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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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TONIGHT!
The Coup in Honduras, the U.S. & Latin American Sovereignty
Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia St., San Francisco (between 15th & 16th Sts.)
Sat. Aug. 29, 7pm
Zenaida Velázquez, founder, Committee of Disappeared Political Activists in Honduras
Pierre Labossiere, coordinator Haiti Action Committee
Cristina Gutiérrez, former member International Commission, Movimiento 19 de Abril of Colombia
Gloria La Riva, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, on the importance ALBA alliance
$5-$10 donation (all are welcome, with or without funds)
Refreshments provided. Wheelchair accessible.
Translation in Spanish and English
For information call: 415-821-6545
Sponsored by the Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition.
The Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition is made up of: ANSWER Coalition; Barrio Unido; Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador; Fellowship of Reconciliation; Flashpoints: FMLN-Northern California; Global Exchange; Guatemala News and Information Bureau; Haiti Action Committee; LACLA; Latin America Alliance for Immigrants' Rights (ALIADI); Movement for an Unconditional Amnesty; NICCA; School of the Americas Watch; Task Force on the Americas.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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CodePINK Womyn's Emergency
R O U N D T A B L E
GROUND THE DRONES
Sunday, August 30th
6:00pm
Redwood Gardens,
2951 Derby St, Berkeley
What are DRONES? Who's making them? How many are there? Who's operating them? What do they do?
As Obama DRONES on, what will we do?
How many Americans know about these murderous killing machines assassinating civilians and CIA/Pentagon/Military targeted "bad guys", at a 'success' ratio of 50:1
Come to this Round Table and find out all you never really wanted to know about DRONES and DRONING; and help strategize how we will "GROUND the DRONES"!
As always: music, song, POT LUCK! Bring a Dish to share
Co-sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against War and others
SAVE the DATES: Sept 25th - 30th Encampment Creech AFB
BACK TO THE STREETS!!!
Wednesday, 7 October 2009
protest on the 8th anniversary of the War on Afghanistan
5 pm
new Federal Building, 7th Street btw. Market and Mission, SF
http://www.answercoalition.org
U.S./NATO OUT--BRING TH TROOPS HOME NOW!
HEALTH CARE--NOT WARFARE!
[DON'T BE FOOLED. DON'T LET THE PUBLIC OPTION HEALTH INSURANCE SCAM DIVERT/DIVIDE. THE PEOPLE UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED. MEDICARE FOR ALL NOW!]
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Join Us to Distribute this important Information On House Speaker
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's Continued Support For The Wars In Iraq & Afghanistan & The Bailout For The Banks
When: Friday September 4, 2009 7:30 AM
Where: St. Francis Hotel, Geary & Powell St. SF
Join anti-war activists, trade unionists, human rights advocates and others to distribute information on Nancy Pelosi’s continued support to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We say to San Francisco's Congresswoman and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bring the Troops Home Now! Although Pelosi has refused to have any Town Hall meetings she will be speaking at a $100 a plate breakfast at the St. Francis Hotel.
Pelosi, who promised to get out of Iraq if the Democrats won control of Congress, is now voting for more funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and for expanding the war in Afghanistan. At the same time Pelosi has voted trillions of dollars for bank bailouts while millions of workers lose their homes and hundreds of thousands of California public workers suffer from furloughs and cutbacks. The attacks on working people continue unabated and Pelosi is a participant in this war.
A major antiwar action at United Nations Plaza, San Francisco, 12 Noon, is set for October 17, 2009 to mark the onset of the U.S. wars on Afghanistan & Iraq and to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam Moratorium, a day where millions took to the streets to say “No to U.S. War! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Please join us to tell Nancy Pelosi:
--Stop Funding the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan & the War on Palestinians!
--Stop The Bailouts For The Banksters While Cutting Back Education, Public Services and Kicking People Out of Their Homes! •Jobs, Single Payer Healthcare, Housing and Free Education, NOT War!
Sponsors: October 17th Antiwar Comm. & SF Peace & Freedom Party
Contact: 510-268-9429 or 415-794-7354 labor Donated
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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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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
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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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