 NATO forces in Afghanistan, where he keeps a chart that is a sea of yellow and red blocks. Each block shows the restrictions that national governments have placed on their forces under his command. Red blocks represent tasks a country will not do, like hunting Taliban or Qaeda leaders. Yellow blocks indicate missions they are willing to consider after asking their capitals for approval.
In Washington, officials lament that NATO nations are unwilling to take the kinds of risks and casualties necessary to confront the Taliban. Across Europe, officials complain the United States never focused on reconstruction, and they blame American forces for mounting air attacks on the Taliban that cause large civilian casualties, turning Afghans against the West.
The debate over how the 2001 victory in Afghanistan turned into the current struggle is well under way.
“Destroying the Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan was an extraordinary strategic accomplishment,” said Robert D. Blackwill, who was in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq policy at the National Security Council, “but where we find ourselves now may have been close to inevitable, whether the U.S. went into Iraq or not. We were going to face this long war in Afghanistan as long as we and the Afghan government couldn’t bring serious economic reconstruction to the countryside, and eliminate the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistan.”
But Henry A. Crumpton, a former C.I.A. officer who played a key role in ousting the Taliban and became the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, said winning a war like the one in Afghanistan required American personnel to “get in at a local level and respond to people’s needs so that enemy forces cannot come in and take advantage.”
“These are the fundamentals of counterinsurgency, and somehow we forgot them or never learned them,” he added. He noted that “the United States has 11 carrier battle groups, but we still don’t have expeditionary nonmilitary forces of the kind you need to win this sort of war.”
“We’re living in the past,” he said.
Among some current and former officials, a consensus is emerging that a more consistent, forceful American effort could have helped to keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s leadership from regrouping.
Gen. James L. Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, said Iraq caused the United States to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure “are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq.”
“Symbolically, it’s more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq,” he said. “If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you’re sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated.”
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.
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4) Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq
Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is struggling to cope with the crisis
Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday August 12, 2007
Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147052,00.html
Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.
When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.
The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.
Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.
Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.
They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now.'
The first soldier starts in again. 'My husband was injured here. He hit an improvised explosive device. He already had a spinal injury. The blast shook out the plates. He's home now and has serious issues adapting. But I'm not allowed to go back home to see him. If I wanted to see him I'd have to take leave time (two weeks). And the army counts it.'
A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.'
When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'
It is a weariness that has created its own culture of superstition. There are vehicle commanders who will not let the infantrymen in the back fall asleep on long operations - not because they want the men alert, but because, they say, bad things happen when people fall asleep. So the soldiers drink multiple cans of Rip It and Red Bull to stay alert and wired.
But the exhaustion of the US army emerges most powerfully in the details of these soldiers' frayed and worn-out lives. Everywhere you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk about divorces, or problems with the girlfriends that they don't see, or about the children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.
'I counted it the other day,' says a major whose partner is also a soldier. 'We have been married for five years. We added up the days. Because of Iraq and Afghanistan we have been together for just seven months. Seven months ... We are in a bad place. I don't know whether this marriage can survive it.'
The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is 'about broken'. Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen.
And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn).
But it is in the soldiers themselves - and in the ordinary stories they tell - that the exhaustion of the US military is most obvious, coming amid warnings that soldiers serving multiple Iraq deployments, now amounting to several years, are 50 per cent more likely than those with one tour to suffer from acute combat stress.
The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.
'They are scraping to get people to go back and people are worn out,' said Thomas Grieger, a senior US navy psychiatrist, told the International Herald Tribune in April.
'Modern war is exhausting,' says Major Stacie Caswell, an occupational therapist with a combat stress unit attached to the military hospital in Mosul. Her unit runs long group sessions to help soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline problems: often they have seen friends killed and injured, or are having problems stemming from issues at home - responsible for 50 to 60 per cent of their cases. One of the most common problems in Iraq is sleep disorders.
'This is a different kind of war,' says Caswell. 'In World War II it was clear who the good guys and the bad guys were. You knew what you would go through on the battlefield.' Now she says the threat is all around. And soldiering has changed. 'Now we have so many things to do...'
'And the soldier in Vietnam,' interjects Sergeant John Valentine from the same unit, 'did not get to see the coverage from home that these soldiers do. We see what is going on at home on the political scene. They think the war is going to end. Then we have the frustration and confusion. That is fatiguing. Mentally tiring.'
'Not only that,' says Caswell, 'but because of the nature of what we do now, the number of tasks in comparison with previous generations - even as you are finishing your 15 months here you are immediately planning and training for your next tour.' Valentine adds: 'There is no decompression.'
The consequence is a deep-seated problem of retention and recruitment that in turn, says Caswell, has led the US army to reduce its standards for joining the military, particularly over the issue of no longer looking too hard at any previous history of mental illness. 'It is a question of honesty, and we are not investigating too deeply or we are issuing waivers. The consequence is that we are seeing people who do not have the same coping skills when they get here, and this can be difficult.
'We are also seeing older soldiers coming in - up to 41 years old - and that is causing its own problems. They have difficulty dealing with the physical impact of the war and also interacting with the younger men.'
Valentine says: 'We are not only watering down the quality of the soldiers but the leadership too. The good leaders get out. I've seen it. And right now we are on the down slope.'
'War tsar' calls for return of the draft to take the strain
America's 'war tsar' has called for the nation's political leaders to consider bringing back the draft to help a military exhausted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option had always been open to boost America's all-volunteer army by drafting in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. 'I think it makes sense to consider it,' he said. Lute was appointed 'war tsar' earlier this year after President Bush decided a single figure was needed to oversee the nation's military efforts abroad.
Rumours of a return to the draft have long circulated in military circles as the pressure from fighting two large conflicts at the same time builds on America's forces. However, politically it would be extremely difficult to achieve, especially for any leader hoping to be elected in 2008. Bush has previously ruled out the suggestion as unnecessary.
Lute, however, said the war was causing stress to military families and, as a result, was having an impact on levels of re-enlistment. 'This kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living-room conversations within these families. Ultimately the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions,' he said.
A draft would revive bad memories of the turmoil of the 1960s and early 1970s when tens of thousands of young men were drafted to fight and die in Vietnam. Few other policies proved as divisive in America and the memories of anti-war protesters burning their draft cards and fleeing to Canada are still vivid in the memory.
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5) The Mercenary Revolution
Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities
By Jeremy Scahill
Counterpunch
August 13, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/scahill08132007.html
If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.
With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation through the use of private war companies.
There are now almost 200,000 private “contractors” deployed in Iraq by Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outsized by a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go largely unmonitored and whose crimes are virtually unpunished.
In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can be used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely profitable for a few unaccountable private companies.
Since the launch of the “global war on terror,” the administration has systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to corporations like Blackwater, USA, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and ArmorGroup. They have in turn used their lucrative government payouts to build up the infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful that they rival or outgun some nation’s militaries.
“I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives,” says veteran U.S. Diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War.
The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson argues, “…makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?”
Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain—by both journalists and elected officials—but some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors. At present, the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.
While much has been made of the Bush administration’s “failure” to build international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, perhaps that was never the intention. When U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of “private contractors” ever deployed in a war. The White House substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts and a coalition of willing nations who provided token forces with a coalition of billing corporations that supplied the brigades of contractors.
There’s no democratic control
During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S. forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops.
In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel occupying Iraq, not including allied nations’ militaries. The statistics on contractors do not account for all armed contractors. Last year, a U.S. government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. “It masks the true level of American involvement,” says Ambassador Wilson.
How much money is being spent just on mercenaries remains largely classified. Congressional sources estimate the United States has spent at least $6 billion in Iraq, while Britain has spent some $400 million. At the same time, companies chosen by the White House for rebuilding projects in Iraq have spent huge sums in reconstruction funds—possibly billions on more mercenaries to guard their personnel and projects.
The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a $293 million payment to the British firm Aegis Defense Services, headed by retired British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who has been dogged by accusations that he is a mercenary because of his private involvement in African conflicts. The Texas-based DynCorp International has been another big winner, with more than $1 billion in contracts to provide personnel to train Iraqi police forces, while Blackwater USA has won $750 million in State Department contracts alone for “diplomatic security.”
At present, an American or a British Special Forces veteran working for a private security company in Iraq can make $650 a day. At times the rate has reached $1,000 a day; the pay dwarfs many times over that of active duty troops operating in the war zone wearing a U.S. or U.K. flag on their shoulder instead of a corporate logo.
“We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making more than the Secretary of Defense,” House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) recently remarked. “How in the hell do you justify that?” In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been performed by soldiers. Some require no military training, but involve deadly occupations, such as driving trucks through insurgent-controlled territory.
Others are more innocuous, like cooking food or doing laundry on a base, but still court grave risk because of regular mortar and rocket attacks.
These services are provided through companies like KBR and Fluor and through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But many other private personnel are also engaged in armed combat and “security” operations. They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition flights, protect senior occupation officials and, in at least one case, have commanded U.S. and international troops in battle.
In a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush’s troop “surge,” said earlier this year that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq by “contract security.” At least three U.S. commanding generals, not including Petraeus, are currently being guarded in Iraq by hired guns. “To have half of your army be contractors, I don’t know that there’s a precedent for that,” says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating war contractors.
“Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American Revolution. Maybe that’s the last time and needless to say, they lost. But I’m thinking that there’s no democratic control and there’s no intention to have democratic control here.”
The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, “In the absence of international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced: those who benefited financially from their involvement, those who benefited politically from their involvement and those few who determined that their relationship with the United States was more important than their relationship with anybody else. And that’s a real problem because there is no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that we’ve taken.”
Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable.
An arm of the Bush administration
During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January, Petraeus praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate for an overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined with Bush’s official troop surge, the “tens of thousands of contract security forces give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission.”
Taken together with Petraeus’s recent assertion that the surge would run into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other private forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable future.
“The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say ‘mercenaries’ makes wars easier to begin and to fight—it just takes money and not the citizenry,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose organization has sued private contractors for alleged human rights violations in Iraq.
“To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire. Think about Rome and its increasing need for mercenaries.”
Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments. Their casualties go uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and their crimes unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there is no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law—military or civilian being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts. And no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority granted them complete immunity.
“These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies,” argues Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. “They charge whatever they want with impunity. There’s no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are.”
That raises the crucial question: what exactly are they doing in Iraq in the name of the U.S. and U.K. governments? Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which is responsible for reviewing sensitive national security issues, explained the difficulty of monitoring private military companies on the U.S. payroll: “If I want to see a contract, I have to go up to a secret room and look at it, can’t take any notes, can’t take any notes out with me, you know—essentially, I don’t have access to those contracts and even if I did, I couldn’t tell anybody about it.”
A marketplace for warfare
On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what appear to be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to possessing child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.
Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed—64 on murder-related charges alone—but not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.” International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war—one, which poses a creeping threat to global order.
“To outsource security-related, military related issues to non-government, non-military forces is a source of great concern and it caught many governments unprepared,” says Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran U.N. diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission before the U.S. invasion.
In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build up armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with the promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay. That the home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed to the war itself is of little consequence.
“Have gun, will fight for paycheck” has become a global law.
“The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside parliamentary control. They come from all over and they are answerable to no one except a very narrow group of people and they come from countries whose governments may not even know in detail that they have actually been contracted as a private army into a war zone,” says von Sponeck.
“If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries.
You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not this should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and shape. It’s a very worrying new aspect of international relations. I think it becomes more and more uncontrollable by the countries of supply.”
In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been deployed by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council, opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.
“There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between politics and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries,” says Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was tortured under Pinochet’s regime.
“This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs—third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world—and maximize benefits. In other words, let others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all.”
New world disorder
The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the world’s poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties—the single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.
In Iraq, many companies are run by Americans or Britons and have well-trained forces drawn from elite military units for use in sensitive actions or operations. But down the ranks, these forces are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Indeed, some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000 contractors are Iraqis, and many mercenaries are reportedly ill-paid, poorly equipped and barely trained Iraqi nationals.
The mercenary industry points to this as a positive: we are giving Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a private corporation hired by a hostile invading power.
Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian named mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association, argued from early on in the occupation, “Museums do not need to be guarded by Abrams tanks when an Iraqi security guard working for a contractor can do the same job for less than one-fiftieth of what it costs to maintain an American soldier. Hiring local guards gives Iraqis a stake in a successful future for their country. They use their pay to support their families and stimulate the economy. Perhaps most significantly, every guard means one less potential guerrilla.”
In many ways, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor in destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The giant multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring locals, even if it’s at starvation wages.
“Donald Rumsfeld’s masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to bring the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of the most powerful military in the world,” says Naomi Klein, whose upcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes.
“We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with so-called hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military technology and design in rich countries while the manual labor and sweat work of invasion and occupation is increasingly outsourced to contractors who compete with each other to fill the work order for the lowest price. Just as this model breeds rampant abuse in the manufacturing sector—with the big-name brands always able to plead ignorance about the actions of their suppliers—so it does in the military, though with stakes that are immeasurably higher.” In the case of Iraq, the U.S. and U.K. governments could give the public perception of a withdrawal of forces and just privatize the occupation. Indeed, shortly after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he wanted to withdraw 1,600 soldiers from Basra, reports emerged that the British government was considering sending in private security companies to “fill the gap left behind.”
The spy who billed me
While Iraq currently dominates the headlines, private war and intelligence companies are expanding their already sizable footprint. The U.S. government in particular is now in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. According to a recent report in Vanity Fair, the government pays contractors as much as the combined taxes paid by everyone in the United States with incomes under $100,000, meaning “more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to [contractors] rather than to the [government].”
Some of this outsourcing is happening in sensitive sectors, including the intelligence community. “This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community,” says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. “My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s outrageous.”
RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and U.S. intelligence, recently obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently that spending represents 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to private companies.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that the current head of the DNI is Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry’s lobbying arm. Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is prepared in part by private companies, despite having the official seal of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
“Let’s say a company is frustrated with a government that’s hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House’s attention and could be used to shape national policy,” Hillhouse argues.
Multinational mercenaries
Empowered by their new found prominence, mercenary forces are increasing their presence on other battlefields: in Latin America, DynCorp International is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries under the guise of the “war on drugs”—U.S. defense contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in U.S. military aid for Colombia; in Africa, mercenaries are deploying in Somalia, Congo and Sudan and increasingly have their sights set on tapping into the hefty U.N. peacekeeping budget (this has been true since at least the early 1990s and probably much earlier). Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while proposals are being considered to privatize the U.S. border patrol.
Brooks, the private military industry lobbyist, says people should not become “overly obsessed with Iraq,” saying his association’s “member companies have more personnel working in U.N. and African Union peace operations than all but a handful of countries.” Von Sponeck says he believes the use of such companies in warfare should be barred and has harsh words for the institution for which he spent his career working: “The United Nations, including the U.N. Secretary General, should react to this and instead of reacting, they are mute, they are silent.”
This unprecedented funding of such enterprises, primarily by the U.S. and U.K. governments, means that powers once the exclusive realm of nations are now in the hands of private companies with loyalty only to profits, CEOs and, in the case of public companies, shareholders. And, of course, their client, whoever that may be. CIA-type services, special operations, covert actions and small-scale military and paramilitary forces are now on the world market in a way not seen in modern history. This could allow corporations or nations with cash to spend but no real military power to hire squadrons of heavily armed and well-trained commandos.
“It raises very important issues about state and about the very power of state. The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of the government—wholly run and owned by—is the use of military power,” says Rep. Jan Schakowsky. “Suddenly you’ve got a for-profit corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states, can effect regime possibly where they may want to go, that seems to have all the support that it needs from this administration that is also pretty adventurous around the world and operating under the cover of darkness.
“It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who influences policy around the globe, about relationships among some countries. Maybe it’s their goal to render state coalitions like NATO irrelevant in the future, that they’ll be the ones and open to the highest bidder. Who really does determine war and peace around the world?”
Jeremy Scahill is author of The New York Times-bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. This article appears in the current issue of The Indypendent newspaper. He can be reached at jeremy(AT)democracynow.org
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6) Wrong Way Out of Iraq
NYT Editorial
August 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/opinion/13mon1.html?hp
As Americans argue about how to bring the troops home from Iraq, British forces are already partway out the door. Four years ago, there were some 30,000 British ground troops in southern Iraq. By the end of this summer, there will be 5,000. None will be based in urban areas. Those who remain will instead be quartered at an airbase outside Basra. Rather than trying to calm Iraq’s civil war, their main mission will be training Iraqis to take over security responsibilities, while doing limited counterinsurgency operations.
That closely follows the script some Americans now advocate for American forces in Iraq: reduce the numbers — and urban exposure — but still maintain a significant presence for the next several years. It’s a tempting formula, reaping domestic political credit for withdrawal without acknowledging that the mission has failed.
If anyone outside the White House truly believes this can work — that the United States can simply stay in Iraq in reduced numbers, while ignoring the civil war and expecting Iraqi forces to impose order— the British experience demonstrates otherwise. There simply aren’t reliable, effective and impartial Iraqi forces ready to keep the cities safe, nor are they likely to exist any time soon. And insurgents are not going to stop attacking Americans just because the Americans announce that they’re out of the fight.
In Basra — after four years of British tutelage — police forces are infiltrated by sectarian militias. The British departure will cede huge areas to criminal gangs and rival Shiite militias. Without Iraqis capable of taking over, the phased drawdown of British troops has turned ugly. The remaining British troops hunkered down in the city at Basra Palace are under fire from all directions. Those at the airbase are regularly bombarded.
And Basra should be easier than Baghdad. Most of the population is Shiite, and neither Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia nor other Sunni insurgent groups have a significant presence. Elsewhere in Iraq, where internal rivalries are overshadowed by the Sunni insurgency, sectarian civil war and rampant ethnic cleansing, a reduced American force might find itself in an even worse predicament. The clear lesson of the British experience is that going partway is not a realistic option.
The United States cannot walk away from the new international terrorist front it created in Iraq. It will need to keep sufficient forces and staging points in the region to strike effectively against terrorist sanctuaries there or a Qaeda bid to hijack control of a strife-torn Iraq.
But there should be no illusions about trying to continue the war on a reduced scale. It is folly to expect a smaller American force to do in a short time what a much larger force could not do over a very long time. That’s exactly what the British are now trying to do. And the results are painfully plain to see.
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7) The War Against Ward Churchill
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
August 4, 2007
prisonradio.org
Scholar-activist Ward Churchill has just been handed the academic equivalent of a death sentence, when the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado voted to remove him from his professorial post.
Churchill has been the target of the rabid right since he published an essay shortly after 9/11, which likened Americans in their attitudes to Nazis.
From that point forward, academics at the University began sharpening their pencils to find the way to separate Churchill from his tenured position.
Indeed, his works, many of which are anti-imperialist in nature, has also made him an enemy of the right-wing nationalists and fascists in the corporate media.
Churchill has written strong, uncompromising books on U.S. history and social, political movements, like the Black freedom movement, and the Native American independence and rights movement.
His book, A Little Matter of Genocide, is a tour-de-force of American and British atrocities against Native people. It is so searing, so honest, that it is difficult and painful to read.
As for his post 9/11 essay, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Churchill sought to engage the question posed by millions in the aftermath of the burning towers "Why do they hate us?"
It may sound rhetorical to compare Americans to “little Eichmanns,” but before World War II, Nazi and Fascist support groups were flourishing in America.
Nazi sympathizers filled Madison Square Garden for the U.S.- Nazi support group, the German-American Bund. Fascist groups were electing councilmen and mayors. They were feted by congressmen. Perhaps the only group with more clout was the Klan.
Plus, where do you think the Nazis learned much of their racially exclusive theories, and of concentration camps, but from the U.S.? That fact is documented.
The inspiration for Nazi and South African racial apartheid came from the U.S. segregation system, and so-called “reservations” for Indian people.
This may prove somewhat unpopular for Americans to hear, but it is the truth.
Ward Churchill is precisely the kind of scholar that Americans need to read and hear, especially in this hour of national and global crisis. He is a brave and brilliant man who has slain more than his share of sacred cows.
As America engages in a global war based on lies, they need him now—more than ever.
Dare to read his books.
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8) U.S. May Provide Billions to Mexico to Fight Drug Cartels
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
August 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/world/americas/14mexico.html
MEXICO CITY, Aug. 13 — Mexico and the United States are holding intensive talks to develop a plan for the United States to provide billions of dollars to Mexico to support its fight against drug cartels, but the negotiations are not likely to produce an agreement before next week’s trilateral meeting with Canada, officials from both countries said.
Both sides are trying to keep the details of the talks secret, but officials with knowledge of the issue said the aid would include money and training for the Mexican police, as well as advanced eavesdropping, surveillance and other spying technology.
Mexican officials insisted that any agreement would not involve operations by the United States military or drug enforcement agents on Mexican soil, as has happened in Colombia and Peru.
“The bottom line is precisely some help with equipment so we can do our job from a more solid perspective,” said Eduardo Medina Mora, the Mexican attorney general, in an interview with Radio Fórmula last week. “What are the concrete components? That is obviously on the table, but always obviously with the principle of respect for our sovereignty.”
Mexican officials said the negotiations began in March, around the time that President Bush met for talks with President Felipe Calderón in Mérida, Mexico. The new discussions come as Mr. Calderón has started using federal troops in a major offensive against drug cartels and has begun extraditing top drug traffickers to the United States, a break with past practice.
In general, Mexico is seeking money, training and advanced technology for its state and federal police forces. One problem for Mexican antidrug officials has been the rampant corruption in municipal police departments.
Recently released tapes of police radio conversations in Tijuana, for instance, suggested that officers had been working hand in hand with gunmen for the Arellano Félix drug cartel to allow them to slip away from federal agents.
But Mexican officials also want the United States to do more to reduce the consumption of drugs at home and stop the flow of arms and ill-gotten cash back into Mexico. “We don’t see this as an assistance package,” said one high-ranking official in the president’s office, who requested anonymity because of the delicate nature of the negotiations here. “We see this as increased cooperation.”
Mr. Medina Mora, the attorney general, said in the radio interview: “There is a flow, of course, of drugs from the south to the north, but there is also an important flow of arms and money from the north to the south.”
While discussions so far have taken place between top diplomats and security experts in the executive branches of both countries, any major aid package for Mexico would probably have to have Congressional approval, officials from both sides said.
Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat who represents a border district that includes Laredo, said he supported the proposal, saying it would mark a “historic shift in policy” by giving Mexico an array of tools to crack down on drug dealers. On the table are tools such as surveillance equipment, aircraft, and advanced radar and telephone-tapping equipment, Mr. Cuellar and Mexican officials said.
“It’s equipment and technology to make sure they are able to match the power of the drug cartels,” Mr. Cuellar said in a recent interview.
Mr. Cuellar was part of a delegation from the House Homeland Security Committee that visited Mexico in April and heard from high-ranking law enforcement officials about the hurdles they faced in fighting well-financed drug cartels.
The official in the Mexican president’s office, however, said it might be weeks before a deal could be presented to lawmakers, while United States officials voiced doubt that an agreement would be reached before the Aug. 20 trilateral meeting in Montebello, Quebec.
“There is no final deal,” the Mexican official said. “There are many things on the table right now and many of those things involve what the U.S. will do in their territory. This has been going on for several weeks. There is no deadline for this.”
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9) Prosecutors Turn to Padilla for Closing Arguments
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
August 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/us/14padilla.html?ref=us
MIAMI, Aug. 13 — Prosecutors barely mentioned Jose Padilla for long stretches of his three-month terrorism trial, focusing instead on his two co-defendants and dozens of wiretapped phone conversations between them.
Mr. Padilla, an American convert to Islam who became one of the country’s first “enemy combatants,” received top billing in the government’s closing arguments on Monday, a reminder of the importance of his prosecution.
A federal prosecutor told jurors that Mr. Padilla attended a training camp in Afghanistan “to learn how to kill, kidnap and maim according to Al Qaeda’s techniques.”
Mr. Padilla, 36, was arrested in 2002 and described as an operative of Al Qaeda plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States. His detention without charges lasted more than three years and became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the effort against terror.
The government transferred him last year to civilian custody here, just as the Supreme Court was weighing taking up the legality of his military detention.
At that point, prosecutors added his case to those of Adham Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Kifah Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born engineer who was a school administrator in Detroit. The accusations about a dirty bomb are not part of the case.
On Monday, Assistant United States Attorney Brian K. Frazier called Mr. Padilla the “star recruit” of a terrorism support cell that included Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi.
Mr. Frazier focused heavily on the “mujahedeen data form” that the government says Mr. Padilla filled out, in Arabic and under an alias, to attend the Qaeda training camp in 2000.
“You don’t mail away for it,” Mr. Frazier said of the five-page form on which Mr. Padilla reportedly wrote personal information and left seven fingerprints. “You are already inside the Al Qaeda organization when you get this form.”
The Central Intelligence Agency found the form in 2001 in Afghanistan, after the American invasion. It had Mr. Padilla’s actual birth date and said the applicant could speak English, Arabic and Spanish, as Mr. Padilla does.
Mr. Padilla’s lawyers have said he moved to Egypt in 1998 in hopes of becoming an imam. He married there and had two children, returning alone to Chicago, where he grew up, in May 2002.
On Monday, Mr. Frazier recalled how the F.B.I. agent who arrested Mr. Padilla at O’Hare International Airport had testified that Mr. Padilla had been evasive. Mr. Padilla acknowledged living in Egypt, the agent said, yet claimed not to remember simple details of his time there, including his wife’s phone number.
“Why wouldn’t he give simple information at O’Hare?” Mr. Frazier asked. “Why would an official Al Qaeda document be recovered from Afghanistan with his prints on it? These are not coincidences.”
Mr. Frazier said the government had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Padilla had spent time in Afghanistan. In fact, it never produced a witness who saw him there.
Instead, prosecutors presented a phone call from September 2000 in which someone told Mr. Hassoun that “Ibrahim,” a supposed alias for Mr. Padilla, was in “the area of Usama,” which an expert witness described as code for Afghanistan.
In a call from October 2000, someone else told Mr. Hassoun that “Abu Abdallah,” another supposed alias for Mr. Padilla, was “currently in Afghanistan.”
Mr. Frazier repeatedly invoked the testimony of Rohan Gunaratna, a government witness described as an international terrorism expert. Dr. Gunaratna backed up a main government theory, that Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi used code words when discussing their scheme by phone.
“Playing football” meant engaging in jihad, prosecutors said, “the dogs” meant the United States government, and “zucchini” meant weapons.
Mr. Hassoun’s lawyers sought to discredit Dr. Gunaratna in their closing arguments and restated their premise that Mr. Hassoun wanted just to “give relief” to persecuted Muslims in places like Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo.
Lawyers for Mr. Jayyousi and Mr. Padilla will present their final arguments on Tuesday, and the jury will probably start deliberating on Wednesday. If convicted of the most serious of the three charges, conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people in a foreign country, the defendants could face life in prison.
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10) August 8th -- Again
[col. writ. 8/8/07] (c)
Mumia Abu-Jamal
From: Howard Keylor
howardkeylor@comcast.net
For those of us who know them, it is almost inconceivable that MOVE members are still in the state's dungeons today -- 29 years later.
For the events of Aug. 8th, 1978 couldn't be clearer; for it was on that date that the state launched a mass armed assault on MOVE's home and headquarters in West Philadelphia, when the state brought its urban war to Powelton Avenue in an attempt to destroy the MOVE Organization.
They shot hundreds of bullets into the house; fully automatic weapons fire in the heart of the city; when that failed, they launched water cannons, flooding the home full of men, women, and babies.
Fire and water, utilized as weapons of war and death; but MOVE men and women (and children) would emerge alive -- and that was their only crime that day -- of survival!
What the city failed to do with fire and water, it would try to do with words --the words of the corporate media, merged with the words of the law, to convict 9 MOVE members of the high crimes of essentially being MOVE members -- being members of a predominantly Black group of rebels and nonconformists.
For, in today's corporate state, being a revolutionary is crime enough!
MOVE folks, followers of the naturalist teachings of John Africa, were sentenced to 30 to 100 years -- sentences not even provided by statute! -- and it's been 29 years in Pa. hellholes for what's known as the MOVE 9.
Twenty-nine years -- in hell.
When MOVE folks were on the street, their inspiration reduced crime, for young minds were engaged in life-affirming ideas, not naked materialism.
Being naturalists, the pursuit of money wasn't important to MOVE people -- what was important was Life.
For 3 decades the city has been without them, and it has fallen steadily, into the abyss.
August 8th -- remembered.
--(c) '07 maj
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11) Prison Women On Farms - Ready To Harvest
By MARGIE WOOD
The Pueblo Chieftain
Sunday, August 12, 2007
http://www.chieftain.com/metro/1186898467/3
To Steve Smith, agri-business manager for Colorado Correctional
Industries, the pilot project using women prison inmates to replace
missing migrant workers has been a success.
A small success, perhaps - the program has mustered two crews of 10 women
each and has served only five farms in Pueblo County. If it expands as
harvest demands expand, Smith said he may have to pull in male inmates
from other assignments.
Expanding the program much beyond that isn't likely to happen until next
year at the earliest, said Department of Corrections Executive Director
Ari Zavaras.
Zavaras said the department is receiving requests for the program
elsewhere in the state, and although the final go-ahead hasn't been given,
he hopes to take it statewide starting next summer.
"That is the direction we want to head in making this a permanent
program," Zavaras said. "We started it out as we do with any industry
program, as a pilot project until we know the benefits and how they work.
At this point in time, we think it has been a tremendous success. We've
filled a void, we haven't displaced any law-abiding citizens, the inmates
are developing a work ethic. It has all the benefits from the standpoint
of teaching the inmates.
"This appears to be a win on all fronts," he added, saying the final
decision on taking the program statewide won't come until the end of the
year. "We will do a full evaluation at the end of this season. But at this
point, our preliminary evaluation is there hasn't been any downside."
The program was started at the suggestion of state Rep. Dorothy Butcher,
D-Pueblo, after local farmers complained to her that they had to leave
crops in the field last year because of strict new immigration laws
adopted by the Colorado Legislature during a special session on illegal
immigration last summer.
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12) U.S. weighs labeling Iran Guard "terrorist": NYT
Reuters
Wednesday, August 15, 2007; 12:41 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/15/AR2007081500081.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is preparing to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization, The New York Times reported in Wednesday editions, citing senior administration officials.
If the declaration is imposed, it would be the first time that the United States has placed the armed forces of any sovereign government on its list of terrorist organizations, the newspaper reported.
The U.S. government has long considered Iran an active state sponsor of terrorism. Singling out the guard would signal a more confrontational turn in the administration's approach to Iran, the newspaper said.
The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop a nuclear arsenal and of arming militant groups throughout the Middle East attempting to destabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, all charges Tehran denies.
Naming the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group would allow the United States to block financial accounts and other assets controlled by the military unit which has moved increasingly into commercial operations under Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Times said, citing U.S. officials.
Separately, The Washington Post reported that the main goal of the new designation would be to target the Revolutionary Guards' vast business network, including foreign companies conducting business linked to the unit and its personnel, the Post said.
The administration plans to list many of the Guards' financial operations, the Post said.
The State Department had no immediate comment.
The New York Times cited senior administration officials as saying that current plans call for the declaration to be made this month, but cautioned that it could be put off or dropped if the U.N. Security Council moved more quickly to impose broad sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.
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13) U.S. Set to Declare Iran Guards Terrorists
By HELENE COOPER and JIM RUTENBERG
August 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/world/middleeast/15cnd-diplo.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — The Bush administration is preparing to declare that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a foreign terrorist organization, senior administration officials said Tuesday.
Today, a White House spokeswoman deflected questions about the designation, saying that the Treasury and State Departments would be the lead agencies in the decision and that President Bush himself “doesn’t actually have to take any action” to make it official.
Referring to the international group of nations negotiating with Iran over its uranium enrichment program the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, (the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council), and Germany the spokeswoman said, “We have been working with the P-5-plus-1 to make sure that Iran is held to account.
“And they have an opportunity to come forward,” said the spokeswoman, Dana Perino, speaking with reporters in Crawford, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing. “And we would like Iran to behave in a way that the rest of the world could embrace them.”
President Bush seemed to signal a tougher approach to Iran last week when he called attention to what American officials have said was an active role by the Revolutionary Guard in providing munitions, training and other support to Shiite militants who have been attacking American troops in Iraq.
“When we catch you playing a nonconstructive role, there will be a price to pay,” Mr. Bush said of Iran during a news conference on Thursday.
Asked today whether Mr. Bush was alluding to military action in that statement, Ms. Perino said he was not, and that the “consequences” to which the president referred were diplomatic.
If imposed, the declaration would signal a more confrontational turn in the administration’s approach to Iran and would be the first time that the United States has added the armed forces of any sovereign government to its list of terrorist organizations.
The Revolutionary Guard is thought to be the largest branch of Iran’s military. While the United States has long labeled Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism, a decision to single out the guard would amount to an aggressive new challenge from an American administration that has recently seemed conflicted over whether to take a harder line against Tehran over its nuclear program and what American officials have called its destabilizing role in Iraq.
According to European diplomats, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has warned of the move in recent conversations with European counterparts, saying that a delay in efforts to win approval from the United Nations Security Council for further economic sanctions on Iran was leaving the administration with little choice but unilateral action.
A move toward putting the Revolutionary Guard on the foreign terrorist list would serve at least two purposes for Ms. Rice: to pacify, for a while, administration hawks who are pushing for possible military action, and to further press America’s allies to ratchet up sanctions against Iran in the Security Council.
The State Department and Treasury officials are pushing for a stronger set of United Nations Security Council sanctions against members of Iran’s government, including an extensive travel ban and further moves to restrict the ability of Iran’s financial institutions to do business abroad. American officials have also been trying to get European and Asian banks to take additional steps against Iran.
Senior administration officials said current plans called for the declaration to be made this month, but cautioned that it could be put off, and that the effort could still be set aside if the Security Council moved more quickly to impose broad sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.
The officials said the declaration was being pushed by Ms. Rice, and would not say if it had been endorsed by the National Security Council or the Pentagon.
Listing would set in motion a series of automatic sanctions that would make it easier for the United States to block financial accounts and other assets controlled by the guard. In particular, the action would freeze any assets the guard has in the United States, although it is unlikely that the guard maintains much in the way of assets in American banks or other institutions.
In the internal debate over American policy toward Iran, Ms. Rice has succeeded over the last year in holding the Bush administration to a diplomatic course in which America and five other world powers have used the Security Council to impose sanctions to try to get Tehran to suspend its enrichment of uranium.
But in recent months, there has been resurgent debate within the administration about whether the diplomatic path is working, with aides to Vice President Dick Cheney said to be among those pushing for greater consideration of military options. The debate has been kindled by reports from international inspectors detailing Iran’s progress in its nuclear program, including the installation of more than 1,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium, as well as the assertions from American intelligence officials about an Iranian role in providing arms and other support to Shiite militias in Iraq and to Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
Iran has repeatedly denied that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons, that it is helping in any way to facilitate attacks on American troops in Iraq or that it is shipping any weapons to the Taliban, a group Iran opposed in the 1990s.
On Tuesday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again dismissed American complaints that Iran is providing weapons to the Taliban. Speaking in Kabul, Afghanistan, after talks with President Hamid Karzai, he said Iran was “fully supporting” its new government.
Mr. Karzai played down the dispute over the weapons shipments, as he did during a visit to the White House this month. He said that Afghanistan and Iran were “brothers” and that both the United States and Iran were helping reconstruct his country.
In June, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the volume of weapons reaching the Taliban from Iran made it “difficult to believe” that the shipments were “taking place without the knowledge of the Iranian government.” In a television interview the same day, Assistant Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said there was “irrefutable evidence” that the weapons were coming from the Revolutionary Guard.
There are currently 42 organizations on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In taking aim at the guard, the administration is also trying to divide Iran’s population. During his news conference on Thursday, President Bush addressed the Iranian people directly. “My message to the Iranian people is, ‘You can do better than this current government,’ ” Mr. Bush said. “ ‘You don’t have to be isolated. You don’t have to be in a position where you can’t realize your full economic potential.’ ”
The United States government has not made a public estimate about the size of the Revolutionary Guard, an organization that dates to the Islamic revolution of 1979 and whose branches are believed to extend widely throughout the Iranian military. An estimate by GlobalSecurity.org, a research group based in Alexandria, Va., puts the total guard forces at 125,000.
The guard and its military wing are identified as a power base for Mr. Ahmadinejad. Under his administration, American officials said, the guard has moved increasingly into commercial operations, earning profits and extending its influence in Iran in areas involving big government contracts, including building airports and other infrastructure, oil production and providing cellphones.
The immediate legal consequence of the guard’s designation as a terrorist organization would be to make it unlawful for anyone subject to United States jurisdiction to knowingly provide material support or resources to the guard, according to the State Department. Any United States financial institution that becomes aware that it possesses, or has control over, funds of a foreign terrorist organization would have to turn them over to the Treasury Department.
Because Iran has done little business with the United States in more than two decades, the larger point of the designation would be to heighten the political and psychological pressure on Iran, administration officials said, by using the designation to persuade foreign governments and financial institutions to cut ties with Iranian businesses and individuals.
The decision would have little impact on American military activities in Iraq, where coalition forces already pursue fighters, advisers and financiers who support antigovernment forces, according to a senior Defense Department official. “We are going to go after any forces that are engaged in activities that are disruptive to the stability and security of Iraq,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the subject was pending administration policy.
Helene Cooper and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington, Jim Rutenberg from Crawford, Tex., and David Rohde from Kabul, Afghanistan.
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14) Stink Tanks
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
August 9, 2007
prisonradio.org
Deep in the American heart is a bitter hatred of intellectuals, thinkers of high education, who are seen, in nativist eyes, as traitors to nationalistic aims of empire and domination.
While it is daily seen and heard here, it did not begin here.
In the first third of the 20th century, French writer Julian Banda penned his classic La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). In his 1928 work, Banda critiqued the damning effect of nationalism upon French intellectuals, writing:
“I shall be told that during the past fifty years...the attitude of foreigners to France was such that the most violent national partiality was forced upon all Frenchmen who wished to safeguard the nation, and that the only true patriots are those who have consented to this fanaticism. I say nothing to the contrary: I only say that the intellectuals who indulged in this fanaticism betrayed their duty, which is precisely to set up a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and truth...”
Julian Banda wrote these words almost 80 years ago. Then, state power hadn’t risen to its present pinnacles; nor had corporate power.
While today’s intellectuals claim fidelity to nationalism, many are in fact corporatists, who swear fealty to transnational corporate power.
Today they hang their shingles in U.S. think tanks, the well-paid agents of globalized corporate wealth.
They provided the ideological cover and punditry to propel the U.S. into this grotesque quasi-war of invasion and occupation. They promised tossed flowers, and tributes to the American liberators.
They promised democratic transformation in the region.
(Yeah—How’s that coming along?)
And, as Christine Ahn showed in her article, “Democratizing American Philanthropy”, included in the recently published, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence [Cambridge, MA, South End Press, April ‘07], the wealthy in the U.S. have created and funded right-wing think tanks to further their deeply held, anti-state beliefs. Through grants and other funds they use these agencies to do their will, as Ahn notes, this is hardly an equal opportunity program:
“In contrast, their liberal counterparts have received only one fourth as much support to build a political infrastructure such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy collectively had a revenue base of $77 million. In contrast, groups that might be considered their progressive counterparts—the Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute, Citizens for Tax Justice, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Twentieth Century Fund, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, OMB Watch, and the Center for Community Change—had on $18.6 million at their disposal.” [pp.69-70]
This is a war brought to you by the Heritage Foundation, Cato, AEI, and the Project for a New American Century. It was conceived in greed, and nourished on nationalist arrogance.
The (so-called) war against terror has instead, strengthened the hand of jihadism, and further isolated despots throughout the region.
Is Pakistan’s President (or is it President-General?) Pervez Musharraf stronger today, or measurably weaker?
Is Jordan’s King Hussein in a better, or worse, position?
Are the sons of Sa’ud in Arabia more secure on their thrones, or less?
America threw a monkey wrench into the works of the Middle East, launching a campaign of chaos—based on the empty promises of think tanks.
How then, can the U.S. even really conceive of either peace, or “victory?”
As bridges crumble, and schools become prisons, and a trillion dollars wing their way to the deserts of Iraq, who can be said to “win”?
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15) Parents Warned Cough Medicines Imperil Infants
By GARDINER HARRIS
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/health/16cough.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 — Hoping to halt the growing number of injuries to infants and toddlers, the Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory Wednesday warning parents never to give cough and cold medicines to children under the age of 2 unless instructed to do so by a doctor.
The warning is part of a broad reassessment by the agency of the safety of the popular medicines, which have been blamed for hundreds of adverse reactions and a handful of deaths in children under the age of 2.
The F.D.A. will convene a panel of independent experts on Oct. 18 to discuss whether more prohibitions or warnings are warranted. Such meetings often signal that the agency is seriously concerned about the safety of the drugs under review.
The drugs’ labels currently advise parents to see a doctor before giving the medicines if their child is under the age of 2, but too many parents are failing to heed this advice, the agency said.
“We continue to see adverse effects associated with the medicines because people are not using them properly,” said Susan Cruzan, an F.D.A. spokeswoman.
If, despite label warnings, parents continue to use the drugs inappropriately in young children, the agency could take more serious action, like restricting the drugs’ wide availability.Most drugs that have been withdrawn in the past 15 years were taken off the market because doctors and patients failed to heed prominent warnings.
Some prominent pediatricians and public health experts said that the drug agency’s advisory did not go far enough.
One group petitioned the agency to ban the marketing of the drugs for children under the age of 6, and some said that the medicines should no longer be sold over-the-counter for use in children at all.
“Unless convincing evidence shows that these medications are effective for children, their easy availability to families should be re-examined,” said Dr. Ian M. Paul, a pediatrician at Penn State Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Pa.
But the drugs’ makers say that the F.D.A. approved the drugs because they are safe and effective. Virginia Cox, a spokeswoman for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, said that the drugs’ labels already advised against their use in children under the age of 2 unless a doctor approved. Ms. Cox said there was no need to raise this age limit to 6.
Some of the drugs have drawings or pictures of infants in diapers on their labels.
The debate results because the standards for drug approvals have changed sharply in the decades since many of the medicines in children’s cough and cold products were approved. If those drugs were currently up for review, they would not be approved for use in children because the manufacturers never tested them thoroughly in children.
Instead, the drugs’ makers performed studies in adults and then simply assumed that they would work in children. Such assumptions, once common, are no longer acceptable. Indeed, a growing number of studies in children suggest that cough and cold medicines work no better than placebos.
Among the ingredients that have caused concern are anticough medicines including dextromethorphan, which is the DM in many preparations. They can cause neurological problems, including abnormal movements and hallucinations, even in standard doses.
Another is pseudoephedrine, which is a decongestant that has been associated with infant deaths, increased blood pressure and arrhythmias.
Some of the injuries and deaths associated with these products have resulted when parents gave two different products to their child, not realizing that both contained identical medicines, resulting in an overdose.
In rare cases, children have been injured when given recommended doses.
Everyone agrees that more studies in children are needed, but companies have little incentive to undertake new trials because the medicines’ patents long ago expired. So the F.D.A. must decide how to regulate drugs that it knows very little about — a position in which it frequently finds itself. In such circumstances, it often turns to advisory boards.
Despite the growing worries, sales of the drugs are booming. Most major pharmacies carry a dozen or more brands. The medicines are popular largely because children have an average of 6 to 10 colds each year, far more than adults.
Even those who petitioned the agency to raise the age limit on the drugs said that dramatic regulatory action against the drugs was unlikely.
Dr. Wayne R. Snodgrass, a petition author who is chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on drugs, predicted that the advisory committee would recommend stronger wording on the drugs’ labels, not an outright ban.
“Personally in a common cold in a young child, I wouldn’t recommend these agents,” Dr. Snodgrass said.
Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department and an author of the petition, applauded the F.D.A.’s decision to hold an advisory committee meeting and predicted it would lead to changes in the way the agency regulates the drugs.
“Having an advisory committee meeting is a good way for the F.D.A. to switch gears on this,” Dr. Sharfstein said.
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16) Push by Chávez to Abandon Term Limits on Presidency
By SIMON ROMERO
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/world/americas/16venez.html?ref=world
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 15 — President Hugo Chávez outlined a proposed overhaul to the Constitution on Wednesday night that would allow him to remain in power indefinitely through perpetual re-elections, an intensification of his efforts to assert greater state control over political and economic institutions.
Taking aim at opponents who say he is assuming too much power, Mr. Chávez said, “I recommend they take a pill, what do they call it, a Valium.” During a meandering, theatrical speech at the National Assembly here, he said, “We have broken the chains of the old hegemonic oligarchy.”
Mr. Chávez, whose current term ends in 2012, also laid out a dizzying array of other proposed changes to the Constitution, all to be put before a congressional vote and a national referendum.
He called for a work day of no longer than six hours, the power to designate military regions for “defense reasons,” the creation of regional governing entities that would be managed by vice presidents appointed by the president, and demarcating Venezuela’s sovereignty in parts of the Caribbean by possibly building artificial islands.
The president’s opponents see such proposals as window dressing to accompany Mr. Chávez’s polemical re-election ambitions, which include expanding presidential terms to seven years from six. Manuel Rosales, the governor of Zulia State and the main opposition candidate in the presidential elections last December, said in televised comments that after Mr. Chávez’s call to abandon term limits, the other proposals were “adornments.”
Criticism of the effort to change the Constitution has sharpened around fears that Mr. Chávez, who has been in office since 1999, could use it to diminish the power of elected governors and mayors, of which a handful in the country still oppose him.
Seemingly undeterred by the criticism, which he described as lies coming from counterrevolutionaries, Mr. Chávez delivered a speech sprinkled with references to Machiavelli and Aristotle and more recent Marxist Italian philosophers like Antonio Gramsci and Antonio Negri.
State television championed his proposals Wednesday, and supporters gathered before television cameras near the National Assembly to chant “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!”
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17) Muslim Groups Oppose a List of ‘Co-Conspirators’
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/us/16charity.html?ref=us
Two prominent Muslim American organizations took steps yesterday to reverse what they called a Justice Department effort to smear the entire Muslim community by naming some of its largest organizations as unindicted co-conspirators in a Texas terrorism trial.
The National Association of Muslim Lawyers, which is not named, sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales objecting to the list, which it said breached the department’s own guidelines against releasing the names of unindicted co-conspirators and did not serve any clear law enforcement purpose.
The letter, also signed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, said the “overreaching list” of more than 300 organizations and individuals would further cripple charitable donations to Muslim organizations and could ratchet up the discrimination faced by American Muslims since the Sept. 11 attacks.
In addition, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which is on the list, announced that it would file a brief today asking Judge A. Joe Fish of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas to remove its name and all others from the list.
The brief, a copy of which was released yesterday, says the list furthers a pattern of the “demonization of all things Muslim” that has unrolled in the United States since 2001.
“Most people don’t understand what an unindicted co-conspirator is,” said Parvez Ahmed, CAIR’s board chairman, adding that the release of the list prompted death threats and hate mail against the council. “They think that being related to a terrorism case means we are terrorists.”
The unindicted co-conspirators were named in the case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which opened July 16. The charity and five of its officers are accused of providing material support for terrorism by funneling millions of charitable dollars to the Palestinian organization Hamas. The federal government ordered the foundation shuttered in December 2001.
Technically, the prosecution can introduce statements made by any individual or organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator without such statements being dismissed as hearsay. Those on the list have not been charged with anything, but they are concerned that the label of unindicted co-conspirator will forever taint them, particularly if the Holy Land group is convicted, and that they will have no legal recourse.
On July 13, Judge Fish barred lawyers from discussing the case with reporters. A Justice Department spokesman, Bryan Sierra, said the order prevented him from commenting about the list, as did the spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Dallas, Kathy Colvin. Before the judge’s order, however, the prosecution, while acknowledging that the list was unusually long, maintained that the names of the organizations would have come up in the trial anyway. Defense lawyers accused the Justice Department of using the list to create the aura of a vast conspiracy where none existed.
Both the National Association of Muslim Lawyers and CAIR said they were working in uncharted legal territory, as they had been unable to find firm legal precedents about how an unindicted co-conspirator could be removed from such a list.
Many organizations named are foreign, but among the most notable in the United States are the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim umbrella organization, and the North American Islamic Trust. The Islamic Society said in a statement that it, too, was seeking a legal recourse, while the North American Islamic Trust did not respond to telephone calls seeking comment.
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18) Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
"MENDACITY
Mendacity, mendacity, it makes the world go round.
A politician makes a speech and never hears the sound.
The campaign trail winds on and on in towns from coast to coast.
The winner ain't the one who's straight, but he who lies the most.
Now voting rights in this fair land we know are not denied.
But if I tried in certain states, from tree tops I'd be tied.
Mendacity, mendacity, it seems its everywhere.
But try and tell the truth, and most folks scream 'Not Fair'"
Incomplete: 30 seconds from MENDACITY can be heard here:
http://tinyurl.com/2y7sgx
By PETER KEEPNEWS
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/arts/music/16cnd-roach.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today in Manhattan. He was 83.
His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.
As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.
Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.
He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.
Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”
He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.
He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.
In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.
Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.
Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”
In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.
Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.
By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.
He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”
Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.
In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.
Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.
The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.
Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.
The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.
“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”
“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”
As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.
Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.
He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.
Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”
This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.
By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson.
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19) Workouts, Not Bailouts
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
August 17, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/opinion/17krugman.html?hp
In April, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, declared that all the signs he saw indicated that the housing market was “at or near the bottom.” Earlier this month he was still insisting that problems caused by the meltdown in the market for subprime mortgages were “largely contained.”
But the time for denial is past.
According to data released yesterday, both housing starts and applications for building permits have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade, showing that home construction is still in free fall. And if historical relationships are any guide, home prices are still way too high. The housing slump will probably be with us for years, not months.
Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that the mortgage problem is anything but contained. For one thing, it’s not confined to subprime mortgages, which are loans to people who don’t satisfy the standard financial criteria. There are also growing problems in so-called Alt-A mortgages (don’t ask), which are another 20 percent of the mortgage market. Problems are starting to appear in prime loans, too — all of which is what you would expect given the depth of the housing slump.
Many on Wall Street are clamoring for a bailout — for Fannie Mae or the Federal Reserve or someone to step in and buy mortgage-backed securities from troubled hedge funds. But that would be like having the taxpayers bail out Enron or WorldCom when they went bust — it would be saving bad actors from the consequences of their misdeeds.
For it is becoming increasingly clear that the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the ’90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.
Yet our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn’t prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble.
Most of the proposals I’ve seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices — which would have been very useful three years ago — but they wouldn’t help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.
Consider a borrower who can’t meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan’s terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.
Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, “the first link in a financial merry-go-round.” The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there’s nobody to deal with.
This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there’s a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn’t be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.
And we’ve done this sort of thing before — for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries’ debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.
The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages — not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans — at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I’m happy to listen to better ideas.
The point, however, is that doing nothing isn’t the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts — but let’s help borrowers work things out.
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20)The Padilla Conviction
NYT Editorial
August 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/opinion/17fri1.html?hp
RELATED:
Re: "A fair and impartial jury" in the Padilla case:
Padilla Trial: Festive July 4th Jurors or Runaway Jury?
by Greg McNeal
"Over at the Southern District of Florida blog (Hat tip to OK at VC ) David Markus details some interesting wardrobe choices in the Padilla trial.
Apparently on July 3rd all of the jurors showed up dressed in patriotic colors. 'Row one in red. Row two in white. And row three in blue.' The jury has dressed up before— having all dressed in black (except one juror) and also having shown up with all the men dressed in blue and all the women dressed in pink."
July 7, 2007
http://aidpblog.org/2007/07/04/padilla-trial-festive-july-4th-jurors-or-runaway-jury/
It is hard to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber. But it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism.
On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of — conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas — bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases.
When Mr. Padilla was arrested in 2002, the government said he was an Al Qaeda operative who had plotted to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb inside the United States. Mr. Padilla, who is an American citizen, should have been charged as a criminal and put on trial in a civilian court. Instead, President Bush declared him an “enemy combatant” and kept him in a Navy brig for more than three years.
The administration’s insistence that it had the right to hold Mr. Padilla indefinitely — simply on the president’s word — was its first outrageous act in the case, but hardly its last. Mr. Padilla was kept in a small isolation cell, and when he left that cell he was blindfolded and his ears were covered. He was denied access to a lawyer even when he was being questioned.
The administration also insisted that the courts had no right to second-guess its actions. It was only after the Supreme Court appeared poised last year to use Mr. Padilla’s case to decide whether indefinite detention of an American citizen violates the Constitution, that the White House suddenly decided to give him a civilian trial. It was obvious that the administration was trying to game the legal system and insulate itself from Supreme Court review. J. Michael Luttig, a federal appeals court judge who heard Mr. Padilla’s case, warned about the consequences “for the government’s credibility before the courts in litigation.”
The administration is already claiming victory, but the result in Mr. Padilla’s case is in many ways a mess. He will likely never be brought to trial on the dirty-bomb plot, a much publicized charge that cries out for resolution. (In another move worthy of Alice in Wonderland, the government is holding another prisoner in Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed, because he was accused of conspiring with Mr. Padilla in the dirty-bomb plot for which Mr. Padilla was never charged.) There is also the danger that Mr. Padilla’s conviction will be reversed on appeal because of his alleged mistreatment before trial. In hailing the verdict yesterday, a White House spokesman thanked the jury for “upholding a core American principle of impartial justice for all.” It is a remarkable statement, since the administration did everything it could to keep Mr. Padilla away from a jury and deny him impartial justice.
After all that, there was still some good news yesterday: a would-be terrorist will be going to jail. And the Bush administration was forced, grudgingly and only at the very end, to provide him with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
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21) Israel to Get $30 Billion in Military Aid From U.S.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
August 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/world/middleeast/17israel.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM, Aug. 16 — Israel and the United States signed a deal on Thursday to give Israel $30 billion in military aid over the next decade in what officials called a long-term investment in peace.
The officials insisted that the deal was not dependent on a simultaneous American plan for $20 billion in sales of sophisticated arms to its Arab allies, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But Israeli officials acknowledged that the aid to Israel would make it easier for the Bush administration to win Congressional approval of the arms sales to Arab countries.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel has not objected to those arms sales, saying that he understands the United States’ need to support moderate Sunni Arab states that, like Israel, are opposed to Shiite Iran’s reach for regional supremacy and nuclear weapons.
The American under secretary of state for political affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, speaking at the signing ceremony here, said, “There is no question that, from an American point of view, the Middle East is a more dangerous region now even than it was 10 or 20 years ago and that Israel is facing a growing threat” from Iran and its ally, Syria.
The threat, he said, is “immediate and it’s also long term,” and he cited Iran’s support for organizations that the United States classified as terrorist and that were opposed to peace and stability in the region, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
The new aid to Israel will average $3 billion a year on a sliding scale, an increase of about 25 percent from current figures, to begin in October 2008. That year, American economic aid to Israel, which has a vibrant, growing economy, is scheduled to end. Uniquely, officials said, the new deal allows Israel to spend 26.3 percent of the aid on arms from Israel’s domestic military industry; the rest of the money must be spent on American equipment.
The Israelis have some specific reservations about what equipment might be sold to Saudi Arabia, however, despite American promises that Israel will keep its “qualitative edge” regionally in military technology.
Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the House majority leader, said in an interview on Thursday that “Congress will be supportive of the aid to Israel, but with respect to Saudi Arabia I think we will look at that more closely.” He said there were “specific concerns on guided missile technology that could be used defensively against Israel and that would be problematic.”
Some Israeli politicians have also discussed trying to limit Saudi deployment of new weapons systems to the east of the country, closer to Iran, keeping them away from Israel.
Mr. Burns and the Israeli team, led by the governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, who holds both American and Israeli citizenship, would not comment on the specifics of the arms deal.
Mr. Fischer said that Israel was grateful for the help, since it had one of the highest defense burdens “in what used to be called the free world,” amounting to 10 percent of gross domestic product.
Mr. Burns said, “This $30 billion in assistance to Israel is to be an investment in peace, in long-term peace — peace cannot be made without strength.”
In Gaza, Hamas, the Islamic group that has taken control there, briefly detained the Palestinian attorney general, Ahmed Mughami, who is allied with Fatah, after he returned to the Gaza Strip to try to prevent Hamas from altering the area’s judicial system. Fatah has ordered the police and other civil servants, including judges, not to work for Hamas in Gaza, and Hamas then said it would set up Islamic courts. Hamas forced Mr. Mughami out of his office at gunpoint in Gaza City. He refused to resign and was released.
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Suicide rate increases among U.S. soldiers
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 (UPI) -- A new U.S. Army report reveals the suicide rate among soldiers is on the rise, CNN reported Thursday.
The study said failed relationships, legal woes, financial problems and occupational/operational issues are the main reasons why an increasing number of soldiers are taking their own lives.
While 79 soldiers committed suicide in 2003, 88 killed themselves in 2005 and 99 died at their own hands last year.
Another two suspected suicides from 2006 are under investigation.
The only year that saw a drop was 2004, in which 67 soldiers committed suicide.
Most of the dead were members of infantry units who killed themselves with firearms.
CNN said demographic differences and varying stress factors make it difficult to compare the military suicide rate to that of civilians.
In 2006, the overall suicide rate for the United States was 13.4 per 100,000 people. It was 21.1 per 100,000 people for all men aged 17 to 45, compared to a rate of 17.8 for men in the Army.
The overall rate was 5.46 per 100,000 for women, compared to an Army rate of 11.3 women soldiers per 100,000.
August 16, 2007
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2007/08/16/suicide_rate_increases_among_us_soldiers/5656/
Illinois: Illegal Immigrant Leaving Sanctuary
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An illegal immigrant who took refuge in a Chicago church a year ago to escape deportation said she planned to leave her sanctuary soon to lobby Congress for immigration changes, even if that means risking arrest. The immigrant, Elvira Arellano, 32, has said she feared being separated from her 8-year-old son, Saul, when she asked the Adalberto United Methodist Church for help, but she said she planned to leave on Sept. 12 to travel to Washington. Ms. Arellano came to the United States illegally from Mexico in 1997, was deported, but then returned. She moved to Illinois in 2000.
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/us/16brfs-ILLEGALIMMIG_BRF.html?ref=us
Bolivia: Coca Leaves Predict Castro Recovery
By SIMON ROMERO
A consultation of coca leaves by Aymara Indian shamans presages the recovery of Fidel Castro, according to Cuba’s ambassador to Bolivia. “The Comandante is enjoying a recovery,” Rafael Dausá, the ambassador, told Bolivia’s state news agency after attending the ceremony in El Alto, the heavily indigenous city near the capital, La Paz. Pointing to Cuba’s warming ties to Bolivia, as the leftist president, Evo Morales, settles into his second year in power, Mr. Dausá said, “Being in Bolivia today means being in the leading trench in the anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America.” Bolivia and Cuba, together with Venezuela, have forged a political and economic alliance called the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas.
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/world/americas/16briefs-coca.html?ref=world
Long-Studied Giant Star Displays Huge Cometlike Tail
By WARREN E. LEARY
August 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/science/space/16star.html?ref=us
Storm Victims Sue Over Trailers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 8 (AP) — More than 500 hurricane survivors living in government-issued trailers and mobile homes are taking the manufacturers of the structures to court.
In a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in New Orleans, the hurricane survivors accused the makers of using inferior materials in a profit-driven rush to build the temporary homes. The lawsuit asserts that thousands of Louisiana residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 were exposed to dangerous levels of formaldehyde by living in the government-issued trailers and mobile homes.
And, it accuses 14 manufacturers that supplied the Federal Emergency Management Agency with trailers of cutting corners in order to quickly fill the shortage after the storms.
Messages left with several of those companies were not immediately returned.
FEMA, which is not named as a defendant in this suit, has agreed to have the air quality tested in some of the trailers.
August 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/us/09trailers.html?ref=us
British Criticize U.S. Air Attacks in Afghan Region
By CARLOTTA GALL
August 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/09/world/asia/09casualties.html?hp
Army Expected to Meet Recruiting Goal
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
After failing to meet its recruiting goal for two consecutive months, the Army is expected to announce that it met its target for July. Officials are offering a new $20,000 bonus to recruits who sign up by the end of September. A preliminary tally shows that the Army most likely met its goal of 9,750 recruits for last month, a military official said on the condition of anonymity because the numbers will not be announced for several more days. The Army expects to meet its recruiting goal of 80,000 for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, the official said.
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/washington/08brfs-ARMYEXPECTED_BRF.html
Beach Closings and Advisories
By REUTERS
The number of United States beaches declared unsafe for swimming reached a record last year, with more than 25,000 cases where shorelines were closed or health advisories issued, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported, using data from the Environmental Protection Agency. The group said the likely culprit was sewage and contaminated runoff from water treatment systems. “Aging and poorly designed sewage and storm water systems hold much of the blame for beach water pollution,” it said. The number of no-swim days at 3,500 beaches along the oceans, bays and Great Lakes doubled from 2005. The report is online at www.nrdc.org/water/oceans/ttw/titinx.asp.
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/science/earth/08brfs-BEACHCLOSING_BRF.html
Finland: 780-Year-Old Pine Tree Found
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Scientists have discovered a 780-year-old Scots pine, the oldest living forest pine known in Finland, the Finnish Forest Research Institute said. The tree was found last year in Lapland during a study mission on forest fires, the institute said, and scientists analyzed a section of the trunk to determine its age. “The pine is living, but it is not in the best shape,” said Tuomo Wallenius, a researcher. “It’s quite difficult to say how long it will survive.” The tree is inside the strip of land on the eastern border with Russia where access is strictly prohibited.
August 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/world/europe/08briefs-tree.html
The Bloody Failure of ‘The Surge’: A Special Report
by Patrick Cockburn
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/07/3029/
Sean Penn applauds as Venezuela's Chavez rails against Bush
The Associated Press
August 2, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/03/arts/LA-A-E-CEL-Venezuela-Sean-Penn.php
California: Gore’s Son Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Al Gore III, son of the former vice president, pleaded guilty to possessing marijuana and other drugs, but a judge said the plea could be withdrawn and the charges dropped if Mr. Gore, left, completed a drug program. The authorities have said they found drugs in Mr. Gore’s car after he was pulled over on July 4 for driving 100 miles an hour. He pleaded guilty to two felony counts of drug possession, two misdemeanor counts of drug possession without a prescription and one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Gore, 24, has been at a live-in treatment center since his arrest, said Allan Stokke, his lawyer.
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31brfs-gore.html
United Parcel Service Agrees to Benefits in Civil Unions
By KAREEM FAHIM
July 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/nyregion/31civil.html?ref=nyregion
John Stewart demands the Bay View retract the truth, Editorial by Willie Ratcliff, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=278&Itemid=14
Minister to Supervisors: Stop Lennar, assess the people’s health by Minister Christopher Muhammad, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=306&Itemid=18
OPD shoots unarmed 15-year-old in the back in East Oakland by Minister of Information JR, http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=18
California: Raids on Marijuana Clinics
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided 10 medical marijuana clinics in Los Angles County just as Los Angeles city leaders backed a measure calling for an end to the federal government’s crackdown on the dispensaries. Federal officials made five arrests and seized large quantities of marijuana and cash after serving clinics with search warrants, said a spokeswoman, Sarah Pullen. Ms. Pullen refused to disclose other details. The raid, the agency’s second largest on marijuana dispensaries, came the same day the Los Angeles City Council introduced an interim ordinance calling on federal authorities to stop singling out marijuana clinics allowed under state law.
July 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/us/26brfs-RAIDSONMARIJ_BRF.html
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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.
