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Stop the ICE Raids!
Tuesday, May 27, 10 AM
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Headquarters
630 Sansome St (at Washington St.) San Francisco
THE ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT IMMIGRATION LAW BY ICE IS UNWARRANTED AND
NEGATIVELY IMPACTS THE COMMUNITY FOR EVERYONE
aldi responds to ICE Press Release and Tuesday, May 27th Press Conference-Demonstration
To: ALDI llamado urgente
News Release
Contact: ALDI at (415)368-8481 or at
(831)261.2493
May 23, 2008
THE ENFORCEMENT OF CURRENT IMMIGRATION LAW BY ICE IS UNWARRANTED AND
NEGATIVELY IMPACTS THE COMMUNITY FOR EVERYONE
According to ICE officials, they have just completed a three week
enforcement surge that has netted them with the arrest of 905
individuals in California. Out of these 905, 441 of them were made
here in Northern California.
Many in our Northern California community probably did not even know
that ICE was up to such activities. However there were many who were
despondently waiting for these surges in enforcement. Undocumented or
with documents we understood that no matter what reason, fairness or
justice seemed to call for, that a legalization program for the
millions of our undocumented residents was not currently attainable.
But that did not mean that we idly waited for these actions to come.
On the contrary these actions seemed to bring out the justice seeker
in us, motivated us to become more informed and to work together and
be more connected with our undocumented immigrant community. As a
result we were well aware that ICE was targeting our communities.
Before ICE issued this press release we knew that ICE had arrested a
father of two in Watsonville, had deported another two who had been
detained by the Hayward Police for traffic violations and that early
yesterday morning, seventeen of our San Rafael community members had
been arrested.
Although these ICE officials are said to be enforcing the law, the
enforcement of current immigration law is unwarranted and overall
negatively impacts the community for everyone Instead of extracting
workers, consumers, students and ultimately human beings from our
communities, our federal government should work to create better
economic, social and educational opportunities for us.
Please join us
Press Conference - Demonstration:
Stop the ICE Raids!
Tuesday, May 27, 10 AM
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Headquarters
630 Sansome St (at Washington St.) San Francisco
An outrageous wave of anti-immigrant ICE raids is sweeping the nations
homes, schools, and workplaces, as business and government tries to
deflect anger over a failing economy, layoffs, rising prices, cuts in
social services, and continuing war.
In San Francisco, the first of the the first of the 63 Balazo Taqueria
workers seized in the May 2nd raids have their hearing on Tuesday, May
27. There will be a demonstration-press conference at 10 AM at ICE
headquarters, 630 Sansome St, demanding:
* Stop the raids on our homes, schools, and workplaces!
* Stop the deportations and the breaking up of our families!
* Immediate, unconditional legalization of immigrant families!
* Victims of deportations be allowed to return to their families!
People are also urged to be at ICE headquarters at 8:30 AM the same
day, to attend the siezed Balazo workers' hearings in support, if possible.
More information: 415-933-2023
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION:
http://natassembly.org/
TO READ THE CALL:
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
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JROTC MUST GO!
Check out the new website:
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
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NO on state Prop. 98!
San Francisco Tenants Union (415) 282-5525 www.sftu.org
Wealthy landlords and other right-wing operatives placed Prop. 98 on the state ballot. This is a dangerous and deceptive measure. Disguised as an effort to reform eminent domain laws and protect homeowners, Prop. 98 would abolish tenant protections such as rent control and just-cause eviction laws, and would end a number of other environmental protection and land use laws. [The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
We All Hate that 98!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Phrt5zVGn0
READ ALL OF PROP. 98 at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) ACLU Slams JROTC as VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
Copyright © 2008 Marc Norton
MARC NORTON ONLINE
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/105754.html
First published in Beyond Chron on May 20, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5684
2) Jury Convicts Officer of Lying in Fatal Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/us/21atlanta.html?ref=us
3) Officers Face Department Charges in Bell Killing
By AL BAKER
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/nyregion/21sean.html?ref=nyregion
4) CPR for the Anti-War Movement
by Ron Jacobs
Monthly Review
May 21, 2008
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jacobs210508.html
5) What the F.B.I. Agents Saw
Editorial
May 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/opinion/22thu1.html?hp
6) U.S. Airstrike Kills 8 Civilians in Iraq
By STEPHEN FARRELL
May 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/world/middleeast/23iraq.html?hp
7) New Florida Law Allows Low-Cost Health Policies
By KEVIN SACK
May 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/us/22crist.html?ref=us
8) Fear of Troop Exodus Fuels Debate on G.I. Bill
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
May 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/washington/22soldiers.html?ref=us
9) Russia and China Condemn U.S. Missile Shield Plan
By ALAN COWELL
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/world/24china.html?hp
10) Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says
By JAMES GLANZ
May 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/world/middleeast/23audit.html?hp
11) Amazon Indians lead battle against power giant's plan to flood rainforest
By Patrick Cunningham in Altamira, Brazil
Friday, 23 May 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/amazon-indians-lead-battle-against-power-giants-plan-to-flood-rainforest-832865.html
12) 270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push
By JULIA PRESTON
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?hp
13) American Axle workers OK contract, ending long strike
By JEWEL GOPWANI
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER
May 22, 2008
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080522/BUSINESS01/80522127
14) Toughest Summer Job This Year Is Finding One
By PETER S. GOODMAN
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/25teen.html?hp
15) The Sergeant Lost Within
By DANIEL BERGNER
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25injuries-t.html?ref=world
16) Immigration Officials Arrest 905 in California Sweep
By REBECCA CATHCART
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24deport.html?ref=us
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1) ACLU Slams JROTC as VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
Copyright © 2008 Marc Norton
MARC NORTON ONLINE
http://www.marcnorton.us/98827/105754.html
First published in Beyond Chron on May 20, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5684
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a major report last week stating that the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) violates a protocol of the United Nations-sponsored Convention on the Rights of the Child, by targeting students as young as 14 for recruitment to the military.
"The United States military's procedures for recruiting students plainly violate internationally accepted standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and aggressive recruitment tactics," according to Jennifer Turner of the ACLU Human Rights Project.
The international protocol analyzed by the ACLU report outlaws the recruitment of child soldiers. The U.S. Senate ratified this protocol in 2002, making it the law of the land, and agreed not to recruit soldiers under the age of 17. However, as usual, the U.S. military sees itself as above the law.
As any dunderhead can see, JROTC -- a prime recruitment tool of the military -- includes high school students well under the age of 17, including many freshmen and sophomores.
The San Francisco school board voted in November 2006 to end JROTC in San Francisco schools this June. Last December, the school board extended JROTC for another year, until June 2009. However, the JROTC Must Go! Coalition continues to press the board to end JROTC now.
--> See "JROTC Must Go Now" in the May 14 Bay Guardian,
at http://www.sfbg.com/printable_entry.php?entry_id=6353.
The release of the new ACLU report on May 13, titled "Soldiers of Misfortune," only adds fuel to the fire of the anti-JROTC movement.
The ACLU report also takes aim at one of the spurious claims of the pro-JROTC forces -- that JROTC is "voluntary." It is worth quoting the ACLU report at length on this:
"Students are involuntarily placed in the JROTC program in some public schools. For example, teachers and students in Los Angeles, California reported that 'high school administrators were enrolling reluctant students in JROTC as an alternative to overcrowded gym classes.' Involuntary placement of Los Angeles students has been a continuing problem, with involuntary enrollment surging before the fall deadline that requires enrollment levels of 100 students to keep the program running (federal law requires JROTC programs to have a minimum of 100 students or 10% of the student body, whichever is less, in order to maintain a unit)."
According to a recent survey of over 800 San Francisco JROTC students, 15.6% of the cadets who responded claimed that they were "placed in the program without my consent." Reports of SF students being placed involuntarily in JROTC go back to at least 1995, during a previous attempt by members of the school board to abolish JROTC.
In Buffalo, New York, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the entire incoming freshmen class at Hutchinson Central Technical High School was involuntarily enrolled in JROTC in 2005.
The Pentagon has a long and deadly reach. It is criminal that they continue to send our young men and women to foreign lands like Iraq to fight and die in illegal and immoral wars. It is intolerable that the San Francisco school board continues to aid and abet the Pentagon -- allowing them to flaunt international law with impunity by recruiting our 14, 15 and 16 year old sons and daughters for their war-mongering.
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2) Jury Convicts Officer of Lying in Fatal Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/us/21atlanta.html?ref=us
ATLANTA (AP) — A jury convicted a police officer on Tuesday of lying to investigators after a botched drug raid that resulted in the death of a 92-year-old woman, but cleared him of two more-serious charges.
After deliberating over four days, the jury convicted the officer, Arthur Tesler, of making false statements. He was acquitted of charges that he violated his oath and false imprisonment under color of legal process. Officer Tesler, who is on leave from the force, faces up to five years in prison.
Plainclothes narcotics officers burst into the home of the woman, Kathryn Johnston, in northwestern Atlanta on Nov. 21, 2006, using a “no-knock” warrant to search for drugs. Ms. Johnston fired a single bullet at the officers. They responded with 39 bullets. Ms. Johnston was hit five or six times.
Officer Tesler, 42, was the sole officer to face a jury on charges related to the raid. Two others, Jason R. Smith and Gregg Junnier, have pleaded guilty to state manslaughter and federal civil rights charges.
The police had originally said they went to the house after an informer had bought drugs there from a man known as “Sam.”
After the death, an investigation found holes in the account.
After searching the home and finding no drugs, the officers tried to cover up the mistake, prosecutors said. They said Officer Smith handcuffed the dying woman and placed three little bags of marijuana in the basement. He then called the informer, Alex White, and told him to pretend that he had bought crack cocaine at the house, the prosecutors said.
Mr. White later sued the city and the police, saying the police had kidnapped and held him against his will for hours in hopes he would help them with the cover-up.
Officer Tesler was stationed at the back of Ms. Johnston’s house and never fired a shot, testimony showed. He testified that his former partners, Officers Smith and Junnier, planned the cover-up and that he feared they would frame him if he did not go along.
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3) Officers Face Department Charges in Bell Killing
By AL BAKER
May 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/nyregion/21sean.html?ref=nyregion
Seven New York City police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell, including three detectives who were acquitted in a criminal trial, were formally accused on Tuesday of breaking Police Department rules in the case.
The department said that the officers violated the internal policy manual in a variety of ways, including improperly firing their guns and failing to process the crime scene after Mr. Bell was killed and his two friends injured in a storm of 50 bullets.
The three detectives who stood trial in the case — Detectives Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper — were charged with “discharging their firearms outside of department guidelines,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. Detective Isnora was also charged with taking enforcement action while working as an undercover officer instead of letting officers who were present, and not working undercover, take control.
Lt. Gary Napoli, the ranking officer at the scene, faces internal charges of failing to supervise the operation, Mr. Browne said. Sergeant Hugh McNeil and Detective Robert Knapp, of the Crime Scene Unit, were also charged: the detective with failing to thoroughly process the crime scene and the sergeant with failing to ensure a thorough processing was done.
Police Officer Michael Carey, was charged with discharging his firearm outside of department guidelines. Another officer involved in the shooting, Detective Paul Headley, was not charged because a review of the evidence currently available did not support charges, officials said.
If the charges, known as administrative charges, are upheld, the officers could face discipline ranging from loss of pay to retraining to firing. But the internal investigation has been suspended as federal prosecutors weigh civil rights charges in the case.
The department filed the internal charges Tuesday to beat a Sunday deadline. Under personnel rules, it had 18 months from the date of the shooting, Nov. 25, 2006, to charge the officers.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who has been a spokesman for the Bell family and has protested the acquittals, called the charges “a step in the right direction.” But he drew a parallel between the Bell shooting and the recent beatings of three suspects by the police in Philadelphia, which was caught on videotape.
He urged Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly “to follow the lead of Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who fired four police yesterday, demoted one sergeant, and disciplined others, without going through a long internal procedure.”
Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, shot back that the “Rev. Al needs to be reminded that all of the detectives were found not guilty in a court of law.” He said the union would “vigorously represent our detectives in the department’s trial room.”
Lawyers for some of the officers also criticized the decision to lodge internal charges against the men.
Though neither Mr. Bell nor his friends had a firearm, defense lawyers argued at trial the three detectives believed someone in Mr. Bell’s car had a gun because of comments they overheard outside the nightclub. Additionally, the evidence suggested the shooting began only after Mr. Bell had twice rammed his car into an unmarked police van. Detectives Isnora and Oliver were charged with manslaughter and Detective Cooper with reckless endangerment, but Justice Arthur J. Cooperman of State Supreme Court in Queens acquitted them, saying the prosecution had not proved that the shooting was unjustified.
But the judge seemed to criticize the operation when he wrote in his verdict, “Questions of carelessness and incompetence must be left to other forums.”
The chaotic moments surrounding the shooting were examined in depth at trial, with testimony showing that no bubble lights were in place on the roofs of the police vehicles during the attempted arrest of Mr. Bell, and that while officers said they were wearing their shields, some were not wearing police raid jackets. Elements of the crime scene investigation were disorganized, with accusations of contamination of evidence and inaccurate markings of physical evidence, such as shell casings.
Shortly after Detectives Isnora, Oliver and Cooper were indicted, they were served with administrative charges in April 2007 that “basically mirrored the criminal charges they faced,” Mr. Browne said. The new internal charges accuse them specifically of breaking departmental rules — though both could result in their being fired.
The officers can contest the charges before a departmental judge, but it is ultimately up to the commissioner to accept or reject the judge’s recommendation.
The department does not always file internal charges in such cases. In 1999, after four officers in the Bronx fired 41 bullets at Amadou Diallo, killing him, the officers were indicted and acquitted, and no departmental charges were filed against them.
The internal charges were determined by what is already in the public record, Mr. Browne said. That includes court testimony in the criminal case and a preliminary departmental report on the shooting. The department did not specify the basis for the charges, that is, why it believed the detectives had violated the rules on shooting, and it did not elaborate on the lapses in handling the crime scene.
Philip E. Karasyk, a lawyer for Detective Isnora, said the department rushed to file charges that he said “are often dismissed or amended.” He added: “The charges that have been served today have been drawn up without the benefit of hearing what the officers have to say.”
Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, defended Officer Carey, saying the department would find that he “acted fully within the scope of his duty and the guidelines of the department.”
Howard Tanner, a lawyer for Lieutenant Napoli, said he “has an excellent prior record.”
Paul P. Martin, the lawyer for Detective Cooper, said he was taking the departmental charges “very seriously,” but was more concerned about the possibility of federal charges.
James J. Culleton, the lawyer for Detective Oliver, did not respond to messages. Sergeant McNeil and Detective Knapp could not be reached for comment, and their lawyers were not known.
Kirk Semple contributed reporting.
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4) CPR for the Anti-War Movement
by Ron Jacobs
Monthly Review
May 21, 2008
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/jacobs210508.html
It is fair to say that the anti-war movement in the US is moribund. A movement that put a million people in the streets a month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and has drawn as many as half-a-million protesters to protests as recently as January 2007 has failed to mobilize anything even near those numbers since then. Part of this is because of differences among the leadership of the two primary anti-war organizations, part of it is because many people opposed to the war have put their energies -- however misplaced -- into working for Barack Obama, and part of it is attributable to the belief that there is nothing one can do to stop the bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The most recent example of this occurred during the week of March 15th, 2008. Despite the announced intentions of both anti-war organizations to organize some kind of national march marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there was no such protest. Instead, hundreds of cities and towns around the country held smaller observances.
In the wake of the failure to organize a national protest, some folks from the US who had formed a coalition following a 2007 international anti-war conference in London decided to step outside the existing organizational stasis. They formed a steering committee with the intention of reigniting the national movement against the war in the United States. The primary movers behind this effort include members of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), US Labor Against the War (USLAW), military veterans and individuals with decades of experience organizing against imperial war, and representatives of numerous local anti-war committees. Characterizing themselves as the mass action wing of the anti-war movement, the steering committee in early spring 2008 put out a call for a nationalmeeting of anti-war activists and citizens in late June of this year -- a call which has been answered by hundreds of organizations and individuals from across the US. Organizing under the name The National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation, the steering committee has garnered the endorsement of several labor organizations and individuals like Cindy Sheehan, Howard Zinn, and Mumia Abu Jamal. In addition, a multitude of local peace and justice organizations, church groups, and student organizations have signed on.
When I asked AFSC organizer and coordinator of the Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition Greg Coleridge, who along with Marilyn Levin of Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace, is one of the national spokespeople for the National Assembly, why this conference should be held now, he responded this way.
"The ever-increasing human carnage, economic costs, and desire for US military conquest connected to the Iraq war and occupation demand effective resistance. There is an urgent need for greater coordination, collaboration and cohesion among US anti-war organizations without giving up their own missions and identities. The upcoming elections provide ample opportunities to distract attention from the current permanent nature of the war and occupation. Now is the time for anti-war activists and concerned citizens to come together and call on the anti-war movement to organize mass actions which communicate to the public and pressure elected officials that US troops, bases and contractors must leave Iraq immediately."
It is important to note that there is not a call for a withdrawal timetable here. As Coordinating Committee member Jerry Gordon told me in a conversation, the only correct demand for the U.S. anti-war movement is for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq. Furthermore, it is assumed that the best way to make this demand is through mass action and a unified anti-war movement that utilizes democratic decision-making and remains independent of any and all political parties and organizations. It is not the intention of those on the steering committee to supersede UFPJ or ANSWER. Indeed, they have the utmost respect for the two organizations and the work they have done to this point. This respect is evident in the fact that both organizations have members from their coordinating committees on the speakers list for the Assembly.
The Assembly, which will take place on June 28th and 29th 2008 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Northeast Cleveland, is open to all. A five-point action plan will be discussed and voted on during the weekend. Although there are several speakers slated for the podium and a number of workshops scheduled, there will be ample time for anyone to speak and it is hoped that those who have serious ideas on how to organize a movement that will stop this war will attend and speak up. As Greg Coleridge put it in an email to me, "I see the Assembly as a collective facilitator -- enabling the many different voices against the war to coalesce and create a massive roar to force an immediate end to the war and occupation." He continued, hoping that a "greater trust" can be developed among those working to end the war. As for concrete outcomes, he said the organizers "hope that Assembly attendees will agree to urge that the broad anti-war movement unite in calling for mass actions this year and next."
Reminding me that the vast majority of people in the US oppose the war and occupation, Coleridge explained why he believes mass action is not only important but essential. "Unfortunately," he wrote in an email. "the US Constitution doesn't permit national initiatives or referendums." If it did, he "believe(s) most people today would vote for a federal initiative calling to end the Iraq war, bring US troops home, close military bases, and end funding beyond required to transport the troops back." Coleridge continued, explaining that "Organized mass street actions have played a historically important role in producing social change in this country. A government that ignores public opinion and mass mobilizations loses credibility, authenticity, and legitimacy. No government can effectively govern without support from the majority of its citizens. A vast majority of people oppose the war and occupation. The anti-war movement has a responsibility to provide forums where those feelings can be expressed. National and coordinated mass action is certainly not the only strategy required to end the Iraq war and occupation. Over the last couple of years, however, it is a strategy that has not been utilized for maximum effect. That must change."
Conference speakers include Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, author of Anti-War Soldier and Co-Founder of Appeal for Redress; Donna Dewitt, president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO; Cindy Sheehan (by satellite); Colia Clark, long time civil rights activist; Fred Mason, President of the Maryland AFL-CIO and National Co-Convenor of USLAW; Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army; and Clarence Thomas, Executive Board member, ILWU Local 10, the trade union that initiated the May 1 one-day strike that closed all U.S. West Coast ports from Canada to Mexico.
For information and to register for the National Assembly, please go to their website at www.natassembly.org or call 216-736-4704.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (republished by Verso). His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at
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5) What the F.B.I. Agents Saw
Editorial
May 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/opinion/22thu1.html?hp
Does this sound familiar? Muslim men are stripped in front of female guards and sexually humiliated. A prisoner is made to wear a dog’s collar and leash, another is hooded with women’s underwear. Others are shackled in stress positions for hours, held in isolation for months, and threatened with attack dogs.
You might think we are talking about that one cell block in Abu Ghraib, where President Bush wants the world to believe a few rogue soldiers dreamed up a sadistic nightmare. These atrocities were committed in the interrogation centers in American military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And they were not revealed by Red Cross officials, human rights activists, Democrats in Congress or others the administration writes off as soft-on-terror.
They were described in a painful report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, based on the accounts of hundreds of F.B.I. agents who saw American interrogators repeatedly mistreat prisoners in ways that the agents considered violations of American law and the Geneva Conventions. According to the report, some of the agents began keeping a “war crimes file” — until they were ordered to stop.
These were not random acts. It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners:
— Four F.B.I. agents saw an interrogator cuff two detainees and force water down their throats.
— Prisoners at Guantánamo were shackled hand-to-foot for prolonged periods and subjected to extreme heat and cold.
— At least one detainee at Guantánamo was kept in an isolation cell for at least two months, a practice the military considers to be torture when applied to American soldiers.
The study said F.B.I. agents reported this illegal behavior to Washington. They were told not to take part, but the bureau appears to have done nothing to end the abuse. It certainly never told Congress or the American people. The inspector general said the agents’ concerns were conveyed to the National Security Council, but he found no evidence that it acted on them.
Mr. Bush claims harsh interrogations produced invaluable intelligence, but the F.B.I. agents said the abuse was ineffective. They also predicted, accurately, that it would be impossible to prosecute abused prisoners.
For years, Mr. Bush has refused to tell the truth about his administration’s inhuman policy on prisoners, and the Republican-controlled Congress eagerly acquiesced to his stonewalling. Now, the Democrats in charge of Congress must press for full disclosure.
Representative John Conyers, who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said he would focus on the F.B.I. report at upcoming hearings. Witnesses are to include John C. Yoo, who wrote the infamous torture memos, and the committee has subpoenaed David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Mr. Conyers also wants to question F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Michael Mukasey, both of whom should be subpoenaed if they do not come voluntarily.
That is just the first step toward uncovering the extent of President Bush’s disregard for the law and the Geneva Conventions. It will be a painful process to learn how so many people were abused and how America’s most basic values were betrayed. But it is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a violator, of human rights.
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6) U.S. Airstrike Kills 8 Civilians in Iraq
By STEPHEN FARRELL
May 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/world/middleeast/23iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD — Iraqi officials said an American helicopter strike on Thursday killed eight civilians including two children and an elderly man during an assault near the northern Iraqi town of Baiji.
American officials confirmed that two children had died in an American assault on Sunni insurgent suspects in the area and expressed regret. Iraqi officials, however, said the incident was likely to stoke anti-American resentment.
An Iraqi police official in Salahuddin Province said the American forces were carrying out an air assault in al-Mazraa village, near Baiji. He cited police officials in the village who said that the people were shot from the air while running away.
The American military said the dead civilians were two children traveling in a car used by suspected insurgents who showed “hostile intent.”
In a statement the military said it has begun an investigation, but said the targets of the operation were “known terrorists” and accused them of hiding behind civilians, “thereby endangering others around them.”
It said the deaths happened during a raid on fighters belonging to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the Sunni insurgent group in Iraq that American intelligence officials have said is led by foreigners.
The American military statement said that the suspects targeted had been operating a weapons storage facility and were believed to be associated with a suicide bombing network, and a senior Qaeda “facilitator” who helped foreign fighters in Iraq.
“Unfortunately, two children were killed when the other occupants of the vehicle in which they were riding exhibited hostile intent,” said the American statement, which was released in Baghdad.
Col. Mudhir al-Qaysi, of the Baiji police, said: “Baiji policemen went to the scene and found the killed family unarmed, and the bodies were burned and torn apart.”
Colonel Qaysi said the actions would reinforce the negative image of American forces locally. “The scene of the bodies is ugly and these acts are unacceptable,” he said. “We were hoping that the American army would seek to improve its image after many crimes carried out by its soldiers in Iraq.”
The deaths came only days after widespread anger in Iraq over the admission that an American sniper used a Koran as target practice near Baghdad.
American military officials say the sniper was disciplined and removed from Iraq but the Iraqi cabinet called for him to be prosecuted.
President Bush made a personal apology to Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
After the Baiji incident Col. Jerry O’Hara, an American military spokesman, said that the American-led coalition “sincerely regrets when any innocent civilians are injured that result from terrorist locating themselves in and around them. We take every precaution to protect innocent civilians and engage only hostile threats.”
The deaths follow a similar incident south of Mosul on May 10 in which American-led forces, targeting aides of what the Americans called a Qaeda foreign facilitator, opened fire on a suspect’s vehicle.
American officials said their soldiers fired three warning shots then opened fire when the driver refused to stop and they saw one man making “threatening movements.”
The shots killed a woman and child, as well as two armed men inside the vehicle. On that occasion the American military also expressed regret for the death of innocent civilians “during our operations to rid Iraq of terrorists.”
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7) New Florida Law Allows Low-Cost Health Policies
By KEVIN SACK
May 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/us/22crist.html?ref=us
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — With considerable fanfare, Gov. Charlie Crist traveled the length of his state on Wednesday to sign a bill aimed at providing low-cost health coverage to the uninsured by allowing the sale of stripped-down insurance policies.
There is disagreement about whether the new law will make much of a dent in Florida’s growing rate of uninsured residents, which at 21 percent is the fourth highest in the country.
But the best part, as Mr. Crist, a Republican, explained at news conferences in Miami, Tampa and Tallahassee, is that the law “doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime.”
That is a common thread in state capitals this spring, as governors and lawmakers struggle to respond to broad anxiety about health care within the limitations of deeply strained budgets. The bold ideas of recent years have been swept away by a worrisome economy, leaving incrementalism and caution in their stead.
In some statehouses, the focus is shifting from covering the uninsured to lowering the cost of health care.
It seems like far more than 16 months ago that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, another Republican, captivated the health policy world by proposing a $14 billion plan for universal coverage there. The plan, which resembled the Massachusetts universal plan enacted in 2006, died in the Legislature in January, largely because of fiscal concerns. Mr. Schwarzenegger is now proposing heavy cuts in health spending to close a $17 billion budget gap.
In Minnesota this month, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, also a Republican, vetoed a bill that would have given the working poor far more access to public insurance. Mr. Pawlenty said in his veto message that the subsidy level in the bill was “excessive and irresponsible.”
He plans to sign a less ambitious bill that the Democratic-controlled Legislature passed on Saturday.
“The system is busted, and you can’t take a system that is growing at several times the rate of inflation and subsidize your way to a solution,” Mr. Pawlenty said in an interview.
Some states have moved to make more people with low and middle incomes eligible for public insurance programs, like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Others have chosen to cut such subsidies to balance budgets, and most new initiatives have been notable for small investments of public dollars.
Michigan is considering shortening the waiting period that insurers can impose on patients with pre-existing medical conditions. In Virginia, a foundation was left to go it alone after the General Assembly opted not to match its $1 million contribution to reducing insurance costs for workers in small businesses.
“To create successful coverage strategies, historically states have had to ante up,” said Laura Tobler, a health policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “But more than half of states are reporting shortfalls. So there hasn’t been as much activity this year as the last two, and the activity we have seen has been of the regulatory nature, which costs less money.”
That is a point that Mr. Crist made repeatedly on Wednesday, noting that the Florida budget dropped, to $66 billion this year from $72 billion last year.
“The economy is in a different place right now,” the governor, the son of a physician, said while traveling between events. “Our obligation is to find a way without tax dollars to still provide better health care for our people.”
His initiative, which both houses of the Republican-controlled Legislature approved unanimously, enables insurers to create bare-bones policies that the governor hopes will sell for no more than $150 a month. That is about 60 percent less than the average cost of a policy for a single person in Florida, according to state insurance regulators.
The policies would be available to any Floridian 19 to 64 who has been uninsured for at least six months and who is not eligible for public insurance. In a critical provision, insurers would be prohibited from rejecting applicants based on age or health status.
To make the policies affordable, Florida will allow insurers to offer policies that do not include many of the 52 services that standard policies must currently cover, like acupuncture and podiatry. The state added a mandate on Tuesday, when Mr. Crist signed a bill requiring coverage for treating autism.
The low-cost plans have to include preventive services, office visits, screenings, surgery, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment and diabetes supplies.
Some options offered by insurers have to include catastrophic and hospital coverage. But an insurance company could, for instance, choose to limit the number of days of hospitalization it will cover or place a dollar cap on reimbursing certain services.
The new law also enables parents to cover children up to age 30 on their policies, raising the age from 25.
Thirteen states have statutes allowing bare-bones policies — and Florida has tried them on a pilot basis — on the theory that some health coverage is better than none. The plans have not proven tremendously popular, according to health policy researchers.
They appeal primarily to people who have to buy insurance on the individual or small-group market, and studies have found that low cost is not always sufficient to persuade consumers to buy policies that may still leave them with high out-of-pocket costs.
“We know people are only somewhat responsive to the price of health insurance,” said Sherry Glied, a professor of health policy at Columbia University. “The question is whether people will perceive these plans to be worth it to them. People that want health insurance tend to want real health insurance.”
Mr. Crist acknowledged that the low-cost plans would not provide “Cadillac coverage.” But he said he was optimistic that uninsured Floridians would buy the plans after they are able to analyze their costs and benefits, starting early next year.
“Even if it’s one person,” Mr. Crist said, “it would be a success. But I’m sure there will be many more than that.”
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8) Fear of Troop Exodus Fuels Debate on G.I. Bill
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
May 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/washington/22soldiers.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON — Ever since the G.I.’s came home from World War II, it has been the nation’s policy to reward war veterans with college education. Now, a bipartisan proposal to expand that benefit significantly for today’s veterans has encountered a new complication: the military still needs its fighting men and women in uniform, not in classrooms.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan far from over, President Bush is threatening to veto a bill that would pay tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for anyone who has served in the military for at least three years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A main reason is the fear that it would hasten an exodus from the ranks.
The issue has created a political conundrum for a president who has often gone to great lengths to show support for the troops. And in an election year, when legislative battles on Capitol Hill are increasingly turning into proxy fights of the presidential campaign, that is almost certainly the point.
“I would say the president really has a choice here,” Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat who has led the Senate’s efforts to expand the benefits, said Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Mr. Bush, he said, needed “to show how much he values military service.”
The legislation, the biggest expansion of the G.I. Bill in a quarter century, has attracted broad bipartisan support, passing the House this month with a veto-proof majority. In the Senate, it has 58 sponsors, 11 of them Republicans.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bush even found himself in opposition to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a group that has generally supported him. The group’s national commander, George Lisicki, emerged from a meeting with the president expressing strong support for the legislation.
Even so, the legislation’s fate is uncertain because of Mr. Bush’s veto threat and the decision by the Democratic leadership to amend it to an emergency military spending bill the president has opposed as lavish.
The legislation also faces a competing bill backed by Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, that seeks to address the Pentagon’s concerns about troops facing a choice between serving and studying.
“The G.I. Bill is one of the greatest examples of social policy,” said Peter D. Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University who served on Mr. Bush’s National Security Council, referring to its original incarnation in 1944 when the nation grappled with the waves of returning service members by sending them to college. At its peak, in 1947, nearly half of the nation’s college students were veterans.
“It was great for soldiers,” Professor Feaver said. “It was great for universities. It was the right way to honor service. It was the right thing all around. But it happened after the war was over.”
The program’s success — versions of it also sent veterans of Korea and Vietnam to college — has always made it politically popular, both on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon, which uses education benefits as a main tool in recruiting an all-volunteer force.
Mr. Bush called for changing benefits in his State of the Union address in January, specifically to allow service members to transfer the education aid to their spouses or children. That provision, pushed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, has become the main point of contention in the debate over the bill.
In its current form, the Montgomery G.I. Bill — named for Sonny Montgomery of Mississippi, the congressman who in 1984 pushed through the last major revisions — provides veterans up to $1,101 a month for education.
Mr. Webb, a former marine, has argued that the current benefits were devised for a peacetime military and need to be increased to reward those who have served in a new wartime era, where troops face repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With college tuition rising, he and other supporters say the current benefits fall short of paying full tuition, forcing veterans pursuing degrees to come up with the money to stay in college.
Mr. Webb’s proposal, first introduced last year, would increase the monthly benefit to the maximum tuition at a public university in each state. On average, the tuition assistance would amount to $1,700 a month. It would also pay up to $1,000 a year for fees and books and provide a housing stipend. Like the current G.I. Bill, it would apply to anyone who served at least three years.
He introduced the legislation in one of his first acts after being elected in the 2006 campaign that gave Democrats control of both houses. But in contrast to other Democratic efforts to shape Iraq policy, Mr. Webb has steadily built support across the political spectrum, uniting opponents and supporters of the war.
Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, was an early co-sponsor, and the bill has gradually won the support of other prominent Republicans, including Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, who is influential on military issues.
At a cost of $52 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the proposal is widely seen as generous, which the Pentagon says is exactly the problem. In a letter to the Senate in April, Mr. Gates warned that “serious retention issues could arise,” adding that “significant benefit increases need to be focused on those willing to commit to longer periods of service.”
As the legislation moved forward, the Bush administration threw its support behind an alternative bill introduced last month by Mr. McCain and two other Republican senators, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Richard M. Burr of North Carolina.
That benefit is also generous, increasing the monthly tuition benefit to $1,500, or roughly the average cost of public university tuition; it would rise to $2,000 for those who serve for 12 years. After new amendments, some as recent as Wednesday, their legislation would also include $1,000 a year for books and fees. The overall cost, Senators Graham and Burr said at a news conference, would be $38 billion over 10 years, financed by an across-the-board cut of a half percent in discretionary spending.
The main difference, though, is the provision to allow service members to transfer the benefits, up to half after 6 years of service and all after 12 years. Echoing the Pentagon’s arguments, they said that would encourage more service members, especially noncommissioned officers, to make the military a career.
“I’m not going to sit on the sidelines and, under feel-good politics, create a program that hurts retention,” Mr. Graham said.
Mr. Webb and other supporters have said the main focus should be on the veterans themselves, though Mr. Warner proposed an amendment that would expand a Pentagon program to transfer benefits in certain instances.
The effect benefits might have on retention is disputed.
The Congressional Budget Office, in its cost analysis, estimated that the benefits would result in a 16 percent drop in re-enlistments, a number opponents have repeatedly cited. But the office also predicted a 16 percent increase in recruitment because of the new benefits.
Mr. Lisicki, the Veterans of Foreign Wars commander, disputed the Pentagon’s assertions that the proposals would result in a troop exodus, and his remarks highlighted the political sensitivity confronting the White House.
“People are leaving after their first enlistment because they are tired of being shot at, and their families are tired of the frequent deployments,” Mr. Lisicki said in a statement after meeting the president. “Whether they stay in 4 years or 20, we owe this newest greatest generation the gift of education.”
Even as the White House issued its veto threat on Tuesday, a new group, VoteVets.org, began running commercials attacking Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain for opposing the Webb bill.
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9) Russia and China Condemn U.S. Missile Shield Plan
By ALAN COWELL
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/world/24china.html?hp
President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia traveled to Beijing Friday to conclude a deal on nuclear cooperation and join Chinese leaders in condemning American proposals for a missile shield in Europe. Both countries called the plan a setback to international trust likely to upset the balance of power.
Mr. Medvedev’s choice of China for an early diplomatic foray as president seemed to signal a desire to continue Moscow’s assertive foreign policy — particularly toward the United States — that was a hallmark of his predecessor, Vladimir V. Putin, during his eight years in office.
Mr. Medvedev was inaugurated as Russia’s president earlier this month, but Mr. Putin retained significant powers as prime minister.
Friday’s announcements in Beijing came as the two giant neighbors, who challenged the United States — and each other —during the cold war, grapple with newer tensions over an array of military and economic issues, including their rivalry over the energy resources of central Asia.
Mr. Medvedev arrived in China after a visit to Kazakhstan, which is seen as an important part of Moscow’s regional energy ambitions.
Both countries have condemned America’s plan for a missile shield. Russia in particular has long sought allies to act as a bulwark against what Moscow depicts as American global hegemony.
In a joint statement signed by Mr. Medvedev and President Hu Jintao, the two countries took issue once more with plans for a missile defense system “in certain regions of the world,” saying such measures “do not support strategic balance and stability, and harm international efforts to control arms and the non-proliferation process.”
“It harms the strengthening of trust between states and regional stability,” the statement said.
The statement did not specifically identify the United States, which has angered Russia with plans to deploy elements of a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. Washington says the shield is to protect against potential attack by rogue states like Iran and North Korea.
For their part, Moscow and Beijing have not always supported Washington’s efforts to characterize Iran as a sponsor of terrorism and a potential nuclear threat, particularly to Israel. Iran insists that its nuclear development program is for peaceful, civilian purposes.
The Russian-Chinese statement Friday also took issue with America’s attitude to the promotion of human rights, insisting that “every state has a right to encourage and protect them based on its own specific features and characters.”
The statement reflected an argument among Washington’s critics that the United States uses the human rights issue as a means of exerting political pressure. It said governments should “oppose politicizing the issue and using double standards” and should not use “human rights to interfere with other countries’ affairs.”
As a mark of the warming ties, the two countries signed a $1-billion agreement for Russia to build a nuclear fuel enrichment plant in China and supply uranium. Sergei V. Kiriyenko, the director of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, described the deal as “a good addition to our presence in China.”
Alan Cowell reported from Paris and Clifford J. Levy contributed reporting from Moscow.
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10) Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says
By JAMES GLANZ
May 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/world/middleeast/23audit.html?hp
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.
The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.
In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered.
Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment without any basis for the payment.”
“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California.
The new report is especially significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on anything resembling this scale.
The disclosure that $1.8 billion in Iraqi assets was mishandled comes on top of an earlier finding by an independent federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that United States occupation authorities early in the conflict could not account for the disbursement of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets.
“This report is further documentation of the fact that the United States had absolutely no preparation to use contracting on the scale that it needed either at the military or aid level in going to war in Iraq,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“We had really allowed ourselves to become more and more dependent on contractors in peacetime,” said Mr. Cordesman, who spoke in a telephone interview on Thursday. “We were unprepared to use contractors in wartime, and all of this had an immense impact.”
The Pentagon report, titled “Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt,” also notes that auditors were unable to find a comprehensible set of records to explain $134.8 million in payments by the American military to its allies in the Iraq war.
The mysterious payments, whose amounts had not been publicly disclosed, included $68.2 million to the United Kingdom, $45.3 million to Poland and $21.3 million to South Korea. Despite repeated requests, Pentagon auditors said they were unable to determine why the payments were made.
“It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid,” said Mr. Waxman, who later in the day introduced what he called a “clean contracting” amendment to a defense authorization bill being debated on the House floor. The amendment, which was accepted by voice vote, would institute a number of reforms, including new whistleblower protections and requirements on competitive bidding.
The audit was carried out by the Defense Department Office of the Inspector General, which is led by Claude M. Kicklighter, a retired lieutenant general. Mr. Kicklighter was not at the Thursday hearing because of a scheduling conflict.
Many of the previous investigations of payments to contractors in Iraq have focused on the flawed effort to rebuild the country’s decrepit electricity grid, oil infrastructure, transportation network and public institutions. The feeble accountability and spotty paperwork of the contracts examined by Mr. Kicklighter’s office make it difficult to say what many of them were for, but the report indicates that many appeared to be for things as mundane as bottles of water, truck rentals and food deliveries.
According to the report, the Army made 183,486 “commercial and miscellaneous payments” from April 2001 to June 2006 from field offices in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, for a total of $10.7 billion in taxpayer money. The auditors focused on $8.2 billion in so-called commercial payments to contractors — American, Iraqi and probably other foreign nationals — although the report does not give details on the roster of companies.
Because the contracts were too numerous to be examined one by one, the auditors said they took a standard approach and examined 702 statistically representative contracts, then extrapolated the results to the full set.
When the results were compiled, they revealed a lack of accountability notable even by the shaky standards detailed in earlier examinations of contracting in Iraq. The report said that about $1.4 billion in payments lacked even minimal documentation “such as certified vouchers, proper receiving reports and invoices,” to explain what had been purchased and why.
Another $6.3 billion in payments did contain information explaining the expenditures but lacked other information required by federal regulations governing the use of taxpayer money — things like payment terms, proper identification numbers and contact information for the agents involved in the transaction. Taken together, those results meant that almost 95 percent of the payments had not been properly documented.
In a separate examination, auditors found that the $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets paid out by American military officers had not been properly accounted for.
Examples of the paperwork for some of those payments, displayed at the hearing, depict a system that became accustomed to making huge payments on the fly, with little oversight or attention to detail. In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.
In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as “Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”
But perhaps the masterpiece of elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a “Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.” It indicates that $320.8 million went for “Iraqi Salary Payment,” with no explanation of what the Iraqis were paid to do.
Whatever it was, the document suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the “quantity” column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were to be paid — to the tune of $320,800 apiece — if the paperwork is to be trusted.
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11) Amazon Indians lead battle against power giant's plan to flood rainforest
By Patrick Cunningham in Altamira, Brazil
Friday, 23 May 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/amazon-indians-lead-battle-against-power-giants-plan-to-flood-rainforest-832865.html
The Amazonian city of Altamira played host to one of the more uneven contests in recent Brazilian history this week, as a colourful alliance of indigenous leaders gathered to take on the might of the state power corporation and stop the construction of an immense hydroelectric dam on a tributary of the Amazon.
At stake are plans to flood large areas of rainforest to make way for the huge Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on the Xingu river. The government is pushing the project as a sustainable energy solution, but critics complain the environmental and social costs are too high.
For people living beside the river, the dam will bring an end to their way of life. Thousands of homes will be submerged and changes in the local ecology will wipe out the livelihoods of many more, killing their main food sources and destroying their raw materials.
For the 10,000 tribal indians of the Xingu, whose lives have changed little since the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago, this will be a devastating blow.
"This is the second time we are fighting this battle," says Chief Bocaire, a young leader of the Kayapo, one of more than 600 Indians from 35 ethnic groups who gathered in record numbers in Altamira. The Indians had travelled hundreds of miles to get there in an area with hardly any roads. The roads that do exist are mostly dirt tracks, impassable in bad weather and difficult and dangerous at the best of times. For most it has been an odyssey of several weeks, travelling in small boats to reach the roads.
"In 1989, our parents defeated a similar proposal with the help of the international media. Now it is back. But we are ready to fight again. This time we speak their language, and we are more determined than ever," says Chief Bocaire.
With so much at stake, tensions spilled over into violence this week when an engineer from the power company Eletrobras was caught up in a melee with Indians wielding machetes. Paulo Fernando Rezende had his shirt ripped from him and was left with a deep cut to his shoulder.
Nineteen years ago, the Indians called on the support of the rock star Sting and the late Body Shop founder Anita Roddick. Pictures of the pair alongside Chief Raoni, with his lower lip distended by a traditional lip plate, sent their message to the outside world.
The reservoir will flood up to 6,140 square kilometres (2,371 square miles). Scientists say it will cause a dramatic increase in greenhouse-gas emissions. from the decomposition of organic matter in the stagnant water of the reservoir.
"Hydroelectric dams have severe social impacts," Philip Fearnside, one of the world's leading rainforest scientists explains, "including flooding the lands of indigenous peoples, displacing non-indigenous residents and destroying fisheries."
Dr Fearnside said the project helps aluminium plants looking to cash in on exports but does little for local needs, and in fact increases the health risks to local populations, including malaria.
For three months in the dry season, the flow of the Xingu reduces to a trickle and the dam's turbines will stop working, unable to maintain the supply of power and necessitating the use of inefficient fossil-fuel power stations.
Last November, Chief Bocaire delivered a letter to President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. Signed by 78 leaders, the letter demanded that all dam be halted.
But Glenn Switkes, of International Rivers, says: "The Lula government and its political allies are closing ranks to ensure it goes ahead no matter what the cost. The construction cost could be more than £5bn, and Belo Monte will not be feasible without building other dams upstream to regulate the flow of the Xingu – and that means facing off with the Kayapo."
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12) 270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push
By JULIA PRESTON
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?hp
WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.
The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.
The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.
Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”
Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were “committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”
The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.
The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.
The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.
The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.
Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”
The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. “It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law.”
Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.
If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.
All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.
“My family is worried in Guatemala,” one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families.”
No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.
Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.
Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron’s Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.
Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.
In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.
“We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish,” said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.
A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. “When you start, you can’t stay awake,” she said. “But after a while you get used to it.”
The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.
Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.
At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was “honored to represent such good and brave people,” saying the immigrants’ only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.
“I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values,” Mr. Nadler said.
Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,” Judge Bennett told the immigrants. “Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”
After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.
“That’s not the defense of justice,” Mr. Nadler said. “That’s just politics.”
Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.
“The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message,” Mr. Clausen said, “that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty.”
Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.
“You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out,” Mr. Rigg said.
Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues “could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel.”
Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants’ detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, “have tried to be fair in their charging.”
The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”
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13) American Axle workers OK contract, ending long strike
By JEWEL GOPWANI
FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER
May 22, 2008
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080522/BUSINESS01/80522127
UAW workers at American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. ratified a contract between the union and the company Thursday, union officials said, ending a 12-week strike against the Detroit supplier that rippled through the auto industry.
The landmark deal for American Axle drops the company’s labor costs to become more competitive and marks a painful turning point for workers who face adjustment to steeply lower wages.
The vote in favor of the contract at UAW Local 235 in Hamtramck — representing 2,000 workers — ensured that the deal would be ratified nationwide.
The UAW said 78% of workers nationwide approved the contract. In Hamtramck, 71% of workers voted for the contract — 1,172 in favor to 479 opposed, said Erik Webb, cochairman of the local’s election committee.
On Monday, union locals in Three Rivers near Kalamazoo and near Buffalo, N.Y., representing about 1,650 workers in all, ratified the deal.
The deal ends a strike that forced General Motors Corp. to shut or cut output at more thaAs workers voted n 30 plants, forcing the automaker — and as a result, several suppliers — to lay off thousands of workers. The lost production further weakened the nation’s economy, and the layoffs ensured Michigan would continue to have one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates.
The automaker offered $218 million to help settle the strike.
“Our members have had to make some tough decisions for themselves and their families and have done so with careful deliberation,” UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said in a statement.
“I’m pleased that the local will be getting back to work,” said Bill Alford Jr., incoming president of UAW Local 235.
While the vote at the UAW’s largest local at American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. was expected to pass, those who opposed it said the vote with was their last chance to express dissatisfaction with the deal and the company.
Some workers are expected to return to work Tuesday, said UAW Local 235 President Adrian King. Workers in Three Rivers also would return to work Tuesday.
But surely, returning will be difficult because the strike soured the relationship between workers and company chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dick Dauch, known for walking the plant floor and knowing workers’ names.
Tiffany Gardner, 33, of Detroit said she figured the deal would pass, but she decided to vote against it as her only way to protest.
Since Sunday, when the contract’s details were revealed to workers, Gardner said, she listened to coworkers who worried that a no vote would affect their chances of taking a buyout or returning to work. Still, Gardner was not swayed.
“At least I can say I did what I thought was best,” she said.
Armando Hernandez, 43, of Dearborn Heights, said the contract — while tough to accept — would give him time to develop a strategy to leave.
“I had no choice but to vote in favor of it,” Hernandez said, adding that he didn’t want a no vote to hurt his chances of taking a buy-down of up to $105,000, depending on the size of his wage cut.
Ben Whitmore, a 58-year-old electrician from Lincoln Park, also said he voted for the deal. “I don’t think they’re going to get any better. It’s time to go back to work,” he said.
As workers voted on Thursday, they also thought about how their lives would change.
Dion Walters, 37, of Clinton Township said he expects to take a buyout and work for a trucking company. “I’m not going to see my family as much,” said Walters, a hi-lo driver.
Walters voted against the contract, which would cut his pay by more than $10 an hour.
“It’s a no-win for us,” he said.
The union lost its leverage, in part, because of the shift in U.S. vehicle sales toward small cars. The strike, took place just as production for American Axle’s bread-and-butter products — SUV and pickup axles — is declining. Automakers are cutting production of those vehicles as consumers turn to more fuel-efficient cars.
On Thursday, lawn chairs, burnt-out steel barrels and even a barbecue remained at former strike sites along Holbrook and the streets surrounding American Axle’s sprawling manufacturing complex that straddles Detroit and Hamtramck.
Strikers withstood several blizzards during a walkout that stretched from the heart of winter into spring.
But the weather wasn’t their toughest test. Striking workers survived on $200 a week in strike pay from the UAW, and some of the strikers’ supporters recently started to lobby for that pay to be doubled.
Throughout the strike, American Axle said it needed concessions to become competitive with its U.S. rivals, including Dana Holding Corp., which is freshly out of bankruptcy.
American Axle has been considered the last of the major auto suppliers paying assembly-line-level wages of about $28 an hour.
Along with the national agreement, workers voted Thursday to accept a local contract that spells out work rules for the Detroit gear and axle plants along Holbrook.
The local contract includes a stricter attendance policy. It ends the use of indoor, designated smoking areas, which means that if workers want to take a smoke break, they must go outside.
It also reinforces a new overtime policy included in the national agreement. Instead of overtime starting after 8 hours of work in a day, it starts after 40 hours of work in a week.
Meanwhile, the company’s stock continued to decline Thursday. Shares dropped 45 cents, or 2.3%, to $19.25. Since last week, the shares have lost 14.6% of their value.
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14) Toughest Summer Job This Year Is Finding One
By PETER S. GOODMAN
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/25teen.html?hp
TULSA, Okla. — School is out, and Aaron Stallings, his junior year of high school behind him, wanders the air-conditioned cocoon of the Woodland Hills Mall in search of a job.
Mr. Stallings, 18, says he has been looking for three months, burning gasoline to get to the mall, then filling out applications at stores selling skateboard T-shirts, beach sandals and baseball caps. He likes the idea of working amid the goods he covets. But so far, no offers.
“I’m going to go to Iraq and get a job,” he says acidly. “I hear they’ve got cheap gas.” He grins. “I’m just playing. But I’ve been all over, and nobody’s hiring. They just say, ‘We’ll call you tomorrow.’ And no one ever calls back.”
As the forces of economic downturn ripple widely across the United States, the job market of 2008 is shaping up as the weakest in more than half a century for teenagers looking for summer work, according to labor economists, government data and companies that hire young people.
This deterioration is jeopardizing what many experts consider a crucial beginning stage of working life, one that gives young people experience and confidence along with pocket money.
Little more than one-third of the 16- to 19-year-olds in the United States are likely to be employed this summer, the smallest share since the government began tracking teenage work in 1948, according to a research paper published by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. That is a sharp drop from the 45 percent level of teenage employment reached in 2000.
The rates among minority young people have been particularly low, with only 21 percent of African-Americans and 31 percent of Hispanics from the ages of 16 to 19 employed last summer, according to the Labor Department.
Retailers, a major source of summer jobs, are grappling with a loss of American spending power, causing some to pull back in hiring. Restaurants, also big employers of teenagers, are adding jobs at a slower pace than in previous summers, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president for research at the National Restaurant Association in Washington.
As older people stay in the work force longer and as experienced workers lose jobs at factories and offices, settling for lower-paying work in restaurants and retail, some teenagers are being squeezed out.
“When you go into a recession, kids always get hit the hardest,” said Andrew Sum, an economist at the Center for Labor Market Studies who led the study on the summer job market. “Kids always go to the back of the hiring queue. Now, they find themselves with a lot of other people in line ahead of them.”
At the lower end of the market, adult Mexican immigrants, in particular, pose competition for jobs traditionally filled by younger Americans, like those at fast food chains.
“Spanish-speaking team members in our stores have increased the age a little bit,” said Andy Lorenzen, senior manager for human resources at Chick-fil-A, a national chain of chicken restaurants based in Atlanta, where 70 percent of the work force is 14 to 19 years old. Adult workers “have lost jobs in this economic downturn and begun to seek employment in our stores.”
Employment among American teenagers has been sliding continuously for the last decade and, with a few ups and downs, dropping steadily since the late 1970s, when nearly half of all 16- to 19-year-olds had summer jobs.
Economists debate the cause of this precipitous decline in teenage employment. Many contend that the drop is largely a favorable trend, reflecting a rising percentage of teenagers completing high school and going on to college, with some enrolling in summer academic programs, leaving less time for work.
“The key factor is the attraction of attending college and enjoying the increasing wage premium that accompanies this,” said John H. Pencavel, a labor economist at Stanford University.
In wealthier households, many have come to see summer work as a waste of time that could be spent gaining an edge in the competition for entry to elite colleges.
“Kids from higher-income households just aren’t going into the labor market,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “They’re looking for things to put on résumés, and working at Dairy Queen or Wal-Mart just isn’t going to help you get into Wake Forest or Stanford. And they just don’t need the cash.”
But others, like Professor Sum, contend that plenty of teenagers want to work but face increasing difficulties landing jobs. From early 2001 to the middle of 2007, the number of Americans employed outside the military grew more than 8.3 million, according to the Labor Department, yet employment among teenagers fell more than 1.2 million.
In the New York metropolitan area, an index by Economy.com shows a modest increase in the sorts of jobs typically filled by teenagers in the summer.
Still, with the economy gripped by what many experts believe is a recession, opportunities are growing leaner for teenagers in most of the country.
Even in parts of the country where there are jobs, some teenagers are having trouble finding them.
Tulsa, a town on the banks of the Arkansas River that swelled into a city amid an oil boom early last century, seems at first an easy place to find work. This metropolitan area of 900,000 people never saw the increase in housing prices and subsequent collapse that leveled economies elsewhere. While energy prices are reaching records and the oil patch is buzzing with activity, Tulsa’s unemployment rate was a mere 3.3 percent in March, compared with the national rate of 5.1 percent that month.
Here, the force of Hispanic immigration is being reversed: A bill aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants passed by the state legislature late last year has prompted thousands of them to leave town.
So along the broad suburban avenues in the southern part of town — ribbons of black pavement lined with ice cream shops, burger stands and barbecue joints — managers are having a hard time finding workers.
“Pretty much everybody is hiring,” said Andy Irick, director of operations for Sonic, a restaurant chain based in Oklahoma, complete with blaring music and servers on roller skates. “If you walk in and you’re clean cut and presentable, you’re going to get a job.”
While summer jobs may be abundant in some industries, opportunities tend to divide along traditional fault lines like race, the connections offered by one’s parents and — not least — whether one has a car in this sprawling city of scant public transportation.
More than 15 percent of the city’s population is African-American, according to the 2000 census. Black people are largely clustered in the older, northern part of town, on weather-beaten roads largely devoid of shopping and places to work. The suburban strip malls to the south are miles away.
At a state-financed program that helps lower-income young people find jobs, Arbor Education and Training, some have quit coming to the center because gas prices are too high, and some have lost jobs because they could not get to work, said the program’s director of operations, Jacky Noden.
Meanwhile, at a job skills class at Booker T. Washington High School, considered Tulsa’s most prestigious public campus, six graduating seniors, all bound for college and all possessing cars, already had jobs for the summer.
Greg Robinson, 18, cast his job as an instructor at a golf course as a perfect chance to network. “Golf is the sport of business.”
Shakhura Henderson, 18, saw her job as an assistant in an optometrist’s office as a beachhead in a growing area of the American economy. She and the other students stammered in veritable horror when asked if they would consider working in fast food.
“I don’t see myself saying, ‘Hey, sir, may I take your order,’ ” Ms. Henderson said. “I don’t see any growth in it.”
Claire Tolson, 17, a student at another selective school, Thomas A. Edison Preparatory, said she planned to spend the summer as a hostess at the Local Table, a restaurant specializing in produce from around the area, earning $8 an hour, plus tips.
Tall, blond and poised, and looking ahead to a career in engineering, Ms. Tolson has two friends working at the restaurant already. One of their parents knows the owner, she said.
“I don’t think it’s too hard to find a job,” she said.
But Ms. Tolson’s classmate, Wesley Childers, has no such connections, relying instead on newspaper classified advertisements for his job search. He wants a job so he can save money to buy a car next year, but his lack of a vehicle presents something of a Catch-22.
“Employers want you to have reliable transportation,” he said.
Mr. Childers wears a pressed blue suit and shiny black loafers to job interviews. He has applied to McDonald’s and to Target, the discount department store, among other places.
“I haven’t heard anything back,” he said. “There’s so many other kids, and there’s also so many other people who are unemployed. It’s getting frustrating.”
At Will Rogers High School in a heavily Hispanic part of town, a 15-year-old sophomore named José, who has lived here since he was 2 years old but lacks legal immigration papers, worried that he would not find a job. He would happily work in fast food, he said, but word is that more places are checking papers.
“It limits your choices,” he said. “A lot of people are afraid.”
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15) The Sergeant Lost Within
By DANIEL BERGNER
May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25injuries-t.html?ref=world
“You want to wear this or this for therapy tomorrow?” Sgt. Shurvon Phillip’s mother asked, holding two shirts in front of him. On one wall of his bedroom hung a poster of a marine staring fiercely, assault rifle in hand and black paint beneath his narrow eyes. Shurvon’s eyes, meanwhile, are wide and soft brown. He sat upright, supported by the tilt of a hospital bed. He cannot speak and can barely emit sound or move any part of his body, and sometimes it’s as if the striking size of his eyes is a desperate attempt to let others understand who he is, to let them see inside his mind, because his brain can carry out so little in the way of communication.
He gazed at the two shirts and, with excruciating effort and several seconds’ delay, managed to jab his gnarled right hand a few inches toward his choice, a black pullover with writing on the front. White letters declared the man, and a white arrow pointed upward to his head; red letters proclaimed the legend, and a red arrow pointed downward to his groin.
Gail Ulerie, Shurvon’s mother, had already received his O.K. — a painstaking raising of his eyebrows — on a pair of jeans. Mostly, Shurvon can answer only yes-or-no questions. The slightly lifted brows, a gesture that stretches his eyes yet wider, signify yes. A slow lowering of his lids indicates no. Now, with tomorrow’s clothes decided, Gail, a Trinidadian-American, reclined Shurvon’s bed for the night. He wore a hospital gown and tube socks pulled up tightly on the twigs of his caramel-colored shins. The socks were immaculately white, as if Gail believed that if everything were properly and precisely attended to, right down to the cotton that sheathed his toes, her son’s brain could recover.
In Iraq’s Anbar Province, in May 2005, Shurvon, who joined the Marine reserves seven years earlier at 17, partly as a way to pay his community-college tuition, was riding back to his base after a patrol when an anti-tank mine exploded under his Humvee. The Humvee’s other soldiers were tossed in different directions and dealt an assortment of injuries: concussions, broken bones, herniated discs. Along with a broken jaw and a broken leg, Shurvon suffered one of the war’s signature wounds on the American side: though no shrapnel entered his head, the blast rattled his brain profoundly.
Far more effectively than in previous American wars, helmets and body armor are protecting the skulls and saving the lives of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a joint Defense Department and V.A. organization, about 900 soldiers have come home with serious traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I., which essentially means dire harm to their brains; it can be caused by explosions that deliver blunt injury to the helmeted skull or that send waves of compressed air to slam and snap the head ruinously even at a distance of hundreds of yards from the blast. (The 900 also include injuries caused by shrapnel or bullets that have managed to penetrate.) Some of these veterans have been left — for protracted periods and often permanently — unable to think or remember or plan clearly enough to cope with everyday life on their own; others, like Shurvon, have been left incapable of doing much at all for themselves. (A recent Rand Corporation report estimates that, additionally, 300,000 soldiers have suffered milder T.B.I., frequently including brief loss of consciousness, disorientation or cognitive lapses.)
In the explosion’s aftermath, Shurvon was airlifted to the American military’s hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where Gail saw him for the first time since he was sent to war a few months before. By that point a portion of the left side of his skull had been cut away to relieve the pressure of the casing of bone against his swelling brain. “His head,” she told me, “looked like a ball with the air half out of it.” She was confronted, too, with a CT scan taken by the hospital. “I didn’t do much biology, but I’m thinking, That’s not a brain I’m looking at,” she said, describing her reaction. “Everyone has a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere, but this didn’t look like that. Do you remember Play-Doh? When children play with Play-Doh” — she slammed her palms together to demonstrate — “it’s just a gray blob. That was Shurvon’s brain.”
Before his injury, Shurvon was, as his younger sister, Candace, recalled, “a big kid” who liked to come home from his job at Wal-Mart, stocking shelves and counting cash, and curl up with his older sister’s son to watch Spider-Man cartoons. Short and slender, he squirmed through every tunnel his nephew slithered into at Chuck E. Cheese. But he was “the brains of the family,” Candace said, and Gail added that, besides being something of a ladies’ man, he had a 3.4 G.P.A. at college and was on his way to an associate’s degree in computer science when he was called up.
Her round face framed by overlapping brown, cream and white headbands, Gail remembered the military doctors at the National Naval Medical Center stopping by her son’s bed in the weeks after his injury and commanding: “ ‘Sergeant Phillip! Sergeant Phillip! Give me a thumbs up!’ ” His hands remained still. “When I called his name,” she said, “sometimes he fluttered his eyelids a little bit.” And his eyes seemed to focus on her, at moments. Those were about the only signs of awareness. And even those may have been her imagination. Col. William O’Brien, then the director of the Severely Injured Marines and Sailors program in the Department of the Navy, visited Shurvon in the hospital during that time. “She was a true believer,” he said of Shurvon’s mother. O’Brien saw no purposeful fluttering of eyelids, no responsiveness whatsoever. He saw a man with a misshapen head, his mouth open, staring vacantly into space. But as Gail recounted to me, she would plead with her son, in a voice infinitely closer and quieter than those of the staff, “Shurvon, give me a thumbs up, please give me a thumbs up.” One day she saw the tiniest shift of his right thumb.
There have been, since then, three years of tiny shifts, tiny increments of progress, tiny indications that Shurvon’s brain could somehow — to some unknown degree — heal. “They say your brain cells cannot regrow,” Gail said to me in February after putting her 27-year-old son to bed. “But God has been smiling on him.”
Gail credited, in addition to God, Dr. Felise Zollman, a neurologist who runs the brain-injury unit at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, or R.I.C., a pristine private hospital where Shurvon was treated between August and December of last year. Zollman’s patients tend to be survivors of car accidents, falls, assaults. But starting in early 2007, with a soldier whose brain was ravaged by a roadside bomb in Iraq and whose family learned that R.I.C. was rated the top rehabilitative hospital in the country by U.S. News & World Report, 15 soldiers wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan have made their way — often with the relentless advocacy of their families helping to pry payment from the military for private treatment — to Zollman’s ward. Shurvon, more than two years after the explosion of his Humvee, became one of them, through the persistence not only of his mother but also of Cmdr. William Bailey, a Navy reservist lawyer in Shurvon’s home city, Cleveland, who took up his cause. The military paid $310,000 for Shurvon’s months at R.I.C.
Some of Shurvon’s infinitesimal advances were made at the military’s own facilities — the naval hospital in Bethesda, a Veterans’ Administration polytrauma center in Minneapolis that specializes in T.B.I., the V.A. hospital in Cleveland — where he was treated before his stay at R.I.C., but Gail said that Zollman and her staff had transformed his life, had fostered miracles, a process Zollman described, less metaphysically, as aiding the adaptive capacities of the brain. Gail was right: the prevailing scientific understanding is that, for the most part, the adult brain cannot grow new cells, new neurons — though there is evidence that the implantation of stem cells into the brain may someday alter this basic neurological truth. But the brain can adjust, rerouting or reinvigorating its wiring. And in what Zollman called “a perverse positive consequence of the war,” attention recently focused on brain-injured troops will likely quicken future discoveries about the brain’s adaptive potential, about ways to prod that potential and about why even a case like Shurvon’s isn’t quite what Colonel O’Brien once thought it was: hopeless.
“The day I met him,” Zollman told me, remembering Shurvon’s arrival at R.I.C., “I realized he was so in there.” With sharp features accentuating brown eyes that appear almost as large as his, she said she felt a connection — “he was really present” — with something behind his still and silent carapace. She asked him about the tattoo on his left forearm, a panther with the words “Trini Boy” near its paws. Fondly she recalled his voiceless reply: the intense brightening of his eyes and the slight, scarcely perceptible shifting of his lips, an attempt to smile with a mouth distorted by the way the blast broke his jaw and, too, by the way it wrecked his brain, causing a muscle spasticity that pulls his lower jaw behind his upper, so that he sometimes seems to have no chin at all. He couldn’t relate whatever story or explanation was behind the tattoo, but it seemed clear that there was one and that it amused him. He has humor, she remembered thinking. He has abstraction. His mind, behind the frozen exterior, was alive.
For more than a year before his arrival at R.I.C., Shurvon was treated by the V.A. hospital in Cleveland, sometimes as an inpatient, when infections and a crisis with his feeding tube imperiled his very survival. And Zollman is careful not to critique the work of the Cleveland staff. But she suggests, as many doctors and advocates for wounded soldiers have argued, that the military medical system just wasn’t prepared for the prevalence of brain injuries among its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and that T.B.I. units like hers have gained a complex understanding of the brain’s capacity for healing through long concentration on civilian injuries. Traci Piero, a nurse practitioner at the Cleveland hospital and the coordinator of Shurvon’s care there, both before and after his time at R.I.C., told me that in the spring of last year, the Cleveland staff considered reducing Shurvon’s physical therapy to a maintenance level. This would have meant abandoning the attempt to help him toward some degree of autonomous movement and focusing simply on preventing bedsores and keeping the muscles in his inert limbs from tightening more than they already had. It was a consideration born of futility. Piero and Dr. Clay Kelly, the hospital’s chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation, explained that Shurvon had hardly progressed from when he first arrived at the Cleveland facility after five months at the V.A.’s Minneapolis polytrauma center; he remained in a nearly vegetative state and was seen as having, in the words of an evaluating neurologist at the Cleveland hospital, “little hope for improvement.”
But by a system of nostril-flaring mastered with his speech therapist at the Cleveland facility, Piero recounted, Shurvon became able, last spring, to respond reliably to yes-or-no questions; Piero said that this breakthrough dissuaded the team from diminishing his physical work. Commander Bailey, Shurvon’s advocate, told things differently. The decision against cutting back Shurvon’s physical therapy was made, he said, in response to desperate pleading from Gail and some urgent lobbying of Bailey’s own.
When Shurvon came under Zollman’s care, he was taking a narcotic painkiller, Fentanyl, prescribed for him by the Minneapolis center and by the Cleveland team. Fentanyl suppresses the function of the brain, Zollman said, and may stunt recovery in T.B.I. patients. Kelly, the Cleveland chief of rehabilitation, who is closely involved with Shurvon’s treatment now but didn’t work with him before his months at R.I.C., referred to case notes and told me that Shurvon’s grimacing (or what grimacing his frozen features allowed) had indicated pain and that the narcotic had been necessary to address it. He compared caring for someone as noncommunicative as Shurvon to a veterinarian’s guesswork. But Zollman managed to communicate with Shurvon well enough to determine that he could do without the Fentanyl and weaned him from it. She weaned him, as well, from the Valium he’d been given, partly for anxiety, by the teams in Minneapolis and Cleveland — Valium, too, dulls the workings of the brain. She prescribed a drug to enhance alertness and cognition. And she started to direct a program of therapy that, she hoped, would give him some fraction of a full life.
In both hemispheres of Shurvon’s brain, the frontal lobes, which are involved in motor control, facial movement, language, judgment and the restraint of impulse, problem-solving and planning, were, Zollman said, “extensively atrophied.” Harm to this region is typical in the nonpenetrating brain injuries so commonly inflicted by explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The inside of the bone plate that guards part of this region is full of ridges. Rattled against the rough surface, the frontal lobes are left bruised and hemorrhaging.
Zollman characterized a blast’s initial jarring of the brain as a kind of earthquake, which is followed by a storm that is just as devastating. Neurons communicate with one another through a series of electrical and chemical reactions that define the brain’s pathways. The mechanical energy of the earthquake in Shurvon’s frontal lobes had almost surely, Zollman explained, upset the electrical balance of his neurons, causing a deluge of neurotransmitters, chemicals like glutamate and dopamine, in toxic excess. “It’s like a conquering army has passed through,” she said of the aftermath, “and left a wasteland of swelling and bursting cells and burnt out pathways.”
When Shurvon arrived at R.I.C. more than two years after these calamities, it was too late, in all likelihood, for Zollman and her staff to help his brain generate new pathways and find new locations to take over the roles of the areas that were ravaged, a potential known as neuroplasticity and an essential part of Zollman’s practice. Once, the dominant neurological notion was that the realms of the brain are fixed in their responsibilities and that if an area is destroyed, no other domain can substitute for it. This has given way, over the past several decades, to the idea that one domain can, to varying degrees, stand in for another. Rudimentary and repetitive exercise — the moving of an arm or the making of sounds with the help of a physical or speech therapist — is the primary means for stirring such substitution. Three floors up from Zollman’s ward, R.I.C.’s researchers are hunting for ways to enhance this dogged and sometimes unsuccessful process. In one lab, a scientist experiments with a crude-looking conductive device that zaps the skull and sends precisely aimed magnetic charges coursing through stand-in domains; the hope is that by stimulating the brain while, say, a physical therapist simultaneously forces a patient’s leg to move in a walking stride, a healthy area of the brain will be jolted into assuming responsibility for that motion. But for reasons that remain unclear, like so much that involves the brain’s hundred billion cells and hundred trillion intercellular connections, the best chance to spur neuroplasticity comes within three or four months of the initial damage. With Shurvon, Zollman was instead reduced to “priming the connections” along the pathways that had survived. To evoke this she conjured another metaphor. “Let’s say you’ve got a railroad station in a small town in the Old West. The switchman is dozing. Trains rarely come, and when one finally does he might be sound asleep. Everything gets slowed down. But if his station is busy he’s more primed to do his job.” Keeping the connections active — and in this way maintaining a ready supply of neurotransmitters to deliver messages — could make the remaining pathways work more effectively and give Shurvon some measure of movement.
Priming connections, like generating neuroplasticity, can seem less a matter of ingenious science than of basic and relentless physical therapy. To address the paralysis of Shurvon’s arms, Botox was injected into his muscles to loosen them and permit a therapist gently to bend and unbend his elbows, over and over. The idea was that the neural pathways governing the extensor muscles would be invigorated by this motion and that eventually Shurvon would be able to straighten his arms whenever his mind decided to. By the time I met him, a few months after his stay at R.I.C., he could, when his mother asked, give her a hug, raising his stiff arms inch by inch and reaching outward, not enwrapping her but at least touching her rigidly on either side of her thick body.
A campaign of physical therapy was waged, as well, to give him minimal influence over his right hand. “You have to remember,” Zollman said, “that tiny changes can lead to big changes in life.” The gains he achieved with his right hand, along with a bit of mobility attained with his right leg, led her to expect that he would soon be operating a power wheelchair with a specially formulated set of controls. She told me that R.I.C. designed such a chair for him, that he had driven a mock-up version on the 10th-floor ward and that the Cleveland V.A. was currently having the chair made. Kelly, at the Cleveland V.A., told me otherwise. No chair was on order. The Cleveland staff didn’t think Shurvon could turn his head readily enough to see and steer around obstacles; Kelly said he didn’t envision Shurvon driving a wheelchair anytime in the near future. When I told Zollman this, she said that she was stunned, that her team was confident of what Shurvon could handle. And listening to Zollman’s dismay and passion, I thought, not for the first time, that without the kind of investment and ingenuity that a place like R.I.C. can offer, patients like Shurvon might be cut off, forever, from any aspect of independence.
When it came to the most fundamental capability, breathing, for more than two years, before arriving at R.I.C., Shurvon had been sucking air through a surgical hole in his Adam’s apple. Zollman and her team resolved to cap the tracheostomy. Part of the difficulty in doing this was that the wreckage of Shurvon’s brain left him unable to swallow at will; mucus and saliva welled at the back of his throat, clogging his airway. But capping the hole stirred panic. So Zollman prescribed an anti-anxiety drug that wouldn’t hinder the function of Shurvon’s brain, and her staff combined a gradual process of conditioning, beginning with the cap in place for just five minutes at a time, along with an effort to awaken his brain’s authority over the back of his throat. The awakening involved crude methods, like jabbing a chilled dental mirror repeatedly behind the tongue of a helpless, paralyzed man until he gagged, that might have qualified as torture in a different context. But the cap stays in 24 hours a day now, and with the occasional assistance of having fluid suctioned from his throat, Shurvon breathes through his mouth.
Zollman said that she has never wondered what she and her staff might have accomplished for Shurvon had he reached R.I.C. much earlier, during the period of possible neuroplasticity. For one thing, his condition was so dire, his survival so precarious, during the first months after his injury that rigorous efforts at rehabilitation might have been unfeasible. For another, Zollman says she thinks in terms not only of neuroscience but of Eastern religions. She spoke often about “accepting what is.” This view seemed to pose a paradox in a doctor devoted to the most hard-won kinds of amelioration. Yet it seemed, as well, part of what enabled her to engage fully with Shurvon, part of what kept her from being horrified and repelled by the facts of his existence: fully conscious, nearly motionless and, when he first came to R.I.C., completely mute.
“Do you hear the sound he’s making?” Gail asked me as we sat in her kitchen, late one evening, with Shurvon put to bed in his room close by. I barely did, but she heard it keenly: a gurgling, strangulated cry, the best his brain could wrest from his throat and mouth. She seemed to love the progress that cry represented; without the capping of his tracheostomy, no sound was possible.
She went in to see what he needed. She wore blue track pants and a blue sweatshirt and three gold hoops in each ear. With the help of a health aide, who is paid for by the V.A. and who comes in every day, Gail is her son’s all-hours caregiver. Before his wounding, she worked as a nurse’s assistant in hospice care and nursing homes.
The only light in Shurvon’s room beamed from the wall-mounted television that played cartoons silently. Under the beam, and at the foot of Shurvon’s bed, Candace’s 3-year-old son, Malik, in a red-and-blue Spider-Man pajama suit, and her 2-year-old daughter, Kyla, her hair in yellow and white beads, slept on the floor on a blanket and couch pillows Gail had spread out for them. This was where they curled up on the nights when Candace, a single mother who lived with Gail and Shurvon, worked as a stocker at Wal-Mart. With their uncle, Malik and Kyla seemed both comfortable and comforted. Malik had earlier scrambled up onto Shurvon’s bed and onto his inert body to show him photographs from the program of a car show. The children can’t pronounce the word “uncle” and instead call him “Ya-Ya.” They slept soundly below him.
And later, when Gail herself was ready to try to close her eyes, she, too, would spend the night, as she always does, in Shurvon’s room, in a lounge chair right beside his bed. Money from the V.A., along with donations raised privately by Commander Bailey and Marine organizations, allowed Shurvon and his family to move to this house in suburban Cleveland from a downtown apartment where the rooms were so tight that Gail could hardly maneuver his wheelchair. Beyond the benefits that helped with the down payment on the house, the V.A.’s disability program pays Shurvon about $86,000 a year. The house has plenty of bedrooms, but three generations spend their nights in the room with the hospital bed, with a suctioning machine and a respirator ready in case they are needed, and with a feeding tube supplying sustenance to the man who was now, with the cry he could manufacture, asking for some unspecified form of attention.
“Are you wet?” Gail asked quietly, leaning over his face in the gray light from the television. He raised his eyebrows a 16th of an inch. She began to unfasten his diaper. During the days, if he’s taken outside the house, he usually wears a catheter that she rolls onto his penis like a condom; in the house he mostly wears diapers. “Oh, that’s why you’re fussing,” she said. “You did more than one.” She turned his body so she could wipe him, then filled a plastic tub with warm water and a bit of gentle soap.
He was silent now, turned onto his back again. In the near-darkness, she dipped a washcloth and squeezed it from above his thighs so that a tiny waterfall dripped down over him. “Don’t worry, big guy,” she said. “Mama’s got you.” She swabbed him with the cloth.
“The first time I gave my son a bath,” Gail told me about life after Shurvon’s injury, as we sat again at the kitchen table, “I cried. It took me a good while to get used to cleaning him up. In the morning if we have to go somewhere, everything that a mom with a baby has to walk with — wipes and everything in a bag — I have to walk with.” She talked about the A&D ointment that kept him from getting rashes, and she talked about how she imagined he thought about this aspect of his life. “Nobody wants anybody else to clean them. He wouldn’t look at it like he’s a child again. He’s this grown man, but he just can’t do it.” Then she remembered that before his deployment, when she would get upset about this or that difficulty in her life, he would say: “ ‘Mom, what are you crying for? If Plan A don’t work, Plan B will work.’ ”
At last Gail went to her lounge chair to sleep, and the next morning a special van picked up Shurvon and his mother to take them for one of the twice-weekly, three-hour stints of therapy that, since his stay at R.I.C., the V.A. hospital provides him. There a physical therapist guided him into a sitting position on the edge of a low bed and had him sit briefly on his own, another of the things his brain learned to compel his body to do in Chicago. And at the V.A. hospital a speech therapist with straight blond hair requested a “kissy face,” by way of motivating him to struggle to close his lips. She asked next for a wink; he couldn’t do that, but immediately he shut and opened both his eyes together. “In Trinidad,” Gail said, thrilled by his quick responsiveness, “we call that the sweet eye.”
“He’s learning how to flirt!” the therapist exclaimed. “You’ve got the kissy face and the wink and,” she added, referring to his arm movements in physical therapy, “the weight room. You’re all set!”
Listening to this, I wondered whether Shurvon, alive to touch and alive in his mind, but imprisoned, was flattered or tormented. He was beaming, eyes glittering. I wondered, too, what he might have said or done had he been capable of speech or any extensive movement. Damage to the frontal lobes — “the area of the superego,” Zollman said — can bring extreme disinhibition. Male patients on her ward sometimes proposition and grope their nurses or therapists; sometimes they masturbate in the halls; not long ago a man masturbated in front of his mother. Sometimes women expose their breasts.
The therapist worked with Shurvon to produce an “ah” sound — he opened his mouth wide and, seconds later, a faint, agonized approximation came out. And she made him practice on his DynaVox, a computer that can speak for him, its screen fixed to his wheelchair or bed. The various icons can generate phrases, like “I am 27,” delivered in a robotic voice that sounds straight out of an old sci-fi movie.
One problem with the device, which Shurvon began trying to use at the V.A. hospital before going to R.I.C., has been how to best click on the icons. At the hospital in Cleveland he tried a nose piece that communicated with the computer whenever he flared a nostril, and at R.I.C. he tried a camera that directed the cursor by tracking his pupils. But the nostril-flaring proved too awkward, and the slight back-tilt of his head, another symptom of his injury, made it difficult to position the camera. As the mobility in Shurvon’s right hand improved, technicians at R.I.C. settled on using a thin cord attached to his right wrist; his tugs can activate an icon. His tugs are deliberate, delayed.
And the icons on his screen are limited. In Chicago, he graduated from an 8- to a 12-choice system; clicking on the “feelings” icon, with its childish renditions of smiley and frowning faces, will lead him to 12 choices including “frustrated” and “mad” and “O.K.” and “proud,” and the computer will then give robotic voice to his selection. The R.I.C. technicians programmed his DynaVox so that Shurvon can tell people that he wants the TV channel changed or so that he can name one of his favorite reggae songs, “Girls,” by Beenie Man, but his system can’t provide much in the way of nuanced personal expression, and he’s a long, long way from being able to navigate programs that would let him construct speech by picking from a wide array of words. For now, except when he’s practicing with his therapist, his DynaVox doesn’t get much use.
In the van, on the ride home, I asked Shurvon if he ever thought about going back to college. He gave the minimal lift of his eyebrows. His mother added that he wants to get a master’s degree.
Later, I talked with his R.I.C. speech therapist, who had tested his cognitive powers. After she’d put him through weeks of drills to improve his battered capacity for concentration, he was able to listen to passages several paragraphs long — she showed me an example, and it certainly wasn’t simple — and could readily indicate the correct answers in sets of multiple-choice comprehension questions. (Eye fatigue seemed the only impediment to his reading extended passages on his own.) Hearing this, I thought that there seemed little reason that Shurvon couldn’t someday earn a master’s degree. But at other moments the reasons appeared too immense ever to be overcome; the notion of college, let alone graduate school, seemed merely a soothing fantasy. And sometimes impossible to overcome, too, was the idea that Shurvon’s life might not be worth living; that I, in his place, would rather stop breathing, cease thinking, that I would prefer to die.
Whenever this idea took hold, I recalled a medical ethicist at R.I.C. telling me about studies showing that doctors and nurses tend to rate the quality of life of severely impaired patients to be far lower than the patients do themselves. The ethicist had spoken, then, about the ways that a life acquires meaning. And I thought about Malik scrambling onto Shurvon’s bed to show him pictures, and about Malik and Kyla curled and comforted on the floor below him. I thought, too, about a kind of exercise that Shurvon’s family discovered recently by chance and that Gail described: with Shurvon sitting in a wheelchair in the driveway, his nieces and nephews tossed inflatable beach balls, one pink and another blue, softly toward him, and he tried to move his arms to bat them back. “They were cheering like at a baseball game,” Gail said, remembering the first time the children did this. “ ‘Yeah! Go on Ya-Ya!’ ” Beach balls and high voices of excitement floated in the air around him.
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His latest book, “A Map of Desire,” will be published in January.
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16) Immigration Officials Arrest 905 in California Sweep
By REBECCA CATHCART
May 24, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24deport.html?ref=us
LOS ANGELES — Federal immigration agents have arrested 905 people in California in the past three weeks after a statewide search for those who had violated orders to leave the country. The operation was the latest in a series of national sweeps by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The arrests were the result of collaboration among teams in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco that began on May 5.
“The focal point of this operation were people who had exhausted all of their due process in the courts,” said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego. “They have a final order of removal issued by a U.S. immigration judge, and they’ve failed to depart.”
In the process of seeking each person on the list, Ms. Mack said, agents often encountered friends, family members and others who had violated immigration laws.
“Agents may come to a house looking for a target, and someone answers the door, or there are other people in the house who have also violated immigration laws,” she said.
Brian DeMore, acting director of the federal Office of Detention and Removal Operations in Los Angeles, said agents took into custody any person they encountered during an arrest who had violated immigration laws. Agents set out with a target list of just over 1,500 “fugitive aliens,” Mr. DeMore said, referring to people who have ignored orders to leave the country.
In addition to the 495 of those found, 410 people were taken into custody on charges of violating immigration laws, he said. Other violations included returning after being deported, overstaying a visa, or living in the country without any legal documentation, Ms. Mack said. Over half of all arrested this month have been deported.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 25.7 percent of those caught in the sweeps had been convicted of crimes while in the country.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Iowa: Lawsuit Filed Over Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
The nation’s largest single immigration raid, in which nearly 400 workers at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville were detained on Monday, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, a lawsuit contends. The suit accuses the government of arbitrary and indefinite detention. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office said he could not comment on the suit, which was filed Thursday on behalf of about 147 of the workers. Prosecutors said they filed criminal charges against 306 of the detained workers. The charges include accusations of aggravated identity theft, falsely using a Social Security number, illegally re-entering the United States after being deported and fraudulently using an alien registration card.
May 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17brfs-LAWSUITFILED_BRF.html?ref=us
Senate Revises Drug Maker Gift Bill
By REUTERS
National Breifing | Washington
A revised Senate bill would require drug makers and medical device makers to publicly report gifts over $500 a year to doctors, watering down the standard set in a previous version. The new language was endorsed by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Company. Lawmakers said they hoped the support would prompt other companies to back the bill, which had previously required all gifts valued over $25 be reported. The industry says the gifts are part of its doctor education, but critics say such lavish gestures influence prescribing habits.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/washington/14brfs-SENATEREVISE_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Sect Mother Is Not a Minor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
Child welfare officials conceded to a judge that a newborn’s mother, held in foster care as a minor after being removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch, is an adult. The woman, who gave birth on April 29, had been held along with more than 400 children taken last month from a ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was one of two pregnant sect members who officials had said were minors. The other member, who gave birth on Monday, may also be an adult, state officials said.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14brfs-SECTMOTHERIS_BRF.html?ref=us
Four Military Branches Hit Recruiting Goals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.
May 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/13brfs-FOURMILITARY_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Prison Settlement Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. The judge, Ricardo Hinojosa of Federal District Court, signed the settlement Monday, and it was announced by the commission Wednesday. Judge Hinojosa had previously rejected a settlement on grounds that it lacked a specific timeline. Federal prosecutors began investigating the prison, the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, in 2006. The settlement establishes parameters for safe conditions and staffing levels, restricts use of youth restraints and guards against retaliation for reporting abuse and misconduct.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-PRISONSETTLE_BRF.html?ref=us
Michigan: Insurance Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
Local governments and state universities cannot offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the State Supreme Court ruled. The court ruled 5 to 2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against same-sex marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers. The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling. Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-INSURANCERUL_BRF.html?ref=us
Halliburton Profit Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON (AP) — Increasing its global presence is paying off for the oil field services provider Halliburton, whose first-quarter income rose nearly 6 percent on growing business in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the company said Monday.
Business in the first three months of 2008 also was better than expected in North America, where higher costs and lower pricing squeezed results at the end of 2007.
Halliburton shares closed up 3 cents, at $47.46, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Halliburton said it earned $584 million, or 64 cents a share, in the three months that ended March 31, compared with a year-earlier profit of $552 million, or 54 cents a share. Revenue rose to $4.03 billion, from $3.42 billion a year earlier.
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/business/worldbusiness/22halliburton.html?ref=business
Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
National Briefing | South
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/us/22brfs-002.html?ref=us
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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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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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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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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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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"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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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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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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"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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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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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
