Published on Friday, March 28, 2008 by The New York Times
Tapes’ Destruction Hovers Over Detainee Cases
By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane
WASHINGTON - When officers from the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting harsh interrogations in 2005, they may have believed they were freeing the government and themselves from potentially serious legal trouble.
But nearly four months after the disclosure that the tapes were destroyed, the list of legal entanglements for the C.I.A., the Defense Department and other agencies is only growing longer. In addition to criminal and Congressional investigations of the tapes’ destruction, the government is fighting off challenges in several major terrorism cases and a raft of prisoners’ legal claims that it may have destroyed evidence.
“They thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from Al Qaeda if the tapes became public,” said Frederick P. Hitz, a former C.I.A. officer and the agency’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, speaking of agency officials who favored eliminating the tapes. “Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves.”
In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay , Cuba , a federal judge has raised the possibility that, by destroying the tapes, the C.I.A. violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner. In at least 12 other lawsuits, lawyers for prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere have filed legal challenges citing the C.I.A. tapes’ destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.
“This is like any other cover-up,” Mr. Remes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface.”
Plans for the possible prosecution of another prisoner, Ali al-Marri, who has been held since 2003 in a naval brig in Charleston , S.C. , could be in jeopardy after the Pentagon recently revealed that it had destroyed some tapes of Mr. Marri’s interrogation. Other tapes showing rough treatment of Mr. Marri, which were discovered in a Pentagon review ordered after the C.I.A. revelations and have been preserved, could prove embarrassing if presented at his trial.
The destruction of tapes has also prompted challenges from lawyers for Zacharias Moussaoui, the convicted Qaeda operative who had unsuccessfully sought testimony at his trial from Abu Zubaydah, one of the two Qaeda suspects whose interrogation videotapes were destroyed in November 2005. At that time, a defense motion seeking records of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation was pending before a federal court in Virginia .
This motion in the Moussaoui case, among other legal challenges, has raised questions about a statement in December by the C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, that he understood the tapes were destroyed only after it was determined that they were “not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries.”
A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said General Hayden “certainly stands by his statement.” He added: “The C.I.A. has been cooperating with the Department of Justice, the courts and the Congress. The reviews of this matter are not complete, and it is only fair to let them conclude before trying to draw conclusions from them or about them.”
Officially, the C.I.A. has said that the tapes were destroyed primarily because of concerns that their public exposure could endanger the safety of C.I.A. officers. But in interviews in recent months with several officers involved in the decision, they said that a primary factor was the legal risks that officers shown on the tape might face.
Lawyers involved in the cases said it still appeared unlikely that a terrorist suspect could go free as a result of the destruction of the videotapes. But they said that judges might decide to exclude evidence in some of the cases, potentially undermining the government’s position and jeopardizing future prosecutions.
All of the court challenges are playing out against the backdrop of the criminal investigation, led by a veteran prosecutor, John H. Durham, who is examining whether destruction of the tapes was an illegal obstruction of justice. A separate investigation by the House Intelligence Committee will soon begin interviewing officials from the White House and the C.I.A., possibly under subpoena, about their roles in the destruction of the tapes.
Congressional officials said that among the White House officials they intend to interview are David S. Addington, chief counsel for Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. The list of current and former C.I.A. officials includes the former C.I.A. directors George J. Tenet and Porter J. Goss as well as several C.I.A. lawyers who gave legal advice about the tapes.
Little is known about the progress of the criminal investigation led by Mr. Durham. But his team has interviewed members of the Sept. 11 commission, including Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, as part of an inquiry into whether the C.I.A. broke the law by withholding the tapes from the commission.
Mr. Hitz, the former C.I.A. inspector general, said the government’s legal woes could be traced to what he believed was an unwise decision to use harsh physical pressure during interrogations. Those techniques had Justice Department approval. But a public backlash set in, which was a factor in the C.I.A.’s decision to destroy the tapes in late 2005.
By then, the C.I.A.’s secret detention program was tied up in a complex web of legal claims and counterclaims.
Beyond that, Mr. Durham, the prosecutor, has found 17 court orders in 21 lawsuits that required preservation of evidence, and he has said in court papers that his team is investigating whether the tapes’ destruction violated those orders.
One of the court orders, issued in July 2005 by Judge Richard W. Roberts of the Federal District Court in Washington, required the preservation of all evidence related to Hani Abdullah, the Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo, who is accused of attending a Qaeda training camp in 2001 and other offenses. Judge Roberts said in a January order that Mr. Abdullah’s lawyers had made a plausible case that Abu Zubaydah would have been asked about their client in interrogations.
Mr. Abdullah’s lawyers, who are challenging his detention as an enemy combatant, assert that the tapes might have helped their case, either by showing Abu Zubaydah did not know their client or that anything incriminating he may have said resulted from harsh treatment.
The remaining tapes of Mr. Marri, the prisoner at the Charleston brig who is challenging his indefinite detention, could create legal headaches for Justice Department lawyers should they someday bring him to trial.
During any future trial, Mr. Marri’s lawyers could show a jury interrogation tapes showing that he had been treated roughly. In addition, they could exploit the Pentagon’s admission that it has destroyed some tapes of Mr. Marri’s interrogation to make the case that the government withheld evidence from the defense.
Despite all the legal complications, those in the C.I.A. who got rid of the videotapes may have achieved one of their presumed goals: preventing a torture prosecution, said Deborah Colson, a senior associate at Human Rights First.
“It may be impossible to reconstruct any criminal conduct that was caught on the tapes,” Ms. Colson said.
© 2008 The New York Times
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
Friday, March 28, 2008
Forty-Two Democrats Vow a Drawdown in Iraq if They Win Seats
There are 299 days until Jan. 20, 2009.
http://www.truthout.org
t r u t h o u t | 03.28
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032808D.shtml
Forty-Two Democrats Vow a Drawdown in Iraq if They Win Seats
By Paul Kane
The Washington Post
Friday 28 March 2008
More than three dozen Democratic congressional candidates banded together yesterday to promise that, if elected, they will push for legislation calling for an immediate drawdown of troops in Iraq that would leave only a security force in place to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad .
Rejecting their party leaders' assertions that economic troubles have become the top issue on voters' minds, leaders of the coalition of 38 House and four Senate candidates pledged to make immediate withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of their campaigns.
"The people inside the Beltway don't seem to get how big an issue this is," said Darcy Burner, a repeat candidate who narrowly lost to Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) in 2006.
The group's 36-page plan does not set a specific deadline for when all combat troops must be out of Iraq . "Begin it now, do it as safely as you can and get everyone out," Burner said.
The starkest difference between the group's proposal, dubbed a "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq ," and those embraced by many senior Democrats and the party's presidential candidates is that it rejects the idea of leaving U.S. troops on the ground to train Iraqi security forces or engage in anti-terrorism operations. The group instead calls for a dramatic increase in regional diplomacy and the deployment of international peacekeeping forces, if necessary.
One of the signatories, Donna F. Edwards, who bested Rep. Albert R. Wynn in his Prince George 's County-centered district in the Democratic primary on Feb. 12, said the candidates are offering "real leadership." She also gave credit to "some in the Congress who are prepared to demonstrate the political will" to end the war, signaling that she disagrees with Democratic leaders who have been thwarted in their legislative efforts to reshape President Bush's Iraq policies.
The antiwar candidates include several challengers who are highly touted by Democratic leaders, including Burner and Eric Massa, who is running a second race against Rep. John R. "Randy" Kuhl Jr. (R-N.Y.). A few are running in Democratic-leaning districts and, should they win their primaries, are likely to win in November. Many more are, for now, longer-shot candidates running against veteran Republican incumbents.
Democratic leaders said the new candidate coalition does not signal a divide in the party's war policy.
"Democrats are united in our need to bring change in Iraq ," said Doug Thornell, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "It's up to the individual candidates to determine how to best do that for their district."
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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.truthout.org
t r u t h o u t | 03.28
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032808D.shtml
Forty-Two Democrats Vow a Drawdown in Iraq if They Win Seats
By Paul Kane
The Washington Post
Friday 28 March 2008
More than three dozen Democratic congressional candidates banded together yesterday to promise that, if elected, they will push for legislation calling for an immediate drawdown of troops in Iraq that would leave only a security force in place to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad .
Rejecting their party leaders' assertions that economic troubles have become the top issue on voters' minds, leaders of the coalition of 38 House and four Senate candidates pledged to make immediate withdrawal from Iraq the centerpiece of their campaigns.
"The people inside the Beltway don't seem to get how big an issue this is," said Darcy Burner, a repeat candidate who narrowly lost to Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) in 2006.
The group's 36-page plan does not set a specific deadline for when all combat troops must be out of Iraq . "Begin it now, do it as safely as you can and get everyone out," Burner said.
The starkest difference between the group's proposal, dubbed a "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq ," and those embraced by many senior Democrats and the party's presidential candidates is that it rejects the idea of leaving U.S. troops on the ground to train Iraqi security forces or engage in anti-terrorism operations. The group instead calls for a dramatic increase in regional diplomacy and the deployment of international peacekeeping forces, if necessary.
One of the signatories, Donna F. Edwards, who bested Rep. Albert R. Wynn in his Prince George 's County-centered district in the Democratic primary on Feb. 12, said the candidates are offering "real leadership." She also gave credit to "some in the Congress who are prepared to demonstrate the political will" to end the war, signaling that she disagrees with Democratic leaders who have been thwarted in their legislative efforts to reshape President Bush's Iraq policies.
The antiwar candidates include several challengers who are highly touted by Democratic leaders, including Burner and Eric Massa, who is running a second race against Rep. John R. "Randy" Kuhl Jr. (R-N.Y.). A few are running in Democratic-leaning districts and, should they win their primaries, are likely to win in November. Many more are, for now, longer-shot candidates running against veteran Republican incumbents.
Democratic leaders said the new candidate coalition does not signal a divide in the party's war policy.
"Democrats are united in our need to bring change in Iraq ," said Doug Thornell, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "It's up to the individual candidates to determine how to best do that for their district."
SUBSCRIBE -> http://truthout.org/subscribe.htm
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
Anti-death penalty video tonight/Fight Violence With Nonviolence
LET HIM HAVE IT [ England , 1991], will be shown Fri., Mar. 28 at AFSC, 4806 York Road [three blocks north of Cold Spring Lane ]. Doors open at 7 PM, and the video starts at 7:30 PM. A discussion follows. There is no charge, and refreshments will be available. Call 410-366-1637.
The Peter Medak film set in 1952 is based on a true story. Derek Bentley was sentenced to death under controversial circumstances. He did not directly play a role in the murder of a police officer, yet he received the greater punishment. Christopher Eccleston plays Bentley, and Tom Courtenay is the father who tries desperately to save his son’s life. The title of the film is taken from Bentley's alleged cry of "Let him have it, Chris!" shortly before Christopher Craig shot the officer. Did he mean, "Go ahead and shoot him," or "Give him the gun" (and thus, surrender)? England has since abolished capital punishment.
Published on Thursday, March 27, 2008 by The Christian Science Monitor
Fight Violence With Nonviolence
Unarmed civilian peacekeepers are saving lives today.
by Rolf Carriere and Michael Nagler
Legends relate that Buddha stopped a war between two kings who were quarreling over rights to a river by asking them, “Which is more precious, blood or water?”
Could ordinary people use the same kind of wisdom - and courage - to check the impulse to fight wars today - over oil, water, or identity? Mahatma Gandhi thought so. He created teams of civilians called the Shanti Sena or “Army of Peace” and deployed them in various communities around India where they could avert communal riots and provide other peacekeeping services.
Over the past 25 years nonviolent peacekeepers have been going into zones of sometimes intense conflict with the aim of bringing a measure of peace, protection, and sanity to life there. Rather than use threat or force, unarmed peacekeepers deploy strategies of protective accompaniment, moral and/or witnessing “presence,” monitoring election campaigns, creating neutral safe spaces, and in extreme cases putting themselves physically between hostile parties, as Buddha did with the angry kings in ancient India .
Civilian unarmed peacekeeping has had dramatic, small-scale, quiet, and unglamorous successes: rescuing child soldiers, protecting the lives of key human rights workers and of whole villages, averting potentially explosive violence, and generally raising the level of security felt by citizens in many a tense community.
Recently a village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines was under threat by two armed groups who had come within 200 meters of each other. The village elders called for help from the Nonviolent Peaceforce stationed there, who intervened and by communicating with all sides persuaded the armed group to back away. Thanks to mediation, no violence erupted, no lives were lost.
Why haven’t you heard about this exciting work? Because it is terribly underfunded, for one thing. There is also a prevailing prejudice that only governments or armed forces - including those of the United Nations - have the responsibility or means to contain conflict. While the UN Security Council has often authorized “all necessary means” to maintain peace and prevent violent conflict, in fact, the UN has not systematically considered large-scale civilian unarmed peacekeeping.
But the biggest obstacle by far is the widespread - and rarely examined - belief that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. It is the belief that there is only one kind of power; threat power, which in the end can be relied upon to get others to change their minds or, failing that, at least their actions.
That may change. The failures of war-fighting for peace, most notably now in Iraq , are getting ever more costly - of life, material, and our civil liberties.
The new global norm of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) should inspire the use of civil society and nonviolent means. While it includes military interventions, R2P is based on emerging international human security and human rights doctrine that aims to avert further failure by the international community to prevent and stop genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
It may yet dawn on the world that these courageous nonviolent peacekeepers are not “unarmed;” they are armed with what Gandhi made bold to call “the greatest force mankind has been endowed with” - nonviolence.
Nonviolent Peaceforce is working to bring this kind of peacekeeping to greater prominence, with the goal of increasing its current 70 field team members to a cadre of 2,000 by 2012. For a recent deployment, Nonviolent Peaceforce had applicants hailing from 55 countries for every position available.
Well-trained unarmed civilians are saving lives and protecting communities under threat in some of the world’s most violent places. They are growing. Recently the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue issued a study documenting how and why this type of “proactive presence” works.
People are ready for peaceful change and they’re willing to dedicate their lives to create it. Civilian unarmed peacekeeping could be the way to recognize and help develop the vital protection role global civil society may credibly, effectively, and legitimately play in human security. For the benefit of children and women in armed conflict, for refugees, journalists, human rights defenders, peacefully protesting monks, aid workers, or election campaigners - for all of us. Because ultimately, none of us is secure until all of us are.
Rolf Carriere spent his career in UNICEF in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Burma as liaison to the World Bank. Both volunteer as senior advisers to Nonviolent Peaceforce. Michael Nagler is professor emeritus of the Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Metta Centre for Nonviolence Education.
Copyright © 2008 The Christian Science Monitor
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
7:30 PM
Add to Calendar
The Peter Medak film set in 1952 is based on a true story. Derek Bentley was sentenced to death under controversial circumstances. He did not directly play a role in the murder of a police officer, yet he received the greater punishment. Christopher Eccleston plays Bentley, and Tom Courtenay is the father who tries desperately to save his son’s life. The title of the film is taken from Bentley's alleged cry of "Let him have it, Chris!" shortly before Christopher Craig shot the officer. Did he mean, "Go ahead and shoot him," or "Give him the gun" (and thus, surrender)? England has since abolished capital punishment.
Published on Thursday, March 27, 2008 by The Christian Science Monitor
Fight Violence With Nonviolence
Unarmed civilian peacekeepers are saving lives today.
by Rolf Carriere and Michael Nagler
Legends relate that Buddha stopped a war between two kings who were quarreling over rights to a river by asking them, “Which is more precious, blood or water?”
Could ordinary people use the same kind of wisdom - and courage - to check the impulse to fight wars today - over oil, water, or identity? Mahatma Gandhi thought so. He created teams of civilians called the Shanti Sena or “Army of Peace” and deployed them in various communities around India where they could avert communal riots and provide other peacekeeping services.
Over the past 25 years nonviolent peacekeepers have been going into zones of sometimes intense conflict with the aim of bringing a measure of peace, protection, and sanity to life there. Rather than use threat or force, unarmed peacekeepers deploy strategies of protective accompaniment, moral and/or witnessing “presence,” monitoring election campaigns, creating neutral safe spaces, and in extreme cases putting themselves physically between hostile parties, as Buddha did with the angry kings in ancient India .
Civilian unarmed peacekeeping has had dramatic, small-scale, quiet, and unglamorous successes: rescuing child soldiers, protecting the lives of key human rights workers and of whole villages, averting potentially explosive violence, and generally raising the level of security felt by citizens in many a tense community.
Recently a village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines was under threat by two armed groups who had come within 200 meters of each other. The village elders called for help from the Nonviolent Peaceforce stationed there, who intervened and by communicating with all sides persuaded the armed group to back away. Thanks to mediation, no violence erupted, no lives were lost.
Why haven’t you heard about this exciting work? Because it is terribly underfunded, for one thing. There is also a prevailing prejudice that only governments or armed forces - including those of the United Nations - have the responsibility or means to contain conflict. While the UN Security Council has often authorized “all necessary means” to maintain peace and prevent violent conflict, in fact, the UN has not systematically considered large-scale civilian unarmed peacekeeping.
But the biggest obstacle by far is the widespread - and rarely examined - belief that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. It is the belief that there is only one kind of power; threat power, which in the end can be relied upon to get others to change their minds or, failing that, at least their actions.
That may change. The failures of war-fighting for peace, most notably now in Iraq , are getting ever more costly - of life, material, and our civil liberties.
The new global norm of “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) should inspire the use of civil society and nonviolent means. While it includes military interventions, R2P is based on emerging international human security and human rights doctrine that aims to avert further failure by the international community to prevent and stop genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
It may yet dawn on the world that these courageous nonviolent peacekeepers are not “unarmed;” they are armed with what Gandhi made bold to call “the greatest force mankind has been endowed with” - nonviolence.
Nonviolent Peaceforce is working to bring this kind of peacekeeping to greater prominence, with the goal of increasing its current 70 field team members to a cadre of 2,000 by 2012. For a recent deployment, Nonviolent Peaceforce had applicants hailing from 55 countries for every position available.
Well-trained unarmed civilians are saving lives and protecting communities under threat in some of the world’s most violent places. They are growing. Recently the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue issued a study documenting how and why this type of “proactive presence” works.
People are ready for peaceful change and they’re willing to dedicate their lives to create it. Civilian unarmed peacekeeping could be the way to recognize and help develop the vital protection role global civil society may credibly, effectively, and legitimately play in human security. For the benefit of children and women in armed conflict, for refugees, journalists, human rights defenders, peacefully protesting monks, aid workers, or election campaigners - for all of us. Because ultimately, none of us is secure until all of us are.
Rolf Carriere spent his career in UNICEF in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Burma as liaison to the World Bank. Both volunteer as senior advisers to Nonviolent Peaceforce. Michael Nagler is professor emeritus of the Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the Metta Centre for Nonviolence Education.
Copyright © 2008 The Christian Science Monitor
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
7:30 PM
Add to Calendar
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Be careful--very difficult to read: Winter Soldier 2008: A Marine Mom's Eyewitness Account of the Testimony
There are 300 days until Jan. 20, 2009.
Published on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Winter Soldier 2008: A Marine Mom’s Eyewitness Account of the Testimony
by Elaine Brower
I. I have spent the past seven-plus years as an activist against the policies of George W. Bush and his regime. Already, my son has completed 2 tours of duty as a U.S. Marine, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq . So my life has been forever altered by the events of the past 7 years. Still, when I initially made plans to attend the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)’s Winter Soldier event, I intended to cover it from the perspective of an independent journalist.
However, after spending almost four days within the halls of the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland, meeting new members of IVAW, as well as many old friends from Veterans For Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and other anti-war groups, and listening to the testimony of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, I realized I can no longer be an objective reporter. So I decided to write this story from the perspective of a Marine mom; one who is adamantly opposed to the so called “war on terror”, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan , and any other wars that this government is cooking up.
On Friday, Day 2, testimony began at 9 AM with a panel about the “Rules of Engagement”. Speakers from the Army and Marine Corps. — people that I have known for the last few years — recounted the atrocities that they not only witnessed but participated in. Anyone who is interested can listen online at www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier. But about halfway into that panel, I lost my objectivity. The stories they were telling about the rules of engagement they learned while training at boot camp, or on a military base “back home”, were the same as what I had heard from my son. I broke down sobbing. The photographs they were showing on the five viewing screens of bloodied bodies torn apart by close gunfire, 50-calibre Machine guns, rocket launchers, and every other damn weapon our great military industrial complex has created, were all too familiar to me. When my son returned home from both war zones, he was so eager to share his stories and pictures.
I could not fathom that my son, whom I raised to be a Catholic, whom I took to Sunday school, who received Communion and Confirmation, had not only been a participant in such horrors, but had pictures to prove it. I immediately told him that I would not listen to his stories or look at those pictures. He could speak with his father. My response may seem too many as being hard on my son, who only wanted to unload what he was feeling on his mother. But I couldn’t come to terms with it then — or now.
Watching and listening to the testimony made me very ill. Here were these young men and women, handsomely dressed, some wearing medals, talking about how they shot civilians who were holding nothing more threatening than a cell phone, groceries, a shovel, a white flag, or a pair of binoculars. Anyone deemed suspicious by the particular soldier or Marine on watch was fair game, subject to the orders, “Take ‘em out!” The Rules of Engagement, as stated by Garrett Rapenhagen were “a joke and disgrace, and ever changing.”
I knew that. I had heard it back home from my son. He told me he had to survive; he had to protect his buddies, so that they could all come home alive. They didn’t know who the enemy was, so they would just “blast them away.” The Marines are taught that. They shoot and don’t even ask questions. Their motto is “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out!”
Camilo Mejia, who is the chair of IVAW, spoke about how soldiers were trained that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary to survival, and how they are taught to think of Iraqis as “hajjis”. In fact, all of the panel members said Iraqi citizens were repeatedly referred to as hajjis. I know that word all too well; I have heard my son talk about it, as well as other anti-Iraqi slurs such as “towel head,” and “sand nigger.” The expression “if you feel threatened, use your weapon” was also a familiar phrase to me. So, too, was the slogan, “Do what you need to do.” That meant that you use your rifle anytime, and you can crush whoever you want with your vehicle in the street.
Members on the panel recounted how, when they were bored, they blew up dogs and other animals to keep themselves entertained. All too well I had heard these stories, which gave me the creeps more than anything else. I also heard the testimony of former Cpl. Matt Childers, who said that after American soldiers had already beaten and starved detainees in their custody, one of them removed a hat from one of the detainees’ heads and smeared it with his own feces, before feeding it to one of the prisoners who was so hungry that he actually attempted to eat it.
One other Marine, whom I happened to interview personally — which produced a conversation I hope to describe more fully in a future article — was Bryan Casler. Casler was part of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. He described Marines taking their MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) which were in plastic bags, and defecating in them before tossing them out to Iraqi children on the side of the road. Those who picked them up would think they were food and attempt to eat the contents. Casler also said soldiers would urinate in bottles and throw them at children. They would also remove the chemical packets that were within the MREs (which helped heat the food) and hand them to children to eat. He said that when they went into Babylon , the marines would drive vehicles into mosques and historic ruins, and break off pieces to take home with them.
Some of the soldiers’ testimony was characterized by defiant anger. At the end of his testimony, former Marine Mike Totten ripped up the commendation he had received from General Petraeus, and threw it on the floor in front of him, to a huge applause. One day earlier, former Marine Jon Turner had taken a chest full of medals and thrown them into the audience. “I don’t work for you anymore!” Turner said. At the end of his heart-wrenching account of the atrocities he had witnessed or committed, Turner begged the Iraqi people for forgiveness.
All too well I know these stories, and have known them for years. So I kept crying and asking myself how these young men and women wound up in this position. How someone who joined the military out of a sense of “patriotism” wound up doing such horrible and heinous things that would make a mother sick to her stomach. How do we let our children do this? Casler, like my son, joined right out of high school. Many others do the same. And many don’t have to be recruited; they join voluntarily, out of a desire to serve their country. Many feel that doing so is what makes heroes.
So I spent three days listening to heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching stories, and continuously asked myself the same question: “Why?” More specifically, why do these soldiers and Marines, who represent a critical new breed of resisters, still feel so tied to the military that many of them espouse some variation of the sentiment, “I am proud of my service in the military. I am not proud of what I did.” For someone like me, I can clearly see that statement making sense. But then I had to ask myself why I thought it made sense.
How could you be proud to be in the military, and yet not like what you participated in while in the military? I have often asked my son this question. He says, “I love the Marine Corps. , but hate the government.” What a deep statement - one that conjures up very mixed, confusing emotions. So I have to examine not only the statements of love, but of loathing for war. War is a dirty business, forever has been and forever will be. So why do we encourage our citizens to think otherwise?
II. I had to get more to the root of my feelings about these questions. So, after spending time at this event, I went to downtown Washington , D.C. to visit monuments built to honor soldiers who fought in past wars. I had to make sense of how we keep making the same mistakes. We send an entire generation off to a foreign land to kill people. My father fought in WWII, and was in the Battle of Okinawa , where he was severely wounded. He was fortunate to come home and repair physically, but never mentally. He hated the Marine Corps. He never spoke about that war, but I always knew he was angry.
The first memorial I visited was that one, where my father’s picture is stored in a digital bank and you can enter the name and information surfaces on a computer screen. There he was, in his Pacific Alphas (green wool uniform ), with all his medals, smiling at the age of 27, when he was first drafted. The roiling emotions took over my entire body. I grew up seeing that photo, and loving my father for what he did to “protect” our freedom. Next to the monument are the infamous words “Freedom isn’t Free,” carved into the granite wall. My father eventually died from liver failure, which was caused by Hepatitis C, which he contracted on the battlefield through a blood transfusion from a Japanese soldier that they had taken prisoner.
So why do we do this as a country? I walked around to the Korean monument where they had life-size statues of a platoon on patrol, and faces carved into another granite wall hailing the suffering and sacrifice of those soldiers. For what? I asked myself. I saw bus loads of visitors from all over the U.S. taking pictures with the statues, wreaths in the background, and against the granite walls, smiling and awestruck at our “heroes.” A guide was repeating that freedom isn’t free and how our military is the most honorable and the best in the world. We should be proud of them, the guide said. Small children with their own cameras were taking photos and looking in wonderment at the soldiers standing in formation, their battle- hardened faces carved into metal.
I asked myself why these kids were there. How could this be such an attraction? So this is where it starts, I thought. Taking kids on bus trips to the nation’s capitol and looking at war monuments. They are being indoctrinated from the inception of their lives that America is brave and wonderful because of its military.
I started thinking what wars the U.S. had launched against other nations that actually served the interests of humanity. I thought about Hitler’s concentration camps in World War II, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered in the cruelest ways imaginable. The U.S. had helped to liberate the concentration camps, defeat the Nazis, and free Europe from the death grip of a madman. That would seem to be a worthy cause, and an argument why we do need a military.
But was the real motive of the Americans in World War II to stop the genocide against Jewish people? It took this nation awhile to enter that war, and it did so only after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to my father-at age 27, the parent of a young son-being drafted. Then we dropped two atomic weapons on innocent Japanese civilians, incinerating hundreds of thousands instantly, and causing still hundreds of thousands more deaths in years to come due to radiation exposure.
Was that heroic? No, it was malicious and vengeful, and meant nothing to the security of our shores. People died at Pearl Harbor , the damage was done, so now it was time to pay back the Japanese one-thousand fold.
III. Our military might equals imperialism. Solidifying the U.S. position atop the imperialist ladder was the real motivation for American entry into World War II, and in fact it has essentially been the motivating factor for every war waged against other countries by this nation’s military. So when I asked myself what wars the U.S. had waged against other nations with the genuine motivation of serving humanity, the answer I arrived at is: None.
We train our soldiers and Marines to kill, and to be merciless. They have the best weapons that our money can buy, and are trained to use them on the enemy, whether they are innocent civilians or someone who is actually threatening their lives directly. It is indiscriminate killing at the behest of a government that is seeking to terrify the world into submission to American empire.
Indeed, the history of the U.S. Armed Forces is littered with war crimes in pursuit of a domestic and global “manifest destiny” to achieve greater lands and resources. Keep in mind that the United States as we know it today would not exist were it not for the military’s systematic decimation of first Native Americans, and then Mexicans, in the most unspeakable ways imaginable. During the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, the U.S. Cavalry murdered hundreds of Native Americans — many of them women and children — in what is today Colorado.
Or consider a recent article in the New Yorker, entitled, “The Water Cure: Debating Torture and Counterinsurgency - A Century Ago.”
After helping free The Philippines from Spanish colonialism, the American conquerors unleashed their wrath on those whom they were supposedly liberating (sound familiar?) As the dawn of the 20th century approached, American troops slaughtered civilians, burned down entire villages, and –yes– waterboarded prisoners.
In 1950, during the Korean War, American soldiers murdered hundreds of Korean civilians — again, many of them women and children — under the bridge at No Gun Ri. The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for its series of articles exposing this crime against humanity; the pieces centered on interviews with former U.S. veterans who had carried out the slaughter.
During the Vietnam War, U.S. forces murdered more than one million Indochinese civilians, employing in the process horrific chemical weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange, which burnt the skin of its victims. During the first Winter Soldier hearings, Vietnam Veterans testified about routinely murdering, disemboweling, and raping Vietnamese civilians, throwing bound prisoners out of helicopters to their deaths, and torching villages.
In fact, the final day of Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most infamous war crimes in U.S. history. On March 16, 1968, U.S. troops entered the village of My Lai and murdered hundreds of men, women, and children — young and old — raping some of the women and bayoneting elderly men.
The systematic crimes against humanity that are mentioned above represent only a small percentage of the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers under the direct leadership of their Commander-in-Chiefs, and they do not even touch on the countless instances of war-crimes-by-proxy carried out throughout the globe by the CIA, and by various puppet regimes installed by the U.S. government.
Without question, the veterans who spoke out against the horrors the U.S. military is inflicting upon the Iraqi people are to be commended for providing tremendously critical exposure at time when the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the Middle East has been rendered “off the table” by the mainstream media and political establishment. These veterans must be praised, as well, for demanding an immediate end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations; their resistance can play a huge role in bringing these nightmares to an end.
However, denouncing these occupations in isolation from the history of repeated war crimes carried out by the U.S. military no more makes sense than examining one murder committed by a serial killer in isolation from the rest of his murders. In order to both understand, and most powerfully resist, the current manifestations of U.S. war criminality in Iraq and Afghanistan — and in order to prevent future occurrences of crimes against humanity — we must realize that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are symptomatic of the historic role of the United States military as an institution.
During last weekend’s Winter Soldier hearings, soldiers repeatedly testified that the crimes against humanity they described were not isolated incidents; that they were the rule, not the exception, of the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan .
The further leap these veterans — and many others within the anti-war movement– must now make is to recognize that the occupations themselves, taken as whole, are hardly isolated incidents; they, too, represent the rule and not the exception of the U.S. military.
Elaine Brower is a member of Military Families Speak Out and is on the national steering committee of World Can’t Wait.
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
Jan. 20, 2009
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Published on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Winter Soldier 2008: A Marine Mom’s Eyewitness Account of the Testimony
by Elaine Brower
I. I have spent the past seven-plus years as an activist against the policies of George W. Bush and his regime. Already, my son has completed 2 tours of duty as a U.S. Marine, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq . So my life has been forever altered by the events of the past 7 years. Still, when I initially made plans to attend the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)’s Winter Soldier event, I intended to cover it from the perspective of an independent journalist.
However, after spending almost four days within the halls of the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland, meeting new members of IVAW, as well as many old friends from Veterans For Peace, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and other anti-war groups, and listening to the testimony of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, I realized I can no longer be an objective reporter. So I decided to write this story from the perspective of a Marine mom; one who is adamantly opposed to the so called “war on terror”, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan , and any other wars that this government is cooking up.
On Friday, Day 2, testimony began at 9 AM with a panel about the “Rules of Engagement”. Speakers from the Army and Marine Corps. — people that I have known for the last few years — recounted the atrocities that they not only witnessed but participated in. Anyone who is interested can listen online at www.ivaw.org/wintersoldier. But about halfway into that panel, I lost my objectivity. The stories they were telling about the rules of engagement they learned while training at boot camp, or on a military base “back home”, were the same as what I had heard from my son. I broke down sobbing. The photographs they were showing on the five viewing screens of bloodied bodies torn apart by close gunfire, 50-calibre Machine guns, rocket launchers, and every other damn weapon our great military industrial complex has created, were all too familiar to me. When my son returned home from both war zones, he was so eager to share his stories and pictures.
I could not fathom that my son, whom I raised to be a Catholic, whom I took to Sunday school, who received Communion and Confirmation, had not only been a participant in such horrors, but had pictures to prove it. I immediately told him that I would not listen to his stories or look at those pictures. He could speak with his father. My response may seem too many as being hard on my son, who only wanted to unload what he was feeling on his mother. But I couldn’t come to terms with it then — or now.
Watching and listening to the testimony made me very ill. Here were these young men and women, handsomely dressed, some wearing medals, talking about how they shot civilians who were holding nothing more threatening than a cell phone, groceries, a shovel, a white flag, or a pair of binoculars. Anyone deemed suspicious by the particular soldier or Marine on watch was fair game, subject to the orders, “Take ‘em out!” The Rules of Engagement, as stated by Garrett Rapenhagen were “a joke and disgrace, and ever changing.”
I knew that. I had heard it back home from my son. He told me he had to survive; he had to protect his buddies, so that they could all come home alive. They didn’t know who the enemy was, so they would just “blast them away.” The Marines are taught that. They shoot and don’t even ask questions. Their motto is “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out!”
Camilo Mejia, who is the chair of IVAW, spoke about how soldiers were trained that dehumanizing the enemy is necessary to survival, and how they are taught to think of Iraqis as “hajjis”. In fact, all of the panel members said Iraqi citizens were repeatedly referred to as hajjis. I know that word all too well; I have heard my son talk about it, as well as other anti-Iraqi slurs such as “towel head,” and “sand nigger.” The expression “if you feel threatened, use your weapon” was also a familiar phrase to me. So, too, was the slogan, “Do what you need to do.” That meant that you use your rifle anytime, and you can crush whoever you want with your vehicle in the street.
Members on the panel recounted how, when they were bored, they blew up dogs and other animals to keep themselves entertained. All too well I had heard these stories, which gave me the creeps more than anything else. I also heard the testimony of former Cpl. Matt Childers, who said that after American soldiers had already beaten and starved detainees in their custody, one of them removed a hat from one of the detainees’ heads and smeared it with his own feces, before feeding it to one of the prisoners who was so hungry that he actually attempted to eat it.
One other Marine, whom I happened to interview personally — which produced a conversation I hope to describe more fully in a future article — was Bryan Casler. Casler was part of the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. He described Marines taking their MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) which were in plastic bags, and defecating in them before tossing them out to Iraqi children on the side of the road. Those who picked them up would think they were food and attempt to eat the contents. Casler also said soldiers would urinate in bottles and throw them at children. They would also remove the chemical packets that were within the MREs (which helped heat the food) and hand them to children to eat. He said that when they went into Babylon , the marines would drive vehicles into mosques and historic ruins, and break off pieces to take home with them.
Some of the soldiers’ testimony was characterized by defiant anger. At the end of his testimony, former Marine Mike Totten ripped up the commendation he had received from General Petraeus, and threw it on the floor in front of him, to a huge applause. One day earlier, former Marine Jon Turner had taken a chest full of medals and thrown them into the audience. “I don’t work for you anymore!” Turner said. At the end of his heart-wrenching account of the atrocities he had witnessed or committed, Turner begged the Iraqi people for forgiveness.
All too well I know these stories, and have known them for years. So I kept crying and asking myself how these young men and women wound up in this position. How someone who joined the military out of a sense of “patriotism” wound up doing such horrible and heinous things that would make a mother sick to her stomach. How do we let our children do this? Casler, like my son, joined right out of high school. Many others do the same. And many don’t have to be recruited; they join voluntarily, out of a desire to serve their country. Many feel that doing so is what makes heroes.
So I spent three days listening to heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching stories, and continuously asked myself the same question: “Why?” More specifically, why do these soldiers and Marines, who represent a critical new breed of resisters, still feel so tied to the military that many of them espouse some variation of the sentiment, “I am proud of my service in the military. I am not proud of what I did.” For someone like me, I can clearly see that statement making sense. But then I had to ask myself why I thought it made sense.
How could you be proud to be in the military, and yet not like what you participated in while in the military? I have often asked my son this question. He says, “I love the Marine Corps. , but hate the government.” What a deep statement - one that conjures up very mixed, confusing emotions. So I have to examine not only the statements of love, but of loathing for war. War is a dirty business, forever has been and forever will be. So why do we encourage our citizens to think otherwise?
II. I had to get more to the root of my feelings about these questions. So, after spending time at this event, I went to downtown Washington , D.C. to visit monuments built to honor soldiers who fought in past wars. I had to make sense of how we keep making the same mistakes. We send an entire generation off to a foreign land to kill people. My father fought in WWII, and was in the Battle of Okinawa , where he was severely wounded. He was fortunate to come home and repair physically, but never mentally. He hated the Marine Corps. He never spoke about that war, but I always knew he was angry.
The first memorial I visited was that one, where my father’s picture is stored in a digital bank and you can enter the name and information surfaces on a computer screen. There he was, in his Pacific Alphas (green wool uniform ), with all his medals, smiling at the age of 27, when he was first drafted. The roiling emotions took over my entire body. I grew up seeing that photo, and loving my father for what he did to “protect” our freedom. Next to the monument are the infamous words “Freedom isn’t Free,” carved into the granite wall. My father eventually died from liver failure, which was caused by Hepatitis C, which he contracted on the battlefield through a blood transfusion from a Japanese soldier that they had taken prisoner.
So why do we do this as a country? I walked around to the Korean monument where they had life-size statues of a platoon on patrol, and faces carved into another granite wall hailing the suffering and sacrifice of those soldiers. For what? I asked myself. I saw bus loads of visitors from all over the U.S. taking pictures with the statues, wreaths in the background, and against the granite walls, smiling and awestruck at our “heroes.” A guide was repeating that freedom isn’t free and how our military is the most honorable and the best in the world. We should be proud of them, the guide said. Small children with their own cameras were taking photos and looking in wonderment at the soldiers standing in formation, their battle- hardened faces carved into metal.
I asked myself why these kids were there. How could this be such an attraction? So this is where it starts, I thought. Taking kids on bus trips to the nation’s capitol and looking at war monuments. They are being indoctrinated from the inception of their lives that America is brave and wonderful because of its military.
I started thinking what wars the U.S. had launched against other nations that actually served the interests of humanity. I thought about Hitler’s concentration camps in World War II, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered in the cruelest ways imaginable. The U.S. had helped to liberate the concentration camps, defeat the Nazis, and free Europe from the death grip of a madman. That would seem to be a worthy cause, and an argument why we do need a military.
But was the real motive of the Americans in World War II to stop the genocide against Jewish people? It took this nation awhile to enter that war, and it did so only after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which led to my father-at age 27, the parent of a young son-being drafted. Then we dropped two atomic weapons on innocent Japanese civilians, incinerating hundreds of thousands instantly, and causing still hundreds of thousands more deaths in years to come due to radiation exposure.
Was that heroic? No, it was malicious and vengeful, and meant nothing to the security of our shores. People died at Pearl Harbor , the damage was done, so now it was time to pay back the Japanese one-thousand fold.
III. Our military might equals imperialism. Solidifying the U.S. position atop the imperialist ladder was the real motivation for American entry into World War II, and in fact it has essentially been the motivating factor for every war waged against other countries by this nation’s military. So when I asked myself what wars the U.S. had waged against other nations with the genuine motivation of serving humanity, the answer I arrived at is: None.
We train our soldiers and Marines to kill, and to be merciless. They have the best weapons that our money can buy, and are trained to use them on the enemy, whether they are innocent civilians or someone who is actually threatening their lives directly. It is indiscriminate killing at the behest of a government that is seeking to terrify the world into submission to American empire.
Indeed, the history of the U.S. Armed Forces is littered with war crimes in pursuit of a domestic and global “manifest destiny” to achieve greater lands and resources. Keep in mind that the United States as we know it today would not exist were it not for the military’s systematic decimation of first Native Americans, and then Mexicans, in the most unspeakable ways imaginable. During the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, the U.S. Cavalry murdered hundreds of Native Americans — many of them women and children — in what is today Colorado.
Or consider a recent article in the New Yorker, entitled, “The Water Cure: Debating Torture and Counterinsurgency - A Century Ago.”
After helping free The Philippines from Spanish colonialism, the American conquerors unleashed their wrath on those whom they were supposedly liberating (sound familiar?) As the dawn of the 20th century approached, American troops slaughtered civilians, burned down entire villages, and –yes– waterboarded prisoners.
In 1950, during the Korean War, American soldiers murdered hundreds of Korean civilians — again, many of them women and children — under the bridge at No Gun Ri. The Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for its series of articles exposing this crime against humanity; the pieces centered on interviews with former U.S. veterans who had carried out the slaughter.
During the Vietnam War, U.S. forces murdered more than one million Indochinese civilians, employing in the process horrific chemical weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange, which burnt the skin of its victims. During the first Winter Soldier hearings, Vietnam Veterans testified about routinely murdering, disemboweling, and raping Vietnamese civilians, throwing bound prisoners out of helicopters to their deaths, and torching villages.
In fact, the final day of Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most infamous war crimes in U.S. history. On March 16, 1968, U.S. troops entered the village of My Lai and murdered hundreds of men, women, and children — young and old — raping some of the women and bayoneting elderly men.
The systematic crimes against humanity that are mentioned above represent only a small percentage of the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers under the direct leadership of their Commander-in-Chiefs, and they do not even touch on the countless instances of war-crimes-by-proxy carried out throughout the globe by the CIA, and by various puppet regimes installed by the U.S. government.
Without question, the veterans who spoke out against the horrors the U.S. military is inflicting upon the Iraqi people are to be commended for providing tremendously critical exposure at time when the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the Middle East has been rendered “off the table” by the mainstream media and political establishment. These veterans must be praised, as well, for demanding an immediate end to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and occupations; their resistance can play a huge role in bringing these nightmares to an end.
However, denouncing these occupations in isolation from the history of repeated war crimes carried out by the U.S. military no more makes sense than examining one murder committed by a serial killer in isolation from the rest of his murders. In order to both understand, and most powerfully resist, the current manifestations of U.S. war criminality in Iraq and Afghanistan — and in order to prevent future occurrences of crimes against humanity — we must realize that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are symptomatic of the historic role of the United States military as an institution.
During last weekend’s Winter Soldier hearings, soldiers repeatedly testified that the crimes against humanity they described were not isolated incidents; that they were the rule, not the exception, of the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan .
The further leap these veterans — and many others within the anti-war movement– must now make is to recognize that the occupations themselves, taken as whole, are hardly isolated incidents; they, too, represent the rule and not the exception of the U.S. military.
Elaine Brower is a member of Military Families Speak Out and is on the national steering committee of World Can’t Wait.
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
Jan. 20, 2009
Add to Calendar
Twilight Zone / When charity ends at home
Twilight Zone / When charity ends at home
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz
March 15, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=964067&contrassID=2&subContrassID=14
The ovens have been brought downstairs, into hiding. The two bagel and cake bakeries have already been closed by army order. The Israel Defense Forces confiscated the ovens in one of them, but the employees in the other bakery managed to rescue and hide theirs. The popular clothing shop Pretty Woman, in the heart of the bustling mall in Hebron, and its neighbor, Mama Care, the high-end shop for baby clothes, are about to close. The same is true of the new and spacious supermarket, the modern physical-therapy institute, the beauty salon, the barbershop and the library: Everything will be closed by order of the GOC Central Command. Local food and clothing warehouses were also emptied out by the IDF last week, with an inventory worth about NIS 750,000, designated for the impressive orphanages of the Islamic Charity Movement. The goods were loaded onto trucks and confiscated.
In the well-kept orphanage we visited this week, the hundreds of children were eating only majadera (a rice-and-lentil dish) and yogurt for lunch: There is no meat, no chicken, no fish; everything has been taken away. The gates of the movement`s new school, a handsome stone building designed for 1,200 pupils, have also been welded shut by the IDF.
The army has declared war on the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron , in the context of the war against Hamas, the war against terror. After emptying the offices of the city`s money changers of cash reserves several weeks ago, the next strategic target is the private bakeries and shops in the city, whose owners happen to lease their places of business from the owner of the buildings: the Islamic Charity Movement.
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How pathetic is an occupation army that empties out warehouses of food and clothing earmarked for orphans; how absurd is GOC Central Command Major General Gadi Shamni, who signs closure orders for beauty salons and clothing shops; how outrageous is the confiscation of industrial refrigerators in which food for children is kept; how cruel is a military regime that closes libraries used by young people; how ridiculous are the excuses that closing bakeries contributes to the war against terror; how foolish is the battle against dairies whose products are earmarked for these children; and how difficult is the situation of the Israeli occupation in the territories if it must resort to such contemptible activities in order to establish its status.
The Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron was established in 1962, long before the birth of Hamas, shortly before the beginning of the Israeli occupation. Since then the organization has established a ramified network of educational and welfare institutions, and has acquired a great deal of real estate all over the city, with the declared aim of providing assistance to the needy - mainly to local orphans and the children of the poor. The legal adviser of the movement, attorney Abd al-Karim Farah, young and energetic in an elegant suit and a well-kempt beard, who does not hesitate to shake women`s hands and is now studying Hebrew at a local ulpan, says that in the early days of the occupation the Military Administration helped and encouraged the activity of the charitable movement. He himself is a product of its institutions.
Today the Islamic Charity Movement cares for 7,000 orphans and children in distress from Hebron and surrounding villages. There are 350 youngsters at its boarding schools and 1,200 pupils attending its three city schools; another six are in outlying towns. The children have lost one or both parents, or come from severely distressed homes. Only a small percentage are children of the fallen. The movement`s institutions employ 550 people, assisted by hundreds of volunteers. Their monthly budget is 400,000 Jordanian dinars, over NIS 2 million. Attorney Farah says everything is supervised by accountants and the Palestinian Authority`s welfare and education ministries. Also, the curricula in the movement`s educational institutions are identical to those of the PA, according to Farah, who emphasizes that `everything is legal.`
Most of its budget comes from donations from abroad - from Arab countries, and European and American agencies - but the charitable organization also has quite a number of independent sources of income: from buildings and modern commercial centers all over Hebron that it owns and leases to private tenants and businessmen, two bakeries, a sewing workshop and a dairy, whose products are used by the children in the institutions and are also for sale in the open market. The movement has a board of directors that is elected biannually and was headed by Dr. Adnan Maswadi, an ear, nose and throat specialist, who was recently released from detention in Israel and was forced to resign. About 30 additional employees are presently under arrest for belonging to the organization.
`I would like to emphasize,` says Farah, `that our movement has no official connection with Hamas. Perhaps some of our workers belong to Hamas, just as in other institutions such as the municipalities, but there is no formal connection. Nor are there transfers of money to Hamas, as Israel claims. Our financial reports are open and transparent. We are in no way the infrastructure of Hamas.`
Since 2002 the IDF has raided the movement`s offices many times, confiscating a computer here and taking away files there, detaining employees for investigation, issuing closure orders. But what has happened in recent days is unprecedented. On February 26, the IDF carried out a raid and issued seven closure orders for institutions associated with the movement. Last Friday it also raided its 500-square-meter food and clothing warehouse. Closure orders were also issued against all the stores and commercial centers owned by the movement.
Attorney Farah says he would have been happy had the IDF explained the steps it took, and what is permitted or forbidden in terms of his organization. The movement has already hired the services of Israeli attorney Jawad Bulus, who will appeal to the attorney general on its behalf and try to overturn the evil decree. Researcher Musa Abu-Hashhash has written a report on behalf of the B`Tselem human-rights organization.
Meanwhile, we go on a tour of Hebron accompanied by Farah, to see the results of the war the GOC Central Command has launched against Hamas.
First stop is the Mercy Bakery, a shop and a gallery, which makes savory and sweet confections. A paper declaring `Confiscation order and closure` is pasted on the display window, in Hebrew, signed by GOC Shamni. `In the context of my authority,` etc.; there are still bagels for sale. The bakery`s staff was told that until April 1 they are allowed to sell them, although Shamni`s order went into effect in February - for three years. Why for three years? Perhaps then the movement will change its ways. Three years with education, but without food. To be on the safe side, the bakers took the forbidden ovens away from here in time. Two sacks of white flour donated by the World Food Program and the European Union remain in the empty premises.
The neighboring store, a modern and luxurious supermarket, lacks for nothing. Its owner has rented the premises from the Islamic Charity Movement, and therefore it has been condemned to closure. `Confiscation order and closure. From April 1 all activity involving equipment found on the business` premises will be forbidden, and the military commander will act to realize his ownership and to seize said equipment.` All in the usual inarticulate and absurd language of the IDF.
The owner of the supermarket, Mujahid al-Atrash, opened his large store only three months ago and invested NIS 500,000 in it. `Don`t I have anything to say about this?` he asks. `Where will I go?` Ein Gedi mineral war, Tnuva sour cream, cans of Red Bull, Huggies diapers, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Osem petit-beurre cookies, Strauss ice creams. The adjacent shop, Ayman`s barbershop, has a closure order on the window. The same is true along Nimara Street, the `street of the tiger.`
On King Faisal Street, Hebron`s answer to Dizengoff, Pretty Woman and Mama Care are both full of customers. Spacious stores, two floors, dozens of women, all wearing head scarves. Pretty Woman`s owner, Lina Karaki, opened the store nine years ago and says she invested about another NIS 1 million in expanding and renovating it about a year ago. The store really is elegant, with a marble floor and chandeliers. `I don`t belong to any organization or any party. I have nothing to do with all this. What is illegal about my store? They gave us a month to get out. Where will we go? This is not a street stall that can be closed in a month,` Karaki says.
On the second floor is the evening-gown department, the best of Hebron fashion for NIS 3,000 per dress. There are 18 employees in the shop, who are liable to lose their livelihood. The end-of-season sale is in full swing, but Karaki emphasizes that it has nothing to do with the closure order. This is only the end of winter and the beginning of summer fashions. She still hopes that the edict will be canceled.
We enter the far reaches of the mall, over which the general`s closure order hovers. And what do we have here, in this bastion of Hamas? A cosmetics store, two clothing shops, The Gap and Calvin Klein in the display windows. There`s a closure order on the dental clinic of Dr. Rima Kawasmeh on the second floor, and also on the door of the private physical-therapy and fitness institute of Dr. Mohammed Amaru, this time signed by Colonel Yehuda Fuchs, the Hebron brigade commander. Shamni and Fuchs have apparently divided the responsibilities between them: Shamni signs the orders for bakeries and Fuchs for fitness clubs. Together with his Ukrainian doctor-wife, Amaru opened the place in 1998 and equipped it with the best rehabilitation and fitness devices. A month ago he completed another renovation in the luxurious institute: sophisticated treatment beds, a Jacuzzi, exercise machines, silent air conditioning, a therapeutic pool and even a `beauty machine` designed for people who suffer from paralysis of the face. Amaru says the patients are afraid to come since the IDF raided the club, about a month ago: `There is no law in the world that will do this to me. I don`t belong to any group, I am not connected to anyone. I only pay rent here.`
On the floor above is the public relations office of the Islamic Charity Movement: rooms that have been emptied of their contents, except for two heaters, which were apparently too heavy for the IDF`s `porters.` Farah says that in the IDF liaison office there are probably already whole containers full of equipment seized from his organization. Its public library for youth, on the third floor of the mall, is also supposed to be closed. It contains 18,800 books, cataloged and classified, about science and religion, plus computers and even tapes for learning Hebrew. Everything will soon be closed, by order.
The IDF spokesman`s response: `During recent weeks forces of the IDF, the Shin Bet security services and the Civil Administration have been operating in order to strike at the institutions of the Islamic Charity Movement, which belongs to the Hamas terror organization and works to increase support for the organization, to disseminate its ideas, to find and enlist activists, and to transfer money for terrorist activity.
`Hamas activity is carried out under the civilian cover of support for the population and charity, but in fact the goal of the movement is to strengthen the power and control of the terror organization Hamas, as part of the expansion of terrorist activity against the State of Israel and its attempt to increase power in Judea and Samaria.
`In the context of the activities and protests of the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron, the movement has transferred money to terror activists and their families, educated young people in the spirit of jihad, supported the families of shaheeds [martyrs] and prisoners, and worked to disseminate Hamas principles among the Palestinian population. By these acts the Hamas terror organization has exploited the Palestinian population and its weaker elements, in order to harness them to the terror network.
`In the context of the activity, the IDF operated against a number of economic assets of the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron, and ordered their closure and the confiscation of some of their property. These assets constituted a source of income for the Hamas terror organization, which earned substantial sums of money from them for terrorist activity. The IDF will continue to adopt all the means at its disposal against the terror organizations and those who help them, and against Hamas in particular, in order to provide security to the inhabitants of the State of Israel.`
The orphanage is located in a pleasant neighborhood on the western slopes of the city, at the edge of a vineyard. Everything is so clean and well-kept - the dining room, the bathrooms, the bedrooms and the classrooms used by 150 children. It is hard to believe that here, in these buildings, live dozens of youngsters in distress. Now they are out in the yard, preparing to enter the dining room for lunch. The discipline is strict and the order is exemplary. Grace for meals is posted on the wall. The children are well-dressed; their bedrooms have posters of native birds on the walls. Mohammed is fatherless, Mahmoud is motherless. All the children with whom I spoke are from severely deprived backgrounds. Outside there is a garden and a shady place to sit, large sports fields with a mosque next to them. Six in a room, they sleep in attractive wooden beds covered with flowered bedspreads. Every residential wing also has a large guest room with armchairs and a television, `so the children will feel at home.`
It is doubtful whether they ever lived in such conditions. It is also doubtful whether they will be able to continue to live like this, if the IDF continues to confiscate, to close and to destroy
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
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz
March 15, 2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=964067&contrassID=2&subContrassID=14
The ovens have been brought downstairs, into hiding. The two bagel and cake bakeries have already been closed by army order. The Israel Defense Forces confiscated the ovens in one of them, but the employees in the other bakery managed to rescue and hide theirs. The popular clothing shop Pretty Woman, in the heart of the bustling mall in Hebron, and its neighbor, Mama Care, the high-end shop for baby clothes, are about to close. The same is true of the new and spacious supermarket, the modern physical-therapy institute, the beauty salon, the barbershop and the library: Everything will be closed by order of the GOC Central Command. Local food and clothing warehouses were also emptied out by the IDF last week, with an inventory worth about NIS 750,000, designated for the impressive orphanages of the Islamic Charity Movement. The goods were loaded onto trucks and confiscated.
In the well-kept orphanage we visited this week, the hundreds of children were eating only majadera (a rice-and-lentil dish) and yogurt for lunch: There is no meat, no chicken, no fish; everything has been taken away. The gates of the movement`s new school, a handsome stone building designed for 1,200 pupils, have also been welded shut by the IDF.
The army has declared war on the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron , in the context of the war against Hamas, the war against terror. After emptying the offices of the city`s money changers of cash reserves several weeks ago, the next strategic target is the private bakeries and shops in the city, whose owners happen to lease their places of business from the owner of the buildings: the Islamic Charity Movement.
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How pathetic is an occupation army that empties out warehouses of food and clothing earmarked for orphans; how absurd is GOC Central Command Major General Gadi Shamni, who signs closure orders for beauty salons and clothing shops; how outrageous is the confiscation of industrial refrigerators in which food for children is kept; how cruel is a military regime that closes libraries used by young people; how ridiculous are the excuses that closing bakeries contributes to the war against terror; how foolish is the battle against dairies whose products are earmarked for these children; and how difficult is the situation of the Israeli occupation in the territories if it must resort to such contemptible activities in order to establish its status.
The Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron was established in 1962, long before the birth of Hamas, shortly before the beginning of the Israeli occupation. Since then the organization has established a ramified network of educational and welfare institutions, and has acquired a great deal of real estate all over the city, with the declared aim of providing assistance to the needy - mainly to local orphans and the children of the poor. The legal adviser of the movement, attorney Abd al-Karim Farah, young and energetic in an elegant suit and a well-kempt beard, who does not hesitate to shake women`s hands and is now studying Hebrew at a local ulpan, says that in the early days of the occupation the Military Administration helped and encouraged the activity of the charitable movement. He himself is a product of its institutions.
Today the Islamic Charity Movement cares for 7,000 orphans and children in distress from Hebron and surrounding villages. There are 350 youngsters at its boarding schools and 1,200 pupils attending its three city schools; another six are in outlying towns. The children have lost one or both parents, or come from severely distressed homes. Only a small percentage are children of the fallen. The movement`s institutions employ 550 people, assisted by hundreds of volunteers. Their monthly budget is 400,000 Jordanian dinars, over NIS 2 million. Attorney Farah says everything is supervised by accountants and the Palestinian Authority`s welfare and education ministries. Also, the curricula in the movement`s educational institutions are identical to those of the PA, according to Farah, who emphasizes that `everything is legal.`
Most of its budget comes from donations from abroad - from Arab countries, and European and American agencies - but the charitable organization also has quite a number of independent sources of income: from buildings and modern commercial centers all over Hebron that it owns and leases to private tenants and businessmen, two bakeries, a sewing workshop and a dairy, whose products are used by the children in the institutions and are also for sale in the open market. The movement has a board of directors that is elected biannually and was headed by Dr. Adnan Maswadi, an ear, nose and throat specialist, who was recently released from detention in Israel and was forced to resign. About 30 additional employees are presently under arrest for belonging to the organization.
`I would like to emphasize,` says Farah, `that our movement has no official connection with Hamas. Perhaps some of our workers belong to Hamas, just as in other institutions such as the municipalities, but there is no formal connection. Nor are there transfers of money to Hamas, as Israel claims. Our financial reports are open and transparent. We are in no way the infrastructure of Hamas.`
Since 2002 the IDF has raided the movement`s offices many times, confiscating a computer here and taking away files there, detaining employees for investigation, issuing closure orders. But what has happened in recent days is unprecedented. On February 26, the IDF carried out a raid and issued seven closure orders for institutions associated with the movement. Last Friday it also raided its 500-square-meter food and clothing warehouse. Closure orders were also issued against all the stores and commercial centers owned by the movement.
Attorney Farah says he would have been happy had the IDF explained the steps it took, and what is permitted or forbidden in terms of his organization. The movement has already hired the services of Israeli attorney Jawad Bulus, who will appeal to the attorney general on its behalf and try to overturn the evil decree. Researcher Musa Abu-Hashhash has written a report on behalf of the B`Tselem human-rights organization.
Meanwhile, we go on a tour of Hebron accompanied by Farah, to see the results of the war the GOC Central Command has launched against Hamas.
First stop is the Mercy Bakery, a shop and a gallery, which makes savory and sweet confections. A paper declaring `Confiscation order and closure` is pasted on the display window, in Hebrew, signed by GOC Shamni. `In the context of my authority,` etc.; there are still bagels for sale. The bakery`s staff was told that until April 1 they are allowed to sell them, although Shamni`s order went into effect in February - for three years. Why for three years? Perhaps then the movement will change its ways. Three years with education, but without food. To be on the safe side, the bakers took the forbidden ovens away from here in time. Two sacks of white flour donated by the World Food Program and the European Union remain in the empty premises.
The neighboring store, a modern and luxurious supermarket, lacks for nothing. Its owner has rented the premises from the Islamic Charity Movement, and therefore it has been condemned to closure. `Confiscation order and closure. From April 1 all activity involving equipment found on the business` premises will be forbidden, and the military commander will act to realize his ownership and to seize said equipment.` All in the usual inarticulate and absurd language of the IDF.
The owner of the supermarket, Mujahid al-Atrash, opened his large store only three months ago and invested NIS 500,000 in it. `Don`t I have anything to say about this?` he asks. `Where will I go?` Ein Gedi mineral war, Tnuva sour cream, cans of Red Bull, Huggies diapers, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Osem petit-beurre cookies, Strauss ice creams. The adjacent shop, Ayman`s barbershop, has a closure order on the window. The same is true along Nimara Street, the `street of the tiger.`
On King Faisal Street, Hebron`s answer to Dizengoff, Pretty Woman and Mama Care are both full of customers. Spacious stores, two floors, dozens of women, all wearing head scarves. Pretty Woman`s owner, Lina Karaki, opened the store nine years ago and says she invested about another NIS 1 million in expanding and renovating it about a year ago. The store really is elegant, with a marble floor and chandeliers. `I don`t belong to any organization or any party. I have nothing to do with all this. What is illegal about my store? They gave us a month to get out. Where will we go? This is not a street stall that can be closed in a month,` Karaki says.
On the second floor is the evening-gown department, the best of Hebron fashion for NIS 3,000 per dress. There are 18 employees in the shop, who are liable to lose their livelihood. The end-of-season sale is in full swing, but Karaki emphasizes that it has nothing to do with the closure order. This is only the end of winter and the beginning of summer fashions. She still hopes that the edict will be canceled.
We enter the far reaches of the mall, over which the general`s closure order hovers. And what do we have here, in this bastion of Hamas? A cosmetics store, two clothing shops, The Gap and Calvin Klein in the display windows. There`s a closure order on the dental clinic of Dr. Rima Kawasmeh on the second floor, and also on the door of the private physical-therapy and fitness institute of Dr. Mohammed Amaru, this time signed by Colonel Yehuda Fuchs, the Hebron brigade commander. Shamni and Fuchs have apparently divided the responsibilities between them: Shamni signs the orders for bakeries and Fuchs for fitness clubs. Together with his Ukrainian doctor-wife, Amaru opened the place in 1998 and equipped it with the best rehabilitation and fitness devices. A month ago he completed another renovation in the luxurious institute: sophisticated treatment beds, a Jacuzzi, exercise machines, silent air conditioning, a therapeutic pool and even a `beauty machine` designed for people who suffer from paralysis of the face. Amaru says the patients are afraid to come since the IDF raided the club, about a month ago: `There is no law in the world that will do this to me. I don`t belong to any group, I am not connected to anyone. I only pay rent here.`
On the floor above is the public relations office of the Islamic Charity Movement: rooms that have been emptied of their contents, except for two heaters, which were apparently too heavy for the IDF`s `porters.` Farah says that in the IDF liaison office there are probably already whole containers full of equipment seized from his organization. Its public library for youth, on the third floor of the mall, is also supposed to be closed. It contains 18,800 books, cataloged and classified, about science and religion, plus computers and even tapes for learning Hebrew. Everything will soon be closed, by order.
The IDF spokesman`s response: `During recent weeks forces of the IDF, the Shin Bet security services and the Civil Administration have been operating in order to strike at the institutions of the Islamic Charity Movement, which belongs to the Hamas terror organization and works to increase support for the organization, to disseminate its ideas, to find and enlist activists, and to transfer money for terrorist activity.
`Hamas activity is carried out under the civilian cover of support for the population and charity, but in fact the goal of the movement is to strengthen the power and control of the terror organization Hamas, as part of the expansion of terrorist activity against the State of Israel and its attempt to increase power in Judea and Samaria.
`In the context of the activities and protests of the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron, the movement has transferred money to terror activists and their families, educated young people in the spirit of jihad, supported the families of shaheeds [martyrs] and prisoners, and worked to disseminate Hamas principles among the Palestinian population. By these acts the Hamas terror organization has exploited the Palestinian population and its weaker elements, in order to harness them to the terror network.
`In the context of the activity, the IDF operated against a number of economic assets of the Islamic Charity Movement in Hebron, and ordered their closure and the confiscation of some of their property. These assets constituted a source of income for the Hamas terror organization, which earned substantial sums of money from them for terrorist activity. The IDF will continue to adopt all the means at its disposal against the terror organizations and those who help them, and against Hamas in particular, in order to provide security to the inhabitants of the State of Israel.`
The orphanage is located in a pleasant neighborhood on the western slopes of the city, at the edge of a vineyard. Everything is so clean and well-kept - the dining room, the bathrooms, the bedrooms and the classrooms used by 150 children. It is hard to believe that here, in these buildings, live dozens of youngsters in distress. Now they are out in the yard, preparing to enter the dining room for lunch. The discipline is strict and the order is exemplary. Grace for meals is posted on the wall. The children are well-dressed; their bedrooms have posters of native birds on the walls. Mohammed is fatherless, Mahmoud is motherless. All the children with whom I spoke are from severely deprived backgrounds. Outside there is a garden and a shady place to sit, large sports fields with a mosque next to them. Six in a room, they sleep in attractive wooden beds covered with flowered bedspreads. Every residential wing also has a large guest room with armchairs and a television, `so the children will feel at home.`
It is doubtful whether they ever lived in such conditions. It is also doubtful whether they will be able to continue to live like this, if the IDF continues to confiscate, to close and to destroy
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
Oscar Winner Plans Abu Ghraib Photo Site
Published on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 by Politico.com
Oscar Winner Plans Abu Ghraib Photo Site
by Jeffrey Ressner
Since Abu Ghraib first came to the world’s attention in 2004, nearly 300 photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse have been shown to the public. But soon an enormous archive of new material - including more than 1,500 other photos, unredacted court papers and interview transcripts - will be posted online by filmmaker Errol Morris, whose latest documentary “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure” examines the scandal in horrific detail.0326 07
“I’d like all this material to be seen,” says Morris, who shot an estimated 200 hours of interviews for his two-hour film and used much of the extra material as research for an accompanying book scheduled for release later this year. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker (for “The Fog of War”) says he’s currently negotiating with several universities to host the large collection.
Using the current promotional site for his new movie to spark the larger project he envisions, Morris plans to create an interface in which clicking on each photo pulls up its context and circumstances - who took it, who else was present when was it shot and any salient testimony made to the commissions investigating Abu Ghraib. Morris sees his website as a growing historical archive, with new information added as more participants and witnesses come forward to speak.
Morris’ new film was publicly unveiled last month at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, where it became the first documentary to ever be nominated for the top award. (It ended up winning a jury grand prize instead.) Opening in several U.S. cities on April 25, the film will roll out to more theaters in May. Raw, brutal and unrelenting, it is also a vivid tone poem recounting the stories behind the well-known photographs and an attempt to uncover the truth of what happened outside the frame.
“We think somehow we know what Abu Ghraib is about because we’ve seen the photographs,” says Morris, “and I believe the photographs do not really tell us the real story. The photographs are both cover-up and exposé. The element of the cover-up is unknown, I suppose because it was covered up. It’s as simple as that. … I don’t think there ever will be justice until parts of the story are made public, and I am trying very hard to do that.”
Morris says few, if any, members of the public are aware, for example, that children were kept at the prison as hostages, ostensibly in order to make family members talk.
Morris also feels the popular perception of Abu Ghraib has been colored by both political agendas. “The left and the right - and I don’t think it makes much difference here - all assume they know what’s in the photographs,” he says. “In that sense, it goes beyond politics. Yes, the left will say it’s because of this administration’s policies, while the right will say it’s a few bad apples. But both [sides] stop at the photographs, because there’s a feeling we know what they mean and what they’re about. … I don’t think it’s been known at all.”
Whether they be big-budget narratives featuring major stars or low-budget documentaries, recent films about the Middle East have had a rough time at the box office.
“No End in Sight,” exploring the neo-conservative’s rationale for invading Iraq and the problems leading to the violent insurgency, became 2007’s second most successful documentary - and earned a miniscule $1.4 million. “Taxi to the Dark Side,” detailing the death of an Afghan taxi driver while he was being interrogated by U.S. soldiers, won the Oscar for best documentary in February, yet it has grossed less than $200,000.
But Morris has never chased commercial success. His films are meditations on the human condition, asking deep, probing questions that often don’t have simple answers. He realizes Abu Ghraib is something most Americans would rather forget than spend $10 to relive on a Saturday night. But he can’t shake the disturbing, nagging notion that the scandal will continue to haunt the nation until and unless it comes to terms with what actually happened.
Congress, under Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has investigated the prisoner abuse scandal, but Morris thinks there is still more to the story.
“I have a feeling that everybody has kept hands-off of this because it’s seen as a political hot potato that perhaps doesn’t help anybody,” says Morris. “But Abu Ghraib goes well beyond the issue of torture - it’s about the abandonment of our military and the scapegoating of low-ranked soldiers. It’s that version of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ where Mr. Potter wins and the little guys are blamed while the big guys walk away scot-free. It happened in My Lai too. Maybe there’s just some fear of proceeding further but, oddly enough, this stuff doesn’t go away. My Lai is still with us; so is the Dreyfus Affair.”
Besides the premiere of his new movie, the upcoming book and the accompanying website, Morris is keeping busy with plans for new films, an ongoing series of articles for The New York Times, as well as other projects.
During the last presidential election cycle, he made several commercials for MoveOn.org, and this year he may again helm some ads for one of the so-called 527 groups. It’s not something he’s entirely thrilled about, however. “I dread politics, I have to tell you,” he confesses. “It’s wandering into the true morass, the swamp. But I’d be happy to do it again.”
ODDS & ENDS:
With any new president comes a flood of new political appointments, so this week The Hollywood Reporter canvassed the “tele-cognescenti” to predict who could be selected as the next Federal Communications Commission chair under different administrations. Should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton become the first woman commander in chief, pundits claimed FCC Commissioner Susan Ness might also become the first female chief.
Under a President Obama, the trade paper suggested Harvard Law School pal Julius Genachowski, former FCC Common Carrier Bureau chief Larry Stickling, policy director Karen Kornbluh or Commission vet Don Gipps. Sen. John McCain, who headed the Senate committee charged with oversight of the FCC, might select Disney lobbyist Bill Bailey, Google counsel Pablo Chavez or top adviser Charlie Black.
Candidates can’t stay away from Hollywood - or Hollywood cash. Clinton will return to Beverly Hills on April 3 for a fundraiser that’s billed as “an evening of live conversation and celebration” at the Wilshire Theater. Tickets start at $100 and go up to, yes, $2,300 - the limit for donors under federal campaign laws. McCain is also in the Los Angeles area this week, for a speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.
© 2008 Politico.com
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
Oscar Winner Plans Abu Ghraib Photo Site
by Jeffrey Ressner
Since Abu Ghraib first came to the world’s attention in 2004, nearly 300 photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse have been shown to the public. But soon an enormous archive of new material - including more than 1,500 other photos, unredacted court papers and interview transcripts - will be posted online by filmmaker Errol Morris, whose latest documentary “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure” examines the scandal in horrific detail.0326 07
“I’d like all this material to be seen,” says Morris, who shot an estimated 200 hours of interviews for his two-hour film and used much of the extra material as research for an accompanying book scheduled for release later this year. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker (for “The Fog of War”) says he’s currently negotiating with several universities to host the large collection.
Using the current promotional site for his new movie to spark the larger project he envisions, Morris plans to create an interface in which clicking on each photo pulls up its context and circumstances - who took it, who else was present when was it shot and any salient testimony made to the commissions investigating Abu Ghraib. Morris sees his website as a growing historical archive, with new information added as more participants and witnesses come forward to speak.
Morris’ new film was publicly unveiled last month at the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival, where it became the first documentary to ever be nominated for the top award. (It ended up winning a jury grand prize instead.) Opening in several U.S. cities on April 25, the film will roll out to more theaters in May. Raw, brutal and unrelenting, it is also a vivid tone poem recounting the stories behind the well-known photographs and an attempt to uncover the truth of what happened outside the frame.
“We think somehow we know what Abu Ghraib is about because we’ve seen the photographs,” says Morris, “and I believe the photographs do not really tell us the real story. The photographs are both cover-up and exposé. The element of the cover-up is unknown, I suppose because it was covered up. It’s as simple as that. … I don’t think there ever will be justice until parts of the story are made public, and I am trying very hard to do that.”
Morris says few, if any, members of the public are aware, for example, that children were kept at the prison as hostages, ostensibly in order to make family members talk.
Morris also feels the popular perception of Abu Ghraib has been colored by both political agendas. “The left and the right - and I don’t think it makes much difference here - all assume they know what’s in the photographs,” he says. “In that sense, it goes beyond politics. Yes, the left will say it’s because of this administration’s policies, while the right will say it’s a few bad apples. But both [sides] stop at the photographs, because there’s a feeling we know what they mean and what they’re about. … I don’t think it’s been known at all.”
Whether they be big-budget narratives featuring major stars or low-budget documentaries, recent films about the Middle East have had a rough time at the box office.
“No End in Sight,” exploring the neo-conservative’s rationale for invading Iraq and the problems leading to the violent insurgency, became 2007’s second most successful documentary - and earned a miniscule $1.4 million. “Taxi to the Dark Side,” detailing the death of an Afghan taxi driver while he was being interrogated by U.S. soldiers, won the Oscar for best documentary in February, yet it has grossed less than $200,000.
But Morris has never chased commercial success. His films are meditations on the human condition, asking deep, probing questions that often don’t have simple answers. He realizes Abu Ghraib is something most Americans would rather forget than spend $10 to relive on a Saturday night. But he can’t shake the disturbing, nagging notion that the scandal will continue to haunt the nation until and unless it comes to terms with what actually happened.
Congress, under Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has investigated the prisoner abuse scandal, but Morris thinks there is still more to the story.
“I have a feeling that everybody has kept hands-off of this because it’s seen as a political hot potato that perhaps doesn’t help anybody,” says Morris. “But Abu Ghraib goes well beyond the issue of torture - it’s about the abandonment of our military and the scapegoating of low-ranked soldiers. It’s that version of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ where Mr. Potter wins and the little guys are blamed while the big guys walk away scot-free. It happened in My Lai too. Maybe there’s just some fear of proceeding further but, oddly enough, this stuff doesn’t go away. My Lai is still with us; so is the Dreyfus Affair.”
Besides the premiere of his new movie, the upcoming book and the accompanying website, Morris is keeping busy with plans for new films, an ongoing series of articles for The New York Times, as well as other projects.
During the last presidential election cycle, he made several commercials for MoveOn.org, and this year he may again helm some ads for one of the so-called 527 groups. It’s not something he’s entirely thrilled about, however. “I dread politics, I have to tell you,” he confesses. “It’s wandering into the true morass, the swamp. But I’d be happy to do it again.”
ODDS & ENDS:
With any new president comes a flood of new political appointments, so this week The Hollywood Reporter canvassed the “tele-cognescenti” to predict who could be selected as the next Federal Communications Commission chair under different administrations. Should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton become the first woman commander in chief, pundits claimed FCC Commissioner Susan Ness might also become the first female chief.
Under a President Obama, the trade paper suggested Harvard Law School pal Julius Genachowski, former FCC Common Carrier Bureau chief Larry Stickling, policy director Karen Kornbluh or Commission vet Don Gipps. Sen. John McCain, who headed the Senate committee charged with oversight of the FCC, might select Disney lobbyist Bill Bailey, Google counsel Pablo Chavez or top adviser Charlie Black.
Candidates can’t stay away from Hollywood - or Hollywood cash. Clinton will return to Beverly Hills on April 3 for a fundraiser that’s billed as “an evening of live conversation and celebration” at the Wilshire Theater. Tickets start at $100 and go up to, yes, $2,300 - the limit for donors under federal campaign laws. McCain is also in the Los Angeles area this week, for a speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.
© 2008 Politico.com
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
Syria: CIA fabricated 'reactor' pictures/Laura Berg's Letter
Syria : CIA fabricated 'reactor' pictures April 25, 2008
Syria's ambassador to the United States said Friday that the CIA fabricated pictures allegedly taken inside a secret Syrian nuclear reactor and predicted that in coming weeks the US story about the site would "implode from within."
"The photos presented to me yesterday were ludicrous, laughable," Ambassador Imad Moustapha told reporters at his Washington residence.
He refused to say what the building in the remote eastern desert of Syria was used for before IAF jets bombed it in September 2007.
Senior US intelligence officials said Thursday they believe it was a secret nuclear reactor meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to make high-yield nuclear weapons. They alleged that North Korea aided in the design, construction and outfitting of the building.
Syria bulldozed the building's ruins a month after it was bombed and constructed a new, larger building in its place, leaving little or no evidence of what had been on the site.
Moustapha would not explain the purpose of the new building. But he said the lack of military checkpoints, air defenses or barbed wire fences around either building should show that it was not a sensitive facility.
So far, Syria has not allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the area.
Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, pledged on Friday to cooperate with the IAEA and suggested that "the main target of the American CIA allegations against Syria is to justify the Israeli attack against the Syrian side."
In a message to employees, CIA Director Michael Hayden praised the agency's "outstanding" work, calling it "a case study in rigorous analytic tradecraft, skillful human and technical collection."
But some outside nuclear experts were questioning some of the CIA's analysis, though not disputing its conclusions.
David Albright, president of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security, analyzed commercial satellite imagery of the bombed facility last fall and surmised then it was a nuclear reactor. He questioned the intelligence agencies' conclusion that the reactor was within months or weeks of completion.
"It's not clear-cut it was ready to turn on," Albright said.
He also took issue with the Bush administration's assertion that the reactor was solely intended to support a nuclear weapons program. Officials said Thursday the reactor was ill-suited for electrical generation, lacking distribution wires or substations, and did not bear the hallmarks of a research reactor. They concluded the plutonium was therefore meant for weapons but acknowledged they had no direct evidence of that.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1208870490261&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Copyright 1995- 2008 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/
The New York Times nytimes.com
April 27, 2008
Editorial
Laura Berg’s Letter
The PEN American Center , the literary organization committed to free expression, is honoring an American most people in this country have never read or even heard of: Laura Berg. She is a psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital who was threatened with a sedition investigation after she wrote a letter to the editor denouncing the Bush administration’s bungling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war.
That’s right, sedition: inciting rebellion against the government. We suppose nothing should surprise us in these days of government zealotry. But the horror and the shame of that witch hunt should shock everyone.
Ms. Berg identified herself as a V.A. nurse when, soon after Katrina’s horrors, she sent her impassioned letter to The Alibi, a paper in Albuquerque . “I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” she wrote. “We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.”
Her superiors at the hospital soon alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and impounded her office computer, where she keeps the case files of war-scarred veterans she treats. Then she received an official warning in which a Veterans Affairs investigator intoned that her letter “potentially represents sedition.”
It took civil rights litigators and Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to “act forcefully” in reminding the government of the Constitution and her right to free speech. The Department of Veterans Affairs retreated then finally apologized to the shaken Ms. Berg.
Even then, she noted, one superior told her it was preferred that she not identify herself as a V.A. nurse in any future letter writing. “And so I am saying I am a V.A. nurse,” Ms. Berg soon boomed out in a radio broadcast. “And some of my fire in writing this about Katrina and Iraq is from my experience as a V.A. nurse.” Thus declared Ms. Berg, well chosen to receive the new PEN/Katherine Anne Porter First Amendment Award.
Copyright 2008 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
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
China Slams Jail Door on Olympic Dissent
Published on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by The Toronto Star
China Slams Jail Door on Olympic Dissent
by Bill Schiller
BEIJING-In the darkest of ironies, as the Olympic torch was lit in Athens yesterday, a court in China sentenced a man to five years in prison after he dared to say the principle of human rights is more important than the Olympic Games.0325 10Unemployed former factory worker, Yang Chunlin, 54, gathered more than 10,000 signatures on a petition last year, appealing against illegal seizures of land from poor farmers by powerful local officials in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang .
The petition letter began: “We want human rights, not the Olympics.”
Yang was promptly arrested July 6 and charged with trying to subvert state power - a broad charge frequently used against those who openly criticize the government.
After Yang’s trial last month - which lasted less than a day - Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch said she feared that, “soon it will be official that objecting to the Olympics is a crime in China .”
In fact, prosecution of outspoken Chinese citizens has picked up pace in the final months before the Games.
Yang’s is the third case of a well-known dissident to come before the courts in recent weeks.
Last month, democracy activist and writer Lu Gengsong was sentenced to four years for “inciting to subvert state power.”
And last week well-known activist Hu Jia was hauled before the courts, but he has yet to be sentenced.
Hu Jia is perhaps best-known for his work in helping HIV/AIDS victims. He and his wife Zeng Jinyan had been kept under house arrest for months in Beijing , before he was finally arrested on Dec. 27.
Yang Chunlin’s 5-year sentence yesterday, comes only weeks after Chinese Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, publicly scoffed at suggestions that any citizen might be sentenced for saying human rights were more important than the Olympics.
“People in China enjoy extensive freedom of speech,” Yang told reporters during an official visit by British Foreign Minister David Milibank. “No one will get arrested because he said that human rights are more important than the Olympics. This is impossible.
“Ask 10 people from the street to face public security officers and ask them to say `human rights are more important than the Olympics’ 10 times or even 100 times, and let’s see which security officer would put him in jail.”
During Yang’s time in jail, the group China Human Rights Defenders claimed he was chained for days in a fixed position and forced to clean the waste of other inmates.
Yesterday, as Yang was being led away from court, a scuffle broke out between police and his family, and Yang was pushed to the floor and shocked with electric batons, according to his lawyer Li Fangping.
Yang now has 10 days to decide whether he will appeal, Li told The Associated Press.
While Yang was being sentenced in China , International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge was insisting to reporters in Athens that it was “right” to have awarded the Olympic Games to China , saying the event would act as a “catalyst” for change.
He said it wasn’t in his or the IOC’s job to dictate directives to a sovereign state, or to engage it in political discussions.
Still, human rights campaigners decried the yesterday’s sentencing.
“Yang Chunlin’s 5-year sentence darkensthe lighting of the Beijing Olympics torch,” Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China , told the Star from New York .
“Imprisonment for peacefully expressing your views - protected by the Chinese Constitution and international human rights law - undermines any claim to the `human rights’ progress cited IOC President Jacques Rogge,” she said.
China has made it clear that it will not brook any embarrassing protests highlighting political or social problems during the Games.
But human rights campaigners have vowed to seize the opportunity to protest while the world’s eyes are on China .
© 2008 The Toronto Star
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
China Slams Jail Door on Olympic Dissent
by Bill Schiller
BEIJING-In the darkest of ironies, as the Olympic torch was lit in Athens yesterday, a court in China sentenced a man to five years in prison after he dared to say the principle of human rights is more important than the Olympic Games.0325 10Unemployed former factory worker, Yang Chunlin, 54, gathered more than 10,000 signatures on a petition last year, appealing against illegal seizures of land from poor farmers by powerful local officials in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang .
The petition letter began: “We want human rights, not the Olympics.”
Yang was promptly arrested July 6 and charged with trying to subvert state power - a broad charge frequently used against those who openly criticize the government.
After Yang’s trial last month - which lasted less than a day - Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch said she feared that, “soon it will be official that objecting to the Olympics is a crime in China .”
In fact, prosecution of outspoken Chinese citizens has picked up pace in the final months before the Games.
Yang’s is the third case of a well-known dissident to come before the courts in recent weeks.
Last month, democracy activist and writer Lu Gengsong was sentenced to four years for “inciting to subvert state power.”
And last week well-known activist Hu Jia was hauled before the courts, but he has yet to be sentenced.
Hu Jia is perhaps best-known for his work in helping HIV/AIDS victims. He and his wife Zeng Jinyan had been kept under house arrest for months in Beijing , before he was finally arrested on Dec. 27.
Yang Chunlin’s 5-year sentence yesterday, comes only weeks after Chinese Foreign Minister, Yang Jiechi, publicly scoffed at suggestions that any citizen might be sentenced for saying human rights were more important than the Olympics.
“People in China enjoy extensive freedom of speech,” Yang told reporters during an official visit by British Foreign Minister David Milibank. “No one will get arrested because he said that human rights are more important than the Olympics. This is impossible.
“Ask 10 people from the street to face public security officers and ask them to say `human rights are more important than the Olympics’ 10 times or even 100 times, and let’s see which security officer would put him in jail.”
During Yang’s time in jail, the group China Human Rights Defenders claimed he was chained for days in a fixed position and forced to clean the waste of other inmates.
Yesterday, as Yang was being led away from court, a scuffle broke out between police and his family, and Yang was pushed to the floor and shocked with electric batons, according to his lawyer Li Fangping.
Yang now has 10 days to decide whether he will appeal, Li told The Associated Press.
While Yang was being sentenced in China , International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge was insisting to reporters in Athens that it was “right” to have awarded the Olympic Games to China , saying the event would act as a “catalyst” for change.
He said it wasn’t in his or the IOC’s job to dictate directives to a sovereign state, or to engage it in political discussions.
Still, human rights campaigners decried the yesterday’s sentencing.
“Yang Chunlin’s 5-year sentence darkensthe lighting of the Beijing Olympics torch,” Sharon Hom of Human Rights in China , told the Star from New York .
“Imprisonment for peacefully expressing your views - protected by the Chinese Constitution and international human rights law - undermines any claim to the `human rights’ progress cited IOC President Jacques Rogge,” she said.
China has made it clear that it will not brook any embarrassing protests highlighting political or social problems during the Games.
But human rights campaigners have vowed to seize the opportunity to protest while the world’s eyes are on China .
© 2008 The Toronto Star
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
Frontline: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late
Published on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Frontline: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late
by Ray McGovern
Frontline’s “Bush’s War” on PBS Monday and Tuesday evening was a nicely put-together rehash of the top players’ trickery that led to the attack on Iraq, together with the power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and limitless incompetence of the occupation.
Except for an inside-the-beltway tidbit here and there-for example, about how the pitiable secretary of state Colin Powell had to suffer so many indignities at the hands of other type-A hard chargers, Frontline added little to the discussion. Notably missing was any allusion to the unconscionable role the Fourth Estate adopted as indiscriminate cheerleader for the home team; nor was there any mention that the invasion was a serious violation of international law. But those omissions, I suppose, should have come as no surprise.
Nor was it a surprise that any viewer hoping for insight into why Cheney and Bush were so eager to attack Iraq was left with very thin gruel. It was more infotainment, bereft of substantive discussion of the whys and wherefores of what in my view is the most disastrous foreign policy move in our nation’s history.
Despite recent acknowledgements from the likes of Alan Greenspan, Gen. John Abizaid, and others that oil and permanent (or, if you prefer, “enduring”) military bases were among the main objectives, Frontline avoided any real discussion of such delicate factors. Someone not already aware of how our media has become a tool of the Bush administration might have been shocked at how Frontline could have missed one of President George W. Bush’s most telling “signing statements.” Underneath the recent Defense Authorization Act, he wrote that he did not feel bound by the law’s explicit prohibition against using the funding:
“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq ,” or
“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq .”
So the Frontline show was largely pap.
At one point, however, the garrulous former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage did allude to one of the largest elephants in the living room-Israel’s far-right Likudniks-and their close alliance with the so-called neo-conservatives running our policy toward the Middle East . But Armitage did so only tangentially, referring to the welcome (if totally unrealistic) promise by Ahmed Chalabi that, upon being put in power in Baghdad , he would recognize Israel . Not surprisingly, the interviewer did not pick up on that comment; indeed, I’m surprised the remark avoided the cutting room floor.
Courage No Longer a Frontline Hallmark
Frontline has done no timely reportage that might be looked upon as disparaging the George W. Bush administration-I mean, for example, the real aims behind the war, not simply the gross incompetence characterizing its conduct. Like so many others, Frontline has been, let’s just say it, cowardly in real time-no doubt intimidated partly by attacks on its funding that were inspired by the White House.
And now? Well the retrospective criticism of incompetence comes as polling shows two-thirds of the country against the Iraq occupation (and the number is surely higher among PBS viewers). So, Frontline is repositioning itself as a mild ex-post-facto critic of the war, but still unwilling to go very far out on a limb. Explaining the aims behind war crimes can, of course, be risky. It is as though an invisible Joseph Goebbels holds sway.
Too Late
On Monday evening I found myself initially applauding Frontline’s matter- of-fact, who-shot-John chronology of how our country got lied into attacking and occupying Iraq . Then I got to thinking-have I not seen this picture before? Many times?
It took a Hollywood producer to recognize and act promptly on the con games that sober observers could not miss as the war progressed. Where were the celebrated “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD)? Robert Greenwald simply could not abide the president’s switch to “weapons of mass destruction programs,” which presumably might be easier to find than the much-ballyhooed WMD so heavily advertised before the attack on Iraq . You remember-those remarkable WMD about which UN chief inspector Hans Blix quipped that the U.S. had one hundred percent certainty of their existence in Iraq , but zero percent certainty as to where they were.
Robert Greenwald called me in May 2003. He had read a few of the memoranda published by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) exposing the various charades being acted out by the administration and wanted to know what we thought of the president’s new circumlocution on WMD.
I complimented him on smelling a rat and gave him names of my VIPS colleagues and other experienced folks who could fill him in on the details. Wasting no time, he arrived here in Washington in June, armed simply with copious notes and a cameraman. Greenwald conducted the interviews, flew back to his eager young crew in Hollywood and, poof, the DVD “Uncovered: The War on Iraq” was released at the beginning of November 2003.”
So Frontline is four and a half years behind a Hollywood producer with appropriate interest and skepticism. (Full disclosure: I appear in “Uncovered,” as do many of the interviewees appearing in Frontline’s “Bush’s War.”)
Actually, the interviewing by Frontline occurred just a few months later. I know because I was among those interviewed for that as well, as was my good friend and former colleague at the CIA, Mel Goodman. I was struck that Mel looked four years younger on this week’s Frontline. It only then dawned on me that he was four years younger when interviewed.
Have a look at “Uncovered,” [http://www.truthuncovered.com /index.php ] and see how you think it compares to Frontline’s “Bush’s War.”
Safety in Retrospectives
It also struck me that producing a Frontline-style retrospective going back several years is a much less risky genre to work with. Chalk it up to my perspective as an intelligence analyst, but ducking the incredibly important issues at stake over the next several months is, in my opinion, unconscionable. The troop “surge” in Iraq , for example.
Only toward the very end of the program does Frontline allow a bit of relevant candor on a point that has been self-evident since Cheney and Bush, against strong opposition from Generals Abizaid and Casey (and apparently even Rumsfeld), decided to double down by sending 30,000 more troops into Iraq. A malleable new secretary of defense would deal with the recalcitrant generals and pick a Petreaus ex Machina of equal malleability and political astuteness to implement this stop-gap plan.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/author Steve Coll, with typical candor, put the “surge” into perspective:
“The decision at a minimum guaranteed that his [Bush’s] presidency would not end with a defeat in history’s eyes; that by committing to the surge, he was certain to at least achieve a stalemate.”
Given this week’s fresh surge of violence as the U.S. surge is scheduled to wind down, even a stalemate may be in some doubt. But, okay, small kudos to Frontline for including that bit of truth-however obvious-and for adding the grim background music to its final comment: “Soon Bush’s war will be handed to someone else.”
Rather Not, Thank You
Intimidation of the media is what has happened all around, including with Frontline, which not so many years ago was able to do some gutsy reporting. Let me give you another example about which few are aware.
Do you remember when Dan Rather made his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, admitting that the American media, including him, was failing to reveal the truth about things like Iraq ? Speaking to the BBC on May 16, 2002, Rather compared the situation to the fear of “necklacing” in South Africa :
“It’s an obscene comparison,” Rather said, “but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck.”
Talking to another reporter, Dan told it straight about the careerism that keeps US journalists in line. “It’s that fear that keeps [American] journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often.”
The comparison to “necklacing” may be “obscene” but, sadly, it is not far off the mark. So what happened to the newly outspoken Dan Rather with the newly found courage, when he ran afoul of Vice President Dick Cheney and the immense pressure he exerts on the corporate media?
We know about the lies and the cheerleading for attacking Iraq . But there is much more most of us do not know and remain unable to learn if Rather and other one-time journalists keep acting like Bert Lahr’s cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz before he gets “the nerve” and courage.
For Dan Rather, the fear would simply not go away…even after leaving CBS for HDNet and promising that, on his new “Dan Rather Reports” show, viewers would see hard-hitting and courageous reporting that he said he couldn’t do at CBS.
Will it surprise you that Dan Rather cannot shake the necklace? I refer specifically to a program for “Dan Rather Reports,” meticulously prepared by award-winning producer, Kristina Borjesson. The special included interviews with an impressive string of first-hand witnesses to neocon machinations prior to the US attack on Iraq, and provides real insights into motivations-the kind of insights Frontline did not even attempt.
Nipped in the Bud by the “Dark Side”
Last year Borjesson’s taping was finished and the editing had begun. Borjesson’s requests to interview people working for the vice president had been denied. But, following standard journalistic practice (not to mention common courtesy), she sent an email to John Hannah in Cheney’s office in order to give Hannah a chance to react to what others-including several of the same senior folks on Frontline last evening- had said about him for her forthcoming report.
At that point all hell broke loose. Borjesson was abruptly told by Rather’s executive producer that by sending the email, Borjesson could have “brought down the whole (‘Dan Rather Reports’) operation.”
The show was killed and Borjesson sacked. For good measure, she was also accused of “coaching” interview subjects and taking their words out of context. Since neither Rather nor his executive producer would provide proof to substantiate that allegation, Borjesson took the unprecedented step of sending her script and transcripts to all her interview subjects, asking them to confirm or deny that she had coached them or taken their words out of context. Not one of them found her script inaccurate or said they were coached. She has the emails to prove this.
This sorry episode and Frontline’s careful avoidance of basic issues like the strategic aims of the Bush administration in invading and occupying Iraq are proof, if further proof were needed, that the White House, and especially Cheney’s swollen office, exert enormous pressure over what we are allowed to see and hear. The fear they instill in the corporate press, and in what once was serious investigative reporting of programs like Frontline, translates into programs getting neutered or killed outright-and massive public ignorance.
Some consolation is to be found in the good news that, in this particular case, Kristina Borjesson is made of stronger stuff; she has not given up, and was greatly encouraged by how many of the very senior officials and former officials she had already interviewed consented to be re-interviewed (since the tapes belonged to the “Rather Not” folks).
Now who looks forward to being re-interviewed?
Borjesson’s original interviewees took into account her problems with the cowards and the censors-and her atypical, gutsy refusal to self-censor-and went the extra mile. A tribute to them as well, and their interest in getting the truth out.
Borjesson is now completing the program on her own. Look for an announcement in the coming months, if you’re interested in real sustenance rather than the pabulum served up, no doubt under duress, by Frontline.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington , DC . He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early sixties, then a CIA analyst for 27 years. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article originally appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
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
Tuesday evening
Add to Calendar
Frontline: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late
by Ray McGovern
Frontline’s “Bush’s War” on PBS Monday and Tuesday evening was a nicely put-together rehash of the top players’ trickery that led to the attack on Iraq, together with the power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and limitless incompetence of the occupation.
Except for an inside-the-beltway tidbit here and there-for example, about how the pitiable secretary of state Colin Powell had to suffer so many indignities at the hands of other type-A hard chargers, Frontline added little to the discussion. Notably missing was any allusion to the unconscionable role the Fourth Estate adopted as indiscriminate cheerleader for the home team; nor was there any mention that the invasion was a serious violation of international law. But those omissions, I suppose, should have come as no surprise.
Nor was it a surprise that any viewer hoping for insight into why Cheney and Bush were so eager to attack Iraq was left with very thin gruel. It was more infotainment, bereft of substantive discussion of the whys and wherefores of what in my view is the most disastrous foreign policy move in our nation’s history.
Despite recent acknowledgements from the likes of Alan Greenspan, Gen. John Abizaid, and others that oil and permanent (or, if you prefer, “enduring”) military bases were among the main objectives, Frontline avoided any real discussion of such delicate factors. Someone not already aware of how our media has become a tool of the Bush administration might have been shocked at how Frontline could have missed one of President George W. Bush’s most telling “signing statements.” Underneath the recent Defense Authorization Act, he wrote that he did not feel bound by the law’s explicit prohibition against using the funding:
“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq ,” or
“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq .”
So the Frontline show was largely pap.
At one point, however, the garrulous former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage did allude to one of the largest elephants in the living room-Israel’s far-right Likudniks-and their close alliance with the so-called neo-conservatives running our policy toward the Middle East . But Armitage did so only tangentially, referring to the welcome (if totally unrealistic) promise by Ahmed Chalabi that, upon being put in power in Baghdad , he would recognize Israel . Not surprisingly, the interviewer did not pick up on that comment; indeed, I’m surprised the remark avoided the cutting room floor.
Courage No Longer a Frontline Hallmark
Frontline has done no timely reportage that might be looked upon as disparaging the George W. Bush administration-I mean, for example, the real aims behind the war, not simply the gross incompetence characterizing its conduct. Like so many others, Frontline has been, let’s just say it, cowardly in real time-no doubt intimidated partly by attacks on its funding that were inspired by the White House.
And now? Well the retrospective criticism of incompetence comes as polling shows two-thirds of the country against the Iraq occupation (and the number is surely higher among PBS viewers). So, Frontline is repositioning itself as a mild ex-post-facto critic of the war, but still unwilling to go very far out on a limb. Explaining the aims behind war crimes can, of course, be risky. It is as though an invisible Joseph Goebbels holds sway.
Too Late
On Monday evening I found myself initially applauding Frontline’s matter- of-fact, who-shot-John chronology of how our country got lied into attacking and occupying Iraq . Then I got to thinking-have I not seen this picture before? Many times?
It took a Hollywood producer to recognize and act promptly on the con games that sober observers could not miss as the war progressed. Where were the celebrated “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD)? Robert Greenwald simply could not abide the president’s switch to “weapons of mass destruction programs,” which presumably might be easier to find than the much-ballyhooed WMD so heavily advertised before the attack on Iraq . You remember-those remarkable WMD about which UN chief inspector Hans Blix quipped that the U.S. had one hundred percent certainty of their existence in Iraq , but zero percent certainty as to where they were.
Robert Greenwald called me in May 2003. He had read a few of the memoranda published by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) exposing the various charades being acted out by the administration and wanted to know what we thought of the president’s new circumlocution on WMD.
I complimented him on smelling a rat and gave him names of my VIPS colleagues and other experienced folks who could fill him in on the details. Wasting no time, he arrived here in Washington in June, armed simply with copious notes and a cameraman. Greenwald conducted the interviews, flew back to his eager young crew in Hollywood and, poof, the DVD “Uncovered: The War on Iraq” was released at the beginning of November 2003.”
So Frontline is four and a half years behind a Hollywood producer with appropriate interest and skepticism. (Full disclosure: I appear in “Uncovered,” as do many of the interviewees appearing in Frontline’s “Bush’s War.”)
Actually, the interviewing by Frontline occurred just a few months later. I know because I was among those interviewed for that as well, as was my good friend and former colleague at the CIA, Mel Goodman. I was struck that Mel looked four years younger on this week’s Frontline. It only then dawned on me that he was four years younger when interviewed.
Have a look at “Uncovered,” [http://www.truthuncovered.com /index.php ] and see how you think it compares to Frontline’s “Bush’s War.”
Safety in Retrospectives
It also struck me that producing a Frontline-style retrospective going back several years is a much less risky genre to work with. Chalk it up to my perspective as an intelligence analyst, but ducking the incredibly important issues at stake over the next several months is, in my opinion, unconscionable. The troop “surge” in Iraq , for example.
Only toward the very end of the program does Frontline allow a bit of relevant candor on a point that has been self-evident since Cheney and Bush, against strong opposition from Generals Abizaid and Casey (and apparently even Rumsfeld), decided to double down by sending 30,000 more troops into Iraq. A malleable new secretary of defense would deal with the recalcitrant generals and pick a Petreaus ex Machina of equal malleability and political astuteness to implement this stop-gap plan.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/author Steve Coll, with typical candor, put the “surge” into perspective:
“The decision at a minimum guaranteed that his [Bush’s] presidency would not end with a defeat in history’s eyes; that by committing to the surge, he was certain to at least achieve a stalemate.”
Given this week’s fresh surge of violence as the U.S. surge is scheduled to wind down, even a stalemate may be in some doubt. But, okay, small kudos to Frontline for including that bit of truth-however obvious-and for adding the grim background music to its final comment: “Soon Bush’s war will be handed to someone else.”
Rather Not, Thank You
Intimidation of the media is what has happened all around, including with Frontline, which not so many years ago was able to do some gutsy reporting. Let me give you another example about which few are aware.
Do you remember when Dan Rather made his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, admitting that the American media, including him, was failing to reveal the truth about things like Iraq ? Speaking to the BBC on May 16, 2002, Rather compared the situation to the fear of “necklacing” in South Africa :
“It’s an obscene comparison,” Rather said, “but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck.”
Talking to another reporter, Dan told it straight about the careerism that keeps US journalists in line. “It’s that fear that keeps [American] journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often.”
The comparison to “necklacing” may be “obscene” but, sadly, it is not far off the mark. So what happened to the newly outspoken Dan Rather with the newly found courage, when he ran afoul of Vice President Dick Cheney and the immense pressure he exerts on the corporate media?
We know about the lies and the cheerleading for attacking Iraq . But there is much more most of us do not know and remain unable to learn if Rather and other one-time journalists keep acting like Bert Lahr’s cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz before he gets “the nerve” and courage.
For Dan Rather, the fear would simply not go away…even after leaving CBS for HDNet and promising that, on his new “Dan Rather Reports” show, viewers would see hard-hitting and courageous reporting that he said he couldn’t do at CBS.
Will it surprise you that Dan Rather cannot shake the necklace? I refer specifically to a program for “Dan Rather Reports,” meticulously prepared by award-winning producer, Kristina Borjesson. The special included interviews with an impressive string of first-hand witnesses to neocon machinations prior to the US attack on Iraq, and provides real insights into motivations-the kind of insights Frontline did not even attempt.
Nipped in the Bud by the “Dark Side”
Last year Borjesson’s taping was finished and the editing had begun. Borjesson’s requests to interview people working for the vice president had been denied. But, following standard journalistic practice (not to mention common courtesy), she sent an email to John Hannah in Cheney’s office in order to give Hannah a chance to react to what others-including several of the same senior folks on Frontline last evening- had said about him for her forthcoming report.
At that point all hell broke loose. Borjesson was abruptly told by Rather’s executive producer that by sending the email, Borjesson could have “brought down the whole (‘Dan Rather Reports’) operation.”
The show was killed and Borjesson sacked. For good measure, she was also accused of “coaching” interview subjects and taking their words out of context. Since neither Rather nor his executive producer would provide proof to substantiate that allegation, Borjesson took the unprecedented step of sending her script and transcripts to all her interview subjects, asking them to confirm or deny that she had coached them or taken their words out of context. Not one of them found her script inaccurate or said they were coached. She has the emails to prove this.
This sorry episode and Frontline’s careful avoidance of basic issues like the strategic aims of the Bush administration in invading and occupying Iraq are proof, if further proof were needed, that the White House, and especially Cheney’s swollen office, exert enormous pressure over what we are allowed to see and hear. The fear they instill in the corporate press, and in what once was serious investigative reporting of programs like Frontline, translates into programs getting neutered or killed outright-and massive public ignorance.
Some consolation is to be found in the good news that, in this particular case, Kristina Borjesson is made of stronger stuff; she has not given up, and was greatly encouraged by how many of the very senior officials and former officials she had already interviewed consented to be re-interviewed (since the tapes belonged to the “Rather Not” folks).
Now who looks forward to being re-interviewed?
Borjesson’s original interviewees took into account her problems with the cowards and the censors-and her atypical, gutsy refusal to self-censor-and went the extra mile. A tribute to them as well, and their interest in getting the truth out.
Borjesson is now completing the program on her own. Look for an announcement in the coming months, if you’re interested in real sustenance rather than the pabulum served up, no doubt under duress, by Frontline.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington , DC . He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early sixties, then a CIA analyst for 27 years. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article originally appeared on Consortiumnews.com.
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
Tuesday evening
Add to Calendar
Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?
Published on Labor Notes (http://labornotes.org)
Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?
Created Feb 26 2008 - 11:56am
Author(s): Jane Slaughter
Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?
Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company’s business practices? Is it a “conspiracy” if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies? Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. . . .
P1010078copy-300[1]
Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, and demonstrated at stockholder meetings (above). The company cites these actions as evidence of a racketeering conspiracy. Photo: Metro Washington Council, AFL-CIO. Click to enlarge.
Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company’s business practices? Is it a “conspiracy” if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies?
Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. The suit aims to halt the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign to unionize 4,600 workers in its Tar Heel, North Carolina , slaughterhouse. The company is using a 1970 statute originally designed to battle gangsters’ extortion schemes—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
“This is a terrible menace to rights of free speech and protest, and constitutional rights and freedom of expression,” said Lance Compa, Cornell University labor relations professor and an expert on the meatpacking industry. “It’s a really dangerous new offensive that employers have seized on to try to snuff out legitimate protest about abusive employer conduct.”
Jobs with Justice, which is named as a defendant in the suit, is launching a campaign against corporations’ use of the RICO act, which has surfaced intermittently as one legal tactic among an arsenal to silence corporate critics. The act has been used to file suits in recent months against campaigns by the Service Employees (SEIU) at the Wackenhut security firm, and the UFCW at an Arizona-based grocery chain.
JWJ expects to work with unions, central labor councils, and city councils to pass fresh resolutions condemning the lawsuit.
“Our goal is to protect the right of not only unions to engage in these activities, but everybody fighting corporate abuses,” said Russ Davis, director of Massachusetts JWJ. “Hopefully we can deter corporations from going down this road. But if these things occur again we want to be ready.”
A VAST CONSPIRACY?
Smithfield sees a wide array of plotters conspiring against it, naming UFCW, JWJ, Research Associates of America, and Change To Win, the labor federation to which the UFCW belongs. Also named are eight individuals, including UFCW President Joe Hansen, the union’s Smithfield campaign director Gene Bruskin, and Andy Stern, SEIU president.
The defendants’ supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.
Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in June 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, demonstrated at stockholder meetings, and filed health and safety complaints with OSHA. Stores in Massachusetts pulled Smithfield products from their shelves.
All these actions the company cites in its lawsuit as evidence of “formation of the conspiracy,” “delivery of the threat,” and “publication of false, misleading, baseless, negative and/or damaging information on the Internet and in the newspapers.”
“Whatever economic consequences flow, they are not considered in the law sufficient to deprive people of free speech,” said Joan Bertin, director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a member of the anti-RICO coalition.
The defendants’ supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.
The union said it had to turn to an aggressive campaign for consumer and community support because Smithfield repeatedly violated laws that are supposed to allow workers to organize.
The UFCW has lost two National Labor Relations Board elections at the plant, both of which were overturned after reams of unfair labor practice charges were sustained against the company. Smithfield’s violations include firing workers for talking about the union, and attempts to spy on and intimidate them.
“A TERRIBLE DISTRACTION”
“They’re trying to box us into a slow, NLRB process, because it doesn’t punish them for violations—all (workers) get is back-pay and reinstatement,” said Renee Bowser, UFCW’s assistant general counsel.
Court-watchers doubt the suit will survive. A similar RICO suit brought by Detroit ’s newspapers last decade against striking newspaper workers ultimately failed.
“This form of coalition building, holding demonstrations—all of these are classic forms of freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly,” Compa said. “Ultimately the case won’t hold up. In the meantime it’s a terrible distraction.”
For more information, see JWJ’s Free Speech at Risk [3].
Source URL:
http://labornotes.org/node/1559
Links:
[1] http://labornotes.org/javascript:openPopupWindow();
[2] http://www.labornotes.org/conference
[3] http://www.jwj.org/campaigns/freespeech.html
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
Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?
Created Feb 26 2008 - 11:56am
Author(s): Jane Slaughter
Is Fighting for Justice at Smithfield Racketeering?
Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company’s business practices? Is it a “conspiracy” if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies? Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. . . .
P1010078copy-300[1]
Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, and demonstrated at stockholder meetings (above). The company cites these actions as evidence of a racketeering conspiracy. Photo: Metro Washington Council, AFL-CIO. Click to enlarge.
Is it illegal for an activist group or union to criticize a company’s business practices? Is it a “conspiracy” if advocates call for boycotts, organize rallies, or press for resolutions from elected bodies?
Smithfield Foods, the largest producer of pork products in the world, is hoping so, after a lawsuit it filed last October passed an initial court challenge. The suit aims to halt the United Food and Commercial Workers’ campaign to unionize 4,600 workers in its Tar Heel, North Carolina , slaughterhouse. The company is using a 1970 statute originally designed to battle gangsters’ extortion schemes—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
“This is a terrible menace to rights of free speech and protest, and constitutional rights and freedom of expression,” said Lance Compa, Cornell University labor relations professor and an expert on the meatpacking industry. “It’s a really dangerous new offensive that employers have seized on to try to snuff out legitimate protest about abusive employer conduct.”
Jobs with Justice, which is named as a defendant in the suit, is launching a campaign against corporations’ use of the RICO act, which has surfaced intermittently as one legal tactic among an arsenal to silence corporate critics. The act has been used to file suits in recent months against campaigns by the Service Employees (SEIU) at the Wackenhut security firm, and the UFCW at an Arizona-based grocery chain.
JWJ expects to work with unions, central labor councils, and city councils to pass fresh resolutions condemning the lawsuit.
“Our goal is to protect the right of not only unions to engage in these activities, but everybody fighting corporate abuses,” said Russ Davis, director of Massachusetts JWJ. “Hopefully we can deter corporations from going down this road. But if these things occur again we want to be ready.”
A VAST CONSPIRACY?
Smithfield sees a wide array of plotters conspiring against it, naming UFCW, JWJ, Research Associates of America, and Change To Win, the labor federation to which the UFCW belongs. Also named are eight individuals, including UFCW President Joe Hansen, the union’s Smithfield campaign director Gene Bruskin, and Andy Stern, SEIU president.
The defendants’ supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.
Since the UFCW’s Justice at Smithfield campaign began in June 2006, the union has asked city councils to pass resolutions and boycott Smithfield products, demonstrated at stockholder meetings, and filed health and safety complaints with OSHA. Stores in Massachusetts pulled Smithfield products from their shelves.
All these actions the company cites in its lawsuit as evidence of “formation of the conspiracy,” “delivery of the threat,” and “publication of false, misleading, baseless, negative and/or damaging information on the Internet and in the newspapers.”
“Whatever economic consequences flow, they are not considered in the law sufficient to deprive people of free speech,” said Joan Bertin, director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a member of the anti-RICO coalition.
The defendants’ supposed crime? They employed strategies long used by unions and social movements to educate the public, garner support, and pressure corporations.
The union said it had to turn to an aggressive campaign for consumer and community support because Smithfield repeatedly violated laws that are supposed to allow workers to organize.
The UFCW has lost two National Labor Relations Board elections at the plant, both of which were overturned after reams of unfair labor practice charges were sustained against the company. Smithfield’s violations include firing workers for talking about the union, and attempts to spy on and intimidate them.
“A TERRIBLE DISTRACTION”
“They’re trying to box us into a slow, NLRB process, because it doesn’t punish them for violations—all (workers) get is back-pay and reinstatement,” said Renee Bowser, UFCW’s assistant general counsel.
Court-watchers doubt the suit will survive. A similar RICO suit brought by Detroit ’s newspapers last decade against striking newspaper workers ultimately failed.
“This form of coalition building, holding demonstrations—all of these are classic forms of freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly,” Compa said. “Ultimately the case won’t hold up. In the meantime it’s a terrible distraction.”
For more information, see JWJ’s Free Speech at Risk [3].
Source URL:
http://labornotes.org/node/1559
Links:
[1] http://labornotes.org/javascript:openPopupWindow();
[2] http://www.labornotes.org/conference
[3] http://www.jwj.org/campaigns/freespeech.html
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
Death penalty film on Friday/MD House/Senate establish death penalty commission/Another disastrous SC decision
The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee will be hosting its latest FILM & SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS VIDEO SERIES. The next film, LET HIM HAVE IT [ England , 1991], will be shown Fri., Mar. 28 at AFSC, 4806 York Road [three blocks north of Cold Spring Lane ]. Doors open at 7 PM, and the video starts at 7:30 PM. A discussion follows. There is no charge, and refreshments will be available. Call 410-366-1637.
The Peter Medak film set in 1952 is based on a true story. Derek Bentley was sentenced to death under controversial circumstances. He did not directly play a role in the murder of a police officer, yet he received the greater punishment. Christopher Eccleston plays Bentley, and Tom Courtenay is the father who tries desperately to save his son’s life.
The title of the film is taken from Bentley's alleged cry of "Let him have it, Chris!" shortly before Christopher Craig shot the officer. Did he mean, "Go ahead and shoot him," or "Give him the gun" (and thus, surrender)? England has since abolished capital punishment.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/politics/bal-death0324,0,2520357.story
March 24, 2008
House votes to create panel to study death penalty in Md.
Baltimore Sun By Brian Wittes
The House of Delegates voted today to create a commission to study
capital punishment in Maryland , after efforts to repeal the death penalty
failed for a second straight year.
The House voted 89-48 to form the commission, which would study racial,
jurisdictional and economic disparities in how the death penalty has
been administered.
The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment also would study the risk
of innocent people being executed and compare the costs of executing
someone with the expense of imprisoning someone for life without parole.
The Senate was scheduled to vote on a similar bill tonight. [The Senate later
voted 32 to 15 for a similar bill.]
The commission would issue a report on its findings and recommendations
to the General Assembly by Dec. 15.
Republicans, citing Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley's opposition to
capital punishment, criticized the idea, saying the commission was being set up
to recommend ending the death penalty. Del. Christopher Shank,
R-Washington, described the proposal as "a textbook model on how to repeal the death
penalty in your state."
"Ladies and gentlemen, the verdict is already in before the jury has
even gone out," Shank said. "This bill is about the repeal of the death penalty,
and I would suggest a 'no' vote."
But Del. Sandy Rosenberg, D-Baltimore, said the bill was carefully
amended to make sure the commission will be "open to discussion and consideration."
"We feel as a committee that we have amended the bill sufficiently so
this bill, as it now stands, creates a credible task force -- one that will
objectively look at the issues," Rosenberg said.
Maryland currently has a de facto moratorium in place against capital
punishment, because of a ruling in late 2006 by the state's highest
court. The court ruled the state's protocol for the lethal injection procedure was
implemented without proper approval by a legislative committee.
Executions can't resume until the O'Malley administration submits new rules for the
committee to approve.
In 2003, University of Maryland criminologist Raymond Paternoster
released a study that found black defendants who killed whites were statistically
most likely to be charged with capital murder and sentenced to death in
Maryland . Black defendants whose victims were white were 2 1/2 times more likely
to be sentenced to death than white defendants with white victims, according
to the study.
Maryland currently has five men on death row. Only five inmates have
been executed since Maryland reinstated the death penalty in 1978. Wesley
Baker, who was put to death in December 2005, was the last person to be
executed in Maryland .
Read House Bill 1111:
http://mlis.state.md.us/2008rs/billfile/hb1111.htm
Read Senate Bill 0614:
http://mlis.state.md.us/2008rs/billfile/sb0614.htm
- - - - -
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.
www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-scotus-mexican-national,0,1300820.story
baltimoresun.com
Court Backs Texas in Dispute With Bush
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer
3:38 PM EDT, March 25, 2008
WASHINGTON
Texas can ignore President Bush and an international court in refusing to reopen the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.
The court said Bush exceeded his authority when he tried to intervene on behalf of Jose Ernesto Medellin, facing the death penalty for killing two teenagers nearly 15 years ago.
The Constitution "allows the president to execute the laws, not make them," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a rebuke of the president in a case that mixed presidential power, international relations and the death penalty.
Justice Stephen Breyer, in dissent, said the decision calls into question U.S. obligations under international treaties and makes it "more difficult to negotiate new ones."
By a 6-3 vote, the court said Texas does not have to give a new hearing to death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a former Houston gang member who is now 33.
The president was in the unusual position of siding with Medellin , a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty.
An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row around the United States violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country's consular officials. The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases.
Bush, who oversaw 152 executions as Texas governor, disagreed with the decision. But he said it must be carried out by state courts because the United States had agreed to abide by the world court's rulings in such cases. The administration argued that the president's declaration is reason enough for Texas to grant Medellin a new hearing.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said Bush was disappointed with the decision and is now reviewing it to see how it might impact international relations.
But, she said, "while we urged a different result, we respect the court's decision and will abide by it."
She noted that the administration's position in the case was focused on the authority it believed the president has to compel a state to comply with international agreements. "The argument of the United States in this case in no way condoned or defended the heinous crime," Perino said.
A Texas prosecutor whose office won a conviction against Medellin said she would ask for an execution date to be set as soon as the high court resolves a separate case over a challenge to lethal injection procedures. The court also could dispose of the cases of seven other Mexicans on death row in Texas as early as Monday.
Roberts, in the unfamiliar role of limiting presidential power, said the international court decision cannot be forced upon the states.
The president may not "establish binding rules of decision that pre-empt contrary state law," Roberts said. Neither does the treaty, by itself, require individual states to take action, he said.
Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, said the international court judgment should be enforced. "The nation may well break its word even though the president seeks to live up to that word," he said.
Justice John Paul Stevens did not sign onto the majority opinion but agreed with the outcome of the case. Stevens said nothing prevents Texas from giving Medellin another hearing even though it is not compelled to do so.
"Texas' duty in this respect is all the greater since it was Texas that -- by failing to provide consular notice in accordance with the Vienna Convention -- ensnared the United States in the current controversy," Stevens said.
Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Roberts' opinion.
Some legal commentators said the decision could have far-reaching implications for other international agreements involving the United States if they cannot be enforced within the United States .
Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, said it could "disrupt a web of international relationships that turn on international dispute resolution." Koh filed a brief in support of Medellin .
But Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who argued the state's case at the high court, said the decision "categorically prohibits foreign courts from undermining American sovereignty and independence."
Medellin was arrested a few days after the killings of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston in June 1993. He was told he had a right to remain silent and have a lawyer present, but the police did not tell him that he could request assistance from the Mexican consulate.
Medellin, who speaks, reads and writes English, gave a written confession. He was convicted of murder in the course of a sexual assault, a capital offense in Texas . A judge sentenced him to death in October 1994.
Texas acknowledged that Medellin was not told he could ask for help from Mexican diplomats but argued that he forfeited the right because he never raised the issue at trial or sentencing. In any case, the state said, the diplomats' intercession would not have made any difference in the outcome of the case.
State and federal courts rejected Medellin 's claim when he raised it on appeal.
Mexico, which has no death penalty, then sued the United States in the world court in 2003. Mexico and other opponents of capital punishment have sought to use the world court to fight for foreigners facing execution in the U.S.
Forty-four Mexican prisoners affected by the decision remain on death row around the country, including 14 in Texas .
Bush has since said the United States will no longer allow the world court to judge the consular access cases because of how death penalty opponents have tried to use the international tribunal.
The case is Medellin v. Texas , 06-984.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.
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 Peter Medak film set in 1952 is based on a true story. Derek Bentley was sentenced to death under controversial circumstances. He did not directly play a role in the murder of a police officer, yet he received the greater punishment. Christopher Eccleston plays Bentley, and Tom Courtenay is the father who tries desperately to save his son’s life.
The title of the film is taken from Bentley's alleged cry of "Let him have it, Chris!" shortly before Christopher Craig shot the officer. Did he mean, "Go ahead and shoot him," or "Give him the gun" (and thus, surrender)? England has since abolished capital punishment.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/politics/bal-death0324,0,2520357.story
March 24, 2008
House votes to create panel to study death penalty in Md.
Baltimore Sun By Brian Wittes
The House of Delegates voted today to create a commission to study
capital punishment in Maryland , after efforts to repeal the death penalty
failed for a second straight year.
The House voted 89-48 to form the commission, which would study racial,
jurisdictional and economic disparities in how the death penalty has
been administered.
The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment also would study the risk
of innocent people being executed and compare the costs of executing
someone with the expense of imprisoning someone for life without parole.
The Senate was scheduled to vote on a similar bill tonight. [The Senate later
voted 32 to 15 for a similar bill.]
The commission would issue a report on its findings and recommendations
to the General Assembly by Dec. 15.
Republicans, citing Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley's opposition to
capital punishment, criticized the idea, saying the commission was being set up
to recommend ending the death penalty. Del. Christopher Shank,
R-Washington, described the proposal as "a textbook model on how to repeal the death
penalty in your state."
"Ladies and gentlemen, the verdict is already in before the jury has
even gone out," Shank said. "This bill is about the repeal of the death penalty,
and I would suggest a 'no' vote."
But Del. Sandy Rosenberg, D-Baltimore, said the bill was carefully
amended to make sure the commission will be "open to discussion and consideration."
"We feel as a committee that we have amended the bill sufficiently so
this bill, as it now stands, creates a credible task force -- one that will
objectively look at the issues," Rosenberg said.
Maryland currently has a de facto moratorium in place against capital
punishment, because of a ruling in late 2006 by the state's highest
court. The court ruled the state's protocol for the lethal injection procedure was
implemented without proper approval by a legislative committee.
Executions can't resume until the O'Malley administration submits new rules for the
committee to approve.
In 2003, University of Maryland criminologist Raymond Paternoster
released a study that found black defendants who killed whites were statistically
most likely to be charged with capital murder and sentenced to death in
Maryland . Black defendants whose victims were white were 2 1/2 times more likely
to be sentenced to death than white defendants with white victims, according
to the study.
Maryland currently has five men on death row. Only five inmates have
been executed since Maryland reinstated the death penalty in 1978. Wesley
Baker, who was put to death in December 2005, was the last person to be
executed in Maryland .
Read House Bill 1111:
http://mlis.state.md.us/2008rs/billfile/hb1111.htm
Read Senate Bill 0614:
http://mlis.state.md.us/2008rs/billfile/sb0614.htm
- - - - -
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.
www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-scotus-mexican-national,0,1300820.story
baltimoresun.com
Court Backs Texas in Dispute With Bush
By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer
3:38 PM EDT, March 25, 2008
WASHINGTON
Texas can ignore President Bush and an international court in refusing to reopen the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.
The court said Bush exceeded his authority when he tried to intervene on behalf of Jose Ernesto Medellin, facing the death penalty for killing two teenagers nearly 15 years ago.
The Constitution "allows the president to execute the laws, not make them," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a rebuke of the president in a case that mixed presidential power, international relations and the death penalty.
Justice Stephen Breyer, in dissent, said the decision calls into question U.S. obligations under international treaties and makes it "more difficult to negotiate new ones."
By a 6-3 vote, the court said Texas does not have to give a new hearing to death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a former Houston gang member who is now 33.
The president was in the unusual position of siding with Medellin , a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty.
An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row around the United States violated the 1963 Vienna Convention, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country's consular officials. The International Court of Justice, also known as the world court, said the Mexican prisoners should have new court hearings to determine whether the violation affected their cases.
Bush, who oversaw 152 executions as Texas governor, disagreed with the decision. But he said it must be carried out by state courts because the United States had agreed to abide by the world court's rulings in such cases. The administration argued that the president's declaration is reason enough for Texas to grant Medellin a new hearing.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said Bush was disappointed with the decision and is now reviewing it to see how it might impact international relations.
But, she said, "while we urged a different result, we respect the court's decision and will abide by it."
She noted that the administration's position in the case was focused on the authority it believed the president has to compel a state to comply with international agreements. "The argument of the United States in this case in no way condoned or defended the heinous crime," Perino said.
A Texas prosecutor whose office won a conviction against Medellin said she would ask for an execution date to be set as soon as the high court resolves a separate case over a challenge to lethal injection procedures. The court also could dispose of the cases of seven other Mexicans on death row in Texas as early as Monday.
Roberts, in the unfamiliar role of limiting presidential power, said the international court decision cannot be forced upon the states.
The president may not "establish binding rules of decision that pre-empt contrary state law," Roberts said. Neither does the treaty, by itself, require individual states to take action, he said.
Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, said the international court judgment should be enforced. "The nation may well break its word even though the president seeks to live up to that word," he said.
Justice John Paul Stevens did not sign onto the majority opinion but agreed with the outcome of the case. Stevens said nothing prevents Texas from giving Medellin another hearing even though it is not compelled to do so.
"Texas' duty in this respect is all the greater since it was Texas that -- by failing to provide consular notice in accordance with the Vienna Convention -- ensnared the United States in the current controversy," Stevens said.
Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Roberts' opinion.
Some legal commentators said the decision could have far-reaching implications for other international agreements involving the United States if they cannot be enforced within the United States .
Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, said it could "disrupt a web of international relationships that turn on international dispute resolution." Koh filed a brief in support of Medellin .
But Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who argued the state's case at the high court, said the decision "categorically prohibits foreign courts from undermining American sovereignty and independence."
Medellin was arrested a few days after the killings of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16, in Houston in June 1993. He was told he had a right to remain silent and have a lawyer present, but the police did not tell him that he could request assistance from the Mexican consulate.
Medellin, who speaks, reads and writes English, gave a written confession. He was convicted of murder in the course of a sexual assault, a capital offense in Texas . A judge sentenced him to death in October 1994.
Texas acknowledged that Medellin was not told he could ask for help from Mexican diplomats but argued that he forfeited the right because he never raised the issue at trial or sentencing. In any case, the state said, the diplomats' intercession would not have made any difference in the outcome of the case.
State and federal courts rejected Medellin 's claim when he raised it on appeal.
Mexico, which has no death penalty, then sued the United States in the world court in 2003. Mexico and other opponents of capital punishment have sought to use the world court to fight for foreigners facing execution in the U.S.
Forty-four Mexican prisoners affected by the decision remain on death row around the country, including 14 in Texas .
Bush has since said the United States will no longer allow the world court to judge the consular access cases because of how death penalty opponents have tried to use the international tribunal.
The case is Medellin v. Texas , 06-984.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press.
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