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Cuba establishes hospital in Port-au-Prince
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/01/17/kastenbaum.haiti.la.paz.hosp.cnn
Disputes emerge over Haiti aid control
[THIS IS A MUST-SEE VIDEO. U.S. AID IS MILITARY OCCUPATION...BW]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F5TwEK24sA&feature=player_embedded
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TUESDAY, JANUARY 18 COURT TO RULE ON MUMIA!
Alert! New Threat To Mumia's Life!
Supreme Court Set To Announce A Decision
On the State Appeal To Reinstate Mumia's Death Sentence
17 January 2010
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610
(510) 763-2347
Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent man on death row and the world's best-known political prisoner, now faces an immediate new threat to his life from the US Supreme Court. The Court ruled last year on Mumia's appeal, by summarily refusing to even consider a reversal of his unjust 1982 murder conviction in a blatantly racist court. And last week, the Supreme Court discussed a cross-appeal by the State of Pennsylvania to reinstate Mumia's death sentence, which had been put on hold by a federal court in 2001. A ruling could be announced as early as Tuesday this week.
It would be an illusion to expect good news. Supporters should stay tuned, and be prepared to participate in actions to free Mumia!
The Vendetta Against Mumia
In making it's flat-out rejection of Mumia's appeal (which it did without making any statement), the Supreme Court had to knowingly violate its own precedent in the 1986 Batson v Kentucky decision. This ruling famously said that purging a jury on the basis of race was unconstitutional. In Mumia's case, at least 10 black jurors were excluded for reasons not applied to their white counterparts. Under Batson, such violations require that the conviction be thrown out!
But this was Mumia Abu-Jamal, the falsely accused "cop killer." And while evidence of his innocence has always been available, along with evidence of the corruption of the cops who framed him, Mumia is the object of a world-wide vendetta led by the Fraternal Order of Police and numerous pundits and politicians. So an exception was made.
The Spisak Case
Meanwhile, the 2001 federal district court decision (besides upholding Mumia's conviction) said that Mumia's death sentence resulted from improper instructions to the jury. The trial judge's instructions to the jury on sentencing had said that a decision had to be unanimous, even on mitigating factors that could result in a sentence of life in prison, instead of death. This violated another Supreme Court precedent, Mills v Maryland, which held that such mitigating factors required only a simple majority.
After tossing out Mumia's appeal in 2009, the Court took it's time on the State's cross-appeal, because another case, Smith v Spisak, dealt with the same issue of jury instructions in sentencing. Frank Spisak is a neo-Nazi who made racist statements in court, wore a Hitler mustache, and confessed to three hate-crime murders in Ohio. The two cases could hardly be more different, yet appeals courts threw out death sentences in both on the basis of the Mills decision. But now, on January 12th, the Supreme Court has reinstated Spisak's death sentence. The decision on Mumia followed shortly thereafter, and the implications are clear. The Spisak decision could open the door to what the cops, courts and ruling class generally want to do most: legally murder Mumia!
The Supreme Court said Mills didn't apply to Spisak for various reasons (that don't seem to apply to Mumia), but the legal ins and outs aren't the point. The point is that the entire legal system is at the service not of the law, but of power in society.
As Mumia Abu-Jamal said in a recent interview, "[Spisak's] case differs from mine substantially, not just in terms of facts, but also in terms of law. But the law is the tool of those in power, so how they use it doesn't depend on the law; it depends on power."
(-Free Speech Radio News, 15 January 2010).
The Question of Innocence!
As an award-winning radical journalist, former Black Panther, and critic of police brutality and malfeasance, Mumia Abu-Jamal is considered an enemy of the state. As such, legal decisions have systematically gone against him, regardless of the law. Batson is only one example of this "Mumia exception."
Manufacturing false confessions, planting evidence, corrupting "witnesses" to say they saw what they didn't see--all of these "illegal" tricks were used against Mumia. The real evidence points to Mumia's innocence, including another man who confessed, witnesses who said Mumia didn't shoot anybody but who were never called to testify, and photos of the crime scene that show that police lied. But very little of this has ever been heard in court.
Rather than follow the "law," the criminal justice system follows a simple rule: "If we want to get you, we will." The US Supreme Court (Herrera v Collins), and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (signed by Bill Clinton in 1996), have effectively said: innocence is no defense!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal has never thought that calling for a new trial, or appealing to the US Justice Department to right the wrongs that they helped create, were anything more than distractions, getting in the way of a mass, working-class movement to free Mumia.
Mumia is a class-war prisoner, and it will take a class struggle to free him: that was position of longshore workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse
Union (ILWU) when they shut down all the ports on the West Coast in 1999, and headed the march in San Francisco, to free Mumia. Oakland teachers, and teachers in Rio de Janeiro Brazil also took work actions to support Mumia. Only this kind of working-class action, combined with mass mobilizations, can defeat a determined frame-up by cops, courts and politicians. Mumia Abu-Jamal is now in imminent danger of a new execution order, so the need for action is urgent. For workers action to free Mumia!
Stay in touch for demonstration details this week.
Visit our newly-rebuilt and updated web site for background information on Mumia's innocence. See the "What You Can Do Now" page: www.laboractionmumia.org
- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610
(510) 763-2347
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Mumialaw/
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Also read below:
7) Supreme Court to rule on famed death penalty case
By Jon Hurdle Jon Hurdle
Sun Jan 17, 9:09 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100117/us_nm/us_usa_court_deathpenalty_1
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STOP SPENDING TRILLIONS ON THE WARS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE OF HAITI NOT THE BANKSTERS!
U.S. OUT OF IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN!
FREE PALESTINE!
MONEY FOR HEALTHCARE, JOBS AND EDUCATION!
U.S. HANDS OFF LATIN AMERICA!
SAN FRANCISCO MARCH AND RALLY
SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 11:00 A.M., CIVIC CENTER
GET THE WORD OUT ABOUT MARCH 20!
--Tuesday January 19th
7pm postering, meet at ANSWER office
NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
For more information call: 415-821-6545
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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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Message from sister of Leonard Bradley Jr., oct22bayarea@gmail.com
Protest the murder of un-armed Leonard Bradley Jr., killed by San Pablo Police
January 18, 2009, 12:00 - 1:30 pm
We will peacefully assemble in front of the San Pablo Police Department at 13880 San Pablo Ave.
Hello Everyone,
I hope this note reaches you all in the best of spirits. My name is Lyn-Tise Bradley,
Some of you may know and some of you may not know but on Saturday, November 14, 2009, my little brother, Leonard Bradley Jr. (also known as Lil L) was shot and killed by San Pablo Police. My brother was unarmed and fleeing the scene from a stolen car when the San Pablo police chased him into grassy field and killed him.
We would like for you all to be a part of our march for our little brother. As well as possibly forwarding this message to everyone in your database. I am unfamiliar with planning protests, but I am willing to do whatever it takes for justice to be served on behalf of my little brother.
Please see the details below.
Thank you in advance for your help.
My family is still trying to bounce back from such a traumatic experience. We miss my brother and will not let him go without a fight. We are asking if everyone could please plan to join us in marching for Leonard. Please see the information below. Post it on your facebook, myspace, and please e-mail it to everyone you know.
Date: January 18, 2009
TIME: 12:00 - 1:30 pm
We will peacefully assemble in front of the San Pablo Police Department at 13880 San Pablo Ave.
CONTACT INFO: Lyn-Tise Bradley (415) 283-9905
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Take A Stand For Economic Human Rights!
JOIN HOUSING RIGHTS COMMITTEE IN DEMANDING MORE FEDERAL FUNDING FOR HOUSING!
in support of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP).
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010, 11:00AM
Justin Herman Plaza
(1 Market St., SF, CA; across street from Ferry Building)
In cities, towns, and rural communities across the country, truly affordable housing is disappearing at alarming rates and resources are increasingly being used to criminalize poverty. We demand: "HOUSE KEYS, NOT HANDCUFFS!"
For more information call 415-621-2533 or visit www.wraphome.org. Email us at wrap@wraphome.org
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Save the Date:
Friday, Feb. 5, 7pm - Haiti Relief Benefit
Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia St. at 16th St., San Francisco
Featured Speaker: Pierre Labossiere, Haiti Action Committee
Sponsored by: ANSWER Coalition. Co-sponsored by: Haiti Action Committee, Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition, FMLN-Northern Calif., Task Force on the Americas and others. All funds collected go to Haiti relief. Call 415-821-6545 for more info.
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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
For more information call: 415-821-6545
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National Call for March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education
By Elly
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog
California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education -- but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the re-segregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the country. A nationwide resistance movement is needed.
We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations and communities across the country to massively mobilize for a Strike and Day of Action in Defense of Public Education on March 4, 2010. Education cuts are attacks against all of us, particularly in working-class communities and communities of color.
The politicians and administrators say there is no money for education and social services. They say that "there is no alternative" to the cuts. But if there's money for wars, bank bailouts, and prisons, why is there no money for public education?
We can beat back the cuts if we unite students, workers, and teachers across all sectors of public education - Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities. We appeal to the leaders of the trade union movement to support and organize strikes and/or mass actions on March 4. The weight of workers and students united in strikes and mobilizations would shift the balance of forces entirely against the current agenda of cuts and make victory possible.
Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services and will be an inspiration to all those fighting against the wars, for immigrants rights, in defense of jobs, for single-payer health care, and other progressive causes.
Why March 4? On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education. After hours of open collective discussion, the participants voted democratically, as their main decision, to call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. All schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics -- such as strikes, rallies, walkouts, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. -- as well as the duration of such actions.
Let's make March 4 an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the re-segregation of public education.
- The California Coordinating Committee
To endorse this call and to receive more information contact:
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com
and check out:
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com
Andy Griggs
andyca6@gmail.com
310-704-3217
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform "the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits "our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive $1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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The US Social Forum II
" June 22-26, 2010 "
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Another World Is Possible! Another US is Necessary!
http://www.ussf2010.org/
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Urgent action needed to stop executions in CA
By Stephanie Faucher, Death Penalty Focus
January 8, 2009
stefanie@deathpenalty.org
Dear supporters,
Please take action today to stop executions from resuming in California. This is very urgent, without your help executions could occur in the near future.
Both Californians and non-Californians are encouraged to take action.
Letters must be received by January 20, 2010 at 5pm PDT.
BACKGROUND:
On January 4, 2010, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) proposed minor revisions to its lethal injection procedures in the form of amendments to its previously proposed procedures. CDCR set a fifteen-day comment period ending January 20, 2010 at 5:00 p.m. during which the public can submit written comments on the proposed amendments.
The amended regulations, which are virtually identical to the regulations proposed in May 2009, can be found here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=DsL2ekA4m2nB2qSfspkiCinFkqj%2BKN3u
The above link contains only those regulations that were amended. To see the full text of the proposed regulations proposed in May 2009, go to this link:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=NHU2PZL0sQWgLuC6BWt%2BfynFkqj%2BKN3u
TAKE ACTION:
We have created a draft letter which you can personalize and send here:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1988
A separate letter will also be sent the Governor of California.
Thank you for taking action!
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BAUAW responds:
Here is the letter I wrote as a representative of BAUAW:
I oppose the racist death penalty to its very core. There is no "humanitarian" way to murder someone. It's barbaric.
Already so many who have been on death row for decades have been proven to be innocent victims of gross forensic mistakes or blatant police frame-ups.
The poor are routinely afforded inferior and indifferent legal services that serve mainly as a go-between the prosecution and accused. It can hardly be called legal defense.
Justice is not served equally or fairly in the United States. Most other nations have done away with the death penalty. Here our "great minds of justice" debate the best way to kill.
Under these concrete circumstances, instead of limiting the appeals process for prisoners, the justice system should bend over backwards to hear and re-hear the evidence and set free those who have been convicted unfairly.
Death should never be our conscious choice as a nation.
I am also very concerned about the newly revised lethal injection procedures.
In particular, I have the following concerns:
* The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) added a news article from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat to the rulemaking file. The article mentions that the original creator of the three-drug lethal injection formula has suggested ways to reform the process, including keeping up with changing drugs and science and proper training of lethal injection team members. The recent experience of Romell Broom in Ohio reinforces a point raised in the article, that botched executions are a real possibility, especially in California, due to the limited training of the lethal injection team members and California's repeated failure to meaningfully change its protocol.
* CDCR's amended regulations continue to be wholly inadequate and inapplicable to female condemned inmates. The regulations now specify that a female condemned inmate shall be transported to San Quentin no sooner than 72 hours and no later than six hours prior to the scheduled execution, but contain no provisions to implement the required 45-day chronology of events prior to her arrival at San Quentin. CDCR also fails to address how and if the female condemned inmate will be in contact with her family members and her legal team during her transport, which may take place on the same day as her scheduled execution.
* Contrary to CDCR's claim, the amended regulations continue to treat the condemned prisoner's witnesses differently than the victim's witnesses. The victim's family is allowed an unlimited number of witnesses at the execution, whereas the prisoner scheduled to die is limited to five individuals other than her or his spiritual adviser. In the event of lack of space, the victim's family is provided with the option of remote viewing of the execution, while the same option is not extended to the inmate's family.
*The distinction drawn between Chaplains and "approved" Spiritual Advisors is confusing and it is unclear how and when a person may become a "pre-approved" Spiritual Advisor.
I expect that you will take these concerns very seriously.
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War, bauaw.org
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The Pay at the Top
The compensation research firm Equilar compiled data reflecting pay for 200 chief executives at 198 public companies that filed their annual proxies by March 27 and had revenue of at least $6.3 billion. (Two companies, Motorola and Synnex, had co-C.E.O.'s.) | See a detailed description of the methodology.
http://projects.nytimes.com/executive_compensation?ref=business
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AMAZING SPEECH BY WAR VETERAN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8
The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? - From Mint.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA
Video: Gaza Lives On
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU5Wi2jhnW0
ASSESSMENT - "LEFT IN THE COLD"- CROW CREEK - 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmfue_pjwho&feature=PlayList&p=217F560F18109313&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
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Tom Zaniello is a living, walking encyclopedia of films about labour.
I heard him speak at a conference once, but it wasn't so much a speech as a high-speed tour through dozens of film clips, lovingly selected, all aiming to make a point.
I don't know anyone who knows more about cinema and the labour movement than he does.
And Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An expanded guide to films about labor is his, well, encyclopedia about the subject.
It's a 434 page guide to 350 labour films from around the world, ranging from those you've heard of - Salt of the Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Roger & Me - to those you've never heard of but will fall in love with once you see them.
Zaniello describes all the films in detail, tells you whether they're available for rental or purchase, and, if so, where.
Fiction and nonfiction, the films are about unions, labour history, working-class life, political movements, and the struggle between labour and capital.
Each entry includes critical commentary, production data, cast list, suggested related films, and annotated references to books and Web sites for further reading.
If you want to know more about labour films, buy this book.
And remember that every copy you purchase helps support LabourStart.
Thanks very much.
Eric Lee
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Letter from Lynne Stewart from behind bars:
Dear Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters:
Well the moment we all hoped would never come is upon us. Good bye to a good cup of coffee in the morning, a soft chair, the hugs of grandchildren and the smaller pleasures in life. I must say I am being treated well and that is due to my lawyer team and your overwhelming support.
While I have received "celebrity" treatment here in MCC - high visibility - conditions for the other women are deplorable. Medical care, food, education, recreation are all at minimal levels. If it weren't for the unqualified bonds of sisterhood and the commissary it would be even more dismal.
My fellow prisoners have supplied me with books and crosswords, a warm it is cold in here most of the time) sweat shirt and pants, treats from the commissary, and of course, jailhouse humor. Most important many of them know of my work and have a deep reservoir of can I say it? Respect.
I continue to both answer the questions put to me by them, I also can't resist commenting on the T.V. news or what is happening on the floor - a little LS politics always! Smile) to open hearts and minds!
Liz Fink, my lawyer leader, believes I will be here at MCC-NY for a while - perhaps a year before being moved to prison. Being is jail is like suddenly inhabiting a parallel universe but at least I have the luxury of time to read! Tomorrow I will get my commissary order which may include an AM/FM Radio and be restored to WBAI and music classical and jazz).
We are campaigning to get the bladder operation scheduled before I came in to MCC) to happen here in New York City. Please be alert to the website I case I need some outside support.
I want to say that the show of support outside the Courthouse on Thursday as I was "transported" is so cherished by me. The broad organizational representation was breathtaking and the love and politics expressed the anger too) will keep me nourished through this.
Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate! And write to me and others locked down by the Evil Empire.
Love Struggle, Lynne Stewart
FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
For further information contact: Jeff Mackler, Coordinator, West Coast Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 510-268-9429 jmackler@lmi.net
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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With a New Smile, 'Rage' Fades Away [SINGLE PAYER NOW!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/08/health/20091208_Clinic/index.html?ref=us
FTA [F**k The Army] Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HlkgPCgU7g
Jon Stewart: Obama Is Channeling Bush VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/03/jon-stewart-obama-is-chan_n_378283.html
US anti-war activists protest
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/200912283650408132.html
Buffy Sainte Marie - No No Keshagesh
[Keshagesh is the Cree word to describe a greedy puppy that wants to keep eating everything, a metaphor for corporate greed]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74&feature=player_embedded#
Buffy Sainte-Marie - No No Keshagesh lyrics:
http://www.lyricsmode.com/?i=print_lyrics&id=705368
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The Tar Sands Blow
Hi -
I just signed the Tar Sands Blow petition -- and I hope you'll do the same.
The Canadian tar sands produce the dirtiest oil on earth -- including five times the greenhouse gases of conventional oil. World leaders meet next month in Copenhagen to deal with climate change. Sign the petition -- so that we all don't get a raw deal.
http://ien.thetarsandsblow.org/
The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA
The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4
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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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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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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 501c)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) The Right Testicle of Hell:
History of a Haitian Holocaust
Blackwater before drinking water
by Greg Palast for The Huffington Post
Sunday 17 January 2010
Posted By Greg Palast
January 17, 2010
http://www.gregpalast.com/the-right-testicle-of-hell-history-of-a-haitian-holocaust/
2) Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says
By JACQUES STEINBERG
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/education/18college.html?hp
3) US accused of annexing airport as squabbling hinders aid effort in Haiti
Priority landing for Americans forces flights carrying emergency supplies to divert to Dominican Republic
By Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent, and Daniel Nasaw in Washington
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 17 January 2010 21.56 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/us-accused-aid-effort-haiti
4) Is the Haiti Rescue Effort Failing?
By Danny Schechter, AlterNet
Posted on January 18, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145226/
5) Alleged police-torture victim freed
Man spent 23 years in prison for murder after he confessed to Chicago police detectives under direction of former Cmdr. Jon Burge
By Matthew Walberg
Tribune reporter
January 15, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-burge-murder-releasejan15,0,4953389.story
6) Clash over Haiti aid flights
By Harvey Morris in New York
Published: January 17 2010
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/558f15be-038b-11df-a601-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
7) Supreme Court to rule on famed death penalty case
By Jon Hurdle Jon Hurdle
Sun Jan 17, 9:09 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100117/us_nm/us_usa_court_deathpenalty_1
8) Volunteer nurses stalled in Haiti earthquake relief
By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 01/17/2010 09:07:28 PM PST
Updated: 01/18/2010 06:45:12 AM PST
http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_14213791
9) More Troops and Supplies Arrive in Haiti
By DAMIEN CAVE and DEBORAH SONTAG
January 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/world/americas/19haiti.html?hp
10) U.S. Mulls Role in Haiti After the Crisis
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
News Analysis
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/americas/18policy.html?ref=world
11) Candidate Bans Worsen Iraq's Political Turmoil
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html?ref=world
12) Pakistan Says Drone Strike Kills 15
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/asia/18pstan.html?ref=world
13) United States Attorney Plans Drug-Terrorism Unit
[i.e., The war on drugs goes global...bw]
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/nyregion/18terror.html?ref=us
14) Blacks in Retreat
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/opinion/19herbert.html?hp
15) U.S. Troops Land With Aid at Presidential Site in Haiti
By RAY RIVERA and SIMON ROMERO
January 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/world/americas/20haiti.html?hp
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1) The Right Testicle of Hell:
History of a Haitian Holocaust
Posted By Greg Palast
January 17, 2010
http://www.gregpalast.com/the-right-testicle-of-hell-history-of-a-haitian-holocaust/
1.
Bless the President for having rescue teams in the air almost immediately. That was President Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP reported that the President of the United States promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000 Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?
2.
There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. 200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum housing and IMF "austerity" plans.
3.
A friend of mine called. Do I know a journalist who could get medicine to her father? And she added, trying to hold her voice together, "My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her, "Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"?
4.
China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US bases in Puerto Rico: right there.
5.
Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than it has." We know Gates doesn't know.
6.
From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.
7.
Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed - without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.
8.
But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.
9.
Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.
10.
Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the island of Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president.
11.
How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?
Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets - with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)
12.
What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its "austerity" plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper.
13.
In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.
14.
Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky, cold colony known as New England. Haiti's wealth was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves rebelled - and have been paying for it ever since.
From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by French slaveholders caused by their slaves' successful uprising. Rather than enslave individual Haitians, France thought it more efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.
15.
Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just some certain facts of life that affect how quickly you can do some of these things." The Navy's hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!
16.
Note just received from my friend. Her sister was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines. That's a fact of life too, Mr. President.
***
Through our journalism network, we are trying to get my friend's medicines to her father. If any reader does have someone getting into or near Port-au-Prince, please contact [2] Haiti@GregPalast.com immediately.
Urgently recommended reading - The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful slave uprising in Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.
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2) Pay Rises for Leaders of Colleges, Survey Says
By JACQUES STEINBERG
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/education/18college.html?hp
Many of the nation's public universities eliminated courses and raised tuition last year, but the salaries and benefits of their presidents continued to rise, though at a slower rate than in years past, a new study has found.
In its ninth annual examination of the pay of 185 public university leaders, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Monday that the median rose to $436,111 in 2008-9, an increase of 2.3 percent when compared with the year before. (When adjusted for inflation, The Chronicle said, the median increase was 1.1 percent.)
By contrast, in the previous four years, The Chronicle said, public university leaders' salaries and benefits rose, on average, by at least 7.5 percent each year, and, in 2005, by 19 percent.
Jeffrey J. Selingo, editor of The Chronicle, said in a statement that while the increases of past years had "riled parents, students and politicians," it was most likely "the bad economy and the fiscal crisis facing many states" that "finally put a halt to these large pay increases."
The Chronicle said that "for the first time in recent history," the base salaries of the leaders of more than one-third of the institutions surveyed "stopped growing" last year, and that 10 percent of the presidents received less compensation over all than they did a year earlier.
Still, the largest compensation packages are unlikely to provide much comfort to students and families that have seen tuition rise or financial aid fall, or to professors who may have received pay cuts or even lost their jobs.
As in 2008, E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, topped the Chronicle's ranking for 2009, with an annual compensation package valued at nearly $1.6 million.
He was followed by Mark A. Emmert of the University of Washington ($905,000); Patrick T. Harker of the University of Delaware ($810,600); John T. Casteen III of the University of Virginia ($797,050); and Francisco G. Cigarroa of the University of Texas ($787,260).
The Chronicle also calculated the pay of the leaders of 64 community colleges, and identified the three who were paid the most last year: Eduardo J. Padrón of Miami Dade College ($548,460); Michael B. McCall of the Kentucky Community College and Technical College system ($532,910); and Orlando J. George Jr. of Delaware Technical and Community College ($450,070).
In November, The Chronicle listed the top-earning presidents of private colleges and universities for 2007-8, and found that 23 earned over $1 million. (The highest-paid private college president, Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., received about $1.6 million.)
At that time, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, criticized private colleges and their leaders for being out of step "with the reality for most parents and students who are trying to pay for college in the midst of high unemployment and after savings for education were either wiped out or greatly diminished."
The salary survey did say that "a growing number of presidents" have given money back to their institutions and cited Mr. Gee of Ohio State among them.
"Last year," The Chronicle reported, Mr. Gee "donated $320,850 from a university bonus to help endow a scholarship fund. This year, he paid the costs for a student majoring in music."
Other leaders who have rejected performance bonuses or other proposed increases in recent months, The Chronicle said, include Sally K. Mason of the University of Iowa and Gregory L. Geoffroy of Iowa State and Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Michigan.
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3) US accused of annexing airport as squabbling hinders aid effort in Haiti
Priority landing for Americans forces flights carrying emergency supplies to divert to Dominican Republic
By Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent, and Daniel Nasaw in Washington
guardian.co.uk
Sunday 17 January 2010 21.56 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/us-accused-aid-effort-haiti
The US military's takeover of emergency operations in Haiti has triggered a diplomatic row with countries and aid agencies furious at having flights redirected.
Brazil and France lodged an official _protest with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, forcing many non-US flights to divert to the Dominican Republic.
Brasilia warned it would not _relinquish command of UN forces in Haiti, and Paris complained the airport had become a US "annexe", exposing a brewing power struggle amid the global relief effort. The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières also complained about diverted flights.
The row prompted Haiti's president, René Préval, to call for calm. "This is an extremely difficult situation," he told AP. "We must keep our cool to co-ordinate and not throw accusations at each other."
The squabbling came amid signs that aid was reaching some of the hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need of water, food and medicine six days after a magnitude 7 earthquake levelled the capital, killing more than 100,000, according to Haitian authorities.
The UN was feeding 40,000 and hoped to increase that to 1 million within a fortnight, said the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, as he arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday. "I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way," he said, speaking outside the severely damaged national palace. He also acknowledged "that many people are frustrated and they are losing their patience."
Ban said he has three priorities in Haiti: saving as many lives as possible, stepping up humanitarian assistance and ensuring the co-ordination of aid coming into the country. "We should not waste even a single item, a dollar," he said.
The plight of 80 elderly people at a partially collapsed municipal hospice just a mile from the airport, now a huge aid hub, showed the desperate need. The body of a dead 70-year-old man rotted on a mattress, nearly indistinguishable from the exhausted, hungry and thirsty people around him. "Others won't live until tonight," an administrator, Jean Emmanuel, told the Associated Press.
The Haitian government has established 14 food distribution points and aid groups have opened five emergency health centres. Water-purification units - a priority to avert disease and dehydration - were arriving.
But with aftershocks jolting the ruins, bloated bodies in the street and severe shortages of water and food many survivors had had enough: an exodus trekked on foot out of the city to rural areas.
The security situation worsened, with some looters fighting with rocks and clubs for rice, clothing and other goods scavenged from debris. In places the embryonic aid machine did not even try to organise distribution. Aid workers tossed out food packets to crowds and US helicopters took off as soon as they offloaded supplies, prompting scrambles in which the fittest and strongest prevailed.
"They are not identifying the people who need the water. The sick and the old have no chance," Estime Pierre Deny, _hoping to fill a plastic container with water amid a scrum of people, told Reuters.
Frustration over aid bottlenecks among donors became tinged by national rivalry as it became clear the US was taking ownership of the crisis. A vanguard of more than 1,000 US troops was on the ground and 12,000 were expected in the region by today, including marines aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson which anchored offshore as a "floating airport".
The Haitian government, paralysed by the destruction of the presidential palace and ministries, signed a memorandum of understanding formally transferring control of Toussaint L'Ouverture airport to the US. Former president Bill Clinton said he will travel to Haiti today to meet with government officials and deliver much-needed emergency supplies.
The UN mission, which had a 9,000-strong peacekeeping force in Haiti before the quake, seemed too stunned by its own losses to take control. Its dead include its Tunisian head, Hédi Annabi, his Brazilian deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa, and the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates, a Canadian.
Flights seeking permission to land continuously circle the airport, which is damaged and has only a single runway, rankling several governments and aid agencies. "There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti," Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the UN's World Food Programme, told the New York Times. "But most flights are for the US military. Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync."
France, which as the former _colonial power expects a prominent role, _protested when an emergency field hospital was turned back. The foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said the airport was not for the international community but "an annexe of Washington", according to France's ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret.
Brazil, which saw its leadership of the UN peacekeeping mission as a calling card of its burgeoning influence, was also indignant when three flights were not allowed to land. The foreign ministry reportedly asked Hillary Clinton to grant Brazil priority over chartered flights. Nelson Jobim, the defence minister, said Brazil would not relinquish command duties and suggested it, not Washington, would continue to lead UN forces. Analysts said it was vital command issues be resolved.
The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières complained about flights with medical staff and equipment which were redirected to the Dominican Republic. "We are all going crazy," said Nan Buzard, of the American Red Cross.
The Obama administration has enlisted former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to spearhead relief efforts. In a series of interviews both men deflected right-wing accusations that the White House was seeking political advantage from the disaster. "I'd say now is not the time to focus on politics," Bush said, as he sat beside his predecessor. "You've got children who've lost parents. People wondering where they're going to be able to drink water."
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4) Is the Haiti Rescue Effort Failing?
By Danny Schechter, AlterNet
Posted on January 18, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145226/
Every disaster plan is built to some degree around the idea of triage --
deciding who can and cannot be saved. The worst cases are often
separated and allowed to perish so that others who are considered more
survivable can be treated.
There is a tragic triage underway in Haiti thanks to screw-ups in the US
and western response, and in part because of the objectively tough
conditions in Haiti that blocked access and made the delivery of food,
water and services difficult. But the planners should have known that!
Look at the TV coverage. "Saving Haiti" is the title CNN has given to
its coverage. It shows us all the planes landing, and donations coming
in and celebrity response on one hand, and then the problems/failures to
actually deliver aid on the other.
Much of the coverage focuses on the upbeat -- people being saved. But
despite that frame, which highlights a compassionate America's response,
the reality of what's happening in Haiti is only barely getting through.
It's not pretty.
Everyone wants to believe in the best intentions of all involved but
five days after the quake, with so few being helped, we have to ask: how
did this get so badly done?
It's like Obama's plan to stop foreclosures through modifying loans.
Great idea, but only a handful of homeowners have benefited. There is a
yawning gap between the idea and its execution.
So what happened in Haiti? The short answer: it is too little and in
many cases, much of it too late. A natural disaster has been compounded
by a well-intentioned man-made one.
Why? One global report explained:
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the
importance of the first 72 hours following the 12 January disaster. But
already much of that crucial time has been spent attempting to assess
the situation. The structures usually responsible for dealing with
civilian emergencies have been unable to respond effectively due to
widespread destruction of national and international power structures.
(This means the UN and the Haitian government as well as the US effort).
Lacking outside support, civilians have worked communally to try to save
their own families. Supplies were sent but many have yet to get out of
the airport. Troops have not been assigned to help deliver water or
guard medical facilities. There is a fear of the wrath of a people that
are pissed off at hearing about aid and money donated, and then seeing
nothing trickling down into their neighborhoods.
And there is a deeper fear -- a political fear. With President Aristide,
the man the US considers too radical for its tastes, anxious to return,
there is fear that a possible revolt against the lack of help could turn
angry and political.
Hillary Clinton keeps telling the Haitians that we are their friends --
but many doubt it. They know that Aristide's Lavalas party is the most
popular in Haiti and wants a more profound transformation than the US
wants to allow. It had been banned from taking part in scheduled
elections next month, that are likely to be canceled now. Haiti's
president Preval is weak and dependent on US largesse.
They also know that in the aftermath of earthquakes, like the one that
rocked Manaqua, Nicaraga in the 1970s, there can be revolution. They
don't want that to happen in Haiti. They also know how volatile the
country is, in part because of neglect by the West over the years.
Private help is not getting through either. Western Union offices are
still closed in a country that relies on foreign remittances as a
lifeline. The media is finally admitting the aid mission is failing,
although that's not the word used -- they say the relief effort is
"troubled!" Here's the headline in the NY Times: "Officials Strain to
Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises." The piece continues: "A
sprawling assembly of international officials and aid workers struggled
to fix a troubled relief effort."
The Guardian/Observer focuses on a water delivery crisis. The article
doesn't ask why armed troops were not assigned to protecting drivers:
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are in desperate need of drinking
water because of an earthquake-damaged municipal pipeline and truck
drivers either unable or unwilling to deliver their cargo.
Many drivers are afraid of being attacked if they go out, some
drivers are still missing in the disaster and others are out there
searching for missing relatives," said Dudu Jean, a 30-year-old driver
who was attacked on Friday when he drove into the capital's sprawling
Cite Soleil slum.
The lack of water has become one of the greatest dangers facing
Haitians in part because earthquake survivors stay outdoors all day in
the heat out of fear of aftershocks and unstable buildings.
But there is something else going on.
The disaster planners have an agenda that goes beyond just saving lives.
They want to use the crisis to rebuild Haiti along lines they support.
(ie. Support of property rights etc) So far they have not spoken about
how policies backed by the United States through the Caribbean Basin
Initiative were responsible for uprooting peasants from the countryside
to move them to the city to be a cheap labor reserve. In that Reagan era
effort, pigs were killed and imported food replaced home grown varieties
to benefit US suppliers. Debt dependence grew -- classic imperialist
policies.
Read this report in coded uncritical top-down language from the
Washington Post:
Even as rescuers are digging victims out of the rubble in Haiti,
policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a
destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into
a self-sustaining nation.
Development efforts have failed there, decade after decade, leaving
Haitians with a dysfunctional government, a high crime rate and incomes
averaging a dollar a day. But the leveled capitol, Port-au-Prince, must
be rebuilt, promising one of the largest economic development efforts
ever undertaken in the hemisphere -- an effort "measured in months and
even years," President Obama said Saturday in an appeal for donations
alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And those
who will help oversee it are thinking hard about how to use that money
and attention to change the country forever.
"It's terrible to look at it this way, but out of crisis often comes
real change," said C. Ross Anthony, the Rand Corp's global health
director. "The people and the institutions take on the crisis and bring
forth things they weren't able to do in the past."
The Rand Corporation is a military contractor primarily, a center for
spooks and covert strategies. The fact that they are being quoted as
saviors is scary in itself. In other words, Haiti's future is being
planned outside of Haiti and will be imposed step by step.
I don't know about you but anything that George W. Bush is supporting, I
tend to be skeptical of, to say the least.
Let's admit it, this disaster response is itself a disaster. And it's
helping promote a new disaster to come.
Greg Palast points to some of the many contradictions that the TV
networks that are milking Haiti's pain in an orgy of self-congratulatory
reporting have yet to explore:
*China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs within 48 hours. China,
Mr. President. China: 8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US
bases in Puerto Rico: right there. [Greg, make that 25,000 miles away!]
* Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "I don't know how
this government could have responded faster or more comprehensively than
it has." We know Gates doesn't know.
* From my own work in the field, I know that FEMA has access to
ready-to-go potable water, generators, mobile medical equipment and more
for hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all still there. Army Lt.
Gen. Russel Honoré, who served as the task force commander for emergency
response after Hurricane Katrina, told the Christian Science Monitor, "I
thought we had learned that from Katrina, take food and water and start
evacuating people." Maybe we learned but, apparently, Gates and the
Defense Department missed school that day.
* Send in the Marines. That's America's response. That's what we're
good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after
three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed -- without any
emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.
* But don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully
equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed
immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of
water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying
capability. They're from Iceland.
[Hillary Clinton said proudly on Saturday that there are now 30
teams in place. No one asked, why only 30?]
* Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was
no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and
allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his
lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.
* Previous US presidents have acted far more swiftly in getting
troops on the ground on that island. Haiti is the right half of the
island of Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle of Hell. The
Dominican Republic the left. In 1965, when Dominicans demanded the
return of Juan Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a junta,
Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines
on the beaches to prevent the return of the elected president. "
And Greg asks the question that our media heroes have yet to explore:
How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure,
from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two
fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that
the nation was simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?
Good question. One of the many we should be asking. In the meantime, we
need the press to start asking tougher questions and exposing a
Katrina-like response that is still losing countless lives.
A country in pain deserves relief. Not more pain.
If you lived there, wouldn't you be pissed and ready to explode?
Danny Schechter writes the News Dissector blog for MediaChannel.org. His
latest book is PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books).
(c) 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145226/
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5) Alleged police-torture victim freed
Man spent 23 years in prison for murder after he confessed to Chicago police detectives under direction of former Cmdr. Jon Burge
By Matthew Walberg
Tribune reporter
January 15, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-burge-murder-releasejan15,0,4953389.story
Freed Thursday after almost a quarter century behind bars, Michael Tillman said it "feels good," but he also had a grim prediction for the Chicago police detectives who allegedly tortured him into confessing.
"They'll get what they got coming," Tillman told reporters in the Cook County Criminal Courts Building. "The system will do to them what they did to me."
Tillman stood in borrowed clothes and nervously fidgeted with a black stocking cap as he addressed the news media moments after special prosecutors dropped charges against him for the 1986 slaying and rape of Betty Howard in an abandoned South Side apartment.
He is the latest longtime inmate to be freed because of allegations of torture by detectives under disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge.
In court papers, special prosecutors brought in to handle the case said that if Tillman was retried, the state would be unable to disprove that the confession had been coerced. And there wasn't enough other reliable evidence to convict him of the murder, they said.
The special prosecutors went on to acknowledge evidence of "a pattern and practice of abuse" at what is now the Calumet Area police headquarters under Burge and his detectives -- which Tillman's lawyers heralded as a first for the state.
"In 35 years -- starting with Richard Daley, Richard Devine, Lisa Madigan -- no prosecutor in charge of these cases has ever conceded that a man was tortured or abused at Area 2," attorney Flint Taylor, who has handled numerous Burge-related cases, said outside court.
A Madigan spokeswoman defended her office's handling of some of the Burge-related prosecutions, noting that six inmates have been freed in recent years after careful analyses of their cases.
Howard, a single mother, had left for a birthday party for her 2-year-old son when they were abducted in their apartment building and taken to a vacant unit. The boy was locked in a nearby bathroom as his mother was tied to a radiator, sexually assaulted, stabbed and shot.
Tillman has long alleged he was tortured into confessing. He was sentenced to life in prison after his first conviction in 1986 in a bench trial before Circuit Judge Kenneth Gillis, now retired. He appealed on the grounds that his confession was coerced and should not have been used at trial. But in overturning his conviction and ordering a new trial in 1991, the Appellate Court found fault instead with the effectiveness of his lawyer. A jury found him guilty again in 1996.
In raising the alleged torture again last year, Tillman contended that over three days of questioning, Burge's detectives beat him with a phone book, staged a mock execution by holding a gun to his head and covered his head with a plastic bag. He also alleged that detectives poured 7UP into his nose after forcing his head back in what his lawyers called a crude form of waterboarding.
In their court papers, the special prosecutors noted that detectives under Burge had given conflicting explanations for blood found on the floor of the room where Tillman was interrogated.
The prosecutors also pointed out that evidence appeared much stronger against Clarence Trotter, who is also serving a life sentence for Howard's murder. He was found in possession of the murder weapon and personal property of the victim's, and his fingerprints were found on a pop can at the murder scene.
Burge, who was fired in 1993 for the abuse of a suspected cop killer, is scheduled to go to trial in federal court in May on charges he lied while testifying in a civil proceeding about the alleged torture under his watch. No detectives under his command have been charged with criminal wrongdoing.
During a 15-minute hearing Thursday, Assistant Special State's Attorney Myles O'Rourke asked that the murder and rape charges against Tillman be dropped because he was convicted with "coerced statements" and the state couldn't prove his guilt based on the remaining "unreliable evidence." Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan then dismissed the case, freeing Tillman after about 23 1/2 years in custody.
Moments later, as Tillman's handcuffs were being removed, O'Rourke approached Tillman's mother, Jean, as she wept in the front row of the courtroom gallery.
"Sorry this took as long as it took," O'Rourke said.
But Tillman's release devastated Howard's relatives, who still believe that he was responsible for her murder. "It's truly messed up that the police messed up this case, and because of that, Michael is getting let out," said the victim's daughter, Angelita.
After his morning release, Tillman celebrated with friends, family and his legal team over lunch at MacArthur's Restaurant, his first post-prison meal.
After so many years behind bars, Tillman was startled at the automatic hand-soap dispenser in the restroom of the West Side restaurant. He also wasn't sure how to hold a cell phone up to his ear and seemed perplexed by a flat-screen television that wasn't turned on. "What's that for?" he asked.
"I feel that it went great today, but I just didn't appreciate being locked up for 23 and a half years for something I did not do," he said over corn bread, fried chicken, barbecue ribs and collard greens. "It hasn't hit me yet. When I'm by myself and just thinking, then it will hit me. Right now I'm just happy."
Taylor said he hopes Tillman's release will help the more than 20 other inmates he estimates remain behind bars despite their allegations that their murder confessions were coerced by Burge and his detectives.
"It is incumbent that everyone who has a documented case of torture or abuse from Area 2 and Burge's people, that they have a new hearing and a new trial without that tortured confession," he said. "It doesn't mean that they are all innocent. It doesn't mean that they are all guilty. ... But, regardless, they are all entitled under the Constitution and the law not to be convicted in part or in total on tortured, coerced confessions."
Taylor said the next step in Tillman's case will be to obtain a certificate of innocence -- similar to a pardon -- that would entitle him to nearly $200,000 in compensation from the state for his years in prison.
Freelance reporter Jessica Pupovac contributed to this report.mwalberg@tribune.com
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6) Clash over Haiti aid flights
By Harvey Morris in New York
Published: January 17 2010
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/558f15be-038b-11df-a601-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Fuel shortages, poor communications and a logjam at the Port au Prince airport on Sunday continued to hinder a massive international aid effort to Haiti five days after a devastating earthquake in which more than 100,000 are now feared to have died.
The United Nations humanitarian agency, Ocha, warned at the weekend that humanitarian operations might be forced to shut down in the next few days if fuel supplies were not replenished.
As Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, headed for Haiti to see for himself the extent of the worst humanitarian disaster that the world body has had to cope with in decades, concern grew over delays in the airlift to the capital's airport, which is under US control.
Alain Joyandet, French co-operation minister, told reporters at the airport he had protested to Washington via the US ambassador about the US military's management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away.
In Paris, the foreign ministry tried to quash a looming diplomatic spat by insisting Franco-American co-operation was proceeding as well as possible in view of the extent of the disaster.
Mr Joyandet's complaint underlined the frustration of relief teams dependent on the single runway at the airport to ferry in supplies if they were to avoid 24-hour delays involved in bringing supplies in by road from the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
The French news agency AFP also quoted people trying to leave Haiti as complaining that the US was giving priority to its own citizens. The US military re-established operations at the airport after its control tower was damaged in the earthquake. Kenneth Merten, US ambassador, told AFP: "We're working in co-ordination with the United Nations and the Haitians. "Clearly it's necessary to prioritise the planes. It's clear that there's a problem."
With telephone communications disrupted by the earthquake after wireless network towers were damaged, Digicel, the Caribbean mobile company, said before the weekend it was pressing to ferry its technicians and equipment to the island state after four planes were turned back.
Digicel's chairman, Denis O'Brien, said: "We have been in contact with the United Nations and numerous NGOs who are telling us that restoring Haiti's communications network is a vital first step in this relief effort."
The UN, with US support, was taking the lead in guaranteeing law and order in Haiti where hundreds of thousands have yet to receive food. The UN had 3,000 members of a 9,000-strong peacekeeping force in Post au Prince when the earthquake struck and units have since been drafted to the capital.
Canada said on Sunday it was sending 1,000 troops to Haiti to double its military presence there.
Canada would have hundreds of vehicles, seven helicopters and two ships available for the Haitian operation once the reinforcements were in place, Peter MacKay, defence minister, said in Ottowa.
The UN confirmed that Hedi Annabi, its civilian head of mission, and Luiz Carlos da Costa, and Doug Coates, its Canadian acting police commissioner, were among those killed in the collapse of the UN headquarters.
The UN's World Food Programme said it planned to deliver emergency food rations to 40,000 people a day over the weekend as part of an emergency operation that would eventually reach 2m.
An aircraft carrying more than 20 tonnes of high-energy biscuits landed in the Dominican Republic from El Salvador and was heading to Port au Prince by road.
Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, former US presidents drafted in by incumbent Barack Obama to help with the aid effort, on Sunday appealed to Americans to donate to the relief efforts. Mr Clinton already serves as the UN's envoy to Haiti.
After Rush Limbaugh, the rightwing talk show host, suggested Mr Obama was using his response to the crisis to burnish his image, Mr Bush said it was no time for politics."There's a great sense of desperation. And so my attention is on trying to help people deal with the desperation."
The UN Security Council was meeting on Monday to discuss the situation, and European Union ministers, at an emergency meeting today, were to call for an international conference to help Haiti.
EU ministers will assess the cost of providing relief for which the UN has launched a $562m flash appeal.
"This will have to be co-ordinated with the UN and international financial organisations like the World Bank. The ministers will also examine how much more needs to be done to help Haiti," said Cristina Gallach, EU spokeswoman.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
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7) Supreme Court to rule on famed death penalty case
By Jon Hurdle Jon Hurdle
Sun Jan 17, 9:09 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100117/us_nm/us_usa_court_deathpenalty_1
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court is expected on Tuesday to issue its latest decision on the fate of Mumia Abu-Jamal, arguably America's most famous death-row inmate, convicted of slaying a Philadelphia policeman, a crime he denies committing.
The court is due to rule on an appeal by the Philadelphia district attorney who is seeking to have Abu-Jamal executed and bring an end to a decades-long legal saga the inmate, a former journalist, wrote about while in prison.
Abu-Jamal, now 55, was convicted in 1982 of killing officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981. He has become an international cause celebre for the anti-death penalty movement whose supporters argue strenuously he did not receive a fair trial.
His backers say he was framed by police, that prosecution witnesses were coerced into false testimony and that ballistics evidence shows Abu-Jamal did not shoot Faulkner but that the murder was committed by another man who fled the scene.
Supporters also claim that Abu-Jamal, who is black, was the victim of a racist and notoriously pro-prosecution trial judge, the now-deceased Albert Sabo, who was overheard to say, "Yeah, and I'm going to help them fry the nigger," according to an affidavit by a court stenographer.
Faulkner's widow, Maureen, and Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police oppose any clemency for Abu-Jamal, arguing his conviction has been upheld repeatedly by numerous courts, including the Supreme Court, over three decades.
They note that bullet fragments taken from Faulkner's body match the ammunition from the gun carried by Abu-Jamal who was earning his living as a taxi driver at the time of the killing.
If the Supreme Court rules in his favor, Abu-Jamal would get a new jury trial on the sentencing, but not his conviction.
But a defeat is likely to send the case back to an appeals court, whose ruling would be based on a new Supreme Court decision on jury instructions in another case, said his attorney, Robert R. Bryan.
Abu-Jamal has been in solitary confinement on death row since the conviction, and has been held since 1995 in a western Pennsylvania prison where he has written books and contributed to international journals and radio shows.
Outside the United States, Abu-Jamal's backers include the human rights group Amnesty International, which in 2000 called for a new trial, arguing his conviction and sentence followed "contradictory and incomplete evidence" in a trial that failed to meet minimum international standards of justice.
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8) Volunteer nurses stalled in Haiti earthquake relief
By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 01/17/2010 09:07:28 PM PST
Updated: 01/18/2010 06:45:12 AM PST
http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_14213791
OAKLAND-More than 10,000 nurses across the United States are signed up with an Oakland-based nurses union to help treat wounded Haitians, but after days negotiating with the U.S. Navy they have not yet found a way to get there, said Chuck Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association.
"A lot of people are frustrated because they're anxious to be deployed, they want to be helping," Idelson said on Sunday night.
From their downtown Oakland office, organizers have worked around the clock since just hours after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook Haiti on Tuesday coordinating a growing list of volunteers, including more than 2,800 from California, so they can be deployed to use their skills to help with international relief efforts.
"Without question, there's a need. There's a shortage of functioning medical facilities," Idelson said.
The group hit a temporary dead end over the weekend, however, when the U.S. military informed the nurses they would not be able to travel aboard a Navy hospital ship called the USNS Comfort, at least not anytime soon. That was after days the union spent scouring the nurses list and making sure volunteers fulfilled the military's extensive list of requirements, Idelson said.
He said the nurses are now actively seeking alternate routes to get into the country using partners who are scouring Port-au-Prince and neighboring towns for places where they can set up clinics.
The nurses culled volunteers through National Nurses United, an affiliate that was founded by the California Nurses Association. They said their list of volunteers includes several Haitian-American nurses who speak French and Kreyol.
Efforts by medical experts around the world to reach Port-au-Prince have been difficult since there is only one working runway at the city airport that has been crowded by international agencies bringing food, supplies, search teams and troops.
One well-known emergency health organization, Doctors Without Borders, had difficulty flying its teams into Haiti over the weekend, causing one French diplomat to criticize the United States, which oversees the airport's traffic, according to wire reports.
Some medical volunteers have traveled over land from the neighboring Dominican Republic, but the biggest challenge is making sure they have some kind of safe and secure medical infrastructure equipped with supplies once they reach Haiti, nurse organizers said.
A smaller, 7-person team of emergency physicians and nurses from Stanford Hospital was also struggling with how to get to Haiti late last week, and it was not known if they had arrived yet.
Once they get there, the team, which includes Stanford's chief of emergency medicine, was going to be stationed for about three weeks at a hospital near the Presidential Palace and a makeshift clinic in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Stanford said the physicians were working with the International Medical Corps group, which had four doctors in Haiti as of Friday and another 13 on the way.
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9) More Troops and Supplies Arrive in Haiti
By DAMIEN CAVE and DEBORAH SONTAG
January 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/world/americas/19haiti.html?hp
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - As new waves of American troops prepared to land in this battered nation on Monday, rescue workers and military teams already on the ground worked to quicken the delivery of aid to hundreds of thousands of Haitians growing increasingly desperate for food and clean water.
The United Nations World Food Program said it planned to distribute 200 tons of food aid on Monday to 95,000 people at eight locations and appealed anew for public donations to the relief effort. The calls for more help came even as aid workers, mobile clinics and other supplies continued to arrive at the airport and overland from the Dominican Republic.
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, requested Monday that the Security Council immediately approve an additional 3,500 security officers for Haiti, both to maintain public order and to guard deliveries as the aid effort gathers steam.
Mr. Ban requested that the council dispatch an additional 1,500 police officers and 2,000 troops to Haiti for at least six months to augment the 9,000 already there. So far episodes of violence have been scattered, with the security situation overall fairly calm, but senior United Nations officials said it might boil over at any moment as the difficulties of living without water, food and shelter mount.
``We need to be very much careful and vigilant against any possibility," Mr. Ban said in an interview. "When their patience level becomes thinner - that is when we have to be concerned."
Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, was also expected to arrive later in the day.
More United Nations peacekeepers were visible on the streets of the capital on Monday morning after reports of a rash of lootings and shootings a day earlier. Buses packed with refugees continued to stream out of the city as people gambled that they had a better chance of finding food and shelter in the countryside.
As scavengers searched the rubble for scrap metal they might sell, rescue teams continued their search for survivors despite dwindling odds and rising estimates of the dead. Haitian officials have discussed tens of thousands of people killed, but there is no certainty on any numbers so far.
A top American commander in Haiti said Sunday that "we are going to have to be prepared for the worst."
In an interview with ABC's "This Week," the commander, Lt. Gen. P. K. Keen, was asked about estimates numbering the dead at 150,000 to 200,000. He called those figures a "start point," but said there were still no exact casualty counts.
On Sunday, the mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches. There were fewer bodies in the streets, though in some places residents began burning corpses left behind.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, arrived to offer a promise of improvement from his organization, which was itself badly hit by the quake but was still heavily criticized for the slow pace of the emergency response.
"I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way," Mr. Ban told a crowd of Haitians in front of the severely damaged National Palace.
On the fifth day after the earthquake, there were signs of improvement, possibly even hope that the worst was passing. Traffic at the airport continued to increase, and there were 27 rescue teams on the ground, with 1,500 people searching for survivors.
But the World Food Program said, "Aftershocks persist, which is a concern given the damaged infrastructure."
The best news came in the form of a small voice from deep in a pile of rubble at the Caribbean Supermarket in the Delmas neighborhood, heard overnight late Saturday or early Sunday. As the odds of finding more survivors fell steeply, American and Turkish rescue workers were stunned to discover a small Haitian girl, who proudly told them that she made it through with hope and leathery fruit snacks.
She was the first of five people to be pulled from the wreckage during a search spanning the weekend, some of whom sent desperate text messages to let loved ones know they were trapped. She was deeply shaken, having been trapped for days in a small space in a devastated market, with death in every aisle. But she had not been pinned down by debris and was not hurt, according to Capt. Joseph Zahralban of the South Florida search and rescue team.
"If you have to be trapped in a collapsed building, a stocked supermarket is probably the best place to be," Captain Zahralban said.
Among the rescuers at the store were members of a joint New York police and fire rescue team, who had arrived in Haiti on Saturday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York said Sunday in a telephone interview. He said the team included 80 people and several rescue dogs.
There were several other reported rescues around the city, including a 2-month-old baby, CNN reported, and Jens Kristensen, a Danish civilian employee of the United Nations peacekeeping forces at the Christopher Hotel, the organization's headquarters here, where perhaps 100 of its workers remained buried.
At the airport, American military officials said that waiting times for landing had declined, while traffic had increased. Each day, there are 100 slots for incoming planes - well exceeding the 30 to 35 flights that the airport handled before the earthquake. But in a sign of both Haiti's needs and the response, even that is not close to handling the number of planes waiting to come in.
"There is certainly more demand than 100 a day," said Maj. Matthew Jones of the Air Force, operations officer of the joint task force running the airport. "However, no one has been denied a slot, but there may be a delay. Sometimes if it's not today, it's tomorrow."
The military has established a priority list for providing slots, Major Jones said. At the top are planes bringing in water. Next is equipment for distributing supplies, followed by food and then medical personnel and medicine.
In Port-au-Prince, the stepped-up effort appeared to be paying off and aid was finally reaching at least some of Haiti's desperate, with varying degrees of order.
On Sunday morning, a United Nations truck appeared in the park near the presidential palace, where hundreds of families have been squatting since the earthquake. They handed out bags of water to a crowd mostly appreciative, with only a little shoving.
The World Food Program also sent at least three convoys to different locations badly affected by the earthquake, with a goal of delivering enough nourishment to last 65,000 people five days.
But the scene at one delivery site suggested that the food - rations of fortified biscuits, each one about the size of a graham cracker - would hardly last the ravenous victims one night. And the agency's distribution methods nearly started a riot when throngs of people who had lost everything mobbed one of the trucks in the convoy.
"It's not their fault," said Guerrier Ernso, looking on at the mob. "They are hungry."
Mr. Ernso, a 25-year-old linguistics student, introduced himself to a World Food Program official and suggested that it might have been more effective if the agency had called ahead to advise community leaders that it was coming. Then he and four other brawny young men dived into the mob and began pulling people apart. Within five minutes the people had been arranged in three neat lines. "They have to create another way to deliver food," Mr. Ernso said of the World Food Program official, speaking in English. "The way they are doing it now, they will not help us out of our misery."
Meanwhile, Col. Cormi Bartal, a doctor in the Israeli Army's newly established field hospital here, pulled back the flap of a tent serving as the hospital's pediatric section and pointed to a woman, Guerlande Jean Michel, 24. She identified a sleeping newborn on her cot, one of the first born in the city after the earthquake, and spoke in a halting voice. "This is my child," said Ms. Jean Michel, a primary school teacher. "His name is Israel."
Colonel Bartal said the hospital had carried out amputations on 10 people, treated patients with burns on 70 percent of their bodies, and saved two people with gunshot wounds. "There are the injuries from the earthquake, but those are subsiding," he explained. "Now we're treating those affected by the aftermath, not from the earthquake."
Still, away from where aid trucks happened to appear - no one seemed to know where or when to expect them - pressure has been building, and with President René Préval still holed up in a police station, without having made a national address, frustration with the government was growing. He and his cabinet held a meeting on Sunday on plastic chairs outside the station.
Signs popping up across the city called for the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who was ousted in 2004, and even for the Duvaliers, who ruled the country brutally from the 1950s to the 1980s.
In the main market downtown, prices had skyrocketed. A small bottle of water cost $6. And residents have grown more desperate. "We need water," said Joseph Jean René, a round man in a Hawaiian shirt standing near a scrum of money changers. "We are dying of thirst and hunger. Even the children are dying."
Violence and looting, unheard of just after the earthquake, also seemed to be spreading. Several reports of the police catching thieves and shooting them on the spot moved across the city, though at times, what happened and why were difficult to divine.
At the national cemetery, three new bodies appeared just after lunch, with wet blood on at least one of their faces. A fourth young man wearing Adidas high tops lay in a fetal position a few yards away on the sidewalk. Vomit and blood spread out from his chest.
Witnesses said they were thieves. "The police brought them here and shot them," said Andre Pierre, 25. He stood over the fourth man, with a growing crowd. "He tried to fight the police," said Maxime Nerestant, 22, a tae kwon do teacher with a shaved head and a beard. " 'Help me, help me,' he said, 'I'm innocent.' "
Suddenly, the man who was believed to be dead lifted his right arm. People asked him what happened, and where he was from. "La Lou," he said quietly. A truck from Doctors Without Borders drove by. The crowd of Haitians did not notice, nor did they try to help the young man in his final moments. "The police shouldn't kill innocent people, but with what's happening in Haiti right now, people shouldn't be stealing," Mr. Nerestant said.
The police at the local precinct in the market area said they knew nothing of the theft or the shooting, though it occurred less than a mile away. Twelve of the station's 29 officers were missing.
An earlier version of this story misstated the date of arrival in Haiti of a joint New York police and fire rescue team. It was Saturday, not Friday.
Reporting was contributed by Ginger Thompson, Ray Rivera, Simon Romero, Marc Lacey and Neil MacFarquhar from Port-au-Prince and the United Nations, Michael S. Schmidt from New York, and Alan Cowell from Paris.
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10) U.S. Mulls Role in Haiti After the Crisis
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
News Analysis
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/americas/18policy.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - President Obama's aggressive response to the deadly earthquake in Haiti has led to criticism from the far right that the United States is taking on too much, at a time when its foreign-policy plate is already full.
But the more relevant question, experts on the region say, is whether the United States will maintain a muscular role in the reconstruction of Haiti once the news cameras go home. The United States has a history of either political domination or neglect in its backyard, and administration officials acknowledge that for Mr. Obama, striking the right balance in Haiti will be crucial.
"The classic U.S. role in the whole hemisphere is either complete neglect, or we come in and run the show," said Sarah Stephens, executive director for the Center for Democracy in the Americas. But with Haiti, a mere 700 miles from Miami, "there is a great opportunity for the United States to do this in a new way," she said.
Mr. Obama has pledged that the United States is in Haiti for the long haul. On Sunday, he mobilized military reserves - particularly medical staff for hospital ships - signing an executive order that said it was necessary to back up active-duty troops "for the effective conduct of operational missions, including those involving humanitarian assistance, related to relief efforts in Haiti."
American troops have taken control of the airport at Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, and are helping to provide security for the enormous international relief effort. A steady stream of administration officials have headed south, from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton - who cut short a trip to the South Pacific, rushed home, and then flew to Haiti on Saturday - to one of Mr. Obama's closest aides, Denis R. McDonough, the National Security Council's chief of staff.
"We will be here today, tomorrow, and for the time ahead," Mrs. Clinton said to Haitian journalists in Port-au-Prince, standing alongside President René Préval.
With so many others in the Haitian government missing or dead, the Obama administration is already facing questions of whether the United States is the only entity capable of bringing order to Port-au-Prince. Beyond that is the question of whether Mr. Obama can handle Haiti at a time when he is already grappling with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The short answer is yes," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois and a frequent visitor to Haiti. "As challenging as it is, there is no question about it straining our capacities at home. This is a tiny country. It's close, and it's not going to be our job alone to rebuild."
Mr. Obama has indicated that the amount the United States has pledged so far to Haiti, $100 million, is bound to go up significantly. Still, it is well below the $350 million that President Bush pledged in the early weeks of the Asian tsunami, which killed 226,000 people after it struck in December 2004.
And while Mr. Obama has increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan by 30,000 to just below 100,000, and promised ambitious efforts to stabilize Yemen and Pakistan, the number of American troops being sent to Haiti is of course smaller - some 10,000 Marines and soldiers by Monday, military officials said.
The bigger issue may be sustaining the effort. In 2009, much of the administration's energy was focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, with little time on this hemisphere. The administration's new point man for Latin America and the Caribbean - Arturo Valenzuela, the assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere - was confirmed only in November.
In the past, American interest in Haiti has waxed and waned. President Clinton sent 20,000 troops there in 1994 to restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, an intervention still viewed today as producing, at best, mixed results.
If Haiti's only problem were poverty, American officials discovered at the time, the job of building its economy would have been one thing. But endemic government corruption and a history of post-colonial abandonment left Haiti in shambles 10 years later, when Mr. Aristide was finally driven from power in 2004.
In the years since 1994, Haiti has resurfaced in the American conscience only during times of crisis: the Aristide meltdown; and after four devastating storms in 2008 that wiped out most of the country's food crops and damaged irrigation systems, causing acute hunger for millions.
Some Haiti experts say that despite the criticism from conservative commentators - Glenn Beck complained that Mr. Obama spent more time reacting to the Haiti earthquake than he did to the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack - the heart-rending tragedy in Haiti may make it impossible for the United States to ignore it once the news media attention goes away.
Mr. McDonough, the national security aide, spoke to that in a call with reporters on Sunday, saying that the administration was determined to do everything it could to alleviate the suffering in Haiti. "The more we hear criticism, the more we are intent on trying to improve the lot of the Haitian people," he said.
What is more, the administration and the international community appear to be uniform in their belief that Mr. Préval, unlike Mr. Artistide, is someone with whom they can deal. They credit him with taking steps in recent years to develop the economy.
Mrs. Clinton said a major reason for her four-hour visit to Port-au-Prince was to buck up Mr. Préval. At one point on Saturday, the Haitian president walked through the makeshift American command center at the airport, appearing dazed by the clamor.
But he seemed comforted by the presence of Cheryl D. Mills, Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff, who is in charge of the Haiti portfolio at the State Department and who has made multiple visits to Port-au-Prince over the last few months.
Administration officials say the White House can handle Haiti without neglecting its other concerns. They noted that Mr. Obama convened a National Security Council on meeting on Friday to discuss the implementation of his new Afghanistan policy.
"It's only a problem if the whole government isn't functioning properly," a senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to publicly discuss internal matters. "What you see here is a good example of the government functioning well."
Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Mark Landler from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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11) Candidate Bans Worsen Iraq's Political Turmoil
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html?ref=world
BAGHDAD - Iraqi officials have done little to clarify who, exactly, has been disqualified from running for Parliament in March because of ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. They did, however, make clear on Sunday that, contrary to Iraqi television news, the government's own spokesman was not among those declared a Baathist and therefore unfit for office.
The fate of the country's defense minister was another matter. So was that of dozens of members of a political alliance led by one of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's top rivals, Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister since 2006.
More than a week after Iraq's Accountability and Justice Commission first announced that it had disqualified at least 15 parties to run for Parliament, it remained unclear how many candidates out of more than 6,000 who have registered would be excluded - and which ones had been..
On Thursday, Iraq's election commission announced that 499 were disqualified, but it postponed the publication of a list on Sunday, saying that still more names would be added Monday.
Far from dissipating, the political turmoil caused by the accountability commission - a little-known government agency headed by an official who until August was in an American prison on charges of orchestrating a 2008 bombing in Baghdad that killed two American embassy workers, two American soldiers and six Iraqis - only worsened over the weekend.
Maysoun al-Damlouji, a member of Parliament from Mr. Bolani's bloc, compared the swirl of events to watching a Bollywood movie from India - in Hindi, without subtitles.
"We don't know what's going on," Ms. Damlouji said.
The disqualification of so many candidates threatened to undermine a national election that has widely been cast as another test of Iraq's nascent democracy. According to many lawmakers and experts, Iraq appears to be failing, raising fears of violence rather than political reconciliation as American troops steadily withdraw, nearly seven years after the American-led invasion that toppled Mr. Hussein.
Among those known to be disqualified is Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni leader of a broad secular coalition that also includes a former Shiite prime minister, Ayad Allawi. The coalition, known in Arabic as Iraqiya, is widely seen as the most formidable challenger to Mr. Maliki's bloc and a second, largely Shiite alliance.
Mr. Mutlaq had been expected to do well among Sunni voters, who largely boycotted Iraq's first post-Hussein parliamentary elections in 2005, but his disqualification seemed to splinter, rather than unite, the coalition. "This can only serve to reignite sectarian war," Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, a research organization, said of the disqualifications.
The opacity of the process only compounded the confusion and anger over the weekend. The government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, was reported by at least one Iraqi television channel to be among those disqualified because, he said in a telephone interview, his name was similar to someone else's on the list.
The commission announced Sunday that he and three others had not been disqualified, but declined to specify who had been. Falah Shanshal, a Shiite lawmaker who heads the parliamentary committee overseeing the Accountability and Justice Commission, denounced leaks of names to the news media - including presumably, Mr. Dabbagh's - as "all untrue," but he too declined to be specific.
Another member of the same committee, Rashid Azzawi, said Sunday that he had resigned in protest because of the way the disqualifications had been carried out.
The disqualification of Iraq's defense minister, Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi, appeared most puzzling of all. He has run the ministry since 2006, by most accounts capably, and is running as a candidate on Mr. Maliki's coalition. A spokesman for the ministry, Brig. Gen. Ali Salih, declined to comment on Sunday, but said a response was expected Monday.
"Our political parties don't have real political and economic programs," said Hazim al-Nuaimi, the director of Middle Eastern studies at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. "So instead of struggling over programs and candidates' capabilities, they are trying to exclude each other - even within the same party or alliance."
Some officials pleaded for calm and patience, suggesting some compromise was possible. Mr. Dabbagh said that while "politically it might be a disturbing issue," another panel in Parliament had the power to consider appeals by disqualified candidates.
Mr. Maliki, for his part, has said nothing to suggest he opposes the disqualifications, but he emphasized "the importance of not politicizing the process," according to a statement issued by his office on Saturday.
The accountability commission, a remnant of the original committee created to purge Iraq's government ministries of former leaders of the Baath Party after the American invasion in 2003, appeared to be digging in.
Its chairman, Ali Faisal al-Lami, stood by the disqualifications in spite of the furor, and the country's election commission has, so far, agreed. Mr. Lami previously headed the de-Baathification committee, as it was known, until his arrest in 2008. Once he was released in August, he returned to the new commission.
In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Lami's commission accused the United Nations of interfering in Iraq. The United Nations, with the United States, has lobbied against the disqualifications.
Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri, Riyadh Mohammed, Duraid Adnan and Omar al-Jawoshy.
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12) Pakistan Says Drone Strike Kills 15
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/asia/18pstan.html?ref=world
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Missiles fired from American aircraft killed as many as 15 people in western Pakistan on Sunday, Pakistani security officials said, part of an increased campaign by the United States to use drones to kill militants.
The target of the strike was a compound owned by a member of the Mehsud tribe, which leads the Pakistani Taliban, in the Shaktu area of South Waziristan. The area is near the border with Afghanistan where the Pakistani military has been conducting operations against the Taliban.
A similar attack on Thursday killed 12 militants in the same area, and according to Pakistani security officials, it wounded Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of Pakistani Taliban. His predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in an American drone strike in August.
The Shaktu area of South Waziristan borders North Waziristan, which American officials say is the main haven for militants from Al Qaeda and for the Afghan Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani.
The Pakistani military's operation in South Waziristan is believed to have forced militants to flee to North Waziristan, and the United States has been pressing Pakistan to conduct operations there.
Hakimullah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the suicide attack that killed eight people at a C.I.A. base in Khost, Afghanistan, late last month. His appearance in a video with the bomber suggested strong links between the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, as well as the Afghan Taliban.
Drone attacks are controversial in Pakistan, whose officials argue publicly that the attacks violate their sovereignty. But privately those officials do not oppose the strikes, which many United States officials believe have been effective in weakening the Taliban and Al Qaeda by killing many of their senior leaders.
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13) United States Attorney Plans Drug-Terrorism Unit
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
January 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/nyregion/18terror.html?ref=us
The United States attorney in Manhattan is merging the two units in his office that prosecute terrorism and international narcotics cases, saying that he wants to focus more on extremist Islamic groups whose members he believes are increasingly turning to the drug trade to finance their activities.
Some Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long pointed to what they say are the symbiotic relationships that sometimes exist between terrorist groups and narcotics traffickers, from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Hezbollah in the Middle East to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
But the move by the United States attorney, Preet Bharara, comes as United States officials have suggested that some members of Islamic extremist groups, including Al Qaeda and some of its affiliates, are more frequently turning to the drug trade - as well as kidnapping and other criminal activities - to help finance their operations.
It is, they say, partly a response to increased pressure on other financial sources, like Islamic charities and private donors.
By merging the units, Terrorism and National Security and International Narcotics Trafficking, Mr. Bharara said he is combining two groups that have developed many of the same skills - working overseas, often using classified information, to build complex cases against sophisticated targets.
The new unit, he said, would be better able to bring drug charges to bear against some terrorists, as well as use a new law that gives federal drug agents the authority to pursue narcotics and terrorism crimes committed anywhere in the world if they can establish a link between a drug offense and a terrorist act or group.
Noting the debate over the appropriateness of bringing terrorists to trial in civilian courts, Mr. Bharara said that federal authorities were facing people who want to kill Americans and were branching out into narcotics distribution and transportation.
"We have these tools in the criminal justice system," he said, noting that in some cases, "you don't necessarily need just the N.S.A. or the C.I.A.; you have abilities to get at them and to infiltrate them and to stop them - it just adds to the arsenal of ways to go after these people."
He added, "It would be sort of law enforcement and national security malpractice not to also be going at it this way."
The new unit, Terrorism and International Narcotics, will employ 21 prosecutors, including three supervisors, drawn from the two components, Mr. Bharara said. It will be headed by Michael Farbiarz, 36, who had served as a deputy in the terrorism unit, and Anjan Sahni, 33, formerly the chief of International Narcotics; their deputy will be Jocelyn Strauber, 36, who was Mr. Sahni's No. 2 in the narcotics unit.
The move effectively doubles the number of prosecutors in the office handling terrorism cases as it prepares for the trial of the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and four other former Guantánamo Bay detainees. It is a major undertaking that will unquestionably prove to be a significant draw on the unit's resources.
In part because groups like Al Qaeda operate in a murky netherworld, determining with certainty the source of the money that fuels such networks - subsidizing training, travel, weapons, day-to-day life and actual operations - is extremely difficult.
And tracking the roles and activities of members and people associated with these secretive groups also can present a formidable challenge, one that at times results in divergent views among government agencies about the level of involvement in the drug trade by members of some groups, like Al Qaeda.
In fact, two government officials who track counterterrorism issues played down the notion of a recent increase in narcotics activity by Islamic extremists. One, a senior Obama administration official, said that most extremists were reluctant to get involved with people outside their group who do not share their ideology. But he noted that as the need for financing grows, such concerns recede.
But officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration, who have worked closely with the narcotics prosecutors in Mr. Bharara's office, say the growing use of Africa as a route to move hundreds of tons of cocaine from South America to Europe has underscored the problem.
One of the officials, Derek Maltz, who heads the D.E.A.'s Special Operations Division in Virginia, which works with more than a dozen other law enforcement and intelligence agencies to stymie major traffickers that operate across international boundaries, acknowledged that the increase was difficult to quantify.
But he added, "Every day, in my position I see more and more examples - real examples - either through credible informants or actually investigative activity, where you start to see different groups involved with drug traffickers."
The transportation route through West and North Africa - where swaths of desert are controlled by extremist groups tied to Al Qaeda and corruption and instability are widespread - has brought traffickers into closer proximity with various terror groups, several officials said.
Indeed, the officials, as well as Mr. Bharara, pointed to a case last month in which the D.E.A. arrested three African men in a sting based on drug and terrorism charges brought by the prosecutor's office. The men, who prosecutors say are tied to Al Qaeda, were accused of conspiring to move cocaine across the region with the assistance of Al Qaeda and another group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. They were taken into custody in Ghana, expelled and flown to New York to face the charges.
The creation of the new unit - coupled with the new law that gives the D.E.A. more authority to investigate such cases - opens the door for greater involvement in terrorism cases by the anti-drug agency.
The original terrorism unit in the prosecutor's office was the first of its kind in the nation, and its lawyers were long the pre-eminent terrorism prosecutors in the nation, winning convictions in the first World Trade Center bombing case and the bombing case stemming from Al Qaeda's 1998 attacks on United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, among others.
The new unit comes into being at a time when the United States attorney's office in Brooklyn has brought a series of terrorism cases that some officials say have equaled or outpaced recent cases brought by its counterpart in Manhattan, something that would have seemed unimaginable in years past.
The Brooklyn office has obtained indictments against the Denver airport shuttle bus driver arrested this fall in a Qaeda bomb plot and against two of his associates. It has also won the cooperation of a Long Island man who spent months in Qaeda training camps in Pakistan and took part in two attacks against American troops, and has dismantled the United States fund-raising operations of the Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan terror group.
Gretchen Peters, whose book "Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda" was published in May, said her research showed a long history of Qaeda involvement in the drug trade.
But she noted that the group's senior cadre served more as facilitators, setting up meetings between traffickers and other powerful figures in the region.
"It's wrong to think that you're going to find Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri driving a jingle truck full of dope down the Kandahar highway," she said.
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14) Blacks in Retreat
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
January 19, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/opinion/19herbert.html?hp
It has been easy for people to forget in the decades since we lost the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that he was a passionate fighter for economic justice as well as civil rights. The two goals were as closely linked as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water.
The historic gathering in 1963 at which Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech was officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
And when Dr. King was murdered in Memphis in 1968, he had gone there to support sanitation workers who were striking for higher wages and better working conditions.
Jobs and freedom. In America, you can't have one without the other. Democrats are in deep trouble right now - just a year after their giddy celebration of Barack Obama's ascendance to the presidency - because so many millions of Americans are out of work, unable to find the gainful employment that would unlock the door to a stable future for themselves and their families.
The president and his party may be obsessed with health care, but unemployed and underemployed Americans want a job. Why this has been so hard for the Democrats to realize, I can't say.
As the nation continues to wallow in the trough of widespread unemployment, black Americans are bearing a disproportionate burden of the joblessness. The election of a black president may have been important to African-Americans for myriad reasons, but it hasn't done much for their bottom line, which continues to deteriorate.
For example, without a dramatic new intervention by the federal government, the poverty rate for African-American children could eventually approach a heart-stopping 50 percent, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Already more than a third of black children are living in poverty.
Present trends are not good. Communities of color are being crushed economically and the national news media have not fully focused on the carnage. The official unemployment rate for blacks is 16.2 percent and could well pass 17 percent before the year is out. The real jobless rate is far more ghastly. The Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy noted that even "college-educated black men are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as their white, college-educated counterparts."
In some poor neighborhoods, a man or woman with a traditional full-time job is the exception, not the rule. In five Midwestern states - Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Oklahoma - the jobless rate for blacks is at least three times as high as that for whites.
Some decades ago, you would have heard a sustained outcry against such dire conditions among blacks, and there would have been loud demands for policy changes designed to bring more black Americans into the economic mainstream. You don't hear much of that now. Too many so-called black leaders are much more interested in invitations to the White House and positive profiles in mainstream publications than in raising any kind of ruckus that might benefit people in real trouble.
What the politicians and today's civil rights types won't tell you is that we're looking ahead to many long decades of grief and strife in America's black communities because of our failure to respond effectively to the horrendous impact of the Great Recession and the policies that led up to it. Black Americans are going backward economically, and right now no one is stepping up to stop the retreat.
United for a Fair Economy, in its latest "State of the Dream" report, which is released annually around the time of Dr. King's birthday, is urging Congress and the president to identify communities with the highest unemployment rates and develop specific job-creation initiatives for them.
That kind of targeted effort is desperately needed, but don't hold your breath. There is precious little sentiment for programs that would provide real help to communities trapped in the nightmarish depths of this downturn, whether the residents are mostly black, mostly white, mostly Hispanic, or whatever.
Speaking about one of his many antipoverty initiatives, Dr. King told Look magazine in 1968: "We called our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, were confronting."
That was then. The loudest voices against poverty and economic injustice of all kinds have long since faded. The government, reclining comfortably on a vast cushion of campaign contributions, has allied itself with big business and the big banks against the interests of ordinary Americans. Millions upon millions of families are suffering, but mostly in silence.
We honor Dr. King with a national holiday, but his long campaign for economic justice has been all but forgotten.
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15) U.S. Troops Land With Aid at Presidential Site in Haiti
By RAY RIVERA and SIMON ROMERO
January 20, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/world/americas/20haiti.html?hp
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Helicopters carrying dozens of American troops landed on the lawn of Haiti's destroyed National Palace on Tuesday morning, a potent symbol of the United States' escalating military presence in Haiti since the earthquake that struck a week ago.
With hundreds of Haitians watching and cheering from outside the white-and-green palace gates, troops in combat fatigues bounded out of the helicopters, carrying food rations, bottled water and other gear across the grass, according to photographs and news reports from the scene.
The troops, who appeared to be establishing a position at the palace, were among the roughly 5,000 United States military personnel already in Haiti; thousands more are expected.
American troops took control of the airport in the immediate aftermath of the devastating earthquake, and have been distributing food and water and providing security for the relief effort. But they have, for the most part, not been a major presence on the streets.
Given the long history of American military intervention in Haiti - stretching back to a Marine landing in 1915 - commanders took pains on Tuesday to reassure Haitians that the United States was not invading.
Col. Gregory Kane of the United States Army told reporters at the Port-au-Prince airport - which has come to resemble an American military base, with helicopters coming and going continually - that the Haitian government remained in charge. He said that United States forces were only on the ground to assist in the relief efforts.
"There have been some reports and news stories out there that the U.S. is invading Haiti," Colonel Kane said. "We're not invading Haiti. That's ludicrous. This is humanitarian relief."
Many Haitians seemed to welcome the promise of help from American troops. In the capital's Nazon neighborhood, a hand-painted sign on a collapsed building read: "Welcome the US Marines. We need some help." An arrow on the it pointed into the building, warning, "Dead bodies inside."
At the police station near the airport that has become the Haitian government's de facto headquarters, President René Préval and ministers held meetings and discussed urgent needs and the latest information on the damage.
In an interview there, the first lady, Elisabeth Delatour Préval, said Mr. Préval was preparing to address the nation later in the day or on Wednesday, by radio, and answered criticism that he had not yet done so.
"Every single person who lives through that experience is under shock," she said. "That doesn't mean they can't assemble their thoughts and think reasonably. He's trying to focus on what the priorities are, and those priorities are changing every minute."
Mrs. Préval said that she and the president were about the enter their residence at the National Palace when the earthquake struck. They stepped back from the stately building, she said, and it collapsed before them. For hours, rumors circulated around the capital that she had been killed.
She said that Mr. Préval quickly jumped onto the back of a motorcycle taxi to tour hospitals and damaged areas, and that he had been in nonstop emergency meetings since. Government ministers, she added, initially held meetings in the yard of the collapsed palace to.
Other troops are also on the way. The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday unanimously approved sending an additional 3,500 police and peacekeeping troops for Haiti, both to maintain public order and to guard deliveries as the aid effort gathers steam. The forces will augment the 9,000 United Nations troops already here.
So far, violence has been scattered in Port-au-Prince. But senior United Nations officials said it might boil over at any moment as the difficulties of living without water, food and shelter mount.
"We need to be very much careful and vigilant against any possibility," the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said in an interview in New York. "When their patience level becomes thinner - that is when we have to be concerned."
Haiti's capital showed faint signs on Tuesday that life in its most basic form was slowly clawing back amid the chaos and destruction.
The streets of Port-au-Prince contained scenes of commerce and activity Tuesday morning, instead of just devastation and death. Merchants sold fruits and vegetables amid the rubble of destroyed businesses. More cars were winding through the debris-strewn streets.
Women walked with baskets on their heads filled with fruit, cookies an other sundries, functioning as mobile stores. At a homeless encampment at a golf course in the Bourdon neighborhood, impromptu markets have opened up, though prices were high. A woman frying chicken in a pot outside her tent sold each piece for 30 gourde, about $1 - half a day's wages here. Another woman offered scoops of rice from a large sack balanced on her head, about 30 gourde for a cup and a half, about double the cost before the earthquake.
"It is what I must pay," the woman, Luciana Delane, explained, saying she had the sack before the earthquake but would have to replace it at increased costs when it runs out. Helicopters buzzed overhead as foreign governments and aid groups tried to coordinate the piecemeal distribution of fresh water, food and medical help.
Meanwhile, people continued to stream out of the capital in an uncertain quest for shelter, fresh water and stability in the interior of the country.
There seemed to be no certainty on any front, not even on the death toll. Alain Le Roy, the United Nations peacekeeping chief, said Monday he could not confirm estimates of as many as 200,000 dead.
He said that as far as he knew, the toll had not surpassed 50,000 dead. "I don't think anybody knows, to be frank," he told reporters in New York.
For many residents, one clear thing appeared to be the need to leave. Bus after bus lined up at gas stations throughout the city, hoping to fill up with fuel before beginning the long trek out of the earthquake-ravaged zone around the capital. Some people lugged overstuffed suitcases; others carried little more than the clothes they were wearing and enough money to pay the new, higher fares.
At one gas station, the messages on some buses, painted in bright colors above their windshields, evoked something more than hope: Christ Est la Réponse (Christ Is the Answer) and Courage Mon Frère (Courage, My Brother).
"I don't know if I'm coming back," said Marcelaine Calixte, 20, a student whose house and college had collapsed, sitting on a crowded bus Monday afternoon headed to Les Cayes, a southern town.
Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, arrived in Haiti Monday afternoon and toured the city's general hospital. "It is astonishing what they're accomplishing," Mr. Clinton said afterward, adding that he had been told that the hospital was overwhelmed with patients. They filled its rooms and hallways, and even open areas in the yard outside. Mr. Clinton said he heard of vodka being used to sterilize and of operations performed without lights.
One of the patients outside, Vladamir Tanget, 24, lay on a mattress with a broken leg.
"The government is not doing anything," he complained. "We need outsiders to come."
Ginger Thompson and Marc Lacey contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, James C. McKinley Jr. from Miami, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
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16) US Security Company Offers to Perform "High Threat Terminations" and to Confront "Worker Unrest" in Haiti
Here we go: New Orleans 2.0
By Jeremy Scahill
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/179-natural-disaster-/775-us-qsecurityq-companies-eying-haiti
We saw this type of Iraq-style disaster profiteering in New Orleans and you can expect to see a lot more of this in Haiti over the coming days, weeks and months. Private security companies are seeing big dollar signs in Haiti thanks in no small part to the media hype about "looters." After Katrina, the number of private security companies registered (and unregistered) multiplied overnight. Banks, wealthy individuals, the US government all hired private security. I even encountered Israeli mercenaries operating an armed check-point outside of an elite gated community in New Orleans. They worked for a company called Instinctive Shooting International. (That is not a joke).
Now, it is kicking into full gear in Haiti. As we know, the member companies of the Orwellian-named mercenary trade association, the International Peace Operations Association, are offering their services in Haiti. But look for more stories like this one:
On January 15, a Florida based company called All Pro Legal Investigations registered the URL Haiti-Security.com. It is basically a copy of the company's existing US website but is now targeted for business in Haiti, claiming the "purpose of this site is to act as a clearinghouse for information seekers on the state of security in Haiti."
"All Protection and Security has made a commitment to the Haitian community and will provide professional security against any threat to prosperity in Haiti," the site proclaims. "Job sites and supply convoys will be protected against looters and vandals. Workers will be protected against gang violence and intimidation. The people of Haiti will recover, with the help of the good people from the world over."
The company boasts that it has run "Thousands of successful missions in Iraq & Afghanistan." As for its personnel, "Each and every member of our team is a former Law Enforcement Officer or former Military service member," the site claims. "If Operator experience, training and qualifications matter, choose All Protection & Security for your high-threat Haiti security needs."
Among the services offered are: "High Threat terminations," dealing with "worker unrest," armed guards and "Armed Cargo Escorts." Oh, and apparently they are currently hiring.
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17) Aid to Haiti Speeds Up, but Delays Plague Effort
By CHARLES FORELLE, JOSé DE CóRDOBA And JOE LAURIA
January 17, 2010
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703626604575011611504785170.html
One week after an earthquake pulverized Haiti, emergency supplies of
water, food and medicine are beginning to reach large numbers of the
country's desperate survivors. The number of U.S. troops in Haiti is
expected to reach about 10,000 by midweek to help transport emergency
supplies, provide security and clear debris.
In the interim, however, residents have perished as distraught
relatives awaited rescue teams and equipment that didn't arrive in
time. Homeless people still camp on the streets, wondering why aid is
taking so long. "They say there's help, but it doesn't arrive," said
Henock Volmidor, an unemployed hotel worker, at a makeshift refugee
camp on Monday.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the Indian Ocean tsunami in
2004 that killed at least 230,000 people in 13 countries, the United
Nations and emergency-relief organizations vowed to avert the
disorganization that plagued that effort. More than 300 charities
showed up in Aceh, Indonesia, with little coordination between them.
WSJ reporter Mike Esterl talks about the challenging situation on the
ground in Haiti. Video courtesy of Fox News.
The U.N. established a rapid-response system to coordinate the work of
its agencies with nonprofit organizations, an online database to track
assistance and avoid duplication, and a special emergency-relief fund
that released $10 million within 24 hours of the Haitian quake. The
U.N. quickly sent to Haiti an assessment team whose tasks included
dispatching search-and-rescue squads that arrived from Iceland, China,
France and the U.S. Meanwhile, what was left of the Haitian government
put out an urgent request to the U.S. ambassador for help.
"The message, basically, was, 'Send everything you've got,'" says
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.
Relief experts working in Haiti say the new U.N. system has prevented
the kind of chaos evident in Aceh, although it remains imperfect. "Any
system you have will struggle in the first 24 to 48 hours, not to
organize itself, but to get stuff on the ground," says John Holmes,
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. Some
disorganization also has been evident.
During a visit to Haiti on Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
conceded that international search-and-rescue teams needed to be "more
balanced" in looking for victims of all nationalities and not just
their own. He also suggested too few teams had been sent-even though
on Friday, the U.N. had appealed to nations not to send any more
rescue squads.
On Monday, he asked the U.N. Security Council to authorize 2,000 more
peacekeepers and 1,500 more U.N. police for Haiti. "The heartbreaking
scenes I saw yesterday [in Haiti] compel us to act quickly," Mr. Ban
said. "I saw mass destruction and mass need."
It has been unclear at times who is in charge-the U.S. military, which
controls the main airport, or the U.N., which ostensibly oversees the
relief operation. Benoit Leduc, operations manager for Doctors Without
Borders in Haiti, on Monday said "hundreds of lives" were lost because
five of its planes carrying surgical teams and equipment weren't
allowed to land and were diverted to Santo Domingo.
"I don't really know who is in charge," he said. Several countries and
other aid groups also have complained that the U.S. military has
refused to let some of their supply planes land at Haiti's crippled
airport.
"It's a question of physics," says Capt. John Kirby, a U.S. military
spokesman in Haiti. "The airport is the only way in, it only has one
runway, and there are literally hundreds of flights trying to make it
in." Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Monday that the U.N. and
its peacekeeping force is "in the lead" in Haiti.
The U.S. military is reluctant to move shipments out of the airport
without a security escort, sometimes causing added delays. "Twenty
containers go out, but you have to have about 100 heavily armed
soldiers," says Gilberto Castro, emergency response director of
transport company Deutsche Post DHL, which is handling hundreds of
tons of aid.
U.S. officials have blamed security concerns for holding up providing
relief. Yet a team of Cuban doctors were seen Monday treating hundreds
of patients without a gun or soldier in sight. The deputy chief of
mission at the American Embassy in Haiti, David Lindwall, said the
U.S. had done a lot, but that some teams and supplies "aren't getting
out as broadly as we'd like because of security" concerns.
Still, search and rescue teams from around the world have saved 71
people from the rubble of fallen buildings, said Tim Callaghan, chief
of the U.S. Disaster Assistance Response Team in Haiti. He said 39 of
those were saved by U.S.-based teams.
U.S. Rescue teams continued search operations Tuesday despite what
they admit are ever-slimmer chances of finding survivors beneath the
rubble of collapsed buildings. "There might be a needle in the
haystack so don't give up," Rex Strickland, operations chief for a
search-and rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., told his 72-member
crew on Tuesday morning. Searchers from the U.S. Air Force have
shifted from missions based on specific reports of trapped people to
general sweeps of affected neighborhoods.
The odds of finding survivors fall after 7 or 8 days, according to
Mark Stone, spokesman for the Fairfax team. "The window is shutting
relatively quickly," said Mr. Stone. Rescuers from California,
however, found a woman alive monday. She had been buried in her bed,
according to U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Keith O'Grady.
On Monday, the U.S. began some air drops of food and water, a move
that U.S. and U.N. officials had said they would avoid because the
drops can invite violent scrambles among refugees.
Many relief experts say no global response plan could likely have
averted the delays seen during the initial days following the
earthquake, given the scale of the destruction and Haiti's poor
infrastructure. The earthquake knocked out the control tower at the
main airport, decimated the capital's port and crippled major roads
needed to ferry supplies. The U.N.'s top lieutenants in Haiti were
killed, as were many Haitian officials. The local government, which
normally would take charge of the relief effort, was paralyzed. And
there were widespread fuel shortages at a time when electricity was
out.
"Here you have a disaster of huge magnitude concentrated in the
capital of one of the most dysfunctional countries in the world," says
Andrew Natsios, who ran the U.S. Agency for International Development
under President George W. Bush and is a veteran of relief operations
going back to the 1980s. "No matter what, it takes five or six days to
get in place and to really open the spigot."
The roads of Port-au-Prince are in miserable condition in normal
times. Unpaved, uneven, twisty and steeply graded roads thwart trucks.
Port-au-Prince's Toussaint L'Ouverture airport, which normally handles
about a dozen flights a day, is now receiving close to 70 flights a
day, ranging from U.S. Air Force C-130s to small chartered jets.
The airport not only lacks warehouse space, but also machinery to
unload the international aid from as far away as China. The U.S.
military was forced to fly in giant forklifts. On Sunday, the Spanish
government shipped a high-tech water-purification system in a
Colombian airliner. But the airport didn't have a loader capable of
removing the heavy, sensitive equipment. Neither DHL nor U.S. soldiers
would risk damaging the plane by unloading it. So the plane sat for
hours, until a squad of Spanish firemen showed up to remove the water
gear.
The U.S. military is relatively new at spearheading massive relief
efforts; Washington has turned increasingly to the military for
disaster relief in part to boost the image of the U.S. diplomatically.
Although it had assisted during crises such as in Somalia and Bosnia
in the 1990s, the Pentagon's role in the tsunami effort, when it sent
huge numbers of U.S. ships, planes and military personnel, marked a
stepped-up role. Afterward, the military assisted the rescue and
feeding of tens of thousands of people following the 2005 earthquake
in Pakistan.
"People forget, but this extensive use of the U.S. military in
humanitarian relief work is relatively new," said John Simon, who
helped coordinate disaster assistance in the Bush White House.
The pace of military response has quickened. Prior to the tsunami,
requests for military assistance after a major hurricane or
earthquake-normally channeled first through the State Department-could
take days or even longer to review. But in 2007, the Defense
Department whittled the approval process down to a matter of hours.
Moving quickly, though, often hinges on luck. After the 2005 Pakistan
earthquake, the U.S. was able to commandeer more than 30 helicopters,
which already were in place in neighboring Afghanistan. "We could not
have done that work without them," says Mr. Simon.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to getting supplies into Haiti quickly is
the state of the country's chief cargo port. "The pier has collapsed
and the cargo cranes are in the water," says U.S. Coast Guard Captain
Jim McPherson.
He says ships which had been en route to Haiti are sitting offshore
unable to pick up or discharge cargo. "You've got to get the pipeline
bigger," he says. "It's essential to the country to get the port
going."
-Steve Stecklow, Neil King and Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.
Write to Steve Stecklow at steve.stecklow@wsj.com, Charles Forelle at
charles.forelle@wsj.com and Joe Lauria at newseditor@wsj.com
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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