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U.S. Out Now! From Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all U.S. bases around the world; End all U.S. Aid to Israel; Get the military out of our schools and our communities; Demand Equal Rights and Justice for ALL!
TAX THE RICH NOT THE POOR! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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LABOR DAY Rally and March for a Fair Contract
One Union! One Contract!
Date:September. 7, Monday
Time: 11:00 am
Meeting Place: Justin Herman Plaza, SF*
On August 14, the contract of 9,000 SF hotel workers expired. Bargaining is
underway, and the bosses are trying to undercut our health care benefits but
we will stand up to protect the standards we have fought for. Health care is
a fundamental human right, and we will take to the streets to defend it.
Join us and community supporters in demanding a fair contract and affordable
quality health care. Flyer for this event is attached.
For more information please contact
Rev. Israel Alvaran, ialvaran@clueca.org or call 415.863.1142
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Eyewitness Gaza:
Breaking the Siege
ANSWER Educational Forum
San Jose:
Tuesday, September 8, 6:30 p.m.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Library
150 E. San Fernando Street (at S. 4th St.)
ANSWER South Bay
408-829-9506
ANSWERsouthbay@gmail.com
San Francisco:
Thursday, September 10, 7:00 p.m.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street (Between 16th and 15th Streets)
ANSWER Coalition, Bay Area
415-821-6545
ANSWER@answersf.org
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National Call For Action And Endorsements at the
G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, PA
Sept. 19 - 25, 2009
Endorsers (list in formation): Iraq Veterans Against the War Chapter 61, Pittsburgh; PA State Senator Jim Ferlo; Veterans for Peace Chapter 047, Pittsburgh; National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations; Thomas Merton Center Pittsburgh; Codepink Pittsburgh Women for Peace; Bail Out The People; Green Party of Allegheny County; World Can't Wait; ISO (International Socialist Organization); WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) Pittsburgh; Socialist Action; Ohio Valley Peace
Activists from Pittsburgh, the U.S., and across the globe will converge to protest the destructive policies of the G-20 - meeting in Pittsburgh this September 24-25.
The Group of Twenty (G-20) Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors represents the world's economic leaders, intimately connected to the most powerful multi-national corporations that dominate the global economy. Their neo-liberal policies have squandered billions on war, plunged economies into deep recessions, worsened social, economic and political inequality, and polluted the earth.
We believe a better world is possible. We anticipate involvement and support from like-minded people and organizations across the country for projected actions from September 19-25:
People's Summit - Sept. 19, 21-22 (Saturday, Monday, Tuesday)
A partnership of educators and social justice groups is organizing a People's Summit to discuss global problems and seek solutions that are informed by the basic principles of genuine democracy and human dignity. This will bring together informed speakers and panels to discuss problems we face and possible solutions, also providing interactive workshop discussions.
Mass March on the G-20 - Friday, Sept. 25:
Money for human needs, not for war!
Gather at 12 noon, march to the City County Building downtown
A peaceful, legal march is being sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, an umbrella organization that supports a wide variety of peace and justice member projects in Pittsburgh. We will hold a mass march to demand "Money for human needs, not for war!"
WE SEEK THE BROADEST RANGE OF SUPPORT, PARTICIPATION, AND ENDORSEMENTS FOR THE MASS MARCH AND PEOPLE'S SUMMIT
To endorse, E-mail: info@pittsburghendthewar.org
Or contact: Thomas Merton Center AWC, 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224
Several other events are being planned by a wide variety of community and social justice groups in Pittsburgh.
For more information and updates please visit:
http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/g20action.htm
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On the 8th Anniversary of the War on Afghanistan
U.S. -- NATO OUT!
BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
End colonial occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti...
Healthcare, jobs, housing, education for all--Not War!
San Francisco Protest:
Wednesday, October 7, 5:00 p.m.
New Federal Building
7th and Mission Streets, Near Civic Center BART
Initiated by the ANSWER Coalition--Act Now to Stop War and End Racism
Volunteers needed: 415-821-6545
answer@answersf.org
ANSWERcoalition.org
ANSWERsf.org
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NATIONAL MARCH FOR EQUALITY
WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 10-11, 2009
Sign up here and spread the word:
http://www.nationalequalitymarch.com/
On October 10-11, 2009, we will gather in Washington DC from all across
America to let our elected leaders know that *now is the time for full equal
rights for LGBT people.* We will gather. We will march. And we will leave
energized and empowered to do the work that needs to be done in every
community across the nation.
This site will be updated as more information is available. We will organize
grassroots, from the bottom-up, and details will be shared on this website.
Our single demand:
Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.
Our philosophy:
As members of every race, class, faith, and community, we see the struggle
for LGBT equality as part of a larger movement for peace and social justice.
Our strategy:
Decentralized organizing for this march in every one of the 435
Congressional districts will build a network to continue organizing beyond
October.
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17 SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
(TIME AND ROUTE DETAILS TO BE ANNOUNCED)
Commemorating the eighth anniversary of the war on Afghanistan and the 40th anniversary of the massive October 17, 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.
Money for Human Needs Not War!
Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, military personnel, bases, contractors, and mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Colombia.
End U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine! End the Seige of Gaza!
U.S. Hands Off Iran and North Korea!
Self-determination for All Oppressed Nations and Peoples!
End War Crimes Including Torture and Prosecute the War Criminals!
See historical images of the Vietnam Moratorium at:
http://images.google.com/images?q=vietnam+moratorium&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=lGaISs7pMIP-sQOr2OznAg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4
Image of San Francisco Vietnam Moratorium, Golden Gate Park, October 17, 1969 (I was there...bw):
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.rchrd.com/photo/images/pb2-12-15.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rchrd.com/photo/archives/1969/&usg=__FeHN5CAwDXv-ewwCt2Hfni6ZUn8=&h=567&w=850&sz=143&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=EJH6Kzj6YI6zzM:&tbnh=97&tbnw=145&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dvietnam%2Bmoratorium%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DX%26um%3D1
This is an initial announcement. Contact information, endorsers and further details to be announced.
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Please forward widely. Contact us if you or your organization would like to endorse this call.
CALL FOR OCTOBER 22 DEMONSTRATION IN OAKLAND, CA:
NATIONAL DAY OF PROTEST TO STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION
Oscar Grant. Brownie Polk. Parnell Smith. And dozens more Oakland alone. Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo in New York City. Adolph Grimes in New Orleans. Robbie Tolan in Houston. Julian Alexander in Anaheim. Jonathan Pinkerton in Chicago. And thousands more nationwide.
All shot down, murdered by law enforcement, their lives stolen, victims of a nationwide epidemic of police brutality and murder.
The racist arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates this summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts – right in his own home – showed that any Black man or woman, no matter their stature, no matter their education, no matter their accomplishments can be targeted for brutality – even murder – at any moment.
Meanwhile, a whole generation of youth is treated as guilty until proved innocent, and hundreds of thousands are criminalized, and locked away in U.S. prisons with no hope for the future. And immigrants are subject to brutal raids, with families cruelly split up in an instant.
We refuse to suffer these outrages in silence. We need to put a stop to this and drag the truth about the nationwide epidemic of police violence and repression into the light of day for all so see. We say no more! Enough is Enough!
Oct 22nd 2009 is the 14th annual national day of protest to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of Generation---bringing together those under the gun and those not under the gun as a powerful voice to expose the epidemic of police brutality. On that day in cities across the country many different people will take to the streets against police brutality and murder, against the criminalization of youth, and against the targeting of immigrants.
We call for a powerful demonstration in Oakland on October 22 demanding:
* Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation!
* October 22....No To Police Brutality
* No to ICE raids and round-ups of immigrants!
* Enough Is Enough! No More Stolen Lives!
* Justice for Oscar Grant and all victims of police murder!
* Wear Black, Fight Back
Contact the National Office of October 22nd at:
Info@october22.org or 1-888-NOBRUTALITY
October 22nd Coalition
P.O. Box 2627
New York, N.Y. 10009
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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TRAILER: Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhydyxRjujU&feature=player_embedded
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Take Action: Stop Rite Aid's abuses: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act!
Stop Rite Aid's abuses: Pass the Employee Free Choice Act!
For years Rite Aid workers have faced unfair firings, campaigns of misinformation, and intimidation for trying to form a union. But Rite Aid would never have been able to get away with any of this if Congress had passed the Employee Free Choice Act.
You can help us fight mounting anti-union opposition to the bill that would have protected Rite Aid's workers. Tell Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act today!
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/riteaidefca2/8gg63dd407ejd5wi?
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From: Labor Cmte. for Peace & Justice
To: bay_area_lc4pj@lists.riseup.net
Sent: Fri, Aug 21, 2009 2:46 am
Subject: [BayArea LC4PJ] Why boycott Whole Foods?
Does John Mackey live in this country, or even on this planet? Reading his recent op-ed article on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal raises that question. And it's prompted quite a few people to swear off shopping at Whole Foods, of which he is co-founder and CEO.
He wrote in part: "With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.
"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead , we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction-toward less government control and more individual empowerment."
He touts his company's own coverage model, notwithstanding that, by his own admission, it carries a high deductible and leaves 11 percent of its employees uncovered.
What prompt my question about his place of residence are the "reform" proposals he makes in the article. You can read it (and weep, or scream, or tear your hair out, or whatever) at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html
Richard Knee
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Scraping By
Opinion | Op-Ed
In the first of a series by the filmmaker Stewart Thorndike on life during the economic crisis, a tent city in Redmond, Wash., is filling up with the newly homeless who are forming a makeshift community.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/08/06/opinion/1247463860996/op-ed-scraping-by.html
06/26/1787 James Madison Statement: "The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, - when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability."
As quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 by Robert Yates. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/yates.asp
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Madison
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END THE DEATH PENALTY NOW! END "LIFE WITHOUT POSSIBILITY OF PAROLE"!
This video is a very compelling story of a man who spent 14 years on Death Row for murders he did not commit. He was finally released upon evidence of his innocence and of racial prejudice at his trial. The whole criminal "In-Justice" system in this country is racist to the core and corrupt. That's why the death penalty and life w/o possibility of parole must be overturned and all inmates should be awarded new chances for exoneration...Bonnie Weinstein
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCZK7AxUCQ
Death Penalty Focus
870 Market St. Ste. 859 San Francisco, CA 94102
Tel. 415.243.0143 - Fax 415.243.0994 - www.deathpenalty.org
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Urgent: Ahmad Sa'adat transferred to isolation in Ramon prison!
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/
Imprisoned Palestinian national leader Ahmad Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was transferred on August 11, 2009 to Ramon prison in the Naqab desert from Asqelan prison, where he had been held for a number of months. He remains in isolation; prior to his transfer from Asqelan, he had been held since August 1 in a tiny isolation cell of 140 cm x 240 cm after being penalized for communicating with another prisoner in the isolation unit.
Attorney Buthaina Duqmaq, president of the Mandela Association for prisoners' and detainees' rights, reported that this transfer is yet another continuation of the policy of repression and isolation directed at Sa'adat by the Israeli prison administration, aimed at undermining his steadfastness and weakening his health and his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Sa'adat has been moved repeatedly from prison to prison and subject to fines, harsh conditions, isolation and solitary confinement, and medical neglect. Further reports have indicated that he is being denied attorney visits upon his transfer to Ramon.
Ahmad Sa'adat undertook a nine-day hunger strike in June in order to protest the increasing use of isolation against Palestinian prisoners and the denial of prisoners' rights, won through long and hard struggle. The isolation unit at Ramon prison is reported to be one of the worst isolation units in terms of conditions and repeated violations of prisoners' rights in the Israeli prison system.
Sa'adat is serving a 30 year sentence in Israeli military prisons. He was sentenced on December 25, 2008 after a long and illegitimate military trial on political charges, which he boycotted. He was kidnapped by force in a military siege on the Palestinian Authority prison in Jericho, where he had been held since 2002 under U.S., British and PA guard.
Sa'adat is suffering from back injuries that require medical assistance and treatment. Instead of receiving the medical care he needs, the Israeli prison officials are refusing him access to specialists and engaging in medical neglect and maltreatment.
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat demands an end to this isolation and calls upon all to protest at local Israeli embassies and consulates (the list is available at: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/ About+the+Ministry/Diplomatic+mission/Web+Sites+of+Israeli+ Missions+Abroad.htm) and to write to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations to exercise their responsibilities and act swiftly to demand that the Israelis ensure that Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners receive needed medical care and that this punitive isolation be ended. Email the ICRC, whose humanitarian mission includes monitoring the conditions of prisoners, at jerusalem..jer@icrc.org, and inform them about the urgent situation of Ahmad Sa'adat!
Ahmad Sa'adat has been repeatedly moved in an attempt to punish him for his steadfastness and leadership and to undermine his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Of course, these tactics have done nothing of the sort. The Palestinian prisoners are daily on the front lines, confronting Israeli oppression and crimes. Today, it is urgent that we stand with Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners against these abuses, and for freedom for all Palestinian prisoners and for all of Palestine!
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org
info@freeahmadsaadat.org
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones
By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21intel.html?ref=world
2) U.S. Military to Stay in Philippines
By THOM SHANKER
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/asia/21military.html?ref=world
3) U.S. and Cuba Work Together on Storms
By MARC LACEY
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/americas/21storm.html?ref=world
4) Michigan: Prisoners' Lawsuit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21brfs-PRISONERSLAW_BRF.html?ref=us
5) American Indian activist denied parole [RE: Leonard Peltier...bw]
Aug 21 2009 12:50PM
Associated Press
http://www.kxmc.com/News/424465.asp
6) All the President's Zombies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
August 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/opinion/24krugman.html
7) Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases
By DAVID JOHNSTON
August 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/us/politics/24detain.html?hp
8) Report Cites Abuse at State Juvenile Prison Centers
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25juvenile.html?hp
9) The Philippines Face Classroom Shortage
By SETH MYDANS
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world/asia/25iht-phils.html?ref=world
10) New York's Disgrace
Editorial
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25tue1.html
11) Guantánamo Detainee Released
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world/asia/25gitmo.html?ref=world
12) U.S. Military to Stay in Philippines
By THOM SHANKER
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/asia/21military.html?ref=world
13) As 8-Year-Old Injured in Fall Heals, Her Mother Deals With Investigators
By JULIE BOSMAN
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25fall.html?ref=nyregion
14) Hawaii to Remove Inmates Over Abuse Charges
By IAN URBINA
August 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/us/26kentucky.html?ref=us
15) California: Privatization of Public Schools
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
August 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/education/26brfs-PRIVATIZATIO_BRF.html?ref=us
16) Another Way to Lose the House
Editorial
August 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opinion/28fri1.html
17) Leaders Criticize Colombia Over U.S. Military Pact
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and SIMON ROMERO
August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/world/americas/29colombia.html?ref=world
18) US Wants 20,000 More Troops to Fight Taliban
British and American soldiers to shoulder brunt of surge's next phase
by Kim Sangupta
August 29, 2009
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/29
19) American Antiwar Movement Plans an Autumn Campaign Against Policies on Afghanistan
By JAMES DAO
August 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30antiwar.html?scp=1&sq=American%20Antiwar%20Movement%20Plans%20an%20Autumn%20Campaign%20Against%20Policies%20on%20%20Afghanistan&st=cse
20) Is the Antiwar Movement Waking Up? Not quite yet…
by Justin Raimondo
August 31, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/08/30/is-the-antiwar-movement-waking-up/
21) Afghan War Is Serious but Winnable, Top General Says
By DEXTER FILKINS
September 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.html?_r=1&hp
22) Wolves Are Set to Become Fair Game in the West
[Here's a thought, get the livestock off their land, or put up better fences. It's the access to all that fresh and helpless meat that boosts the wolf population in the first place! Keep the slaughter of wolves OFF the agenda. It's not the wolves fault the only concern of U.S. agribusiness is how much of a profit they can turn...Bonnie Weinstein]
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
August 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/science/earth/31wolves.html?ref=us
23) A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style
By MICHAEL POWELL
August 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/nyregion/31judge.html?ref=nyregion
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1) C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones
By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21intel.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington's most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda's leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.
The division's operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.
The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency's most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq.
A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the agency hired Blackwater in 2004 as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top Qaeda operatives.
In interviews on Thursday, current and former government officials provided new details about Blackwater's association with the assassination program, which began in 2004 not long after Porter J. Goss took over at the C.I.A. The officials said that the spy agency did not dispatch the Blackwater executives with a "license to kill." Instead, it ordered the contractors to begin collecting information on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda's leaders, carry out surveillance and train for possible missions.
"The actual pulling of a trigger in some ways is the easiest part, and the part that requires the least expertise," said one government official familiar with the canceled C.I.A. program. "It's everything that leads up to it that's the meat of the issue."
Any operation to capture or kill militants would have had to have been approved by the C.I.A. director and presented to the White House before it was carried out, the officials said. The agency's current director, Leon E. Panetta, canceled the program and notified Congress of its existence in an emergency meeting in June.
The extent of Blackwater's business dealings with the C.I.A. has largely been hidden, but its public contract with the State Department to provide private security to American diplomats in Iraq has generated intense scrutiny and controversy.
The company lost the job in Iraq this year, after Blackwater guards were involved in shootings in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead. It still has other, less prominent State Department work.
Five former Blackwater guards have been indicted in federal court on charges related to the 2007 episode.
A spokeswoman for Xe did not respond to a request for comment.
For its intelligence work, the company's sprawling headquarters in North Carolina has a special division, known as Blackwater Select. The company's first major arrangement with the C.I.A. was signed in 2002, with a contract to provide security for the agency's new station in Kabul, Afghanistan. Blackwater employees assigned to the Predator bases receive training at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to learn how to load Hellfire missiles and laser-guided smart bombs on the drones, according to current and former employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting the company.
The C.I.A. has for several years operated Predator drones out of a remote base in Shamsi, Pakistan, but has secretly added a second site at an air base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, several current and former government and company officials said. The existence of the Predator base in Jalalabad has not previously been reported.
Officials said the C.I.A. now conducted most of its Predator missile and bomb strikes on targets in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region from the Jalalabad base, with drones landing or taking off almost hourly. The base in Pakistan is still in use. But officials said that the United States decided to open the Afghanistan operation in part because of the possibility that the Pakistani government, facing growing anti-American sentiment at home, might force the C.I.A. to close the one in Pakistan.
Blackwater is not involved in selecting targets or actual strikes. The targets are selected by the C.I.A., and employees at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., pull the trigger remotely. Only a handful of the agency's employees actually work at the Predator bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the current and former employees said.
They said that Blackwater's direct role in these operations had sometimes led to disputes with the C.I.A. Sometimes when a Predator misses a target, agency employees accuse Blackwater of poor bomb assembly, they said. In one instance last year recounted by the employees, a 500-pound bomb dropped off a Predator before it hit the target, leading to a frantic search for the unexploded bomb in the remote Afghan-Pakistani border region. It was eventually found about 100 yards from the original target.
The role of contractors in intelligence work expanded after the Sept. 11 attacks, as spy agencies were forced to fill gaps created when their work forces were reduced during the 1990s, after the end of the cold war.
More than a quarter of the intelligence community's current work force is made up of contractors, carrying out missions like intelligence collection and analysis and, until recently, interrogation of terrorist suspects.
"There are skills we don't have in government that we may have an immediate requirement for," Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who ran the C.I.A. from 2006 until early this year, said during a panel discussion on Thursday on the privatization of intelligence.
General Hayden, who succeeded Mr. Goss at the agency, acknowledged that the C.I.A. program continued under his watch, though it was not a priority. He said the program was never prominent during his time at the C.I.A., which was one reason he did not believe that he had to notify Congress. He said it did not involve outside contractors by the time he came in.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who presides over the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the agency should have notified Congress in any event. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."
Mark Landler contributed reporting.
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2) U.S. Military to Stay in Philippines
By THOM SHANKER
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/asia/21military.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has decided to keep an elite 600-troop counterinsurgency operation deployed in the Philippines despite pressure to reassign its members to fulfill urgent needs elsewhere, like in Afghanistan or Iraq, according to Pentagon officials.
The high-level attention given to the future of the force, known as the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines, illustrates the Pentagon's difficulty in finding enough of these highly trained units for assignments to two wars - as well as for the wider effort to combat insurgencies and militancy in other parts of the world deemed to be threats to American interests.
Senior officials said the decision also acknowledged a cautionary lesson from Afghanistan: that battlefield success should be rewarded with sustained commitment, while prematurely turning the military's attention elsewhere - as when the Bush administration shifted focus to Iraq - provides insurgents and terrorists the opportunity to rush back in.
In the seven years that the Philippines-based American force has been operating, its members have trained local security units and provided logistical and intelligence support to Filipino forces fighting insurgents.
Senior officials say the American force and partners in the Central Intelligence Agency were instrumental in successes by the Filipino armed forces in killing and capturing leaders of the militant group Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, antigovernment organizations operating in the south.
In a simultaneous counterinsurgency effort in the Philippines, members of the American force have completed hundreds of infrastructure projects, including roads, schools, health clinics and firehouses, conducted medical examinations and administered vaccines.
Adm. Timothy J. Keating, commander of American forces in the Pacific, said the force's work was not yet done. "The successes we enjoy, and the gains, can tend to anesthetize us a little bit," he said. "When the options were presented to our leadership, the decision was made to continue the Philippines mission."
Before making his decision, Mr. Gates visited the Philippines in June. Then, Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, followed with an unannounced visit in July - underscoring the tight link between the military and intelligence efforts.
"Based on his briefings heading into Manila and his meetings on the ground there, Secretary Gates just felt this is not the right time to begin scaling back our support," said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. "While we have made real progress against international terrorist groups there, everyone believes they would ramp back up their attacks if we were to draw down."
Even independent, nongovernmental organizations that normally look skeptically on American military efforts have praised the Philippines operation.
"In general, the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines has been regarded as a success story, especially in terms of winning hearts and minds through civic action and medical assistance projects," said Mark L. Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group.
He noted, however, that the insurgency in the Philippines "is a political problem first and foremost" and that no military effort alone can bring success against antigovernment forces.
Special Operations Forces are the most highly skilled in the military at capture-and-kill missions against insurgent and terrorist leaders. Within their ranks, Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, have for decades been training allied troops on their home soil and conducting counterinsurgency missions.
The American ambassador to the Philippines, Kristie A. Kenney, said that measuring the impact of the military mission there was difficult, but she emphasized that the task force's efforts were multiplied by being closely coordinated with the Filipino government and American development assistance.
Col. Bill Coultrup, the task force commander, said that when he arrived in 2007, his goal was simple: "Help the Philippines security forces. It's their fight. We don't want to take over."
His service includes deployments with Special Operations units in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Bosnia, where the mission focused on capturing or killing adversaries. But in the Philippines, Colonel Coultrup's work has been only 20 percent combat-related. That portion of the military mission is designed to "help the armed forces of the Philippines neutralize high-value targets - individuals who will never change their minds," he said.
Eighty percent of the effort, though, has been "civil-military operations to change the conditions that allow those high-value targets to have a safe haven," Colonel Coultrup added. "We do that through helping give a better life to the citizens: good governance, better health care, a higher standard of living."
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3) U.S. and Cuba Work Together on Storms
By MARC LACEY
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/americas/21storm.html?ref=world
MEXICO CITY - The first tropical storms of the season have begun raging across the Atlantic, bringing with them all manner of panic and potential destruction - and, behind the scenes, a little boost in United States-Cuba relations.
The gusty winds, heavy rains and ocean swells that hurricanes produce do not know the difference between Guantánamo and Galveston, which has made the weather one of the few topics on which the United States and Cuban governments regularly engage.
"We've had a close working relationship in regard to tropical cyclones that goes back to the '70s and '80s," said Max Mayfield, who retired in 2007 after seven years as director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "Any storm that goes toward Florida goes over Cuba, so we need their observations. And they need our data from the aircraft."
With coastal communities in both countries vulnerable, meteorology could bring the longtime adversaries closer together, especially with the policy of increased engagement pushed by President Obama, experts argue. Wayne Smith, a former American diplomat in Havana who is now a fellow at the Washington-based Center for International Policy, has brought an array of American officials to Cuba in recent years to look at how Cuban disaster preparedness programs manage to keep the number of hurricane deaths on the island so low.
Among those who made the trip last month were Russel Honoré, a retired lieutenant general who was the commander of the military's Hurricane Katrina task force; Robert Turner, regional director of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East; and Stewart Simonson, assistant secretary for emergency preparedness in the Department of Health and Human Services during the George W. Bush administration.
Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane expert at Louisiana State University who visited Cuba last year, contends that American policies should be loosened to allow a transfer of technology to Cuba to help bolster its oceanographic and weather data collection. The United States could learn from Cuba's evacuation plans, post-disaster medical support and citizen disaster education programs, he said.
"No matter how much our government may decry the Cuban regime, it is a fact that they are very successful in orchestrating evacuations and meeting the public health and medical needs of their population during disasters," Mr. van Heerden wrote in a paper several months ago for the Center for Democracy in the Americas, a Washington-based group that wants to normalize relations with Cuba.
Cubans are taught about hurricanes in elementary school, and every block has a captain whose job it is to help evacuate people and relocate their possessions to safe locations. Evacuations are compulsory in Cuba, which keeps casualties low but also highlights the government's control over most aspects of people's lives. Those same captains also keep tabs on neighbors' loyalty to the government.
"We have a different form of government in the United States," Lyda Ann Thomas, the mayor of Galveston, Tex., told reporters during a visit to Cuba in April to examine Cuba's preparedness plans. "When we call for a mandatory evacuation and citizens are warned they may be left without water and resources, they still have the right to tell their government they do not wish to leave their homes."
For years, the Cubans have allowed American government "hurricane hunter" planes to enter their airspace to measure storms from the air. Even during Mr. Bush's presidency, when the trade embargo between the countries was tightened, American and Cuban government meteorologists were cooperating when it came to storms.
While one part of the United States Commerce Department was in charge of enforcing the embargo - fining those who visited Cuba illegally or purchased outlawed Cuban cigars - another part of it was trading information and engaging in training exercises with the Cubans on storms.
Tensions do still arise. The two governments have turned down hurricane aid from each other, and when advocacy groups held a United States-Cuba hurricane summit meeting in Mexico in 2007, an American government meteorologist said he received a call from the State Department as he was heading there ordering him not to attend.
"The State Department called me at the airport and said, 'You're not allowed to go to the meeting,' " said Lixion Avila, a Cuban-born hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center. "I told them that we meet Cuban meteorologists regularly."
Still, Cuban hurricane experts participate in the annual training exercises at the hurricane center in Miami. "It's not as simple as with Jamaica when it comes to visas, but we work together," Mr. Avila said.
Mr. Mayfield, who is now a hurricane specialist for a Miami television station, said he understood those who were pushing for greater engagement with Cuba and those who considered the government so abhorrent that isolation was the only acceptable approach. "I have a lot of Cuban friends whose parents were taken off to prison by the military," he said. "I understand their views, but it seems there are some areas where it makes sense to talk."
Mr. Mayfield said his counterpart at Cuba's Institute of Meteorology, José Rubiera, had the advantage of having his own government television station to reach the population in advance of approaching storms. "It's easier if you have a government-run television station," Mr. Mayfield said. "He could get the message out anytime he wanted to. There were times I would have liked to have had that platform."
Mr. Avila, whose mother lives in Cuba, sees his work with Cuban meteorologists as apolitical. "I'm trained to save lives and it doesn't matter if they are Cuban, Chinese or American lives I'm saving by forecasting storms," he said.
But he said the evacuation approach used in his birthplace would not necessarily work for his adopted home.
"There, they put everyone in a truck and move them," Mr. Avila said. "You can't do that in the U.S."
But some things are more transferable. Mr. Turner, the Louisiana flood official who visited Cuba last month, said he was impressed with the islandwide disaster drills and the regular inspections of homes to determine their ability to withstand strong winds.
"There are probably lessons that can be learned on both sides," he said.
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4) Michigan: Prisoners' Lawsuit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
August 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21brfs-PRISONERSLAW_BRF.html?ref=us
Four hundred more current or former female inmates have filed claims for part of a $100 million settlement in the month since the state resolved accusations that prisoners had been raped, groped and peeked at by male members of the corrections staff, a lawyer said. All told, more than 900 women are seeking money for alleged sexual misconduct inside state prisons from March 1993 to July 2009. The development was disclosed as a Washtenaw County circuit judge, Timothy Connors, gave final approval to the class-action settlement, despite complaints from some former inmates who won at trial, but will get less under the settlement. Ten lawyers who worked on the case will get $28.7 million for their work and for administering the settlement. The remaining $71.3 will be given to victims based on the severity of abuse. Deborah Labelle, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the settlement was fair. "A hundred million dollars recognizes the kind of human rights violations that went on by the state," Ms. Labelle said.
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5) American Indian activist denied parole
Aug 21 2009 12:50PM
Associated Press
http://www.kxmc.com/News/424465.asp
Bismarck, N.D. (AP) U.S. Attorney Drew Wrigley says imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier has once again been denied parole.
Wrigley says the next scheduled hearing for Peltier is 2024, when Peltier would be 79 years old.
Peltier is serving two life sentences for the execution-style deaths of FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams during a June 26, 1975, standoff on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
He was convicted in Fargo, N.D., in 1977. He has claimed the FBI framed him, which the agency denies, and unsuccessfully appealed his conviction numerous times.
Peltier had a full parole hearing for the first time in 15 years last month at the Lewisburg, Pa., federal prison where he is being held.
Defense attorney Eric Seitz declined comment on the U.S. Parole Commission decision Friday, saying the Justice Department had not informed him.
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) APNP 08-21-09 1247CDT
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6) All the President's Zombies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
August 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/opinion/24krugman.html
The debate over the "public option" in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction - in Congress, if not with the broader public - simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism - by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Let's talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the "magic of the marketplace" were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn't happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.
Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there's the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.
There's a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis - and the crisis came.
"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. "We know now that it is bad economics." And last year we learned that lesson all over again.
Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option - not just Republicans, but Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and Senator Ben Nelson - have offered no coherent arguments against it. Mr. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance - which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
But it's much the same on other fronts. Efforts to strengthen bank regulation appear to be losing steam, as opponents of reform declare that more regulation would lead to less financial innovation - this just months after the wonders of innovation brought our financial system to the edge of collapse, a collapse that was averted only with huge infusions of taxpayer funds.
So why won't these zombie ideas die?
Part of the answer is that there's a lot of money behind them. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," said Upton Sinclair, "when his salary" - or, I would add, his campaign contributions - "depend upon his not understanding it." In particular, vast amounts of insurance industry money have been flowing to obstructionist Democrats like Mr. Nelson and Senator Max Baucus, whose Gang of Six negotiations have been a crucial roadblock to legislation.
But some of the blame also must rest with President Obama, who famously praised Reagan during the Democratic primary, and hasn't used the bully pulpit to confront government-is-bad fundamentalism. That's ironic, in a way, since a large part of what made Reagan so effective, for better or for worse, was the fact that he sought to change America's thinking as well as its tax code.
How will this all work out? I don't know. But it's hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we're at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.
In my column last Monday, I made a joke about the Swiss that fell flat with some readers. Also, the Swiss don't wear lederhosen.
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7) Justice Dept. Report Advises Pursuing C.I.A. Abuse Cases
By DAVID JOHNSTON
August 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/us/politics/24detain.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department's ethics office has recommended reversing the Bush administration and reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, potentially exposing Central Intelligence Agency employees and contractors to prosecution for brutal treatment of terrorism suspects, according to a person officially briefed on the matter.
The recommendation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, presented to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in recent weeks, comes as the Justice Department is about to disclose on Monday voluminous details on prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the C.I.A.'s inspector general but have never been released.
When the C.I.A. first referred its inspector general's findings to prosecutors, they decided that none of the cases merited prosecution. But Mr. Holder's associates say that when he took office and saw the allegations, which included the deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he began to reconsider.
With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A. It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.
The advice from the Office of Professional Responsibility strengthens Mr. Holder's hand.
The recommendation to review the closed cases, in effect renewing the inquiries, centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department report is to be made public after classified information is deleted from it.
The cases represent about half of those that were initially investigated and referred to the Justice Department by the C.I.A.'s inspector general, but were later closed. It is not known which cases might be reopened.
Mr. Holder was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general's report and other materials.
In examples that have just come to light, the C.I.A. report describes how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill. It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a prisoner with imminent death.
Mr. Holder, who questioned the thoroughness of previous inquiries by the Justice Department, is expected to announce within days his decision on whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct a new investigation; in legal circles, it is believed to be highly likely that he will go forward with a fresh criminal inquiry.
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said Sunday that the Justice Department recommendation to reopen the cases had not been sent to the intelligence agency. He added: "Decisions on whether or not to pursue action in court were made after careful consideration by career prosecutors at the Justice Department. The C.I.A. itself brought these matters - facts and allegations alike - to the department's attention."
The report by the Justice Department's ethics office has been under preparation for more than five years, and its critique of legal work on interrogations provoked bitter complaints from Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey as he was leaving office as the Bush administration's final attorney general.
The Justice Department's report, the most important since Mr. Holder took office, was submitted by Mary Patrice Brown, a veteran Washington federal prosecutor picked by Mr. Holder to lead the Office of Professional Responsibility earlier this year after its longtime chief, H. Marshall Jarrett, moved to another job in the Justice Department.
There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., and in some instances not even the details of the cases have been made public.
Former government lawyers said that while some detainees died and others suffered serious abuses, prosecutors decided they would be unlikely to prevail because of problems with mishandled evidence and, in some cases, the inability to locate witnesses or even those said to be the victims.
A few of the cases are well known, like that of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in 2003 in C.I.A. custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after he was first captured by a team of Navy Seals. Prosecutors said he probably received his fatal injuries during his capture, but lawyers for the Seals denied it.
Over the years, some Democratic lawmakers sought more details about the cases and why the Justice Department took no action. They received summaries of the number of cases under scrutiny but few facts about the episodes or the department's decisions not to prosecute.
The cases do not center on allegations of abuse by C.I.A. officers who conducted the forceful interrogations of high-level Qaeda suspects at secret sites, although it is not out of the question that a new investigation would also examine their conduct.
That could mean a look at the case in which C.I.A. officers threatened one prisoner with a handgun and a power drill if he did not cooperate. The detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was suspected as the master plotter behind the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole.
All civilian employees of the government, including those at the C.I.A., were required to comply with guidelines for interrogations detailed in a series of legal opinions written by the Justice Department. Those opinions, since abandoned by the Obama administration, were the central focus of the Justice Department's internal inquiry.
It has been known that the Justice Department ethics report had criticized the authors of the legal opinions and, in some cases, would recommend referrals to local bar associations for discipline.
But the internal inquiry also examined how the opinions were carried out and how referrals of possible violations were made - a process that led ethics investigators to find misconduct serious enough to warrant renewed criminal investigation.
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8) Report Cites Abuse at State Juvenile Prison Centers
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25juvenile.html?hp
ALBANY - Children at four juvenile detention centers in New York were so severely abused by workers that it constituted a violation of their constitutional rights, according to a report by the United States Department of Justice made public on Monday.
The findings raise the possibility of a federal takeover of the state's entire youth detention system if the problems are not addressed.
The report caps a nearly two-year investigation by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division into claims of excessive physical force at some of the state's 28 juvenile residential centers, which house children who were convicted of criminal acts but are too young to serve in adult jails and prisons.
Federal investigators found that workers at the four locations - the Lansing Residential Center and the Louis Gossett Jr. Residential Center in Lansing, N.Y., and two facilities, one for boys and one for girls, at Tryon Residential Center in Johnstown, N.Y. - routinely used physical force to restrain residents, despite rules allowing force only as a last resort.
The report documented dozens of episodes at the four centers in a period of less than two years that resulted in serious injuries, including broken teeth and bones. It found that physical force was often the first response to any act of insubordination by residents, who are all under 16.
"Staff at the facilities routinely used uncontrolled, unsafe applications of force, departing from generally accepted standards," says the report, which was given to Gov. David A. Paterson on Aug. 14. "Anything from sneaking an extra cookie to initiating a fistfight may result in a full prone restraint with handcuffs," the report continued. "This one-size-fits-all approach has not surprisingly led to an alarming number of serious injuries to youth, including concussions, broken or knocked-out teeth, and spiral fractures" (bone fractures caused by twisting).
The investigation is the latest blow to New York's troubled juvenile justice system, which currently detains about 1,000 youths.
In a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union issued in September 2006, New York's juvenile residential centers were rated among the worst in the world.
Later that year, an emotionally disturbed teenager, Darryl Thompson, died after two employees at the Tryon center pinned him down on the ground. The death was ruled a homicide, but a grand jury declined to indict the workers. The boy's mother is suing the state.
During the same period, a separate joint investigation by the state inspector general and the Tompkins County district attorney found that the independent ombudsman's office charged with overseeing juvenile detention centers had virtually ceased to function.
In a statement on Monday, after the report became public, Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, said that the administration had inherited a juvenile justice system "rife with substantial systemic problems" but acknowledged that efforts so far to overhaul it had fallen short.
"We have made great strides," said Ms. Carrión, "but much more still needs to be done."
The previous scandals had spurred a major effort within Ms. Carrión's department, which oversees juvenile residential centers, to overhaul the system. It reconstituted the ombudsman's office and issued clearer policies on the use of physical force, leading to a sharp drop in instances where restraints were applied. The department has also required new training for the staffs at juvenile detention centers.
Officials have also sought to close down centers that were underused and redirect resources to counseling and other services, as other states have done, though they have faced fierce resistance from public employees' unions and their allies in the Legislature. Last year, Mr. Paterson appointed a commission to recommend further changes.
The report by federal investigators revealed that despite those changes, problems at some of the centers remain severe. Under federal law, New York has 49 days to respond with a plan of action to comply with the report's recommendations. If the state does not meet the deadline, the Justice Department can initiate a lawsuit that could result in a federal takeover of the state's juvenile residential centers.
In one case described in the report, a youth was forcibly restrained and handcuffed after refusing to stop laughing when ordered to; the youth sustained a cut lip and injuries to the wrists and elbows. One boy, after glaring at a staff member, was forced into a sitting position and his arms were secured behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken.
Another youth was restrained eight times in three months despite signs that she might have been contemplating suicide. "In nearly every one of the eight incidents," the report found, "the youth was engaged in behaviors such as head banging, putting paper clips in her mouth, tying a string around her neck, etc."
Officials at the centers also routinely failed to follow state rules requiring that instances in which force is used be reviewed after the fact. In some cases, the same staff member involved in an episode conducted the review. And even when a review determined that excessive force had been used, the staff members responsible sometimes faced no punishment.
In one case, it was recommended that a youth counselor with a documented record of using excessive force should be fired after throwing a youth to the ground with such force that the youth's chin required stitches. But after the counselor's union intervened, the punishment was downgraded to a letter of reprimand, an $800 fine and a two-week suspension that was itself suspended.
The report also found that state officials failed to provide youths in detention with adequate counseling and mental health treatment, something the vast majority of residents require. Three-quarters of residents enter New York's juvenile justice system with drug or alcohol problems, more than half have diagnosed psychological problems and a third have developmental disabilities, according to figures published by Office of Children and Family Services.
"The majority of psychiatric evaluations at the four facilities did not come close to meeting" professional standards, investigators determined, and "typically lacked basic, necessary information."
In many instances, a single resident received several different or conflicting diagnoses - and correspondingly different regimens of psychotropic drugs - from different psychiatrists or counselors. The medications were dispensed without rigorous monitoring. Typically, parents were not offered an opportunity to give their informed consent for the treatment.
One 15-year-old, according to the report, was on six medications at once, with no record of an agreed-upon diagnosis or description of the symptoms the drugs were intended to target. Another resident, a boy who was mentally ill, told a doctor that he thought he might be pregnant.
"Despite this significant incident," the report noted, "it appears that the youth's belief that he was pregnant and the possibility that he was delusional was not communicated to the treating psychiatrist. It is unknown whether this was addressed in the youth's individual therapy."
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9) The Philippines Face Classroom Shortage
By SETH MYDANS
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world/asia/25iht-phils.html?ref=world
MANILA - When Irene Mendevil, a high school English teacher, shouts at her students, she said, she gets a sore throat. So she has begun to use an amplifier.
"I had the experience of losing my voice completely," she said of her constant shouting. "No sounds came out of my mouth. I had to write on paper to tell my students what to do."
Ms. Mendevil, 33, shouts because her class is so big that just getting the students to listen is a challenge. There are 100 of them, more or less the same number as in the other classes here in Justice Cecilia Muñoz-Palma High School.
And the school itself is not unusual in a country whose population of 92 million is exploding so fast, and whose education budget is so small, that it cannot find space to teach its children.
More children are also coming into the public schools as the economy tightens and families cannot afford the haven of private schools, with their smaller classes.
This school year opened with a nationwide enrollment of 21 million students from elementary through high school, almost exactly a million more than in the previous year.
Although the government began a classroom-building program three years ago, the schools are still 27,124 classrooms short, according to Juan Miguel Luz, a former under secretary of education who works with the National Institute of Policy Study, which advocates better education policies.
To squeeze in all the students, many classrooms have been divided into two by partitions. Stairwells and corridors have been converted into miniature classrooms. In 2006, double sessions were introduced to take off some of the pressure.
Toilets are a problem of their own, with 62 percent of schools suffering shortages, Bashir Rasuman, under secretary for public works, said recently. In the capital, Manila, Education Department figures show an average of one toilet for every 143 high school students and one for every 114 elementary school students.
Here at Muñoz-Palma High School, some lavatories have been converted into claustrophobic faculty lounges, while the lounges have been put to use as classrooms.
"I have 106 students in my class and 90 seats," said Rico Encinares, 34, a chemistry teacher. "Everybody has seats if some of them are absent. But if they all come, there are not enough seats. They have to share seats."
Only about 10 percent of his students - the truly motivated ones - get a quality education, he said. Individual attention is almost impossible.
"I don't know the names of all my students, even at the end of the school year," he said. "You only remember the ones who are very noisy or very good. But the silent ones who just sit there listening, you can't recall their names."
He said he planned to buy an amplifier to reach the ones in the back rows as soon as he had the money.
According to the World Bank, the Philippines spends $138 per student per year. By comparison, Thailand spends $853 per student, Singapore spends $1,800 and Japan spends $5,000.
The Philippine government spends 2.19 percent of its budget on education, according to official figures, well short of the 6 percent that educators say is optimal - despite a constitutional mandate to make education a priority.
At the start of the decade, educators talked of a radical overhaul of the education system, but the main change since then has been increasingly intense overcrowding, Mr. Luz, of the policy study institute, wrote in a recent paper.
"Sadly, today, we have the same overcrowded structure, the same processes and the same low education standards but with millions more children to attend to," he said.
In her state of the nation speech last month, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo called education a priority and said the government was building new classrooms.
Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said in a report that the department planned to build 1,908 new classrooms and renovate 2,513 classrooms. He said 6,322 toilets would be installed, though only 194 were to be completed this year. Not long ago, Mr. Lapus also announced that schools would be collecting scrap material to build and repair furniture.
In the Department of Education, a certain amount of manpower was used working out the alliteration of a new program called Operation 10 R - recycle, repair, refurbish, rehabilitate, restore, remodel, repaint, renew, redistribute and reuse.
At the Muñoz-Palma High School, students scavenge for plastic bottles, hauling them in huge sacks to help pay the costs of school equipment.
At the Payatas Elementary School nearby, Edmon Miguel Jr., 24, is spending his own money to try to improve conditions.
"We are just waiting for our salary, the other teacher and me," said Mr. Miguel, who earns 9,000 pesos, or $187, a month. "We will make it a beautiful classroom. We will make it a classroom conducive to learning."
His classroom is a narrow passageway with a tin roof and no windows where 62 children ages 8 to 12 sit crammed together at tiny desks. It floods during monsoon season.
"When it rains, my shoes get wet, but I continue to teach the children," Mr. Miguel said. "Sometimes their notebooks fall in the water."
This is a poor community, he said, and he sometimes buys notebooks and paper for the students. "So each time we have a test," he said, "I buy them a piece of paper."
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10) New York's Disgrace
Editorial
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25tue1.html
The Justice Department has sued several state juvenile detention systems for subjecting children to neglect and abuse. The department is now threatening to sue New York for the same reasons, and rightly so. A recently completed federal investigation has documented unsafe and, in some cases, heartbreaking conditions in several New York state detention facilities.
This problem has been festering for decades. Elected officials who have ignored it will need to clean house as swiftly as possible, closing down the worst institutions and ensuring that children in custody are protected from abuse in compliance with federal law.
In an angry letter to Gov. David Paterson, the department describes a hellish environment where excessive force is commonplace and children risk serious injury - concussions, knocked-out teeth and fractured bones - for minor offenses like laughing too loudly, getting into fistfights or "sneaking an extra cookie" at snack time.
The investigators focused on four facilities - including the infamous Tryon Boys Residential Center, in upstate Fulton County, where an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old named Darryl Thompson died in 2006 after being pinned face down on the floor and held there by two grown men. Three staff members who were trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation and required to administer it failed to do so. The medical examiner labeled the death a homicide, but the grand jury declined to indict the two men involved.
The report notes that the physical restraints used just before Darryl died have been banned in many parts of the country. But at the time of the investigation, it says, staff members in New York facilities were still being trained to use dangerous restraint techniques and used them, often at the slightest provocation.
The report further suggests that acts of violence and abuse against children have been routinely covered up. Officials fail to act in a timely fashion, or at all, when cronies are caught violating policy in dangerous ways. A 300-pound staff member who slammed a young woman to the floor, causing a concussion, is a vivid example.
The section of the letter on mentally ill children, who make up a significant part of the incarcerated population, is enough to make the reader weep. Psychiatric services, such as they are, are shamefully inadequate. Children often get several different diagnoses within the same institution, which makes it impossible to treat them effectively. Medications appear to be handed out almost at random, without proper monitoring or clear therapeutic goals. Although many detained youths have drug problems, treatment programs are in a shambles.
The Justice Department report fully vindicates Gladys Carrión, the reform-minded commissioner of New York's Office of Children and Family Services, who assumed office in 2007. Ms. Carrión has closed many facilities, downsized others, and is working to emphasize treatment and rehabilitation instead of force.
She has faced resistance from lawmakers, who want to keep juvenile centers open in their districts at all costs, and the unions, which are committed to some of the practices the Justice Department finds unconstitutional. Her opponents must now contend with the federal government, which was bound to intervene.
The Justice Department lays out a list of steps the state must take to bring its system into compliance with federal law and basic standards of decency. For starters, it must protect children from excessive force, and provide mental health care and rehabilitative treatment. If not, the state will almost surely be sued.
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11) Guantánamo Detainee Released
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/world/asia/25gitmo.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - One of the youngest people held at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was welcomed home on Monday by joyful relatives after almost seven years in detention - freed by a military judge who ruled that he had been coerced into confessing to wounding United States soldiers with a grenade.
The prisoner, Mohammed Jawad, who is now about 21, was flown to Kabul, the Afghan capital, in the afternoon and was released to family members late in the evening.
Mr. Jawad was arrested in Kabul in December 2002 and accused of tossing a grenade at an unmarked vehicle in an attack that wounded two American soldiers and their interpreter. The Afghan police delivered him into American custody, and about a month later he was sent to Guantánamo Bay.
A federal judge ordered Mr. Jawad released last month after a war crimes case against him fell apart over a lack of evidence and concerns about his age.
Soon after his arrival here on Monday, Mr. Jawad was taken to the presidential place to meet with President Hamid Karzai, according to Maj. Eric Montalvo, one of Mr. Jawad's Pentagon-appointed defense lawyers.
The case was first complicated by doubts about Mr. Jawad's age. Relatives say he was about 12 when he was arrested. The Pentagon said a bone scan showed that he was about 17 at the time.
Last October, a military judge at Guantánamo threw out Mr. Jawad's confession, saying that he had initially denied throwing the grenade but that he had changed his story after Afghan authorities threatened to kill him and his family.
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12) 2 Ex-Judges May Be Tried in Sentencing of Juveniles
By IAN URBINA
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/25judge.html?ref=us
Two former Pennsylvania county judges who pleaded guilty in February to a kickback scheme that involved sending juveniles to private detention facilities withdrew their guilty pleas Monday, opening the way for them to go on trial.
A federal judge rejected plea agreements last month after deciding that the men had failed to accept responsibility for their actions and that their proposed prison sentence of more than seven years was too lenient.
Last week, the former judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. of the Luzerne County juvenile court and Michael T. Conahan of the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas, filed a motion asking the judge, Edwin M. Kosik of Federal District Court in Scranton, Pa., to reinstate the plea agreement.
On Monday, Judge Kosik denied that request, prompting Mr. Ciavarella, 59, and Mr. Conahan, 57, to withdraw their pleas. They are accused of taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.
Robert K. Mericle, 46, a developer who prosecutors say paid kickbacks to the judges after winning contracts to build the detention centers, is scheduled to plead guilty on Sept. 2 in federal court to failing to report a felony, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine. As part of his plea agreement, Mr. Mericle would donate $2.1 million to local programs to benefit children.
On Aug. 12, Judge Arthur A. Grim, appointed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to determine how to handle the juveniles who were convicted by Mr. Ciavarella and Mr. Conahan, recommended that virtually all the cases should be thrown out.
Judge Grim said that retrying the 1,866 cases of juveniles who appeared before Mr. Ciavarella without lawyers from 2003 to May 2008 would amount to double jeopardy. He wrote that there would be no public benefit in retrying juveniles who had lawyers but completed their sentences. He also wrote that he planned to review the cases of juveniles who had been represented by lawyers and had not completed their sentences.
Marsha Levick, the legal director of the Juvenile Law Center, a child advocacy organization in Philadelphia that began raising concerns about the judges in 1999, said she hoped the case would begin moving forward.
"It's nice that the judges are being given the right to withdraw their pleas and proceed to trial with counsel, something Ciavarella denied the thousands of kids in his courtroom," she said.
Mr. Ciavarella's lawyer, Al Flora Jr., said there were no current negotiations under way on a new plea agreement.
"Mark Ciavarella has not been convicted of any crime," Mr. Flora said. "He is entitled to the full presumption of innocence. We made a concerted and good faith effort to convince the judge to reconsider the plea agreement, and he declined."
Mr. Conahan's lawyer, Philip Gelso, declined to comment, as did the United States attorney's office.
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13) As 8-Year-Old Injured in Fall Heals, Her Mother Deals With Investigators
By JULIE BOSMAN
August 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/nyregion/25fall.html?ref=nyregion
Just after 1 a.m. on Friday, Robin Antonio woke to neighbors banging on her door to relay gut-wrenching news: her 8-year-old daughter, Destiny, had been found on the ground outside, having fallen out of her seventh-floor bedroom window.
Since that moment, Ms. Antonio said she has dealt with the initial fear that Destiny had died, followed by the relief that, miraculously, she had not. Ms. Antonio suffered chest pains after hearing of her daughter's fall, and was taken to the hospital in a separate ambulance. Doctors told her that Destiny had broken her pelvis and her right leg, had sustained intestinal injuries, and would remain hospitalized until year's end, at least.
Now, she says, she and her family have been enduring another ordeal: city welfare workers investigating whether she was guilty of neglect.
"The whole family is under attack," said Ms. Antonio, 48, as she sat on her sofa on Monday.
Since her daughter's fall, Ms. Antonio and her children, who live in a public housing project in the Bronx, have been interviewed by the police and workers from the city's Administration for Children's Services, who she says swept through her home, taking pictures and pressing her children for information. During an interview, one investigator asked her 12-year-old son, Tamar, if he drinks alcohol, she said.
Ms. Antonio and her companion, Ron Haynes, who considers himself Destiny's stepfather, say they believe the investigation is excessive and have hired a lawyer to help.
On Saturday, three children's services workers and more than a dozen police officers stayed at the home for hours, said Adell, Ms. Antonio's 21-year-old daughter.
"They bogarted their way in," Mr. Haynes said. "Now this family doesn't know when the police are going to come here and harass their mama."
Sheila Stainback, a spokeswoman for the children's services agency, said the investigation is standard practice. "This is a normal procedure any time a child is injured and adult caregivers are present when it happens," Ms. Stainback said.
The agency has 60 days to complete its investigation.
Ms. Antonio said she was asleep early Friday when Destiny was awakened by noise in the courtyard.
"Somebody was out there arguing," Ms. Antonio said, relaying her daughter's account.
Destiny apparently climbed down from her top bunk, and stepped up on a windowsill to investigate. The window had protective metal guards on the bottom, but Destiny pulled down the top half of the window and stuck her head through. Ms. Antonio said the window was supposed to lower only four inches, but Destiny managed to pull it down seven inches.
Somehow, she fell out, barely missing three air-conditioners and a grate made of metal and concrete below. She landed on a patch of overgrown grass, dazed but conscious.
The window has since been repaired, but another window in the bedroom is held together with duct tape, a broken pane of glass threatening to fall out. Ms. Antonio said she asked that the windows be fixed in July, but the repairman said he didn't have the proper tools and promised to return on Sept. 3.
Howard Marder, a spokesman for the New York City Housing Authority, declined to comment on the specifics of the case, which he said is under investigation by the Police Department and the Housing Authority. "We will continue to inspect all window guards in our developments, as is our current practice," he said. "Safety in our developments is paramount, which is why N.Y.C.H.A.'s policy mandates the installation of window guards in all of our windows and goes beyond what is required by D.O.H. code."
Ms. Antonio lives in the four-bedroom apartment, decorated with trinkets and family pictures, with 5 of her 12 children - some are old enough to live on their own - and 2 grandchildren.
Early Monday afternoon, Ms. Antonio said she wanted to visit her daughter again in the hospital, but was waiting for a worker to come repair the other window.
She said a social worker wanted to meet with her in the morning and interview Destiny again. "I don't think it's over," she said.
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14) Hawaii to Remove Inmates Over Abuse Charges
By IAN URBINA
August 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/us/26kentucky.html?ref=us
Hawaii prison officials said Tuesday that all of the state's 168 female inmates at a privately run Kentucky prison will be removed by the end of September because of charges of sexual abuse by guards. Forty inmates were returned to Hawaii on Aug. 17.
This month, officials from the Hawaii Department of Public Safety traveled to Kentucky to investigate accusations that inmates at the prison, the Otter Creek Correctional Center in Wheelwright, including seven from Hawaii, had been sexually assaulted by the prison staff.
Otter Creek is run by the Corrections Corporation of America and is one of a spate of private, for-profit prisons, mainly in the South, that have been the focus of investigations over issues like abusive conditions and wrongful deaths. Because Eastern Kentucky is one of the poorest rural regions in the country, the prison was welcomed by local residents desperate for jobs.
Hawaii sent inmates to Kentucky to save money. Housing an inmate at the Women's Community Correctional Center in Kailua, Hawaii, costs $86 a day, compared with $58.46 a day at the Kentucky prison, not including air travel.
Hawaii investigators found that at least five corrections officials at the prison, including a chaplain, had been charged with having sex with inmates in the last three years, and four were convicted. Three rape cases involving guards and Hawaii inmates were recently turned over to law enforcement authorities. The Kentucky State Police said another sexual assault case would go to a grand jury soon.
Kentucky is one of only a handful of states where it is a misdemeanor rather than a felony for a prison guard to have sex with an inmate, according to the National Institute of Corrections, a policy arm of the Justice Department. A bill to increase the penalties for such sexual misconduct failed to pass in the Kentucky legislature this year.
The private prison industry has generated extensive controversy, with critics arguing that incarceration should not be contracted to for-profit companies. Several reports have found contract violations at private prisons, safety and security concerns, questionable cost savings and higher rates of inmate recidivism. "Privately operated prisons appear to have systemic problems in maintaining secure facilities," a 2001 study by the Federal Bureau of Prisons concluded.
Those views are shared by Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, a nonprofit group based in Seattle that has a monthly magazine and does litigation on behalf of inmates' rights.
"Private prisons such as Otter Creek raise serious concerns about transparency and public accountability, and there have been incidents of sexual misconduct at that facility for many years," Mr. Friedmann said.
But proponents say privately run prisons provide needed beds at lower cost. About 8 percent of state and federal inmates are held in such prisons, according to the Justice Department.
"We are reviewing every allegation, regardless of the disposition," said Lisa Lamb, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Corrections, which she said was investigating 23 accusations of sexual assault at Otter Creek going back to 2006.
The move by Hawaii authorities is just the latest problem for Kentucky prison officials.
On Saturday, a riot at another Kentucky prison, the Northpoint Training Center at Burgin, forced officials to move about 700 prisoners out of the facility, which is 30 miles south of Lexington.
State investigators said Tuesday that they were questioning prisoners and staff members and reviewing security cameras at the Burgin prison to see whether racial tensions may have led to the riot that injured 16 people and left the lockup in ruins. A lockdown after a fight between white and Hispanic inmates had been eased to allow inmates access to the prison yard on Friday, the day before the riot. Prisoners started fires in trash cans that spread. Several buildings were badly damaged.
While the riot was an unusual event - the last one at a Kentucky state prison was in 1983 - reports of sexual abuse at Otter Creek are not new. "The number of reported sexual assaults at Otter Creek in 2007 was four times higher than at the state-run Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women," Mr. Friedmann said.
In July, Gov. Linda Lingle of Hawaii, a Republican, said that bringing prisoners home would cost hundreds of millions of dollars that the state did not have, but that she was willing to do so because of the security concerns.
Prison overcrowding led to federal oversight in Hawaii from 1985 to 1999. The state now houses one-third of its prison population in mainland facilities.
The pay at the Otter Creek prison is low, even by local standards. A federal prison in Kentucky pays workers with no experience at least $18 an hour, nearby state-run prisons pay $11.22 and Otter Creek pays $8.25. Mr. Friedmann said lower wages at private prisons lead to higher employee turnover and less experienced staff.
Tommy Johnson, deputy director of the Hawaii Department of Public Safety, said he found that 81 percent of the Otter Creek workers were men and 19 percent were women, the reverse of what he said the ratio should be for a women's prison. Mr. Johnson asked the company to hire more women, and it began a bonus program in June to do so.
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15) California: Privatization of Public Schools
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
August 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/education/26brfs-PRIVATIZATIO_BRF.html?ref=us
The Los Angeles Board of Education voted to adopt a resolution that could turn a third of its schools over to private operators. The proposal was approved on a 6-to-1 vote after a contentious three-and-a-half-hour public hearing and board debate. Superintendent Ramon Cortines now has 60 days to develop a plan.
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16) Another Way to Lose the House
Editorial
August 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/opinion/28fri1.html
The foreclosure crisis will get much worse before it gets any better.
That's the only conclusion to draw from a recent survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association, which found that six million loans were either past due or in foreclosure in the second quarter of 2009, the highest level ever recorded by the group. Worse, loan defaults are not the only cause of foreclosures. In some areas, unpaid property taxes are provoking foreclosures, even for homeowners otherwise current on their payments.
The Times's Jack Healy reported the other day that in recent years, some cities and counties that are strapped for money have sold their delinquent tax bills to private firms. The firms, which typically charge double-digit interest rates and steep fees, get to keep what they collect. They also get the right to foreclose on the homes, taking priority over mortgage lenders.
Debt collection is always tough. But it is especially fraught when private firms go after unpaid taxes, because private collection distorts the public interest. For example, governments can also foreclose for unpaid taxes, but they are less likely to do so out of concern for property values and quality of life. The auditor in Lucas County, Ohio - which sold more than 3,000 tax liens for $14.7 million - said that the cost to the community from abandoned and foreclosed properties has been greater than the short-term benefit from selling the liens.
Local governments cannot undo their previous tax lien sales. But changes in federal policy can reduce the foreclosure risk from unpaid property taxes. During the mortgage bubble, some lenders kept monthly loan payments low by not tacking on an extra amount to cover taxes and insurance.
For the loans in question - which generally fell into the categories of subprime, Alt-A (a notch above subprime) or jumbo loans - neither federal law nor pressure from mortgage investors compelled the inclusion of taxes and insurance in the monthly payment. Housing advocates say that many homeowners did not realize the amounts were excluded.
In 2008 - after the bubble had burst - the Federal Reserve altered the rules, but the changes were weak. They require taxes and insurance to be included, but only for subprime loans and only for a year. After that, lenders can let borrowers opt out of paying those charges as part of their monthly bills.
Excluding the charges might help lenders, because it increases the likelihood that borrowers will need to refinance to cover unexpected expenses. But it puts many borrowers and whole communities at risk. What is needed is a rule that requires the inclusion of taxes and insurance in the monthly payment for all types of mortgages and that disallows opt-outs until borrowers have made at least five years of steady payments.
The issue is also one more reminder that the nation badly needs an independent consumer safety regulator for mortgages and other loans - and that the Fed is not the right choice for the job.
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17) Leaders Criticize Colombia Over U.S. Military Pact
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and SIMON ROMERO
August 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/world/americas/29colombia.html?ref=world
RIO DE JANEIRO — Left-leaning South American leaders criticized Colombia on Friday for agreeing to allow the United States to increase its military presence on Colombian bases.
At a meeting in Bariloche, Argentina, leaders from Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia made clear their vehement opposition to the decision by President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia to expand cooperation with the United States to counteract narcotics trafficking and violence by insurgents.
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela demanded that Mr. Uribe give the group that was gathered, known as the Union of South American Nations, copies of the signed agreement with the United States. Mr. Correa argued that the accord put the region’s stability at risk.
“You are not going to be able to control the Americans,” Mr. Correa said. In response, Mr. Uribe insisted at the meeting, which was televised, that Colombia would not cede its sovereignty or even a “millimeter” of its territory to the United States. He said that the military bases would remain under Colombian control and that American soldiers would work only to combat drug trafficking and domestic terrorism.
He also told the leaders that a copy of the 20-point accord with the United States was available on the Internet. Despite the heated speeches, the only consensus the presidents reached at the meeting was to support a document that, without referring to the accord, rejects foreign military threats to the sovereignty of the group’s 12 member nations.
At the end of the session, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, who leads the region’s rising economic and political power, chastised his colleagues for speaking too much and complained about the rather vague outcome. “When the meeting seemed to have finished,” he said, “it turns out we’re discussing everything again.”
In defending the agreement, Colombia and the United States have said that it simply expands their existing cooperation. American antidrug surveillance flights would rise sharply in Colombia, but American personnel would not be allowed to take part in combat operations in the country.
American and Colombian officials have also said that the accord will not raise the maximum level of American soldiers beyond the 800 already permitted. About 250 American military personnel are currently in Colombia.
The agreement “does not allow the transit of troops or warships because our Constitution prohibits it,” Mr. Uribe said. “This is an arrangement for tactical intelligence and strategy.”
Mr. Correa, with support from Mr. da Silva and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, suggested meeting with President Obama to discuss the accord. Mr. Uribe contended that the United Nations was a more appropriate forum.
The United States, which is not a member of the regional association, did not send an observer. “We and the Colombians have been clear about the nature of the bilateral agreement,” Charles Luoma-Overstreet, a State Department spokesman, said in an e-mail message. “We will continue to reach out to our hemispheric neighbors to explain the agreement.”
Mr. Chávez had previously described the accord as a step toward war and had said it involved American designs on Venezuelan oil. He has been threatening to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia.
President Alan García of Peru, who has warm relations with the United States, took a shot at Mr. Chávez, noting Venezuela’s continued willingness to export oil to the United States.
“Man, why are they going to dominate the petroleum if you already sell it all to the United States?” Mr. García said. The remark drew laughter, though not from Mr. Chávez.
Some countries, including Brazil and Chile, offered a less polarized assessment of the agreement. While some presidents said that they, too, had reservations about the presence of foreign soldiers on the continent, they also said Colombia’s neighbors should respect its sovereignty.
In response to criticism that the accord represented the continuation of American imperialism in the region, Mr. Uribe said the American soldiers were needed to help resolve Colombia’s four-decade war against guerrillas who have financing from the lucrative cocaine trade. About 90 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia is smuggled into the United States, despite more than $6 billion of American security aid to Colombia over the last decade to combat insurgents and trafficking.
Mr. Uribe insisted that the agreement would have no effect on Colombia’s neighbors. He acknowledged that relations with Venezuela, Colombia’s second-largest trading partner, had become difficult and asked Mr. Chávez to refrain from threatening to use Venezuela’s newly acquired arsenal of Russian weapons and aircraft, including Sukhoi fighter jets, against Colombia.
“On various occasions Mr. Chávez has said that at any moment he’d turn on his Sukhois and in a few minutes they are in Colombia,” Mr. Uribe said.
Mr. Chávez, for his part, spoke of his deep mistrust of Mr. Uribe and of destabilization plots that he said originated in Colombia; he was referring to about 300 Colombians who were arrested in Caracas and described as paramilitary combatants. Mr. Chávez said the men were planning a coup against him.
Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Simon Romero from Caracas, Venezuela.
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18) US Wants 20,000 More Troops to Fight Taliban
British and American soldiers to shoulder brunt of surge's next phase
by Kim Sangupta
August 29, 2009
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/29
The commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan will ask for 20,000 more international troops as part of his new strategic plan for the alliance's war against a resurgent Taliban, The Independent has learned.
The demand from General Stanley McChrystal will almost certainly lead to more British soldiers being sent to the increasingly treacherous battlegrounds of Helmand, the Taliban heartland, despite growing opposition to the war.
General McChrystal, tasked with turning the tide in the battle against the insurgency on the ground, has given a presentation of his draft report to senior Afghan government figures in which he also proposes raising the size of the Afghan army and police force.
But the request for troop reinforcements will come at a time of intensifying public debate about the role of the Nato mission. Last month saw a record number of troop deaths and injuries in a conflict that has claimed more than 200 British soldiers since the start of the US-led invasion in 2001. British losses rose sharply last month with 22 deaths, making it the bloodiest month for UK forces since the Falklands war. August has been the deadliest month for American troops in the eight-year war. Most of the deaths have come from lethal roadside bombs that Western troops appear unable to combat effectively. For the first time, the American public now views the fight against the Taliban as unwinnable, according to the most recent opinion polls.
The conduct of the Afghan government has not helped the mood on either side of the Atlantic. While US, British and other foreign troops are dying in what is supposedly a mission to rid Afghanistan of al-Qa'ida militants and make the country safe for democracy, the incumbent President stands accused of forging alliances with brutal warlords and overseeing outright fraud in an attempt to "steal" the national elections, the results of which are still being counted.
Last week, General David Petraeus, the head of US Central Command, intervened against a backdrop of heightened debate about the UK's military role. He stressed that the objective of the war was "to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for al-Qa'ida and other extremists".
According to General McChrystal's draft plan, the number of Afghan troops would rise from 88,000 to 250,000, and the police force from 82,000 to 160,000 by 2012. These increases are higher than expected, with previous suggestions that the totals would be raised to 134,000 and 120,000 for the army and police respectively.
The US commander will, however, ask other Nato countries to send further reinforcements and will travel shortly to European capitals to discuss the issue. It is widely expected that the UK will send up to 1,500 more troops. At the same time, a force of 700 sent to help provide security for the Afghan elections last week on a temporary basis will become a permanent presence.
Following the withdrawal from Iraq, British military commanders, backed by the then Defence Secretary, John Hutton, had recommended in the spring that up to 2,500 extra troops could be sent to Afghanistan. However, following lobbying from the Treasury, Gordon Brown agreed to only the temporary deployment of 700. Criticism of the decision by senior officers has led, it is claimed, to Downing Street changing its stance.
General McChrystal, who replaced Gen David McKiernan as Nato chief in Afghanistan earlier this year, was originally due to produce his strategic report this month, but decided to wait until after the Afghan presidential election. According to Western and Afghan sources he is continuing to take soundings from various quarters and the finalised document is due out after it becomes clear whether or not a second round of voting is needed to decide the outcome of the poll.
As part of an initial troop surge overseen by General McChrystal, the US has already committed to boosting its forces from 31,000 to 68,000 this year. However Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan was told by commanders in Afghanistan last week that those numbers would not be enough for what is being viewed as defining months of fighting to come.
In his meeting with Afghan officials, General McChrystal is reported to have stated that the extra troops would be needed to enforce a new policy of maintaining a presence in the areas captured from insurgents. This will provide security for residents and allow reconstruction and development.
Other Nato nations have the option of focusing on the training of Afghan security forces. However, say American officials, failure by Nato countries to "step up to the plate" would mean the shortfall would be covered by the US.
Diplomatic sources have also revealed that plans are being drawn up to sign a "compact" between Afghanistan and the US which will reiterate Washington's commitment to the security of Afghanistan while the Afghan government pledges to combat corruption and reinforce governance. Unlike previous international agreements over Afghanistan, the compact will be bilateral, without any other governments being involved. The timing of the agreement is due to coincide with a visit by Mr Karzai to New York, if, as expected, he emerges the election winner.
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19) American Antiwar Movement Plans an Autumn Campaign Against Policies on Afghanistan
By JAMES DAO
August 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30antiwar.html?scp=1&sq=American%20Antiwar%20Movement%20Plans%20an%20Autumn%20Campaign%20Against%20Policies%20on%20%20Afghanistan&st=cse
A restive antiwar movement, largely dormant since the election of Barack Obama, is preparing a nationwide campaign this fall to challenge the administration’s policies on Afghanistan.
Anticipating a Pentagon request for more troops there, antiwar leaders have engaged in a flurry of meetings to discuss a month of demonstrations, lobbying, teach-ins and memorials in October to publicize the casualty count, raise concerns about the cost of the war and pressure Congress to demand an exit strategy.
But they face a starkly changed political climate from just a year ago, when President George W. Bush provided a lightning rod for protests. The health care battle is consuming the resources of labor unions and other core Democratic groups. American troops are leaving Iraq, defusing antiwar sentiments in some quarters. The recession has hurt fund-raising for peace groups and forced them to slash budgets. And, perhaps most significant, many liberals continue to support Mr. Obama, or at least are hesitant about openly criticizing him.
“People do not want to take on the administration,” said Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org. “Generating the kind of money that would be required to challenge the president’s policies just isn’t going to happen.”
Tom Andrews, national director for an antiwar coalition, Win Without War, said most liberals “want this guy to succeed.” But he said the antiwar movement would try to convince liberals that a prolonged war would undermine Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda. Afghanistan, he said, “could be a devastating albatross around the president’s neck.”
But there is also a sense among some antiwar advocates that Mr. Obama’s honeymoon with Democrats in general and liberals in particular is ending. As evidence, they point to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showing that 51 percent of Americans now feel the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting, a 10-point increase since March. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
“We’re coming out of a low period,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar group Code Pink. “But as progressives feel more comfortable protesting against the Obama administration and challenging Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress, then we’ll be back on track.”
The Obama administration has opposed legislation requiring an exit strategy, saying it needs time to develop new approaches to the war. “Given his own impatience for progress, the president has demanded benchmarks to track our progress and ensure that we are moving in the right direction,” a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The October protest schedule is expected to include marches in Washington and elsewhere. But organizers acknowledge that it may be difficult to recruit large numbers of demonstrators. So groups like United for Peace and Justice are also planning smaller events in communities around the country, including teach-ins with veterans and families of deployed troops, lobbying sessions with members of Congress, film screenings and ad hoc memorials featuring the boots of deceased soldiers and Marines.
“There are some that feel betrayed” by Mr. Obama, said Nancy Lessin, a founder of the group Military Families Speak Out. “There are some who feel that powerful forces are pushing the president to stay on this course and that we have to build a more powerful movement to change that course.”
The October actions will be timed not only to the eighth anniversary of the first American airstrikes on Taliban forces and the seventh anniversary of Congressional authorization for invading Iraq, but also an anticipated debate in Congress over sending more troops to Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, is widely expected to request additional troops, beyond the 68,000 projected for the end of the year, after finalizing a policy review in the next few weeks.
The antiwar movement consists of dozens of organizations representing pacifists, veterans, military families, labor unions and religious groups, and they hardly speak with one voice. Some groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War have started shifting their focus toward Afghanistan, passing resolutions demanding an immediate withdrawal of troops from there. Others, like VoteVets.org, support the American military presence in Afghanistan, calling it crucial to fighting terrorism.
And some groups, including Moveon.org, have yet to take a clear position on Afghanistan beyond warning that war drains resources from domestic programs.
“There is not the passion around Afghanistan that we saw around Iraq,” said Ilyse Hogue, Moveon.org’s spokeswoman. “But there are questions.”
There are also signs that some groups that have been relatively quiet on Afghanistan are preparing to become louder. U.S. Labor Against the War, a network of nearly 190 union affiliates that has been focused on Iraq, is “moving more into full opposition to the continuing occupation” of Afghanistan, said Michael Eisenscher, the group’s national coordinator.
“President Obama risks his entire domestic agenda, just as Johnson did in Vietnam, in pursuing this course of action in Afghanistan,” Mr. Eisenscher said.
Handfuls of antiwar protestors can still be seen on Capitol Hill, outside state office buildings and around college campuses. Cindy Sheehan, for instance, has set up her vigil on Martha’s Vineyard while Mr. Obama vacations there. But many advocates say a lower-key approach may be more effective in winning support right now.
An example of that strategy is an Internet film titled “Rethink Afghanistan,” which is being produced and released in segments by the political documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald. In six episodes so far, Mr. Greenwald has used interviews with academics, Afghans and former C.I.A. operatives to raise questions about civilian casualties, women’s rights, the cost of war and whether it has made the United States safer.
The episodes, some as short as two minutes, are circulated via Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and blogs. Antiwar groups are also screening them with members of Congress. Mr. Greenwald, who has produced documentaries about Wal-Mart and war profiteers, said the film represented a “less incendiary” approach influenced by liberal concerns that he not attack Mr. Obama directly.
“We lost funding from liberals who didn’t want to criticize Obama,” he said. “It’s been lonely out there.”
Code Pink is trying to build opposition to the war among women’s groups, some of which argue that women will suffer if the Taliban returns. In September, a group of Code Pink organizers will visit Kabul to encourage Afghan women to speak out against the American military presence there.
And Iraq Veterans Against the War is using the Web to circulate episodes of a documentary, “This Is Where We Take Our Stand,” filmed in 2008 at its Winter Soldier conference, at which veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testified about civilian casualties, combat stress and other tolls of the wars.
The group’s leaders say they do not expect many people to take to the barricades against the administration any time soon. But that will change, they argue, as the death toll continues to rise.
“In the next year, it will more and more become Obama’s war,” said Perry O’Brien, president of the New York chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “He’ll be held responsible for the bloodshed.”
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20) Is the Antiwar Movement Waking Up? Not quite yet…
by Justin Raimondo
August 31, 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/08/30/is-the-antiwar-movement-waking-up/
Like Rip van Winkle, it seems that the American antiwar movement is – finally – waking up, although, like the original Rip, it doesn’t seem to have changed its idle ways. "A restive antiwar movement," avers the New York Times, "largely dormant since the election of Barack Obama, is preparing a nationwide campaign this fall to challenge the administration’s policies on Afghanistan." Just how restive, however, is a matter of some ambiguity.
No real national protests have been called by any significant antiwar grouping. Instead, we are to be treated to scattered local protests. The Times reports that, in response to the administration’s announcement that they’re sending 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan,
"Antiwar leaders have engaged in a flurry of meetings to discuss a month of demonstrations, lobbying, teach-ins, and memorials in October to publicize the casualty count, raise concerns about the cost of the war, and pressure Congress to demand an exit strategy."
Oh, but there’s a slight problem: that old reliable "lightning rod for protest," George W. Bush, is gone, replaced by a liberal icon whom "progressives" are loath to criticize. Antiwar organizers, we are told, "face a starkly changed political climate from just a year ago," but what the article fails to mention is that this change has taken place among a very narrow group of people. Progressives who were jumping up and down denouncing Bush’s war are silent – and even, in the case of groups like VoteVets, enthusiastic supporters – when it comes to Obama’s wars.
Yet the real change, and far more significant, is the one taking place in the population at large, among Republicans as well as Democrats. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds, for the first time, that a majority of Americans think the Afghan war is "not worth it." The breakdown is even more ominous for the Obamaites: of the antiwar contingent, 41 percent feel strongly, while on the other side, only 31 percent feel that way. The belief that the U.S. and its dwindling band of allies can reasonably expect to win the war is similarly wavering.
What support the president has managed to maintain on this issue has a soft underbelly highly vulnerable to continued bad news from the battlefield – which is one reason why the administration has hired the Rendon Group, whose marketing job for Ahmed Chalabi worked out so well, to vet "embedded" reporters in Afghanistan. The Obama crowd, like its predecessors, knows full well the value of controlling the narrative. Now if only they can declare a "cyber-emergency" and seize control of the Internet, as Jay Rockefeller’s bill envisions!
Yet not even that would succeed, I’ll wager: the American people are sick and tired of constant wars, and it doesn’t matter if the commander in chief is a Democrat, a Republican, or a Vegetarian.
This is a reality the War Party has had to contend with ever since the Founders’ time, and as our old republic morphed into an Empire, it has been increasingly a problem for our rulers. Americans have a natural antipathy to meddling in the affairs of other peoples, a sentiment often derided as obstinate "isolationism" by our all-knowing elites, who, of course, know better. More bad news for the War Party: hostility to overseas adventurism is amplified in times of economic trouble, when it seems – to any ordinary person, that is – as if we have enough problems to deal with right here at home. Why, they want to know, are we engaging in "nation-building" in Afghanistan, of all places, when our own country seems to be literally falling apart at the seams?
This is precisely why the New York Times piece rings so hollow when it gets to enumerating reasons for the general lack of enthusiasm among progressives for opposing the Afghan war: you see, "The health care battle is consuming the resources of labor unions and other core Democratic groups."
Is it really necessary to point out that funding for the healthcare programs these groups say they want is being diverted into the Afghan money pit? Congressman Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican whose anti-interventionist views set him apart from the other GOP presidential contenders, rightly argues that if we would "just get rid of the Empire" we’d have enough to subsidize healthcare for every American – and then some.
Of course, Rep. Paul, being a libertarian, opposes government-subsidized healthcare, but I’m just sayin’ – if American progressives really, really want these programs, then why aren’t they fighting for them by demanding an end to a war that will wind up devouring any chance for a fiscally feasible national healthcare system?
The reason, I believe, is because, as Jon Soltz, leader of VoteVets.org, puts it, "People do not want to take on the administration. Generating the kind of money that would be required to challenge the president’s policies just isn’t going to happen."
It’s fascinating to watch "antiwar leaders" like Soltz – who openly supports the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan – move in the opposite direction from the rest of the country. What "people" don’t want to take on the administration? Why, Soltz and his oh-so-progressive friends who run Democratic front organizations, that’s who.
Rank-and-file progressives, however, have a very different view. The Washington Post/ABC News poll shows almost eight in ten self-identified liberal Democrats saying the war isn’t worth it, a precipitous 22 percent decline in support since March from that particular demographic. A development with even more potential significance is the lack of support among reliably pro-war Republicans: a mere 58 percent say the U.S. is winning the war in Afghanistan. As the pollsters put it [.pdf]:
"The changes have not come in Obama’s base alone. Looking just by partisan affiliation, support for decreasing the U.S. deployment has risen by 20 points since January among Democrats, but also by 15 points among independents and by 12 points among Republicans. Since March, views that the war’s been worth fighting have lost 14 points among Democrats, but also 7 points among independents and Republicans alike."
The major rationale – a purely political one, I might point out – for the Afghan war among Democrats, and the argument advanced by "centrists" against the antiwar base, is that exhibiting "weakness" in foreign policy matters opens the administration and the party in general to attacks from Republicans. Yet if a good part of the GOP’s own base is increasingly disenchanted with our Afghan adventure, then that excuse becomes ever less credible. This just adds to the irony of the "official" antiwar movement’s notorious left-sectarianism, which effectively excludes conservative and libertarian speakers at antiwar events and refuses to address the concerns of ordinary, middle-class Americans.
Contra Soltz, while money is an important factor is building an effective antiwar movement – we’ve just finished a particularly grueling fundraising drive, as I probably needn’t remind you – it is hardly decisive. What’s more important is the depth of commitment, and that is what seems truly lacking in what passes for the antiwar movement these days.
The Times cites Tom Andrews, national director of Win Without War, as saying "’most liberals ‘want this guy to succeed’" and fear the unfolding disaster in Afghanistan "could be a devastating albatross around the president’s neck." Whether this is a prescription for picking up the pace of liberal antiwar protests, in order to alert the Obama administration to the danger, or a rationale for inaction, so as not to have that albatross weigh even heavier around the Dear Leader’s neck, is not at all clear – although I rather suspect the latter.
A visit to the Web site of the main antiwar coalition, United for Peace and Justice, reveals little urgency when it comes to the Afghan war, and I note the only national actions scheduled for fall are being launched by groups other than UFPJ. Evidence of those "local actions" calling for an end to the Afghan war is scant: a search of their events calendar notes very few.
Of course, since UFPJ is dominated by the old Commie network – the remnants of the CPUSA and its social democratic split-off, the Committees of Correspondence – this is hardly surprising. These people have long been a drag on the antiwar movement, stifling the creation of a broad-based anti-interventionism in favor of saddling protests with the familiar litany of liberal demands. Now Obama’s campaign for free ice cream has totally eclipsed the ostensibly antiwar aims of the movement, inducing near complete paralysis.
While the "official" antiwar movement – which most certainly does not include this Web site – is sleepily rubbing its eyes and reluctantly responding to the president’s alarming escalation of the "Af-Pak" war, the determination of some elements of the movement is admirably unequivocal: "In the next year, it will more and more become Obama’s war," says Perry O’Brien, president of the New York chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. "He’ll be held responsible for the bloodshed."
Really? While I wouldn’t hold my breath, I’d love to be pleasantly surprised. I should point out, however, that it isn’t just the president who makes our wrong-headed foreign policy, it’s the Democratic Party establishment, in coalition with its Republican equivalent. The entire apparatus of the party machinery, its leaders, and a great many of its most active foot-soldiers – including those in the media – are beholden to the War Party and amenable to its decisive influence in the world of Washington politics. As long as the "official" antiwar movement is merely the tail on the Democratic donkey, there will be no effective opposition to our war-crazed foreign policy, at least not in this country.
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21) Afghan War Is Serious but Winnable, Top General Says
By DEXTER FILKINS
September 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/world/asia/01military.html?_r=1&hp
KABUL, Afghanistan — The top commander in Afghanistan said Monday that conditions on the ground were “serious” but that the war here is still winnable, part of a long-awaited assessment of the American-led war.
The report, prepared by General Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of American and NATO forces here, does not call for additional American soldiers and Marines. That request, if it comes, is expected to be made in the coming weeks.
General McChrystal’s assessment, delivered to senior officials, could form the basis on which President Obama could make such a decision. In recent weeks, senior American officers here have said that they do not have enough troops to succeed.
The question of sending more combat troops is potentially divisive. Possibly for this reason, American commanders and officials in Kabul were ordered to neither reveal the details of General McChrystal’s assessment nor talk about them.General McChrystal assumed command here in June with an explicit charge to reverse the course of the war. Though it is still only August, 179 American soldiers have already been killed this year, making it the deadliest yet since the war began nearly eight years ago. Still, the general said that the war can still be won.
“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,” General McChrystal said in a statement.
As the overall commander here, General McChrystal oversees about 68,000 American soldiers and marines, and about 40,000 from NATO and other countries.
American commanders say that General McChrystal’s assessment does call for a large expansion of Afghan security forces, and an acceleration of their training. There are currently about 134,000 Afghan police, and about 82,000 Afghan soldiers. Many of these units are inadequately equipped and have little logistical capability to sustain themselves.
Just how many more Afghan police and soldiers Gen. McChrystal wants is unclear. In Iraq, where conditions have stabilized markedly over the past two years, the American-trained Iraqi security forces number about 600,000. Some 29 million people live in Iraq; the population of Afghanistan is over 33 million.
The main thrust of Gen. McChrystal’s strategy has been illuminated by him and other commanders in recent weeks. The overriding goal of American and NATO forces is not so much to kill Taliban insurgents as it is to make ordinary Afghans feel secure, and by so doing, isolate the insurgents. That means using force less and focusing on economic development and good governance.
General McChrystal also intends to try to unify the effort of America’s allies, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France, all of which have troops deployed here. He may also ask those allies to contribute more troops, money and training.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters Monday that while he had not yet seen the report, he expected that it would highlight some bright spots about the Afghan military mission, along with some conclusions that he described as “gloom and doom.” Speaking in Fort Worth, Tex., he also said Afghan forces may have to grow beyond the planned level of 230,000 personnel to make headway, news services reported.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he wouldn’t rule out the necessity of more international troops in Afghanistan, but like Mr. Gates, he focused on the need for additional Afghan forces.
“I would not exclude the possibility that we need more combat troops, but first and foremost I would say that we need to increase significantly the number of Afghan soldiers,” Mr. Rasmussen said in an interview at NATO headquarters in Brussels today, Bloomberg reported.
As the deadliest month yet of the war for American forces came to an end, the United States military announced Monday that two American soldiers had died in separate incidents involving improvised explosive devices. The British Ministry of Defense announced separately that two British soldiers had been killed Monday in an explosion in southern Afghanistan.
Sharon Otterman contributed reporting from New York.
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22) Wolves Are Set to Become Fair Game in the West
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
August 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/science/earth/31wolves.html?ref=us
A wolf hunt is set to begin in Idaho on Tuesday if a federal judge does not stop it. It would be the first time in decades that hunters have been allowed to pursue the gray wolf, an animal that has come to symbolize tensions over how people interact with wilderness in the West.
On Monday, the judge, Donald W. Molloy of Federal District Court, will hold a hearing to determine whether to issue an injunction sought by wildlife advocates against the hunt and reopen the question of returning the wolf to the endangered list.
Gray wolves were taken off the list five months ago, after being protected under federal law for more than 30 years. More than 6,000 hunters in Idaho have bought licenses for the chance to participate in the hunt, in which wildlife officials will allow 220 wolves to be killed. In 2008, the population stood at about 850. Montana will allow 75 animals to be killed, starting Sept. 15.
The states’ hunts will be over when the limit is reached or when the season ends, which is Dec. 31 in most areas.
“The first day is the best day when it comes to an animal as smart as a wolf,” said Nate Helm, president of Idaho Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife.
The resurgence of the wolf population, rooted in a federal effort to reintroduce the animals to the Northern Rockies in the mid-1990s, has long angered deer and elk hunters and cattle and sheep ranchers who say the wolves are depleting game and killing livestock. Federal wildlife officials said that in 2008 a record 264 wolves were killed in the region for the legal reason of protecting livestock.
The clash illustrates a persistent divide in the West, where environmentalists and wildlife conservationists have long gone to court to fight laws they say favor powerful groups like hunters, ranchers and others. Wolves have been one of the most tangled issues of late, including in front of Judge Molloy.
In March, the Obama administration announced it would remove wolves from the endangered list. The Bush administration made a similar decision the year before, but Judge Molloy, in a lawsuit by plaintiffs including Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club, ordered wolves returned to the list last fall.
In the years since they were reintroduced to parts of the Northern Rockies, including Yellowstone National Park, the wolf population had risen to more than 1,640 in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming as of 2008. Federal officials say the population has recovered and no longer needs protection as if it were endangered.
Idaho and Montana game officials say their hunts will keep the population from growing and eventually reduce it, while the limits will make sure enough animals endure to keep them from becoming endangered. Idaho game officials say they would like to have a little more than 500 wolves in the state, though the official plan calls for at least 150.
Wildlife advocates cite several reasons for wanting to stop the hunt. They say that the state plans do not have enough protections, that hunting will prevent the wolves from roaming the Northern Rockies freely enough to preserve genetic diversity and maintain access to the proper habitat.
Part of the claim is rooted in the federal government’s continuing effort to protect wolves in Wyoming because it has not come to terms with that state on a management plan.
“It’s a matter of whether we’re going to have a healthy recovered population or isolated animals that are always struggling to survive,” said Suzanne Stone, the Northern Rockies representative for Defenders of Wildlife, one of the parties seeking the injunction.
Doug Honnold, the lead lawyer for the environmentalists in the case, said, “Our vision of recovery is 2,000 to 5,000 wolves in a connected population and with a legal safety net to keep them there.”
State and federal wildlife officials overseeing the wolf population say the number of wolves is more than enough and that multiple studies, including those on genetic diversity, have established that the animals are roaming widely and intermingling with others elsewhere.
“Clearly, wolves are restored in the Rocky Mountains,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Helena, Mont. “They’re always going to be here, and nobody is talking about getting rid of all the wolves. That’s never going to happen. The population is doing great. There are not genetic problems. There are not connectivity problems.”
Mr. Bangs added, “But they’re starting to cause a lot of problems, and the question is what’s the best tool for the future management of wolves.”
He said the wolves had caused about $1 million in livestock losses and other damage.
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23) A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style
By MICHAEL POWELL
August 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/nyregion/31judge.html?ref=nyregion
The judge waves you into his chambers in the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, past the caveat taped to his wall — “Be sure brain in gear before engaging mouth” — and into his inner office, where foreclosure motions are piled high enough to form a minor Alpine chain.
Every week, the nation’s mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors.
He plucks out one motion and leafs through: a Deutsche Bank representative signed an affidavit claiming to be the vice president of two different banks. His office was in Kansas City, Mo., but the signature was notarized in Texas. And the bank did not even own the mortgage when it began to foreclose on the homeowner.
The judge’s lips pucker as if he had inhaled a pickle; he rejected this one.
“I’m a little guy in Brooklyn who doesn’t belong to their country clubs, what can I tell you?” he says, adding a shrug for punctuation. “I won’t accept their comedy of errors.”
The judge, Arthur M. Schack, 64, fashions himself a judicial Don Quixote, tilting at the phalanxes of bankers, foreclosure facilitators and lawyers who file motions by the bale. While national debate focuses on bank bailouts and federal aid for homeowners that has been slow in coming, the hard reckonings of the foreclosure crisis are being made in courts like his, and Justice Schack’s sympathies are clear.
He has tossed out 46 of the 102 foreclosure motions that have come before him in the last two years. And his often scathing decisions, peppered with allusions to the Croesus-like wealth of bank presidents, have attracted the respectful attention of judges and lawyers from Florida to Ohio to California. At recent judicial conferences in Chicago and Arizona, several panelists praised his rulings as a possible national model.
His opinions, too, have been greeted by a cry of affront from a bank official or two, who say this judge stands in the way of what is rightfully theirs. HSBC bank appealed a recent ruling, saying he had set a “dangerous precedent” by acting as “both judge and jury,” throwing out cases even when homeowners had not responded to foreclosure motions.
Justice Schack, like a handful of state and federal judges, has taken a magnifying glass to the mortgage industry. In the gilded haste of the past decade, bankers handed out millions of mortgages — with terms good, bad and exotically ugly — then repackaged those loans for sale to investors from Connecticut to Singapore. Sloppiness reigned. So many papers have been lost, signatures misplaced and documents dated inaccurately that it is often not clear which bank owns the mortgage.
Justice Schack’s take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose.
“If you are going to take away someone’s house, everything should be legal and correct,” he said. “I’m a strange guy — I don’t want to put a family on the street unless it’s legitimate.”
Justice Schack has small jowls and big black glasses, a thin mustache and not so many hairs combed across his scalp. He has the impish eyes of the high school social studies teacher he once was, aware that something untoward is probably going on at the back of his classroom.
He is Brooklyn born and bred, with a master’s degree in history and an office loaded with autographed baseballs and photographs of the Brooklyn Dodgers. His written decisions are a free-associative trip through popular, legal and literary culture, with a sideways glance at the business pages.
Confronted with a case in which Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs passed a defaulted mortgage back and forth and lost track of the documents, the judge made reference to the film classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the evil banker played by Lionel Barrymore.
“Lenders should not lose sight,” Justice Schack wrote in that 2007 case, “that they are dealing with humanity, not with Mr. Potter’s ‘rabble’ and ‘cattle.’ Multibillion-dollar corporations must follow the same rules in the foreclosure actions as the local banks, savings and loan associations or credit unions, or else they have become the Mr. Potters of the 21st century.”
Last year, he chastised Wells Fargo for filing error-filled papers. “The court,” the judge wrote, “reminds Wells Fargo of Cassius’s advice to Brutus in Act 1, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ”
Then there is a Deutsche Bank case from 2008, the juicy part of which he reads aloud:
“The court wonders if the instant foreclosure action is a corporate ‘Kansas City Shuffle,’ a complex confidence game,” he reads. “In the 2006 film ‘Lucky Number Slevin,’ Mr. Goodkat, a hit man played by Bruce Willis, explains: ‘A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left.’ ”
The banks’ reaction? Justice Schack shrugs. “They probably curse at me,” he says, “but no one is interested in some little judge.”
Little drama attends the release of his decisions. Beaten-down homeowners rarely show up to contest foreclosure actions, and the judge scrutinizes the banks’ papers in his chambers. But at legal conferences, judges and lawyers have wondered aloud why more judges do not hold banks to tougher standards.
“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”
Banks and the cottage industry of mortgage service companies and foreclosure lawyers also pay rather close attention.
A spokeswoman for OneWest Bank acknowledged that an official, confronted with a ream of foreclosure papers, had mistakenly signed for two different banks — just as the Deutsche Bank official did. Deutsche Bank, which declined to let an attorney speak on the record about any of its cases before Justice Schack, e-mailed a PDF of a three-page pamphlet in which it claimed little responsibility for foreclosures, even though the bank’s name is affixed to tens of thousands of such motions. The bank described itself as simply a trustee for investors.
Justice Schack came to his recent prominence by a circuitous path, having worked for 14 years as public school teacher in Brooklyn. He was a union representative and once walked a picket line with his wife, Dilia, who was a teacher, too. All was well until the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
“Why’d I go to law school?” he said. “Thank Mayor Abe Beame, who froze teacher salaries.”
He was counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association in the 1980s and ’90s, when it was on a long winning streak against team owners. “It was the millionaires versus the billionaires,” he says. “After a while, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘He’s making $4 million, he’s making $5 million, and I’m worth about $1.98.’ ”
So he dived into a judicial race. He was elected to the Civil Court in 1998 and to the Supreme Court for Brooklyn and Staten Island in 2003. His wife is a Democratic district leader; their daughter, Elaine, is a lawyer and their son, Douglas, a police officer.
Justice Schack’s duels with the banks started in 2007 as foreclosures spiked sharply. He saw a plague falling on Brooklyn, particularly its working-class black precincts. “Banks had given out loans structured to fail,” he said.
The judge burrowed into property record databases. He found banks without clear title, and a giant foreclosure law firm, Steven J. Baum, representing two sides in a dispute. He noted that Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf, made more than $11 million in 2007 while the company’s total returns fell 12 percent.
“Maybe,” he advised the bank, “counsel should wonder, like the court, if Mr. Stumpf was unjustly enriched at the expense of W.F.’s stockholders.”
He was, how to say it, mildly appalled.
“I’m a guy from the streets of Brooklyn who happens to become a judge,” he said. “I see a bank giving a $500,000 mortgage on a building worth $300,000 and the interest rate is 20 percent and I ask questions, what can I tell you?”
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