Thursday, June 29, 2006
US Supreme Court blocks Guantanamo trials
The US Supreme Court today blocked the trial of Guantanamo Bay prisoners in special military courts, ruling that the process drawn up by the Bush Administration broke both American law and the Geneva Conventions.
In a blow to the executive powers of President Bush, America's highest court decided that the first trials of Guantanamo detainees - originally scheduled for later this year - could not go ahead.
The "structure and procedures" of the proposed military commission violated international laws governing the treatment of prisoners of war, it said - essentially, that prisoners should not be tried by their military captors.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Justices to hear global warming case
12 states want Bush administration to regulate carbon dioxide emissions
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court’s most important decisions on the environment.
The decision means the court will address whether the administration’s decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat climate change are legal under federal clean air laws.
“The Supreme Court has seen the importance of this case and will now have an opportunity to address the most significant environmental issue of our generation," said Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly, whose state is one of 12 challenging the Bush administration.
[Read the whole article here]
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip-Sliding Away
Read the article here.
How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business
Posted Friday, Jun. 23, 2006
Soldiers are trained to kill and doctors to heal. At least that's how we usually understand those two professions. But wars can often distort reality, and the war on terrorism has turned into a test case. An inspiring example is that of Colonel Kelly Faucette, M.D. He recently wrote about caring for a new patient at the intensive-care unit of the 47th Combat Support Hospital in Mosul, Iraq. The patient was a terrorist insurgent, a man who planted hidden roadside bombs to murder civilians and Faucette's fellow soldiers. Faucette wrote in his local paper: "Something inside me wants to walk up to this guy ... and just clobber him." But Faucette didn't. Instead he healed him before sending him to a jail, and by that act of healing he helped heal Iraq.
That's the America I know and love. But it is not, alas, the only face of America in this war. One of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should be involved in monitoring torture. It was a fateful decision — and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed (to be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles, and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules. [read more]
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
The mystery of the discovered Pinturicchio
"A treasure hunt which lasted five centuries found its closure with the presentation to the press of a masterpiece by painter Pinturicchio, "Gesù bambino delle mani" (Jesus child of the hands).
So far never seen by the public, it is probably a fragment of a fresco decorating the apartment of Pope Alexander VI Borgia.
According to Vasari, it portrays the Pope kneeling and adoring before the Virgin Mary who has the facial traits of the Pope's mistress Giulia Farnese.
For this reason the painting disappeared. It will be exhibited in Perugia on Sept. 16 in the "Arte Vita" exhibition and then will be lent for other exhibitions in Italy and abroad."
COMMENT: The Virgin Mary has the traits of the Pope Alexander VI's mistress Giulia Farnese, according to Vasari. I wonder if Jesus looks like one of the Pope's children (he had at least eight children from different mistresses)?
Monday, June 19, 2006
Quick! A chaise longue, for I fain would faint
A robust volume, The Dangerous Book for Boys, has become this summer’s unexpected bestseller, covering — for the benefit of small, male readers — such subjects as constructing tripwires, skimming stones, making bows and arrows, teaching dogs tricks, and building tree houses. In short, the volume is a book-sized portal to The Old Days, days when hoodies were not hoodies but “urchins”, and the world rang with the sound of small boys falling out of trees on to their “noggins”, shouting “cor!”
While the ruthlessly modern-minded may find this distasteful — preferring to forge on into a future where children ride above the cityscape in spacepods and survive on one Curly Wurly pill a day — I can see the sense in it. Certain elements of culture or society do reach a peak at a certain time: hair in the 1960s, film in the 1970s, ratty moustaches in the 1980s. Although many aspects of childhood have improved — mainly those concerning polio, slippering, emotional suppression and “lonely” Roman Catholic priests who wanted a “cuddle” — as far as the important business of playing is concerned, those car-free roads, fry-able ants and dammable rivers were the stuff of near perfection. [...] (read more)
Monday, June 12, 2006
Phony words of Bush on the three suicides at Guantanamo Bay
The Guardian reports that White House press secretary Tony Snow said President Bush expressed ``serious concern'' about the fact that three detainees committed suicide at the prison of Guantanamo Bay. Still according to the press secretary, George W. Bush was concerned that the bodies would be ``treated humanely and with cultural sensitivity'.
That sounds one of the phoniest things I have ever heard.
First you put 460 people in prison for years without even charging with specific crimes (if not only 10% of them), a procedure that is unheard of in law, has aroused the reprimands of most civil countries, and has been defined by the United Nations as tantamount to torture. Then, when three people, out of desperation for such inhuman treatment, commit suicide you are concerned that the "bodies are treated humanely and with sensitivity"! Treated inhumanely as living human beings, and humanely as corpses.
Phony words don't make up for barbarism.
Whatever those people kept indefinitely in the prison of Guantanamo Bay have done or not done, they deserve a humane treatment, respecting international law and decency.
The Guardian also reports that "one of the Guantanamo detainees who committed suicide had been cleared for transfer to another country". I wonder which country. Perhaps one of those where they can confortably perform torture without the United States directly staining their hands with blood? Whether one simply orders torture to be performed or does it directly it makes no difference. It's equally barbarian and disgusting.
And this is the civilisation that must be exported to other countries?
Read also:
Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale
Special reports on rendition flights
Special reports on Guantanamo Bay
Excerpt from "Those Pesky Voters" by Bob Herbert:
Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots. [...]
No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Bush. [...]
Read the whole article here (registration required).
Associate Publisher: Public interest in news topics beyond control of mainstream media
The blogosphere has been abuzz. But in the days since Rolling Stone magazine published a long piece that accused Republicans of widespread and intentional cheating that affected the outcome of the last presidential election, the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening.
In terms of bad news judgment, this could turn out to be the 2006 equivalent of the infamous "Downing Street memo," the London Times story that was initially greeted by the U.S. media with a collective yawn.
Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone mega-essay is titled "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" It focuses on widespread voting irregularities, questionable tallies and disenfranchising practices, particularly in Ohio, which President Bush won by more than 100,000 votes.
Singling out Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell for much of the blame, Kennedy writes persuasively that enough was awry in that state alone to raise serious questions as to whether Bush really defeated John Kerry in 2004. Blackwell, now a Republican candidate for governor, headed Bush's state re-election campaign at the same time he was constitutionally in charge of the state's voting machinery. [...]
It's too early to tell whether it will become big news in the same delayed manner the British intelligence memo did. But the titans of the news industry still have things to learn about how news becomes news in the present-day media landscape. Editors will always have responsibility for filtering, and helping readers understand the importance and credibility of news reports.
But nowadays, the American discourse is rightfully in hands other than ours.
Read the whole article here.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
How Melting Glaciers
Alter Earth's Surface,
Spur Quakes, Volcanoes
June 9, 2006; Page A11
by Sharon Begley
Imagine the surface of Earth as a giant trampoline that accumulated a slab of ice over the winter, and you can get a sense of what a growing number of scientists say is in store for the planet as glaciers keep melting.
Once the trampoline's ice turns to water that drips over the edges in the warm days of spring, the concave elastic slowly rebounds to its original flat shape. That's how Earth responds as glaciers retreat, and the consequences promise to be ... interesting.
The reason is that one cubic meter of ice weighs just over a ton, and glaciers can be hundreds of meters thick. When they melt and the water runs off, it is literally a weight off Earth's crust. The crust and mantle therefore bounce back, immediately as well as over thousands of years. That "isostatic rebound," according to studies of prehistoric and recent earthquakes and volcanoes, can make the planet's seismic plates slip catastrophically, and cause magma chambers that feed volcanoes to act like bottles of shaken seltzer.
"It's unavoidable that glacial retreat will induce tectonic activity," says geoscientist Allen Glazner of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. [read more]
U.S.: 3 Gitmo Inmates Hanged Themselves
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said Saturday. They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base for years without charge. [...]
Amnesty International said the apparent suicides "are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention" and called the prison "an indictment" of the Bush administration's human rights record.
Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a telephone interview from New York that those held at Guantanamo "have this incredible level of despair that they will never get justice. And now they're gone. And they died without ever having seen a court."
Olshansky, whose group represents about 300 Guantanamo detainees, wept during the interview. She appealed to the Bush administration "for immediate action to do the right thing. They should be taken to court or released. I don't think this country wants the stain of injustice on it for many years to come." [...]
A U.N. panel said May 19 that holding detainees indefinitely at Guantanamo violated the world's ban on torture and the United States should close the detention center. [...] (read the whole article here)
Acts, not words allow to distinguish a civilised nation from a non civilised one.
A nation may claim to be an example of justice and freedom. But detaining indefinitely hundreds of people (some have been/are children or minors too) without even charging them for crimes can hardly be considered civilised. In fact the United Nations have stated that holding detaineed indefinitely is tantamount to torture.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
From Times Online:
"ISRAELI artillery fire killed a Palestinian family who were picnicking on the beach in Gaza yesterday, as the shoreline was packed with people on a Muslim holiday." [read more]
From YnetNews.com:
"Wiham Ralia lost his father, a stepmother, 3 sisters and a brother in IDF artillery strike on Gaza beach; in interview with Ynet he and his sister speak of their ordeal from a Gaza hospital"
Hadil weeping by her father's dead body (Photo: AFP) [Found on YNetNews.com]
[...] Wiham sat in the family's mourning tent in Beit Lahiya when he spoke to Ynet. "I hope Allah will have mercy on them and avenge their death. In a moment we became nothing, with no taste for life. We were by the beach and we tried to find a little happiness and rest and this doesn't happen to us a lot, and until we had the chance to live in this atmosphere; everything was blown away because of the Israelis who don't let us breathe and live. There is no point in living." [read more]
COMMENT:
It was the first day of holiday in Gaza. A Palestinian family was peacefully picnicking on a beach, packed with people.
And all of the sudden they are attacked by the Israeli ARMY.
Too often Israeli army fires with their high-tech weapons on poor, defenseless people, blindly.
I call these gratuitous murders terrorism.
When a nation uses disproportionate fire power blindly, and not against another army, but ordinary people, civilians, women and children, indiscriminately, with criminal negligence or carelessness, how could anyone call this if not terrorism?
It does not make a difference if they wear a uniform.
The Israelis must stop their actions against Palestinian civilians. And the world must cease its indifference.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
and prisons
More evidence surfacing in a Council of Europe report
[Picture found on La Repubblica Online]
The Council of Europe has conducted a probe on the CIA's secret flights and secret detection centres.
The probe was led by Swiss senator Dick Marty. In his 67 page-long report, senator Dick Marty reveals the existence of a "spider's Web" of US secret flights and secret detection centres and that 14 EU nations colluded with it.
The US practice called "extraordinary rendition" is illegal under international laws. As illegal is torture practiced in some countries to which people were secretely sent by the US intelligence, without any legal guarantee.
The report by senator Dick Marty titled "Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states" is available for download here.
A draft of a EU Resolution on illegal transfers of detainees involving EU nations has been drawn up by senator Dick Marty, available here.
An excerpt of the draft of EU Resolution:
5. Thus, across the world, the United States has progressively woven a clandestine "spider’s web" of disappearances, secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers, often encompassing countries notorious for their use of torture. Hundreds of persons have become entrapped in this web, in some cases merely suspected of sympathising with a presumed terrorist organisation.
6. The "spider’s web" has been spun out with the collaboration or tolerance of many countries, including several Council of Europe member States. This co-operation, which took place in secret and without any democratic legitimacy, has spawned a system that is utterly incompatible with the fundamental principles of the Council of Europe. [...]
The US Ambassador at the United Nations got irked for the content of a speech of the UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown in which he said that the US participates in the UN with scarce conviction, for their own ends without considering the interests of all, and without defending its importance at home.
This is part of the content of Malloch Brown's speech as reported by the Guardian:
[...] ``You have to engage to help make this institution a better institution,'' Malloch Brown told reporters. ``And you need to engage, if I dare say so, with your own public opinion to explain better why the U.N. matters to American interests.''
In the speech, Malloch Brown said the United States relies on the United Nations as a diplomatic tool but doesn't defend it against criticism at home. That policy of ``stealth diplomacy'' is unsustainable, he said.
While praising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessors, Malloch Brown lamented that the good works of the U.N. are ignored. ``Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.''
``The U.N.'s role is in effect a secret in Middle America even as it is highlighted in the Middle East and other parts of the world,'' Malloch Brown said. [...]
Frankly I think the speech of Mark Malloch Brown is quite accurate. And the US is being disingenuous.
The evidence of the US not actually supporting the UN, 'exploiting' it only when useful, and not defending it against criticism is the US Ambassador John Bolton himself.
Some of John Bolton's statements (found here):
“There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world and that is the United States when it suits our interest and when we can get others to go along. And I think it would be a real mistake to count on the U.N. as if it is some disembodied entity out there that can function on its own.” (Global Structures Convocation, Feb. 3, 1994)
In an interview in 2000 on National Public Radio, Mr. Bolton told Juan Williams, "If I were redoing the Security Council today, I'd have one permanent member because that's the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world." ... "And that one member would be, John Bolton?" Mr. Williams queried. "The United States," Mr. Bolton replied. (New York Times, March 9, 2005)
“Diplomacy is not an end [in] itself if it does not advance U.S. interests.” (Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2005)
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Hammurabi Human Rights Group-EPA
In starting it, the Bush administration has not only vilified a country but its own people, and even those who died on September 11, used as an excuse to deploy plans of power and profit.
If there is some justice, George W. Bush and those responsible of this slaughtering, should face a trial. Their position and power should not be a reason of immunity for the immense war crime that is the war on Iraq.
Monday, June 05, 2006
[...] George Bush is correct. A "full and complete" investigation needs to be made into the crimes against humanity in Iraq, and if justice prevails, this would in turn lead to the trial and conviction of George and the rest of the neocon purveyors of torture and murder, for which the maximum penalties should be applied.
The level of accountability needs to rise higher than Specialist or Private and should reach up down the very blackest bowels of an administration that lied through its teeth to get our country into a war of aggression and occupation. The commander in chief needs to be prosecuted: NOW! [...]
do those guilty always pay?
Yes, if they are not too powerful
Haditha's massacre is being handled at the "highest levels", Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice assures (read here). There will be a "serious and thorough investigation" because "that's what democracies do when there are allegations of misconduct".
I often read these PR reminders of the greatness of democracy in dealing with "misconduct".
Yes, the misconduct of some soldiers will be punished (if the crimes emerged after attempts of coverup are confirmed).
But what about those high in the power chain, who knew what was going on?
And what about the crimes of those who start wars based on lies and deceit and cause not 24 but 200,000 deaths. Will those crimes get investigated and punished?
Or is it - the way it works in the world - that if you kill hundreds of thousand people you get away with it, and if you kill a few you get punished (if found out)?
They should stop uttering their TV-savvy mottos about democracy and justice. It's hypocritical and revolting to hear words on justice from those that appear to put themselves beyond justice and humanity.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Supporting our troops over a cliff
By FRANK RICH
Excerpts:
THE sunlight was brilliant in New York City on Memorial Day weekend, and the sailors deposited in town by Fleet Week looked brilliant in it. Nothing, including the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, has shaken American affection for the troops. Nothing should. These men and women go to war so we can party on. Since 9/11, our government has asked no sacrifice of civilians other than longer waits at airline security. We've even been rewarded with a prize that past generations would have found as jaw-dropping as space travel: a wartime dividend in the form of tax cuts.
“It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war,” said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who retired after his stint as a commander in Iraq and became an outspoken critic of Donald Rumsfeld. He told The Wall Street Journal that “it was almost surreal” that the only time some Americans “think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car.”
General Batiste's observation about the ''almost surreal'' disconnect between the home front and the war is damningly true, even in Washington. As the violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled before and after Memorial Day, Congress kept its eye on its own ball. In a bipartisan display of honor among thieves, Democrats and Republicans banded together to decry the F.B.I. for searching the office of a Democratic congressman, William Jefferson, who had been accused of hiding $90,000 in questionable cash in his freezer. Even more ludicrously, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales -- a man who damaged our troops incalculably by countenancing an official policy of torture -- finally threatened to resign on principle. The principle he was standing up for, however, was not the Geneva Conventions but the F.B.I.'s right to raid Mr. Jefferson's office.
Contrast these clowns with J. W. Fulbright, a senator who convened hearings to challenge presidents from both parties during Vietnam, changing the nation's course. The current Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, has proudly put on this month's legislative agenda constitutional amendments to stop same-sex marriage and flag burning. ''Right now people in this country are saying it's O.K. to desecrate that flag and to burn it,'' he said on Fox News last Sunday, though it's not clear exactly who these traitors are. A Nexis search turns up only one semi-recent American flag-burning incident -- by a drunk and apparently apolitical teenager in Mr. Frist's home state, Tennessee, in 2005.
The marriage-amendment campaign will be kicked off tomorrow with a Rose Garden benediction by the president. Though the amendment has no chance of passing, Mr. Bush apparently still thinks, as he did in 2004, that gay-baiting remains just the diversion to distract from a war gone south.
[...] We know that even as coalition partners like Italy and South Korea bail out, we are planning an indefinite stay of undefined parameters: the 104-acre embassy complex rising in the Green Zone is the largest in the world, and the Decider himself has said that it's up to ''future presidents and future governments of Iraq'' to decide our exit strategy.
Actually, the current government of Iraq already is. On Thursday the latest American-backed Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom Mr. Bush is ''proud to call'' his ''ally and friend,'' invited open warfare on American forces by accusing them of conducting Haditha-like killing sprees against civilians as a ''regular'' phenomenon. If this is the ally and friend we are fighting for, a country that truly supports the troops has no choice but to start bringing them home.
(To read the whole article click here)
US confronts brutal culture among its finest sons
In the wake of the Haditha massacre come further allegations of outlaw killings in Iraq. They add to growing unease about US military culture that fails to distinguish civilian from insurgent
Paul Harris in New York, Peter Beaumont in London, and Mohammed al-Ubeidy in Baghdad
Sunday June 4, 2006
The Observer
American veterans of the war in Iraq have described a culture of casual violence, revenge and prejudice against Iraqi civilians that has made the killing of innocent bystanders a common occurrence.
The US military is now involved in at least three separate investigations into its own soldiers' conduct in Iraq that may illegally have led to the deaths of Iraqi civilians. It is widely expected that more incidents will be uncovered. The most serious is the alleged massacre of 24 civilians in the Sunni town of Haditha by a unit of marines. The victims included women and children who were shot after a roadside bomb hit a convoy and killed a US soldier.
Last week it was revealed that two more incidents have also been under investigation. The first is the death of 11 Iraqis during an American raid near Balad in March. The dead included five children. The second inquiry involves seven US marines and a sailor in the death of an Iraqi civilian near Baghdad in April. It is believed the man was dragged from his home and shot before an AK-47 and a shovel were placed next to his body to make it look like he was an insurgent.
Some American veterans have expressed little surprise at the latest revelations. 'I don't doubt for one moment that these things happened. They are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions,' said Camilo Mejia, a US infantry veteran who served briefly in the Haditha area in 2003.
American veterans have told The Observer of a military culture that places little practical emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties in the heat of battle, although they also point out the huge problems of urban fighting against a tough enemy that often hides within the civilian Iraqi community.
'In these circumstances you would be surprised at how any normal human being can see their morals degenerate so they can do these things,' said Garrett Reppenhagen, a former US sniper.
Mejia, who has served time in jail for refusing to return to Iraq for a second tour of duty, said there was widespread prejudice against Iraqis in his unit, and that Iraqis were routinely referred to as 'Hajis' in the same way that local people during the Vietnam war were called 'gooks' or 'Charlie'.
'We dehumanise the enemy under these circumstances,' said Mejia. 'They called them gooks in Vietnam and we called them Hajis in Iraq.'
Bar group will review Bush's legal challenges
WASHINGTON -- The board of governors of the American Bar Association voted unanimously yesterday to investigate whether President Bush has exceeded his constitutional authority in reserving the right to ignore more than 750 laws that have been enacted since he took office.[...] (read more)
US soldiers: Iraq massacre not exception
Coral Wynter & Jim McIlroy, Caracas
The response of the Pentagon and White House to the massacre of more than 20 Iraqi civilians by US marines in Haditha last year has followed a familiar pattern. Official investigations into the incident were finally forced by the publication in Time magazine of details of the killings. The massacre has been presented as a horrifying aberration of US policy in Iraq.
However, on May 20 US group Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) issued a statement that explained: “The massacre at Haditha is not an exception to the situation in Iraq, it is a punctuation mark in a longer atrocity — the war itself.”
The statement said that foreign troops “cannot simultaneously be empathetic to a population and be obliged to control that same population by pointing guns at them, breaking into their homes, turning them into collateral damage, and taking vengeance on them out of the inevitable frustration of fighting an urban counter-insurgency”.
At the World Social Forum, held in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas in January, Green Left Weekly spoke to IVAW member Geoff Millard. Millard explained that US soldiers are forced to dehumanise Iraqis to carry out Washington’s brutal occupation policy.
He told GLW, “US soldiers are put into a situation where they are forced to brutalise, forced to racialise, forced to sexualise everyone in order to dominate and control a people”.
“The way that has to be done is that you are forced to dehumanise that person. That’s what they are doing in Iraq. You see this brutalisation factor whenever you talk to World War 2 veterans about 'Japs’. In Vietnam they were 'gooks’ and in Iraq the people are called 'haji’ [among Muslims, haji refers to a person who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and is used as a term of respect, but among US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan it has been turned into a racist epithet]. So the racist, class brutality continues. The real Iraqis getting bombed are the poor. It’s the poor in Iraq who make up the resistance, just like anywhere, because the rich are still going to get their’s, whatever.” [...]
(Read the whole article here)
Saturday, June 03, 2006
by Curtis Lang
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 3, 2006
First Published in Satya Center.com
[...] The strategic importance of the world’s oil fields has long been a pre-eminent policy issue among military analysts around the world. The major military campaigns and imperial ambitions of the major powers engaged in the World Wars of the Twentieth Century revolved around control of world oil supplies and supply lines.
As America ascended to its current position of global hegemon during these World Wars, the American “way of life” has been synonymous with cheap energy to sustain its suburban lifestyle, its global industrial agricultural system, its worldwide war machine, and the dominance of its global corporations, which all depend upon massive utilization of cheap energy resources to support their far-flung globalized supply lines.
[...] Over the last forty years, numerous countries have realized the increasing value of their oil reserves and have nationalized their oil infrastructure. Mexico, Middle Eastern oil producers, Ecuador, Brazil and Venezuela have all taken control of their oil resources away from multi-national oil companies during this period.
All this constitutes a threat to US hegemony, but for America, the worst by far is soon to come. America’s dependence on foreign oil will soon prove its undoing.
[...] In a striking parallel to the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, America’s existing social, political, and economic systems appear to be dominant, immovable and totally geared toward preserving the status quo for those in power. Just as in Brezhnev’s USSR, America’s economic system, based on an aggressive Utopian ideology out of touch with the real world, provides increasing rewards only for the privileged few.
Over the last twenty-five years in the US, a Utopian economic ideology, free-market laissez-faire capitalism, has been deified as the guiding principle for all segments of society and all forms of social interaction.
However, free markets in America are a fraud. All major economic segments, including banking and finance, health care, insurance, agriculture, military contracting, oil and energy, utilities, publishing and media, advertising, automobiles, and the rest are dominated by comfortable oligopolies. [...]
[Read the whole article here]
Web users to 'patrol' US border
A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.
The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings. [...]
Web users worldwide will be able
to watch the Texas border
Free number
The Texas governor announced his plans for streaming the border surveillance camera footage over the internet at a meeting of police officials on Thursday. [...]
Web users who spot an apparently illegal crossing will be able to alert the authorities by telephoning a number free of charge. [...]
So the desire that some unfortunate people have to find a better future is trasformed into an Internet game for the entertainment of world-wide Web users.
There is something sadistic in all this. Something that erases the most elementary notions of compassion and empathy. A human being is trasformed into a Guard with the task of spotting another human being who, on the screen, is not a man who might be looking desperately for a better future, but an indistinct "enemy" to fetch, in a cat-mouse type of play.
Will the "Web Guards" keep a score? Will an award be given to the "Web guard" who, from the comfort of his house, spots the highest numbers of Mexicans trying to pass that inhuman wall?
This is sick.
But then again, how many nations have a Guantanamo Bay?
From World Volunteer Web:
Meanwhile: Where have all the protesters gone?
01 June 2006
by Sam Graham-Felsen
The greatest disappointment of my generation has been its failure to truly stand up to the Bush administration - and particularly, its refusal to actively oppose the war in Iraq.
We are the youth who are living through what will perhaps be remembered as the most scandal- plagued, secretive, privacy-invading, rights-infringing, incompetent administration in American history - and we have barely made a peep.
How is it possible, that during a time of unprecedented promise for youth mobilization that this generation has remained so silent, so acquiescent?
Many point to the lack of personal threat; there is, as of now, no draft to frighten us into action. Others suggest that the pressures of an unstable and uncertain economy have caused my generation to look inwards, focusing on creating a solid economic future for themselves rather than dilly-dally with Utopian visions.
All of these explanations have merit, but I want to offer an alternative hypothesis. The reason that youth aren't protesting about anything, let alone the war in Iraq, is because there is no longer a serious youth political culture in this country. And the reason for that is because this generation does not believe in its ability to alter, or even slightly disrupt, the status quo.
Community service and volunteering is at an all-time high, so young people do, in fact, care. But this generational shift from activism to volunteerism reflects our lack of faith in our ability to affect broad social change.
We were force-fed the ideology that there is no alternative to the existing model of neoliberalism and corporate- controlled globalization. If we tried to suggest that we could play a role in molding our own destinies, we were laughed at. What's best for business is what's best for the world, we were told, and if you disagree with the bosses, too bad, because no one's going to listen.
All you can do is face this cold reality, get a good job, and try to keep as warm as possible within the confines of your isolated, insulated home.
Idealism died in this country because the doctrine of "There Is No Alternative" killed it. We don't dream of utopia anymore. So it's no wonder that our parents, not us, are showing up to protest the war in Iraq. They believe in the power of social movements because they saw the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement shape history before their very eyes. [...]
(Read the whole article here)
And the GOP 4-step Recipe
to 'Blackwell' the USA in 2008
Abracadabra: Three million votes vanish
Friday, June 2, 2006
By Greg Palast
Excerpt:
[Heads up! Catch Robert Kennedy Jr., Mike Papantonio and Greg Palast this next Saturday, June 10th, on Air America's 'Ring of Fire' on the shoplifting of the last election & and the next one.]
This is a fact: On November 2, 2004, in the State of Ohio, 239,127 votes for President of the United States were dumped, rejected, blocked, lost and left to rot uncounted.
[...] But the shoplifting of those votes in Ohio was just the tip of the theft-berg. November 2, 2004 was a national ballot-box bonfire. In total, over three million votes (3,600,380 to be exact) were cast -- marked, punched, pulled -- YET NEVER COUNTED. I'm not talking about the Ukraine or Uganda. I'm talking about the United States of America "with liberty and justice for all."
Well, not "all." The nine-to-one Black-to-White ballot spoilage rate is a national statistic -- not just an Ohio trick. Last year, I flew to New Mexico to investigate the 33,981 cast but not counted ballots of that state in the 2004 race. George Bush "won" New Mexico by 5,988 votes. Or did he? I calculated that, of the all the ballots rejected and "spoiled," 89% were cast by voters of color. Who won New Mexico? Kerry won -- or he would have, if they had counted the ballots. [...]
(Read the whole article here).
Friday, June 02, 2006
VIDEO - Robert Kennedy Explains 2004 Stolen Election to Tucker Carlson
Guest blogged by David Edwards of Veredictum.com
(Read the whole post and watch the video here).
(Read the whole post here).
From The San Diego Union Tribune:
"Republican Jim Galley, who is running for Congress as a “pro-traditional family” candidate, was married to two women at the same time, defaulted on his child support payments and has been accused of abuse by one of his ex-wives."
COMMENT: That's sounds sooooooo pro-traditional family! So Republican.
Photographs taken by Agence France Presse but not distributed by major US media outlets show the bodies of Iraqi civilians killed in March in a home in Ishaqi, Iraq. [...]
The photographs were discovered and highlighted by by Christopher Floyd of ChrisFloyd.com earlier this year.
According to Reuters report on the incident, the 11 bodies of men, women and children, including a 75-year old grandmother and a child under the age one one, were found bound in their blown-up home. All were shot in the head; the house was riddled with bullets. At the time, "The U.S. military said two women and a child died during the bid to seize an al Qaeda militant from a house." [...]
Public health and religion: Aids, America, abstinence...
Uganda was a beacon of hope in Africa's struggle against HIV, but the Christian right's grip on US policy is undermining this effort with fatal consequences, reports Oliver Duff from Kampala
Excerpt:
[...] Health workers see the fingerprints of America's Christian right all over the chastity message and believe the Bush administration is using its financial might to bully them into accepting evangelical ideology at the expense of public health.
Aids may have killed one million Ugandans and infected a further million but the latest crisis seems strange when you consider that foreign donors still hold up Uganda as Africa's Aids success story. What's more, under Bush's 2003 Emergency Plan For Aids Relief, where he pledged $15bn (£8bn) to fighting Aids in the worst-afflicted countries, Uganda receives more US money than ever: doubling in two years to $169.9m in 2006. But that cash comes with conditions: in a gesture to the Christian right in the US, at least one-third of all prevention money must go to "abstinence-only" projects - $10m in Uganda in 2005. Critics counting each new infection in field clinics say this has dangerously skewed Uganda's previous "balanced" approach which seemed to be working.
At a tiny clinic in the capital's suburbs, women wait for antenatal advice and Aids testing. "We have worked so hard to get people to understand HIV and that there are three options open to them: A, B or C," says Dr Henry Katamba. "That's Abstain from sex, Be faithful or use a Condom, whichever is the one for you. That's what our government used to say - and everyone understood. The message recognised that it wasn't realistic to ask for abstinence from everyone who's not married." Dr Katamba is health co-ordinator of the Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau, an umbrella of churches providing clinical help in the absence of government hospitals.
Under the previous "balanced" strategy, condom distribution grew from four million a year to 118 million by 2001. Thanks to the abstinence message, teenagers lost their virginity about 18 months later than before. People with several partners realised they needed to stop sleeping around so much. In 1992, one in five Ugandans had Aids. By 2001 that dropped to one in 20.
"Because of the US, our government now says Abstain and Be faithful only," says Dr Katamba. "So people stop trusting our advice. They think we were lying about how condoms can stop Aids. Confusion is deadly."
And so it is proving to be: the number of infections is again rising, after years of decline. Questionable government figures say that 6.4 per cent of Ugandans have HIV/Aids. One in three civil war refugees in camps in the north has Aids, a local NGO says. [...]
COMMENT:
The A-B-C approach was working in Uganda. Then the Bush administration forced his fundamentalist approach to the AIDS problem (stressing abstinence against condoms) on local policies, and now AIDS is growing again.
Even the Roman Catholic Church, which surely is not an example of far-sightedness in social policies, has shown signs of acceptance of the use of condoms to prevent infections (read here), however culpably late and still with no sufficient clarity (shame on the Pope, who has not given any official istruction to the flock of Catholic sheep, but shame also on all the hierarchies - to the lowest rank of priests - who with their passivity are also responsible for this delay).
Thos who privilege ideology over evidence, and in doing so cause harm to people are despicable.
Tuesday 30 May 2006
Excerpt:
[...] A key quote from a Marine officer could be used to show premeditation - and thus malice - in support of a possible murder charge against the shooters. An article in yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune which is reprinted from the New York Times News Service, cites a report by "one Marine officer" that "inspectors suspected at least part of the motive for the killings was to send a message to local residents that they would 'pay a price' for failing to warn the Marines about insurgent activity in the area."
Curiously, that paragraph is missing from the same story in both the print and online editions of yesterday's New York Times. For some reason, the Times had second thoughts about that paragraph, and removed it, after the copy had been sent to other papers over the wire.
Regardless of how those who may ultimately be charged with murder fare in court, a more significant question is whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will be charged with war crimes on a theory of command responsibility.
Willful killing is considered a war crime under the US War Crimes Act. People who commit war crimes can be punished by life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, a commander can be held liable if he knew or should have known his inferiors were committing war crimes and he failed to stop or prevent it.
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are knowingly prosecuting a war of aggression in Iraq. Under the United Nations Charter, a country cannot invade another country unless it is acting in self-defense or it has permission from the Security Council. Iraq had invaded no country for 11 years before "Operation Iraqi Freedom," and the council never authorized the invasion.
A war that violates the UN Charter is a war of aggression.
Under the Nuremberg Tribunal, aggressive war is the supreme international crime. [...]
(Read the whole article here).
