Activist Supports Probe of Aid Raid

Published on Friday, July 30, 2010 by the Albuquerque Jounal (New Mexico)

Activist Supports Probe of Aid Raid

by Charles D. Brunt

The United States should join the call for an independent investigation of Israel's handling of the Gaza Aid Flotilla, in which nine activists were killed and dozens, including several Israeli soldiers, were wounded, a former Army colonel and ex-diplomat said Tuesday in Albuquerque.

(photo by Ann Wright/ uploaded from Flickr uscodepinkhq)

Ann Wright, who served 29 years in the Army and nearly six years as a diplomat for the State Department, was one of three department officials to resign over the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Now an outspoken peace activist, Wright took part in the May 30-31 Gaza Aid Flotilla in which six civilian ships tried to go through Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, ostensibly to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.

The flotilla, organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, was reportedly carrying humanitarian aid, medical supplies, construction materials and 718 international activists, journalists and crewmen.

After repeated warnings by Israeli Defense Force officials to turn back, the ships continued toward Gaza until they were boarded by Israeli commandos and taken to the port of Ashdod. Shots were fired during the boarding, resulting in the deaths.

All the participants were detained and deported within weeks. The ships and their cargo - including all records of the incident collected by the roughly 70 journalists on board - remain in Israeli hands.

"They took every camera we had, they took every cell phone we had. They took every computer we had," Wright told about 75 people gathered at First Congregational Church at the invitation of Veterans for Peace.

"All of the evidence ... is in the hands of the Israeli military," she said. "That's why we need an independent, neutral investigation, and the international community forcing Israel to give up the rest of the evidence."

The U.N. Security Council condemned the raid and demanded an impartial investigation. Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plea for President Barack Obama to veto any Security Council condemnation of Israel, Obama has refused to do so.

Israel has said the three-year blockade of Gaza is needed to keep weapons and militants from infiltrating the Hamas-run territory.

Wright said the world has a one-sided view of what occurred because Israel has released only portions of confiscated video, Wright said.

"This is why we need an independent investigation," she said. "Right now, we only have the Israeli side of the story."

Wright is adamant that her activism is fueled by concern for the Palestinian people who, she said, live in an Israeli-imposed "open-air prison."

Though noting that Hamas - labeled a terrorist organization by the United States - was democratically elected by the Palestinians, Wright said she does not support the Palestinian government.

"I am there to help the people of Gaza. It's a very clear distinction to me."

Wright is now organizing another attempt to get past the blockade, this time under the banner of a group called U.S. Ship to Gaza.

© 2010 Albuquerque Journal

 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/30-0

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

Activist Supports Probe of Aid Raid

Published on Friday, July 30, 2010 by the Albuquerque Jounal (New Mexico)

Activist Supports Probe of Aid Raid

by Charles D. Brunt

The United States should join the call for an independent investigation of Israel's handling of the Gaza Aid Flotilla, in which nine activists were killed and dozens, including several Israeli soldiers, were wounded, a former Army colonel and ex-diplomat said Tuesday in Albuquerque.

(photo by Ann Wright/ uploaded from Flickr uscodepinkhq)

Ann Wright, who served 29 years in the Army and nearly six years as a diplomat for the State Department, was one of three department officials to resign over the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Now an outspoken peace activist, Wright took part in the May 30-31 Gaza Aid Flotilla in which six civilian ships tried to go through Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, ostensibly to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.

The flotilla, organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, was reportedly carrying humanitarian aid, medical supplies, construction materials and 718 international activists, journalists and crewmen.

After repeated warnings by Israeli Defense Force officials to turn back, the ships continued toward Gaza until they were boarded by Israeli commandos and taken to the port of Ashdod. Shots were fired during the boarding, resulting in the deaths.

All the participants were detained and deported within weeks. The ships and their cargo - including all records of the incident collected by the roughly 70 journalists on board - remain in Israeli hands.

"They took every camera we had, they took every cell phone we had. They took every computer we had," Wright told about 75 people gathered at First Congregational Church at the invitation of Veterans for Peace.

"All of the evidence ... is in the hands of the Israeli military," she said. "That's why we need an independent, neutral investigation, and the international community forcing Israel to give up the rest of the evidence."

The U.N. Security Council condemned the raid and demanded an impartial investigation. Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plea for President Barack Obama to veto any Security Council condemnation of Israel, Obama has refused to do so.

Israel has said the three-year blockade of Gaza is needed to keep weapons and militants from infiltrating the Hamas-run territory.

Wright said the world has a one-sided view of what occurred because Israel has released only portions of confiscated video, Wright said.

"This is why we need an independent investigation," she said. "Right now, we only have the Israeli side of the story."

Wright is adamant that her activism is fueled by concern for the Palestinian people who, she said, live in an Israeli-imposed "open-air prison."

Though noting that Hamas - labeled a terrorist organization by the United States - was democratically elected by the Palestinians, Wright said she does not support the Palestinian government.

"I am there to help the people of Gaza. It's a very clear distinction to me."

Wright is now organizing another attempt to get past the blockade, this time under the banner of a group called U.S. Ship to Gaza.

© 2010 Albuquerque Journal

 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/30-0

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

Report Suggests 'Correlation' between U.S. Aid and Army Killings

Published on Friday, July 30, 2010 by Inter Press Service

Report Suggests 'Correlation' between U.S. Aid and Army Killings

by Helda Martínez

BOGOTÁ - "There are alarming links between increased reports of extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian army and units that receive U.S. military financing," John Lindsay-Poland, lead author of a two-year study on the question, told IPS.

Lindsay-Poland is Research and Advocacy Director for the U.S.-based Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which presented a new report, "Military Assistance and Human Rights: Colombia, U.S. Accountability, and Global Implications", in Bogotá Thursday.

The report, produced in conjunction with the U.S. Office on Colombia (USOC), studies the application in Colombia of the so-called Leahy Law, passed in 1996, which bans military assistance to a foreign security force unit if the U.S. State Department has credible evidence that the unit has committed gross human rights violations.

The Leahy Law is one of the main U.S. laws designed to protect against the use of U.S. foreign aid to commit human rights abuses.

"If the Leahy Law was fully implemented, assistance would have to be suspended to nearly all fixed army brigades and many mobile brigades in Colombia," Lindsay-Poland said.

The report points out that most military training in Colombia is funded by the U.S. Defence Department.

Colombia, caught up in an armed conflict for nearly five decades, is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the world, along with Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

The study reviewed data on more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions reportedly committed by the armed forces in Colombia since 2002 and lists of more than 500 military units assisted by the United States since 2000.

"We found that for many military units, reports of extrajudicial executions increased during and after the highest levels of U.S. assistance," Lindsay-Poland said.

The results were obtained by comparing the number of reports of such killings in the two years prior to the start of Plan Colombia -- the multibillion-dollar U.S. military aid package -- in 2000 with the number of killings after the launch of that counterinsurgency and anti-drug strategy.

It also found that reports of alleged killings of civilians by the army dropped when assistance was cut.

"Whatever correlation may exist between assistance and reported killings, there are clearly other factors contributing to high levels of killings. Yet, while we could not fix the causes of increased reports of killings after increases in U.S. assistance, our findings highlight the need for a thorough investigation into the reasons for this apparent correlation," the authors say.

"The U.S. government should respond to the questions raised by the report," Lindsay-Poland said.

For example, "why U.S. officials neglect their duties under the Leahy Law, not only in Colombia but in countries like Pakistan, where the situation is very complex."

The U.S. military presence in Colombia dates back to the 1940s, when leftwing guerrillas became active in the country. But it escalated to a new level in 1999 when Plan Colombia was agreed by the governments of then presidents Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001).

Plan Colombia was complemented and extended in 2004 by Plan Patriot, signed by President Álvaro Uribe, whose term ends Aug. 7, and former president George W. Bush (2001-2009).

The two plans have undergone radical changes since 2009, according to Lindsay-Poland, when they reached beyond the initial aims of counterinsurgency and counternarcotics, with a view towards strengthening U.S. control in the region.

U.S. army Southern Command documents state the importance of establishing a base "with air mobility reach on the South American continent and a capacity for counter-narcotics operations until the year 2025," he said.

Uribe offered the U.S. military the use of seven bases at strategic points in Colombia, including both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the province of Caquetá in the Amazon jungle, and the provinces of Meta, Tolima and Cundinamarca in the centre of the country.

Lindsay-Poland and other members of FOR tried to visit the Palanquero base in Cundinamarca, one of the seven, on Wednesday. But "they did not let us in," he said. "They demanded authorisation from the U.S. Embassy. So what kind of autonomy are we talking about here?"

Furthermore, the agreement for U.S. military access to the bases has not been approved by the Colombian Congress, as required by law.

As a result, the Constitutional Court ruled the agreement unconstitutional on Jul. 22 and gave Congress one year to approve or reject it.

If the legislature ratifies the deal, the Constitutional Court will once again study it, to determine whether or not it is in line with the constitution.

The report presented by FOR and USOC coincided with the start of an investigation of reports of unmarked graves in the La Macarena cemetery, which is next to an army base, according to a Jul. 22 public hearing in that town in the central province of Meta, which was attended by opposition lawmakers and international observers, including European legislators.

At the hearing, witnesses said military helicopters flew in the remains of bodies to La Macarena, 340 km south of Bogotá. Human rights groups say the bodies were those of civilians killed by the army.

"This is happening at the end of a government marked by grave human rights violations, which have largely affected the most vulnerable groups in society, and which are reflected in the thousands of 'false positives', as the extrajudicial executions have been popularly known," Alberto Yepes, director of the Observatorio de Derechos Humanos (DIH - Human Rights Observatory), told IPS.

The scandal over the so-called "false positives" -- young civilians killed by the army and passed off as guerrilla casualties in the military's counterinsurgency campaign --broke in the press in September 2008.

Although there are no hard statistics on the number of people killed, the report by FOR and USOC puts the number at over 3,000 in the last decade.

A group that calls itself the Madres (mothers) of Soacha, a vast working-class suburb stretching south of Bogotá, has filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the loss of their 16 sons in 2007 and 2008. The young men were recruited with the promise of jobs, but their bodies were found in morgues or mass graves hundreds of kilometres away.

Yepes said the complaint filed by the Madres de Soacha "is a way to pressure the state to modify this kind of behaviour."

While activists and groups mobilise to pressure the armed forces to live up to the constitution, "the United States should assume its responsibility through better oversight, holding (authorities in Colombia) accountable and adopting corrective measures, so the money of U.S. taxpayers does not end up financing killings in Colombia," he said.

Copyright © 2010 IPS-Inter Press Service

---

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/30-6

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/us/politics/31waters.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

 

NEW YORK TIMES

 

July 30, 2010

Ethics Trial Expected for California Congresswoman

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, will face charges of misusing her office and is expected to contest the claims in a House trial, the second powerful House Democrat to opt for such a public airing in recent days, Congressional officials said Friday.

A House ethics subcommittee has charged Ms. Waters, 71, a 10-term congresswoman, in a case involving communications that she had with the top executive of a bank that her husband owned stock in while it was applying for a federal bailout in 2008, two House officials said.

Charges are expected to be announced next week, several Congressional officials said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because the proceedings remained confidential. Details of the specific accusations of wrongdoing were not available Friday evening.

The expected trial, coming just after the start of a similar proceeding on Thursday for Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, would be a modern-day precedent for the House, Congressional officials said. At no time in at least the last two decades have two sitting House members faced a public hearing detailing allegations against them.

It would also be an embarrassment for the Congressional Black Caucus. Ms. Waters and Mr. Rangel are two of its most revered and long-standing members, and both have spent decades as key leaders in banking and financial services issues in the House.

Mikael Moore, Ms. Waters’s chief of staff, declined to comment on the case on Friday, saying that the congresswoman had not been formally notified of any action by the ethics committee.

Ms. Waters, at the time the investigation by the House ethics panel began last fall, was accused of intervening on behalf of OneUnited, a Boston-based bank. The Times reported last year that Ms. Waters called Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in 2008, as the economy was in a free fall, to ask him to host a special meeting with executives from black-owned banks.

As a key House player on the Financial Services Committee, Ms. Waters often called Mr. Paulson. He agreed to arrange the requested meeting, The New York Times reported last year.

What Mr. Paulson did not know at the time was that Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, owned stock in and had served on the board of OneUnited, whose chief executive turned the Treasury headquarters meeting into a special appeal for bailout assistance. The executive of the institution, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks, asked for $50 million in federal aid, The Times reported.

After articles on the case by The Times and The Wall Street Journal, the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency, began an inquiry. The office referred the matter to the ethics committee, which charged the subcommittee with opening an examination of Ms. Waters’s activities. The four-member subcommittee, which included two Democrats and two Republicans, was led by Representative Kathy Castor, Democrat of Florida.

Because Ms. Waters — like Mr. Rangel — has refused to agree to a proposed settlement, the case is headed toward a House ethics trial, officials said. “She is fighting it,” one House official said Friday.

Ms. Waters made the call to Mr. Paulson on behalf of the National Bankers Association, a Washington-based organization of minority-owned banks. Its incoming chairman, Robert Cooper, was an executive at OneUnited, which had branches in Miami and Los Angeles, part of which Ms. Waters represents.

Mr. Cooper and his boss, Kevin Cohee, the chief executive at OneUnited, ended up dominating the meeting, participants said, and made an unusual request for a special federal bailout.

The Treasury Department officials, in interviews with The Times, said they were taken aback when they later learned about Ms. Waters’s ties to the bank. She had once owned stock in the bank, and her husband still did. He had stepped down from the board earlier that year.

Mr. Rangel separately is facing charges that he inappropriately used his office staff to try to line up donations for a New York City educational center being built in his honor, and also that he failed to report income from a beachfront property he had rented out in the Caribbean.

The prospect of two trials playing out as the November election approaches will almost certainly be seized upon by Republicans, who already had been attacking Democrats’ moral leadership and questioning whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi had lived up to her promise to “drain the swamp” of ethics violations in Washington.

The case could still be concluded without trial, if Ms. Waters decided to settle. But if a trial were to take place, it is highly unlikely that it would start before September, as the House began its summer recess on Friday.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

The Heroism of PFC Bradley Manning

Published on Friday, July 30, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

The Heroism of PFC Bradley Manning

by Evan Knappenberger

At the US Army’s Intelligence Training Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona in 2003 and 2004, our first term paper was assigned to be on the military intelligence hero of our choice. The museum there had several dozen to choose from, though I forget now who I wrote about. Aside from the occasional joke (Isn’t M.I. an oxymoron?) I don’t think I got much out of it. So here I am: seven years, one degree, and a hell of a lot of heartache later, re-writing the paper, which I intend to submit in its entirety to the commander of that school.

I am writing today about PFC Bradley Manning, and why he is my new M.I. hero. Mr. Manning has the distinction of being the prominent “wiki-leaker” suspected of the 92,000 document upload featured in the news this last week. I look up to Mr. Manning specifically because he had the guts to do what I didn’t: expose the lie that is war.

My proudest moment as a US Army intelligence analyst came when I was in Iraq. I did a comprehensive study of civilian sectarian violence in and around Baghdad. Roughly a few weeks before the Lancet published a study that estimated more than 550,000 Iraqis had been killed between 2003 and 2006, I had corroborative, classified intelligence to the same effect. After first mapping out a GIS database of all insurgent weapons caches, findings of bodies by US forces, and reports of kidnapping, I made a series of overlays that gave each 50-meter area its own designation: weapon cache site, insurgent checkpoint, body dumping ground, or sectarian-contested area. In this way, using empirical classified data, I correctly predicted a dozen sites where armed militants were manning checkpoints and kidnapping civilians. The cache report also led, simultaneously, to the largest find of illicit explosives to that date in Iraq: nearly a thousand artillery rounds piled in a junkyard north of Baghdad.

After completing this phase of the study, I was surprised to learn that the Rand Corporation was being contracted by the Department of Defense to do a similar GIS study at the cost of several million dollars. Intrigued, I found a copy on the army’s secret computer network, the SIPRNET, and was disgusted with the obviousness of the results. The Rand’s expensive product was very simply a satellite image of the main highway in Iraq, with a few highlighted areas named “IED Hotspots”. This was nothing that a few hours on the ground wouldn’t tell any soldier in the army; but somehow, someone behind a desk in DC was making tons of money off it.

The next phase of the study was kind of an accident. I had the unfortunate experience of being assigned to guard the base for 97 nights on a metal tower behind the burning cesspools of the American occupiers’ filth. Several times, I was shot at on this guard duty, late at night. Once or twice we were mortared as well. After returning to my job as an analyst, I half-jokingly set myself the task of finding these attacks in the database, where they should have been after my reports. Surprise: they were not there. Thus began my next project: determining the actual extent of the databases’ failure.

For two weeks I worked non-stop to get a picture of the accuracy of the data that ultimately determined the narrative that our commanders told themselves and their bosses. My best estimate was that 30-50% of attacks on US forces went unreported at this time. This number was worse for the Iraqi Army, where probably 70% of attacks went unreported, unless casualties were taken.

Another part of my job was to sit in on the nightly classified SIPRNET briefings for the Multi-national Division Baghdad. Major General JD Thurmond, then in charge, would start every night about 6 pm with a hearty Salaam Alaikum, Baghdad! This briefing would often include visiting Senators and other administration officials, as well as Iraqi officials. One night as I was preparing this phase of my study, I was amused to listen for nearly an hour as two of Thurmond’s associates tried to claim credit for a perceived drop in violence in an area recently turned over to the Iraqi Army. One general argued that it was his superior training and logistics that had prevailed against the insurgents. Another claimed it was the cultural similarities of the Iraqi troops that made them adaptable to the territory. Never did it cross any of their minds that perhaps attacks were actually increasing against the Iraqi army at this point, but not making it to their screens in the nightly briefing. Thurmond settled the issue by saying something to the effect that more area should be turned over to the Iraqi unit as soon as possible.

My point in sharing these stories is twofold. First, I would hope to illustrate the principle of a lost narrative. Not only is the information fed to the American media and often inaccurate (even to the point of being propaganda), but the information that the military uses to form its own narrative of conflict is skewed. Second, that sometimes even the privates in the army know better than the generals in charge. This almost certainly is the case for PFC. Bradley Manning, now in jail accused of leaking information to the world.

Mr. Manning, at twenty-two, is something of a hero to me now. We went through the US Army’s Intelligence Analyst School at Fort Huachuca Arizona at different times, but I feel like we are on the same page. My biggest regret about my time in Iraq is that I didn’t leak the information I had access to. One can only hope that these soldiers, in better position to see the situation than anyone else, continue to leak the military’s secrets to the world.

I have to admit, I am not surprised at the reaction of the media to this latest leak. For a bunch of idiots hiding in the green zone, I don’t think there is much to their supposed analysis of the situation beyond what they get spoon-fed by the military’s press liaisons. That anyone could expect the press coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to be anything other than utter drivel is pretty ironic. Not as ironic, though, as General Mattis telling a roomful of reporters that Wikileaks “already has blood on their hands.”

If I couldn’t tell the generals a single thing as an intelligence analyst when I was in the Army, maybe I could have told the world. I have to wonder about a country that would send me to war as a twenty-year-old virgin but is shocked and unwilling to hear of the horrible things that happen there on a regular basis. If these 92,000 or so “documents” are what the military is using to assess its own situation, it makes one wonder what doesn’t make it into their database. The questions that the media has failed to ask extend far beyond those posed by the comparatively mundane Wikileaks documents exposed this week.

Perhaps now that the administration has some of the public looking over its shoulder, it will be compelled to tell the truth about Afghanistan. So far, the only challenge to the war propaganda has been the rising number of coalition casualties. Now, it seems, the monumental task of making up reasons for these numbers is going to have to fit in with the half-truth of the Afghanistan database documents.

As far as the courageous PFC Manning goes, he is my new military intelligence hero. Thanks, Brad. And shame on you, media, for being out-reported by a twenty-two year-old kid with a laptop. But most of all, shame on you, US Army, for forcing a kid to be the one to finally expose the truth about your costly and deadly wars.

Evan Knappenberger is an Operation Iraqi Freedom (05-07) veteran living in Bellingham, Washington, and a recent graduate of Whatcom Community College.  He can be reached at evan.m.knappenberger@gmail.com [1].

 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/30-1

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

S.E.C. Charges Brothers With $550 Million Fraud

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/business/30sec.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

 

July 29, 2010

NEW YORK TIMES

S.E.C. Charges Brothers With $550 Million Fraud

By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — Samuel and Charles Wyly, the billionaire brothers from Dallas who are large donors to philanthropies and to conservative causes, were charged Thursday with conducting an extensive securities fraud that the Securities and Exchange Commission said reaped $550 million in undisclosed gains.

The brothers, who founded Sterling Software, a business software and services company that they sold for $4 billion in stock to the software company CA in 2000, were also charged with insider trading violations from which they profited by more than $31 million, the S.E.C. said

The civil charges, coming just two weeks after the S.E.C. reached a $550 million settlement with Goldman Sachs, are part of a concerted effort by the commission to focus more sharply on prominent enforcement cases.

The agency came under fierce attack after the financial crisis of 2007-8 for failing to uncover fraudulent activity in the mortgage securities markets and for missing chances to halt the Ponzi scheme operated by Bernard L. Madoff.

The Wyly brothers are in many ways a study in contrasts, paradigms of self-made billionaires who for years have fought investigations into suspected tax dodges by the offshore trusts that the S.E.C. claims they controlled.

Samuel E. Wyly, 75, and Charles J. Wyly Jr., 76, who through a lawyer called the charges “without merit,” have given millions of dollars to Republican candidates and organizations, but Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.

The S.E.C. case, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, centers on charges of securities fraud and insider trading related to the shares of companies founded by the Wyly bothers or where they served as directors or executives. They include the retail craft chain Michaels Stores, Sterling Software, Sterling Commerce and Scottish Annuity and Life Holdings.

The ill-gotten gains, according to the S.E.C., were used to buy tens of millions of dollars of art, collectibles and jewelry; $100 million of real estate, including two ranches in Aspen, Colo., and a 100-acre horse farm near Dallas; and for charitable contributions, including $10 million to the business school at Samuel Wyly’s alma mater, the University of Michigan.

The charges are the result of a six-year investigation that began in 2004 when Bank of America reported to the S.E.C. that it had terminated numerous accounts held in the name of companies based in the Isle of Man because it could not determine who actually owned the companies.

The S.E.C. found that those companies, and similar entities registered in the Cayman Islands, were registered as trusts over which the Wylys said they had no formal control. But in fact, the S.E.C. charged, the brothers directed nearly all the investment activity in the trusts, selling hundreds of millions of dollars in shares without following S.E.C. disclosure rules governing stock ownership and trading by company insiders.

Through a lawyer, the Wylys said that they believed the charges were “a misapplication of the law” and that they had conducted all of their activities on the basis of accounting and legal advice that they received.

“They have never been given any reason to believe the financial transactions in question were anything other than legal and fully appropriate,” said William A. Brewer III, a partner at the Dallas law firm of Bickel & Brewer who is lead counsel for the Wylys. The brothers “expect to be fully vindicated,” he said.

Also charged in connection with the case were a lawyer for the Wylys, Michael C. French of Dallas, and a stockbroker, Louis J. Schaufele III, also of Dallas.

Lawyers representing Mr. French and Mr. Schaufele did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment.

The S.E.C. can bring only civil actions, but the brothers have previously been reported to be under criminal investigation for actions related to their investment activities. Lorin L. Reisner, the deputy director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, declined to comment on whether the commission had referred its current findings to the Justice Department or other law enforcement agencies.

The S.E.C. claimed that a scheme of undisclosed investments and securities sales took place over 13 years and involved three-quarters of a billion dollars in stock. As longtime executives and directors of public companies, the S.E.C. said that the Wylys knew or should have known their obligations as the owners of more than 5 percent of the stock of several companies.

S.E.C. regulations require that holders of more than 5 percent of a company’s stock disclose that fact, and that company directors and executives report any and all sales or purchases of shares. Though they claimed to own only small stakes in their companies, the S.E.C. charged that they owned from 16 percent to 36 percent of the four companies named in the complaint.

Many investors track stock sales by company insiders because they believe that can provide clues to a company’s prospects; if well-informed company insiders are selling, investors might conclude that a company’s financial position is weakening.

“By concealing that the entities making the sales were under the control of the Wylys, other investors paid inflated prices for the shares they sold,” Mr. Reisner said.

If the S.E.C. is successful in proving all of its allegations, it could result in one of the biggest judgments ever in a securities fraud case. The commission is seeking disgorgement of the $550 million in gains and prejudgment interest and financial penalties.

Unlike some billionaires who maintain a cloak of privacy around their private lives, the Wylys maintain their own Web site extolling their business history, philanthropic activities and other interests.

They have been, at times, similarly open about their political affiliations. In 2000, Sam Wyly was a principal contributor to Republicans for Clean Air, a group that bought ads extolling then-Gov. George W. Bush’s environmental record and criticizing the record of Senator John McCain.

Four years later, the Wyly brothers were substantial contributors to the Swift Boat campaign that raised questions about the war record of Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who was running for president against President Bush.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/us/30fbi.html?th&emc=th

 

NEW YORK TIMES

White House Seeks to Clarify F.B.I. Powers vis-à-vis E-Mail

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has asked Congress to give clear authority to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain records related to the context of e-mails and other Internet-based communications without first obtaining a warrant from a judge.

Some advocates of electronic privacy have raised alarms about the proposal, saying it could expand government eavesdropping on computer activity without court oversight. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Thursday that the proposal raised “serious privacy and civil liberties concerns.”

The administration portrays its proposal, first reported by The Washington Post, as a mere technical fix to clarify a confusingly written statute and says it would not grant the F.B.I. any new powers. It says that F.B.I. agents have been requesting such information for years and that most Internet service providers routinely provide it.

“The statute as written causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. “This clarification will not allow the government to obtain or collect new categories of information, but it seeks to clarify what Congress intended when the statute was amended in 1993.”

Specifically, administration officials have asked Congress to include a provision in the 2011 intelligence authorization bill modifying the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which forbids companies that handle electronic communications — including Internet service providers and Web-based companies like Google — to reveal customer information without a court warrant.

The act makes exceptions for information relevant to national-security investigations, when speed can be essential. For example, it allows F.B.I. agents to issue a “national-security letter” requiring a company to turn over records listing the phone numbers someone has called, although a warrant is still required to eavesdrop on the content of calls.

The proposal would add “electronic communication transactional records” — like e-mail addresses used in correspondence and Web pages visited — to a list of the categories of information that F.B.I. agents can demand.

The Justice Department contends that the F.B.I. already has the authority to obtain such Internet records with a national-security letter because “electronic communications transactional records” are mentioned elsewhere in the act, although not in that specific list.

A 2008 memorandum written for the bureau by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel said that the specific list of categories of information that the F.B.I. can demand is "exhaustive." Still, a footnote said that "categories of information parallel to subscriber information and toll bill records for ordinary telephone services" are also covered.

The F.B.I. contends that the e-mail addresses to which people send messages, and the Web pages they visit, are the functional equivalent of the phone numbers they call. Officials familiar with the matter, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue, say that most companies agree with that interpretation and have routinely turned over such records when requested.

At least one company has balked, though, saying it feared a lawsuit for illegally turning over private information. The officials declined to identify the company.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/world/asia/30kurds.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

NEW YORK TIMES

 

July 29, 2010

Turkey Softens Law That Jailed Young Kurds

By DAN BILEFSKY

BATMAN, Turkey — Berivan Sayaca, a vivacious 15-year-old Kurdish girl, dreamed of escaping her life as a seamstress and studying law. Instead, she was convicted of supporting terrorism by attending a protest rally and sentenced to nearly eight years behind bars.

This week, Berivan was released from prison about 10 months into her sentence. The move came after the Turkish Parliament, in an attempt to alleviate rising tensions with the Kurdish minority here in the southeast, passed a bill this month reducing the sentences of hundreds of youths, 18 and younger, who had been put on trial and nicknamed the “stone-throwing kids.”

An estimated 40,000 people have died during the decades of conflict over national identity and land between Turkey and the separatist guerrilla group known as the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K. In recent years, many young Kurds have been accused of being terrorists, yet in some cases their only crime was to have attended a demonstration, chanted a slogan or thrown a stone.

After Berivan returned home this week to this poor, predominantly Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast, her emotional reunion captured by television stations across Turkey, she said her imprisonment had emboldened her resolve.

“It was very hard to be in jail at my age,” she said. “But now I have my life back, and I still want to be a lawyer.”

The Turkish government is particularly edgy about the Kurdish issue now. In June, the P.K.K. ended a 14-month cease-fire, prompting a surge of attacks on the Turkish armed forces and undermining a recent attempt at outreach to the Kurds.

More than 80 Turkish soldiers have been killed this year by the P.K.K., which in the past has committed hundreds of attacks on civilians, including Kurds. Turkey, the United States and the European Union classify the P.K.K. as a terrorist organization. Some fear a return to the 1990s, when thousands of Kurdish villagers were driven from their homes.

The intensification of the violence coincided with the deadly clash between Israel and an aid flotilla to Gaza led by a Turkish organization, an event deeply resented by many of Turkey’s estimated 12 million ethnic Kurds.

Many of them view their quest for self-determination through the prism of the Arab-Israeli conflict and bitterly accuse the Turkish government of championing the Palestinians and defending the militant group Hamas while turning its back on its own minorities.

“How dare Turkey send boats to Gaza and make friends with Hamas when its own house is on fire, when they are sending our kids to jail and we have no hope?” Meryem Sayaca, Berivan’s mother, said before the teenager’s release. “We empathize with the Palestinians, but are we not Muslims, too?”

Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s minister for European Union affairs, said the governing Justice and Development Party had been seeking ways to improve the lives and rights of Kurds, including licensing a Kurdish-language television station, advocating Kurdish-language studies at universities and promoting Kurds’ membership in Parliament.

But many Kurds debate the government’s recent concessions or remain distrustful of them, and the efforts have also come under attack from opponents who fear that the moves may encourage terrorism.

Several members of the opposition in Parliament questioned the legal changes that led to Berivan’s release and warned that the bill’s supporters risked ending up with blood on their hands. Many youths fill the ranks of the P.K.K., including young female guerrillas, they argued.

“From now on, you are responsible for exploited minors and the people who are harmed by these minors,” said Ridvan Yalcin of the Nationalist Movement Party, whose members stormed out of the meeting when the bill was being debated.

Hundreds of Kurdish children were imprisoned under a tough antiterrorism law, introduced in 2006, that equated protest activities like attending an illegal rally with being a member or supporter of a terrorist group, according to Berivan’s lawyer, Reyhan Yalcindag, a leading human rights activist.

Berivan was jailed soon after her family moved last year from Istanbul to Batman, one of dozens of bleak cities in Turkey’s impoverished southeast where high unemployment and illiteracy rates have made it a fertile recruitment ground for the P.K.K.

Like many young Kurdish girls, Berivan had left school for manual labor. On Oct. 9, she went to visit her aunt, but did not return home. Soon after, Berivan’s mother said, the family heard she had been arrested after being seen at a pro-P.K.K. demonstration.

During her 30-minute trial, four months later, the main evidence produced by the prosecution was a photograph of her at the protest, a scarf pulled over her face. Berivan told her parents that she had accidentally stumbled onto the demonstration. But police officials in Batman said they had filmed her participating in the protest.

“Berivan was upset when I was fired from my job for speaking Kurdish,” said her father, Selim Sayaca. “But she is just a girl; she is not a terrorist.”

Last October, 34 Kurds, including 8 P.K.K. fighters, were allowed to return to Turkey from northern Iraq in what was viewed as a critical peace gesture on both sides. But their return prompted an angry public outcry when they traveled triumphantly across the southeast dressed as guerrillas and refused to renounce violence. The arrest of hundreds of Kurdish activists followed.

Nijat Yaruk, chairman of the main Kurdish political party in Diyarbakir, the southeastern city where Berivan was imprisoned, said the government had refused to allow Kurdish to be taught in the state schools or to approve any moves toward Kurdish autonomy.

Some historians say the modern Turkish republic, founded in the early 1920s, has long viewed the assertion of ethnic identity, Kurdish or otherwise, as a threat to unity.

The resumption of fighting here has sent the stone-throwing kids back into the streets, and on a recent day, hundreds of Kurdish children, some of them as young as 7, gathered in front of a mosque in Diyarbakir to await the return of the bodies of two P.K.K. guerrillas killed by the Turkish Army.

“Revenge! Revenge!” they chanted, waiving illegal P.K.K. flags and wearing white sheets on their heads to avoid being identified by the police.

While such actions would have been enough in the past to convict a minor as a member of a terrorist organization, under the amendment to the 2006 law, minors caught at pro-P.K.K. demonstrations will no longer be charged with being members of a terrorist organization. Their cases will go to juvenile courts instead of courts that handle serious crimes.

With no education in prison, many newly freed young Kurds were re-entering society with psychological trauma and no skills, said Ms. Yalcindag, the human rights lawyer. Last year, she said, one of her clients, a 16-year-old Kurdish boy, hanged himself in his cell with a blanket.

Ali Oncel, 17, a vegetable seller who was arrested after attending a P.K.K.-sponsored demonstration in February and spent about five months in a jail before being released this month, said that prison had left him feeling despondent, isolated and angry.

“My only contact with the outside world was one room in the jail without a roof where you could see the sky,” said Ali, the only breadwinner in his family of nine.

Asked whether he would now join the P.K.K., he paused and sighed.

“My friends in prison said they would get their revenge by going directly from prison to the mountains to fight,” he said. “I have to take care of my family. But if I didn’t, I know what I would have to do.”

Yilmaz Akinci contributed reporting.

# Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

 

Don't Be Fooled: Nuclear Power Kills

Published on Thursday, July 29, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

Don’t Be Fooled: Nuclear Power Kills

by John LaForge

Two of the nuclear industry's talking points these days are that "nuclear power hasn't killed anyone" and that "no one died at Three Mile Island."  

The 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe puts the lie to such bull, but the deliberate denial of thousands of other deaths is also part of the industry's effort. For younger people who have no experience or recall of reactor explosions and meltdowns, steam bursts or radioactive waste spills, pro-nuclear propaganda has convinced many of them that radiation is merely medicinal or dental and must be harmless. On the contrary, there is no safe dose of radiation, and any exposure no matter how little increases the risk of cancer and other diseases.

A quick look at the record of some of the deadliest radiation accidents counters efforts by the Nuclear Energy Institute, and some in Congress, to whitewash their poisoned nuclear power and win another $32 billion in taxpayer giveaways for building new reactors. What follows is a sampling -- a completely footnoted version of the list is available from Nukewatch [1].

January 3, 1961: Three killed in Idaho

The experimental boiling-water reactor called SL-1 (Stationary Low-Power Plant No.1) in Idaho blew apart killing three technicians. Two Army Specialists, John Byrnes, age 25 and Richard McKinley, age 22, and Richard Legg, a 25 year old Navy Electricians Mate died in the explosion. According to Arlington National Cemetery Records, "One technician was blown to the ceiling of the containment dome and impaled on a control rod. The men were so heavily exposed to radiation that their hands had to be buried separately with other radioactive waste, and their bodies were interred in lead coffins."

July 27, 1972: Two killed at Surry reactor

At the Surry Unit 2 pressurized water reactor in Virginia, pressurized steam burst through a corroded pipe and scalded two workers to death.

March 28, 1979: Three Mile Island and infant mortality

Exposure to radioactive fallout and contaminated water released by the meltdown at Three Mile Island may have caused thousands of deaths. Among many, two books, "Deadly Deceit: Low Level Radiation High Level Cover-up" by Jay Gould and Ben Goldman, 1990, and Joe Mangano's "Low-Level Radiation and Immune System Damage: An Atomic Era Legacy," 1999, document these fatalities.

Infant deaths in surrounding counties soared 53 percent in the first month after TMI; 27 percent in the first year. As originally published, the federal government's own Monthly Vital Statistics Report shows a statistically significant rise in infant mortality rates shortly after the accident.

 Studying 10 counties closest to TMI, deaths from birth defects were15-to-35 percent higher afterward than before the accident; breast cancer incidence rose seven percent higher; these increases far exceeded those elsewhere in Pennsylvania. Gould suggests that between 50,000 and 100,000 excess deaths occurred after the TMI accident.

In counties downwind of the accident, leukemia deaths among kids under 10 (1980-to-1984) jumped almost 50 percent compared to the national rate. From 1980-1984 death rates in the three nearest counties were considerably higher than 1970-74 (before the reactor opened) for leukemia, female breast, thyroid and bone and joint cancers.

March 26, 1986: From 4,000 to 125,000 Chernobyl deaths

 Estimates of deaths caused by Chernobyl vary widely. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported April 27, 1995 that Ukrainian Health Minister Andrei Serdyuk had announced the latest Ukrainian estimate of Chernobyl's death toll at 125,000 from illnesses traced to radiation.

The United Nations reported Sept. 6, 2005 that its scientists predicted about 4,000 eventual radiation-

related deaths among 600,000 people in the affected area. CNN reported April 26, 1997, "Ukrainian authorities say over 4,000 died of radiation-related illnesses.

The Wisconsin State Journal noted on April 15, 1991 that "The most senior scientist at the Chernobyl nuclear power station says the disaster claimed up to 10,000 lives, thousands more than Soviet authorities have admitted, a London newspaper reported on Sunday.

The Milwaukee Journal, on April 21, 1991 reported, "Many Soviet and Western researchers dispute the official death toll of only 32, saying that at least 500 people and possibly as many as 7,000 have died of cancer and other illnesses."

December 9, 1986: Four more killed at Surry

 Again at the Surry Reactor Unit 2, a similar pressurized steam burned four people to death after an unchecked and corroded 18-inch steel feed-water pipe broke and spewed 30,000 gallons of extremely hot pressurized water.

March 11, 1997: Cancer deaths unknown at Tokaimura

Japan's Tokaimura reprocessing facility suffered explosions and fire at this experimental waste treatment site. At least 37 people were seriously contaminated, 34 internally through inhalation. Experts said, "a massive amount of heat and energy was released" in the explosion at the state-run facility. A lack of medical follow-up for the contaminated workers has allowed the industry to deny that deaths resulted.

September 30, 1999: Two killed at Tokaimura

Workers at Japan's Tokaimura uranium processing complex caused a "uranium criticality burst" that killed two men, exposed at least 600 residents in the surrounding community to a burst of neutron radiation, and caused the evacuation of thousands. One worker died of radiation poisoning after 82 days of agonizing pain, the other took 210 days to die.

August 9, 2004: Five killed at Mihama

At the Mihama reactor in Japan, a burst of highly pressurized steam at 390° F, killed five workers and severely burned 11 others when a corroded pipe ruptured and burned them to death. The accident was Japan's deadliest at a nuclear reactor. About 800 tons of water escaped from the large pipe that had not been inspected in 28 years.

John LaForge is on the Nukewatch [1] staff and edits its Quarterly.

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URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-0

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs