A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
Edward Abbey
Thanks to Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog / June 11, 2008
Thorne Webb Dreyer, Editor
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Quote of the Day : A Patriot
Truckers Blockade Traffic in Europe
Two truck drivers die as fuel protests spread across Europe
June 10, 2008
MADRID — Two lorry drivers were killed on picket lines in Spain and Portugal on Tuesday as strikes by thousands of truckers over soaring fuel prices turned deadly.
Spanish police escorted petrol supply tankers into Barcelona on the second day of the stoppage that has caused food and fuel shortages and huge tailbacks on the Spanish-French border.
French railway workers began their own walkout, increasing the transport chaos.
A Portuguese driver was killed after he was hit by a truck as he manned a barricade filtering traffic near Alcanena, north of Lisbon.
A police spokesman quoted witnesses as saying the 52-year-old man climbed onto the side of a truck in a bid to stop it and fell off under the wheels, Lusa news agency reported.
Later Tuesday, a truck driver in Spain was run over and killed by a van as he manned a picket line outside a wholesale market in the southern city of Granada, police said.
Road haulage representatives suspended strike negotiations with the Spanish government following the incident.
Other trucks in Portugal and Spain have been stoned or had their windows smashed and tyres punctured for working during the national strikes.
A total of 15 people, most of them manning picket lines, were arrested in Spain Tuesday for disturbing public order, assault or threats, Spanish media said.
Tens of thousands of truckers are on strike or joining the protests to demand government help to offset the higher fuel costs.
Authorities in northern Spain ordered emergency measures after many petrol stations in the Catalonia region ran out of fuel.
“Twenty tanker trucks escorted by the regional police left an industrial zone this morning for Barcelona port to help supply and distribute to petrol stations in the region,” a regional police spokesman told AFP.
Forty percent of petrol stations in Catalonia have run out of fuel, according to Manuel Amado, president of the Catalonia Federation of Service Stations.
Arrivals of fresh meat, fish and fruit in Madrid have come to a near halt, according to officials at the Mercamadrid market, Spain’s biggest wholesale market. They said that fish would be in short supply from Thursday but stocks of other foods should last until the end of the week.
Automakers in Spain said most of the country’s automobile plants, including those of Nissan, Mercedes Benz, Seat and Renault, have had to cut or halt production.
Auto plants are particularly vulnerable to a strike by hauliers, which provide them with spare parts.
Truckers stopped lorries from crossing the French-Spanish border and caused major tailbacks around major Spanish cities, including Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.
Spanish and French truckers staged pickets on either side of the frontier between the two countries. They blocked a bridge on the border at Bidassoa in the western Basque region and other main crossing points.
On the French side, service areas on motorways were packed with trucks from the border right back to Bordeaux, about 200 kilometres (125 miles) away.
Spain’s second largest hauliers’ union Fenadismer, which claims to represent 70,000 out of Spain’s 380,000 truck drivers, launched an open-ended strike on Monday.
Talks Monday between the hauliers and the government ended in failure, Fenadismer said.
The Portuguese government said it hoped to have an agreement with its truckers by the end of the week.
A separate strike by workers at the French rail company, SNCF, severely hit rail traffic.
About half of intercity and local commuter trains were running along with about three quarters of TGV high speed trains from Paris to southwest France. Some express commuter lines into Paris were badly affected by the strike.
Spanish fisherman were keeping up their strike against fuel prices but most French trawlers have decided to go back to work after several weeks of blocking ports and access to oil refineries.
Source. / AFP
Also see 90,000 truckers bring Spain to a standstill. / Daily Mail
Thanks to Jesse James Retherford / The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Civil Disobedience, Energy, Europe, Fuel Costs, Labor, Social Action
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Senate Report : No Saddam, al-Qaida Link
The Big Story You May Have Missed During the Obama v. Clinton Finale
By Arianna Huffington / June 9, 2008
For those of you who were understandably busy following the last round of the Democratic Nomination Ultimate Fighting Championship this past week (I won’t give away the ending for those who have it TiVo’d), I’d like to call your attention to a major story you may have missed: the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 200-page “Phase II” report on how the Bush administration used — and abused — pre-war intelligence in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
The Committee’s conclusion: the president and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq. No surprise there.
But it’s vitally important that we continue to reiterate and document the truth of what happened and who was responsible for perpetrating this fraud on the American public. And here’s why: the war is still going on (and American soldiers continue to die as a result of the deception); the same people responsible for this debacle still have their hands on the wheel; desperate to cover their tracks, they continue to lie about how we got into this mess; and they are currently hitting all the same notes in agitating for war in Iran.
The report is a direct rebuke to the administration’s continued claims that it was the intelligence that was faulty, and that Bush and co. were simply presenting what the C.I.A. had given them.
A statement released by committee chairman Jay Rockefeller makes it clear that the administration “on numerous occasions, misrepresented the intelligence and the threat from Iraq…in making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
The report doesn’t use the word, but we all know what it’s called when someone presents something as fact that’s directly contradicted by the evidence. A lie. Not a mistake. A lie.
Some specifics from Rockefeller’s statement (emphasis mine):
Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
*Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
*Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
*Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
*The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
*The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.
So much for the tired claim that “everybody in the world” agreed that Iraq had WMD, was a “grave and gathering threat,” was in league with Al Qaeda, etc., etc., etc.
The report also details how a cabal very high up in the Pentagon and the Vice President’s office got played by a group of shady Iranian exiles in order, as McCaltchy’s John Walcott puts it, to “feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.”
This meeting was brokered by neo-con All-Star Michael Ledeen, who is now one of those desperately agitating for war with Iran. The story reads like a bad spy novel.
In December of 2001, Ledeen and two Pentagon Iran experts met an Iranian named Manucher Ghorbanifar in Rome. Ghorbanifar sketched out his plan to overthrow the Iranian regime on a cocktail napkin. The plan involved, as the Senate report puts it, “simultaneous disruption of traffic at key intersections leading to Tehran,” which would “create anxiety, work stoppages and other disruptive measures.” Ghorbanifar asked for $5 million in seed money to get started.
This was not the first time Leeden and Ghorbanifar had met. Both are alumni of the Iran-Contra arms scandal. In fact, in 1984, the CIA had said that Ghorbanifar “should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance.”
Operation Desert Gridlock never happened, but Ledeen continued to feed his dubious intelligence to an eager Pentagon, including giving Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith a 100-day plan which would provide evidence that Iraqi WMD had been secretly moved to Iran. On this, he was backed up by three Republican senators: Rick Santorum, Jon Kyl and Sam Brownback.
Eventually alarm bells went off in the CIA and State Department and an investigation of the Pentagon’s contacts with Ghorbanifar was started. It was shut down after only one month, however, by Stephen Cambone, then Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.
The reaction of Republicans to the Phase II report has been predictable. They’re desperate for the public not to dwell on the truth about this war. And if they can’t present contrary evidence to refute the report (and they can’t, because it doesn’t exist), they can at least sow doubt — acting as if the report is the result of partisan bickering as opposed to the smoking gun of the Bush administration’s tragic acts.
In fact, the committee vote on the report was 10-5, with Republicans Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snow voting with the Democrats.
“It rots the very fiber of democracy when our government is put to these uses,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in response to the report.
It’s no coincidence that a war built on lies continues to be conducted using lies (“the surge is working”). Mark Green proposes a way to end the cycle of deception: create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “This worked in a very different historical situation of South Africa and can work here as well,” wrote Green on HuffPost. “South Africans who engaged in murder and violence were given amnesty if they confessed under oath to their crimes and knowledge — but would be prosecuted if they didn’t…. The largely successful effort led to both truth and reconciliation.”
Richard Clarke echoed Green’s proposal last week, and also suggested something each of us can do: “I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.”
If the leaders responsible for that suffering are not held accountable — both at the ballot box and by being shamed and shunned as Clarke suggests — we dishonor the sacrifices of the fallen, and make it likely that many more will endure a similar fate.
Source. / The Huffington Post
The Rag Blog
A Flashback with a Moral and Mental Midget
A few choice words from Rupert Murdoch that appeared in the Guardian on 11 February 2003. Just shows how arrogant and ignorant Amerikkkan power can be.
Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog / June 10, 2008
On the war Mr Murdoch was equally unequivocal.”We can’t back down now. I think Bush is acting very morally, very correctly, and I think he is going to go on with it,” he said.
“The fact is, a lot of the world can’t accept the idea that America is the one superpower in the world,” he added.
Mr Murdoch said the price of oil would be the war’s main benefit on the world economy.
“The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in the any country.”
Read all of it here. / The Guardian
The Rag Blog
Like a Forced Marriage, It Probably Won’t Work
U.S. seeking 58 bases in Iraq, Shiite lawmakers say
By Leila Fadel / June 9, 2008
BAGHDAD -Iraqi lawmakers say the United States is demanding 58 bases as part of a proposed “status of forces” agreement that will allow U.S. troops to remain in the country indefinitely.
Leading members of the two ruling Shiite parties said in a series of interviews the Iraqi government rejected this proposal along with another U.S. demand that would have effectively handed over to the United States the power to determine if a hostile act from another country is aggression against Iraq. Lawmakers said they fear this power would drag Iraq into a war between the United States and Iran.
“The points that were put forth by the Americans were more abominable than the occupation,” said Jalal al Din al Saghir, a leading lawmaker from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. “We were occupied by order of the Security Council,” he said, referring to the 2004 Resolution mandating a U.S. military occupation in Iraq at the head of an international coalition. “But now we are being asked to sign for our own occupation. That is why we have absolutely refused all that we have seen so far.”
Other conditions sought by the United States include control over Iraqi air space up to 30,000 feet and immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops and private military contractors. The agreement would run indefinitely but be subject to cancellation with two years notice from either side, lawmakers said.
“It would impair Iraqi sovereignty,” said Ali al Adeeb a leading member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s Dawa party of the proposed accord. “The Americans insist so far that is they who define what is an aggression on Iraq and what is democracy inside Iraq… if we come under aggression we should define it and ask for help.”
Both Saghir and Adeeb said that the Iraqi government rejected the terms as unacceptable. They said the government wants a U.S. presence and a U.S. security guarantee but also wants to control security within the country, stop indefinite detentions of Iraqis by U.S. forces and have a say in U.S. forces’ conduct in Iraq.
The 58 bases would represent an expansion of the U.S. presence here. Currently, the United States operates out of about 30 major bases, not including smaller facilities such as combat outposts, according to a U.S. military map.
” Is there sovereignty for Iraq – or isn’t there? If it is left to them, they would ask for immunity even for the American dogs,” Saghir said. “We have given Bush our views – some new ideas and I find that there is a certain harmony between his thoughts and ours. And he promised to tell the negotiators to change their methods.”
Maliki returned Monday from his second visit to Iran, whose Islamic rulers are adamantly opposed to the accord. Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei said following meetings with Maliki that we have “no doubt that the Americans’ dreams will not come true.”
Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, criticized the lawmakers for poisoning the public discussion before an agreement is concluded. He said U.S. officials had been flexible in the talks, as well as “frank and honest since the beginning.”
“This is an ongoing process,” Zebari said. “There is no agreement yet. Proposals have been modified, they have been changed and altered. We don’t have a final text yet for them to be judgmental.”
Zebari, who said a negotiating session was held with U.S. officials on the new accord Monday, said any agreement will be submitted to the Iraqi parliament for approval. Leaders in the U.S. Congress have also demanded a say in the agreement, but the Bush administration says it is planning to make this an executive accord not subject to Senate ratification.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain didn’t respond for requests for comment, but the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, said through a spokesman that he believes the Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress and that it should make “absolutely clear” that the United States will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.
Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said he had not heard of a plan to seek 50 or more bases in Iraq, and that if it is the case, Congress is likely to challenge the idea. “Congress would have a lot of questions, and the president should be very careful in negotiating,” Hamilton, who now directs the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, told McClatchy.
The top U.S. Embassy spokesman in Iraq rejected the latest Iraqi criticism.
“Look, there is going to be no occupation,” said U.S. spokesman Adam Ereli. “Now it’s perfectly understandable that there are those that are following this closely in Iraq who have concerns about what this means for Iraqi sovereignty and independence. We understand that and we appreciate that and that’s why nothing is going to be rammed down anybody’s throat.
“It’s kind of like a forced marriage. It just doesn’t work. They either want you or they don’t want you. You can’t use coercion to get them to like you,” he added.
U.S. officials in Baghdad say they are determined to complete the accord by July 31 so that parliamentary deliberations can be completed before the Dec. 31 expiration of the UN mandate.
The agreement will not specify how many troops or where they will be deployed, said a U.S. official who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject, but the agreement will detail the legal framework under which U.S. troops will operate. The U.S. official said that in the absence of a UN resolution authorizing the use of force, “there have to be terms that are in place. That’s the reality that we’re trying to accommodate.”
Iraqis are determined to get their nation removed from the purview of the U.N. Security Council under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which allows the international body to declare a country a threat to international peace, a step the U.N. took after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Iraqi officials say that designation clearly is no longer appropriate.
But even on that basic request, the U.S. has not promised to support Iraq, Saghir said, and is insteadn withholding that support as a pressure point in negotiations.
U.S. demands “conflict with our sovereignty and we refuse them,” said Hassan Sneid, a member of the Dawa party and a lawmaker on the security committee in the parliament. “I don’t expect these negotiations will be done by the exact date. The Americans want so many things and the fact is we want different things.”
“If we had to choose one or the other, an extension of the mandate or this agreement, we would probably choose the extension,” Saghir said. “It is possible that in December we will send a letter the UN informing them that Iraq no longer needs foreign forces to control its internal security. As for external defense, we are still not ready.”
Margaret Talev in Washington contributed.
Source / McClatchy
The Rag Blog
Reasons to Redefine the Word "Murder"
Burma, Food Crisis, Wall Street and the World Economy: Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry
By Allan Nairn / June 9, 2008
In parts of Burma before the cyclone hit the heat was so severe that you could walk around on a hazy day and run the risk of sunstroke.
On Thingyan the Buddhist holiday in which people dunk each other with water you could get a full-face full-pail drenching and be crisply sundried in minutes.
But when the storm water rose on the Irrawaddy Delta drying out became secondary because the sun’s rays were largely gone and so was much of the land, housing, and plantings.
No one really knows how many people died but the world press has made the point that it would have been far fewer if Burma had a better government.
The point could also be made, though, that far fewer still would have died if the world had a better system of producing and allocating its wealth.
It’s hard to come up with solid figures but it seems safe to estimate that the entire disposable wealth of the Irrawaddy Delta before the storm, that of its’ 3.5 million residents, could have been less than that of one table-full of diners at New York’s Four Seasons Grill Room.
Actually, it’s more dramatic than that.
Working with figures from Forbes magazine, the IMF, and the UNDP, it’s possible to estimate that there are between three hundred and a thousand individuals whose accumulated wealth is so vast that any one of them alone could pay each person in the Irrawaddy Delta for a year, and in the case of the richest, like Warren Buffett, could do it for six decades running and still have billions left.
One could get a visualization of this notion and its implications when flying over the Netherlands. Looking down from the Royal Dutch Airline a few weeks after Irrawaddy sank, you could see another delta, a country with much land below sea level, but where long infusions of wealth — much of it extracted from Southeast Asia by whip (see the histories of the Dutch East and West Indies Companies) — have made possible the building, behind strong dikes, by the sea, of nice, glassy homes and offices.
A cyclone Nargis would have killed anywhere — viz. the recent storms in the US midwest — but whether you survive a storm depends in important part on whether you and your ancestors were rich or poor and were able to build good infrastructure (even in the US, see New Orleans).
So the rich world is right to flagellate the Burmese generals for holding back resources as people die (a BBC World TV interviewer yesterday called it “criminal neglect”) but wrong to fail to note that they do the same thing daily, on a global, far more deadly, scale.
The rich do pass out some of their spare wealth during a cyclone or other covered crisis, but on a daily basis withhold enough of it such that 850 million people routinely go hungry.
The recent food price hike has upped that statistic by perhaps a hundred million, and so it is said that we are in a “food crisis” and that “the era of cheap food is over.”
The world would indeed be in a food crisis if there were not enough food to feed the people. But that is not the case.
The problem is that many millions of people can’t afford food. That, clearly, is not a food crisis, but rather a wealth crisis, more precisely a wealth distribution crisis that can be solved by shifts from rich to poor, and a crisis that can be kept from recurring if laws and economies are then modified to institutionalize a new, more realistic, system that doesn’t happen to starve people — an objective which, one would think, is a fairly modest, and perhaps popular, goal.
Today in Rome there is a world summit on food and there has been a political stir over an attempt to exclude Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s liberator and despot.
The point is made correctly that Mugabe runs a failed economic system that kills many people who could have been saved if he had made different choices.
But the same could also be said of a number of others at the summit — those who run the world economy –, which is certainly failed from the point of view of those who draw their last breath hungry.
UN people from FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and other agencies have also caused a flutter by talking about $50 billion, over many years, for various food projects, which is a tenfold increase but still less than the personal holdings of Buffett, Bill Gates, and Carlos Slim, who got quite rich essentially overnight when Mexico gave him its cell phone system. It’s also what the US goes though in about five months of occupying Iraq, where child malnutrition has risen in rough correlation with precision bomb drops and Iraqui democracy.
If someone’s dying and you have a dollar that could save them and you withhold it, you have killed them. It’s so extreme it sounds ridiculous, but it happens to be true, and will continue to be true so long as surplus coexists with bodies living on the cliff of death, or, for the luckier young ones, the cliff of mere body stunting and underdevelopment of their brains.
The big story before the food crisis was the US Wall Street financial crisis. For some weeks sober economists were fearing 1929-style panic. But Ben Bernanke, the US Federal Reserve chairman, stepped in to save the day by essentially imagining into existence several hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money that was effectively made available to some of the world’s richest institutions and people.
The coverage focused on the fact that Bernanke did this cleverly, and succeeded, but it could also have noted that this is a remarkable aspect of today´s economy: while most people have to work for their money incrementally, bending in mud to plant their rice, a few can imagine it into existence in large blocks, and give it to their friends and colleagues.
By printing money, issuing bonds, making loans, creating new financial instruments, and by other means, these few create notions that have the power to buy goats, or anything else one wants, and can continue doing so indefinitely so long as rich society buys the pretense.
Which is to say that though, say, getting food to people, requires rearranging some physical things, most of the task involves rearranging the notions that govern actions from people’s heads.
It´s simply a choice as to whether the power to conjure funds will be used for hungry people, and not just the juridical, imaginary persons that are investment corporations (US judicial precedent gives corporations the legal rights of persons, but like persons become ghosts it´s impossible to jail them if they transgress).
And it is likewise simply a choice whether or not to save expiring people by allowing resources to be shifted from an aid ship off Burma´s shore, or from the guys having drinks and lunch at the Four Seasons, table four.
Allan Nairn writes the blog News and Comment at http://www.newsc.blogspot.com/.
Source / CounterPunch
The Rag Blog
"Ain’t Gonna Study War No More…"
Vets for Peace hold “Sangha” for Ft. Hood GI’s
By Doug Zachary / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2008
[Doug Zachary is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A veteran, he is president of the Austin chapter of Veterans for Peace and is a member of MDS/Austin.]
This weekend (June 7-8) we gathered for the first session of “Cline’s Corner,” a veterans’ writing workshop sponsored by Veterans for Peace (VPF), Chapter 66 and held in Austin, Texas at the home of venerable VFP member and noted photographer, Alan Pogue, and fierce warrior/lawyer D’Ann Johnson.
The writers’ “sangha” is conducted in a Zen Buddhist form inherited from Thich Nhat Hahn, a world renowned Buddhist monk from Hue, Viet Nam, who has been working for 40 years among United States Veterans to heal the wounds of the American War through meditation and self-expression via poetry and prose. For fifteen years Maxine Hong Kingston has brought this sangha form to military veterans and has led us, through “deep listening” and the development of compassionate and awakened hearts, to heal ourselves and each other and to publish an astonishing collection of our stories.
Four active duty soldiers from Fort Hood joined us, along with a member of Military Families Speak Out whose husband is on his third tour in Iraq. During the check-in period the soldiers each spoke of childhoods weighted with class inequities, loneliness and violence, of the propaganda that led them to join the military, and of their personal awakenings. The MFSO wife told us about her husband’s Purple Heart and of how it felt to have her husband redeployed for his third tour, even when his wounds prevented him from wearing protective gear. One soldier announced that, although he had been applying for warrant officer status and a lIfetime in the military when we met six weeks ago, he was now submitting his application for conscientious objector status. Laura Beth, the founder of Daughters of Viet Nam Veterans, wrote a truly amazing piece in which she told her personal story, about a childhood with (hah, actually without) a father who had been destroyed psychologically and spiritually in Viet Nam.
Other participants included Alan (Pogue), combat medic in Viet Nam who set the stage by speaking from deep within his heart about the suffering he witnessed in Viet Nam and which he had felt powerless to stop. David Hamilton of MDS/Austin (Movement for a Democratic Society) told us (too briefly, for my taste) about the day that he and David Cline were attacked by shotgun toting KKK members on a country road in Central Texas. One of the soldiers told about an incident in Iraq where he had almost killed a seven year old girl, only to have the incident end with his looking deep within her sweet and innocent eyes and how in that moment he had begun to know himself.
Two other soldiers, not yet sent to Iraq, told us of their spiritual struggles with the meaning of responsible citizenry and the ever-diminishing role of military authority in their lives. Another veteran of 23 years in the military told us about the over 1,300 days that he had spent in the Middle East and how he had come to realize that the United States was NOT deployed in the region to promote world peace. Another participant spoke of her 25-year marriage to an F-111 pilot and how he had seen through the macho image of fighter pilot which the mainstream consciousness had offered him as an identity and how she had known him for the sweet transcendent poet hidden within. I will soon publish a feature article in the Texas Observer where you will be able to hear the other stories we shared and witnessed. The sangha, at the end of an emotionally charged and spiritually transcendent day together, elected to meet monthly rather than quarterly. We are launched; we are blessed.
Saturday night we reconvened at Jovita’s [an Austin Mexican restaurant and music venue] for a fundraiser for Texans For Peace. Charlie Jackson and Alyssa Burgin had organized an event which turned out to be THE precise tonic needed by our soldier allies. Brady Coleman, an attorney for the Oleo Strut [GI anti-war coffee house in Killeen, Texas, near Ft. Hood, during the Viet Nam war], led off the night with his band, the Melancholy Ramblers. They played their usual collection of labor/love/peace songs and the soldiers from Fort Hood were moved by the love shown them by members of the audience. Bill Johns played a song he had written after meeting an infantry soldier on an airplane in the Mideast.
Finally, Shelley King, the Texas Musician of the Year, took the stage with her rockin-ass blend of R&B, southern rock, Texas swing and psychedelia and rocked our souls. Laura Beth took to the dance floor with all the Fort Hood soldiers and brought the place alive with her beauty, charm and grace. The soldiers were recognized by name and progressive Austin poured its love into their hearts. At the end of the night, an Iraq veteran took the stage and read the note he had submitted to his Top Sergeant three days ago announcing his spiritual awakening. He then ripped off his dogtags and announced, “I am a soldier no more!”
Sunday the Fort Hood soldiers came to the monthly meeting of our recently-resurrected chapter of Veterans For Peace and spoke gratefully about the Engagement Project. They pleaded with us to continue this work and promised to get us into the barracks for audiences with growing numbers of disgruntled, wounded soldiers. Cathy Doggett, the daughter of U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D, Texas) offered to help us to reach out with our message of love and responsible citizenry.
Joyce Pohlman spoke to us about the growing numbers of veterans on the streets of Austin whose lives have been destroyed by the current regime and who have been tossed aside and promised to help to connect us with them.
The Neil Bischoff chapter of Veterans For Peace became the Neil Bischoff-Utah Phillips chapter [legendary folksinger, VFP member and peace activist Phillips recently passed away] . The chapter is revived, we are engaged in the lives of active duty soldiers, and we are connected to each other in a new and deeper way on our prophetic journeys. Tomorrow we will return to the barricades near Fort Hood.
I’m grateful, beyond my wildest dreams.
The Rag Blog
Posted in Rag Bloggers
Tagged Austin, GI's, Iraq, Music, Peace Movement, Rock 'n Roll, Social Action, Veterans, Vietnam
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Tom Hayden on Hillary’s Endorsement of Obama
Hillary’s Winning Speech
By Tom Hayden / June 7, 2008
Hillary Clinton’s moving and brilliant speech today cemented an independent place for herself and feminists in general in the unfolding historical drama of the 2008 presidential election.
The speech, which situated her more firmly than ever in women’s history, provided a powerful endorsement for Barack Obama while at the same time reinforcing her position as virtually his equal in the Democratic primary race.
Clinton essentially empowered her audience by implying they, more than anyone, could make the historic difference by electing an African-American president on the rising, tide of the women’s vote. She assured them that the two candidacies had shattered all gender and racial barriers to democracy’s highest office.
Hers was not the surrender pose traditionally expected of “losers” but a redefinition of what winning ultimately means. It suggested that she will be treated as a full partner in the process, and it was a victory speech for the power of social movements.
She bravely rejected the bitter destructiveness that gnaws within all campaigns that lose closely, and held the high ground.
Characterizing her decision as a “suspension”, however, still left open the prospect of hard bargaining with Obama over a range of issues, but apparently in a greater atmosphere of unity.
One wonders if she would be the nominee if she had pursued the tone of today’s speech more and the advice of her [male] advisors less. It took a year, and a string of campaign disasters, before she threw out Mark Penn, though still leaving in place a cast of male operatives like Lanny Davis who only blighted her image as an experienced, pragmatic representative of the Sixties student, antiwar and women’s movements.
Her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq War, which opened the door for Obama’s candidacy, was advised as the way to prove that a woman could be commander-in-chief. So were her later comments about obliterating Iran. Her male advisers incessantly pressured the media to play up Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, race-baiting and red-baiting positions she never would have adopted in the late Sixties.
This wasn’t a problem unique to Clinton alone, of course. If Bill Clinton had not promoted NAFTA and the WTO, there would have been no space for Ralph Nader to run in 2000. Had John Kerry followed his 1970 anti-war, anti-establishment instincts in 2004, he probably would have been president today. The Democratic Party consultant class has been counseling retreat from the Sixties ever since…the Sixties. It has been a risk for Obama’s centrist campaign as well, although his 2002 antiwar stance and the unified enthusiasm of the black community position him firmly within a progressive history.
This basic identity confusion at the center of the Clinton strategy was the crucial reason, next to Obama’s superlative campaign, for her narrow defeat. The irony is that her resurrection can now begin.
Source. / Progressives for Obama
The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Democratic Party, Feminism, Hillary, Obama, Presidential Campaign
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Torture? Bet You Can’t Prove It!
Pentagon Told Guantanamo Interrogators To Trash Evidence
By Michael Melia / June 8, 2008
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.
The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.
Kuebler said the apparent destruction of evidence prevents him from challenging the reliability of any alleged confessions. He said he will use the document to seek a dismissal of charges against Khadr.
A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.
The “standard operating procedures” manual that contained the purported instructions was made available to Kuebler last week as part of a pretrial review of potential evidence, the Navy lawyer said.
“The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify, keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues,” the document is quoted as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler.
The document could support challenges by other detainees to suppress confessions at Guantanamo, where the U.S. military says it plans to prosecute as many as 80 of roughly 270 detainees before the first U.S. war-crimes tribunals since World War II.
The case against Khadr, who was captured in Afghanistan when he was 15, is on track to be one of the first to trial. He faces war-crimes charges including murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces soldier during a 2002 firefight.
Kuebler said the nature of the interrogations is particularly relevant in Khadr’s case because prosecutors are relying on evidence “extracted” from him at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.
“If handwritten notes were destroyed in accordance with the SOP, the government intentionally deprived Omar’s lawyers of key evidence with which to challenge the reliability of his statements,” Kuebler said in an e-mail to reporters.
The operations manual, which dates to January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report on an investigation into detainee abuse allegations at Guantanamo, Kuebler said. A summary of the findings was released at the time, but the defense lawyer said the section including the manual has not been made available publicly.
The so-called Schmidt-Furlow report documented degrading treatment, including one instance of a top terror suspect forced to dance with another man and behave like a dog. But investigators stopped short of saying torture occurred.
Source. The Huffington Post / AP
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Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Criminal Justice, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Military, Official Repression, Pentagon, Torture
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Another One Bites the Dust
Caribbean Monk Seal Gone for Good
By Jessica Marshall / June 9, 2008
The Caribbean monk seal is officially extinct.
Last seen in 1952 on a small group of reef islands between Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the seal — covered in brown fur tinged with gray, and with a yellow belly — was easy prey for European settlers in the 1600s and 1700s, who killed it for meat, oil, and to seal the bottoms of boats.
The crew of Columbus’ second voyage was the first to kill the seals. “It’s one of the first mammals that Columbus saw when he discovered this region, and it’s the first one to go extinct,” said Kyle Baker of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association’s Fisheries Service in Saint Petersburg, Fla.
“By the mid 1800s, they were very rare,” Baker said.
The seal was the only subtropical seal native to the Caribbean.
Several seal sightings were reported in the Caribbean between 1952 and the present, but until the 80s and 90s — when people began carrying cameras and cell phones — it was difficult to verify whether those sightings really were Caribbean monk seals.
“Reviewing the data, we’ve identified most of these as hooded seals, which are Arctic species coming down from the northeast,” Baker said. Other sightings have turned out to be bearded seals and harbor seals, but none have been Caribbean monk seals.
With better information, “we decided it was time to do the status review [under the Endangered Species Act] and to come to the conclusion, unfortunately, that the species is now gone,” Baker said.
Two other species of monk seal remain: the Hawaiian monk seal and the Mediterranean monk seal, both also endangered with only 1,200 and 500 seals remaining, respectively.
The Hawaiian monk seal suffers from different threats than hunting by humans, according to Bud Antonelis, who heads the Protected Species Division at NOAA Fisheries Service in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Hawaiian seals face threats from habitat loss, food limitation, marine debris and shark predation.
“We expect in the next couple of years, the numbers will be below 1,000,” Antonelis said. The population is declining by about 4 percent a year.
Removing marine debris and sharks that threaten unweaned pups is part of the recovery plan, Antonelis said. Some seals have been brought into captivity and fed to treat malnourishment, then released.
In many places, the seal’s habitat could be restored, Antonelis said. Erosion has been the major cause of habitat loss. “There’s a lot of conservation work that remains to be done,” he added.
“While the loss of the Careibbean monk seal is extremely disappointing, it serves as a lesson for us to pay attention to the resources that are still here and to do everything we can so that the same problem doesn’t happen to them,” Antonelis said. “I don’t think it’s too late for the Hawaiian monk seal.”
Source. / Discovery News
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Zbigniew Brzezinski on Israel and Palestine
Barack Obama supporter accuses Jewish lobby members of McCarthyism
By Alex Spillius
A foreign policy expert consulted by Senator Barack Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, has accused members of the American Jewish establishment of “McCarthyism” in its attitude towards critics of Israel.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national security adviser, said that the pro-Israel lobby in the US was too powerful, while the slur of anti-Semitism was too readily used whenever its power was called into question.
Presenting a solution for the Middle East, he listed historical compromises that had to be made by Israelis and Palestinians but accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) – the largest and most influential Jewish lobby group – of obstructing peace efforts.
He said: “Aipac has consistently opposed a two-state solution and a lot of members of Congress have been intimidated and I don’t think that’s healthy.”
He added that other country-specific lobbies, such as the Cuban-Americans, the Armenians and the Irish, had also exerted undue influence in Washington.
Mr Brzezinski, who served under President Jimmy Carter, was a key player in the 1978 Camp David Accords and remains an important voice in the US foreign policy establishment.
An active author and analyst at 80, he is close enough to Mr Obama that his remarks may feed fears in the American-Jewish community that the senator would soften America’s traditional strong pro-Israeli stance if he became president.
This perception has been created in part by Mr Obama’s professed willingness to talk to Iran and partly by other foreign policy associates.
In recent weeks, Mr Obama has courted the Jewish vote and, on Israel’s 60th anniversary, underlined the need for the US to show “unshakeable” support.
Mr Brzezinski has been accused of being “anti-Israel” by some Jewish academics, writers and bloggers after criticising Israel for excessive use of force and unwillingness to compromise.
Last year, censure of him reached new heights when he defended John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two academics who had criticised the pro-Israel lobby and were accused of questioning the right of the state of Israel to exist.
Mr Brzezinski said “it’s not unique to the Jewish community – but there is a McCarthyite tendency among some people in the Jewish community”, referring to the Republican senator who led the anti-Communist witch hunt in the 1950s.
“They operate not by arguing but by slandering, vilifying, demonising. They very promptly wheel out anti-Semitism. There is an element of paranoia in this inclination to view any serious attempt at a compromised peace as somehow directed against Israel.”
Although Mr Brzezinski is not a formal day-to-day adviser and stressed he doesn’t speak for the campaign, he said that he “talks to” Mr Obama.
He endorsed the Illinois senator, lauding him as “head and shoulders” above his opponents. He said that he was the only candidate who understood “what is new and distinctive about our age”.
In turn, Mr Obama has praised Mr Brzezinski as “someone I have learned an immense amount from” and “one of our most outstanding scholars and thinkers”.
They share very similar views on the folly of the Iraq war.
Robert Malley, a Middle East expert, recently quit as an Obama adviser after it emerged that he was talking to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, as part of his work for the International Crisis Group.
Senator John McCain, who would be Mr Obama’s Republican opponent for the White House, is expected to focus on the 46-year-old senator’s lack of foreign policy experience and supposed weakness towards enemies.
But as president, he will need the support of Aipac and other groups, which may be hard to achieve given his associations.
In Mr Brzezinski’s view, whoever is the next US leader must persuasively propose the following dramatic steps to peace: a) Palestinians give up the right of return from Jordan b) demilitarise of the Palestinian state c) Israel share Jerusalem d) Israel return to its pre-1967 war borders with “equitable adjustments”.
If this agenda is pursued, in time “Israel and Palestine could be the Singapore of the Middle East and that is in the interests of the US”, he said.
Source. / Telegraph, UK / May 27, 2008
Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog
Posted in RagBlog
Tagged Anti-Semitism, Israel, Middle East, Obama, Palestine, Presidential Campaign
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Frat Boy Graverobbers
Hey Dubya!
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!
By Michael Dinkinson / June 8, 2008
How would you feel if you knew that the skull of your great grandfather, stolen from his tomb, was being used in the secret ceremonies of a spoilt elite brat pack whose members have included some of the most powerful men in the world? A bit pissed off, right?
And if you also learned that the American President, George W Bush, his father George and his brother Jonathan, have taken part in these ceremonies, and, what’s more, in fact, that the President’s great grandfather, Prescott Bush, was one of those who had stolen the skull from its grave in the first place, it wouldn’t be surprising if you felt a little outraged.
Sounds unlikely? But this is precisely the situation which faces Harlyn Geronimo, great grandson of the iconic Native American Apache rebel leader, whose name he has inherited.
After the massacre of his wife and three children by Spanish troops in 1858, the original Geronimo, (real name Goyathlay, “One who Yawns”), took up arms against the Mexicans and Americans as they broadened their horizons on the continent, forcing the original inhabitants to be confined to arid, government-sanctioned ‘reservations’ where they could be taught to obey the rules of their new dollar bosses.
Geronimo was one of the last tribal leaders of Native Americans to remain defiant, rebellious and free until the colonization of the country by the whites was complete. After being captured by the American army with his 35 braves at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona in 1886, Geronimo was held as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, until his death in 1909, apart from the occasional outing to be exhibited at shows and pageants as a national attraction. He even rode in President Roosvelt’s 1905 inaugural parade. They paid him in dollars, of course.
Throughout his imprisonment , Geronimo never stopped asking to be allowed to return to his homeland in the Southwest, but his request was never granted. When he died, his body was buried in the Apache cemetery of Fort Sills.
There it lay until 9 years later when the grave was disturbed by members of a secret student society (including Prescott Bush) who were stationed at the fort on military duty at the time. The skull and thigh bones of Geronimo’s corpse were stolen and taken to a sombre stone windowless edifice in New Haven, Connecticut known as ‘the Tomb’, where Yale university’s elite student’s ‘order’ ‘Skull and Bones’, holds its secret meetings every week. On arched walls inside are carved slogans in German: “Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich,” or, “Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all’s the same in death.” Nearly a hundred years after the robbery of his grave, the skull and bones of Geronimo remain captive in the Tomb of his enemies.
It wasn’t until Ned Anderson, former Chairman of the San Carlos Apaches of Arizona, started agitating in the eighties to have Geronimo’s remains returned to his native Arizona that he learned the true state of affairs. An anonymous letter from a Bones member sent him a photo of the skull and bones on show in a glass case inside the Tomb building at Yale, and the copy of an old Bones log book which recorded the robbery of the grave. Outraged, and describing the news as “a sacrilege and national disgrace”, Anderson asked the FBI to investigate. They said they would, if he turned over all his evidence to them, which he refused to do. In an attempt to retrieve the documentary evidence from Anderson, Bones member Jonathan Bush, brother of George W, met and offered him a skull which he claimed to be Geronimo’s as a swap. On examination the skull was identified as that of a ten year old child. Anderson, naturally, again refused to hand over the evidence. He asked senator John McCain to arrange a meeting with George Bush senior, but the request was refused.
In 1990 the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law. In accordance with this bill Yale’s Peabody Museum was forced to return certain artifacts it had held. Unfortunately the Act only applies to organizations that receive federal funding, and Yale’s secret societies are not directly affiliated to the University, exempting them from jurisdiction.
Still, members of Skull and Bones have violated laws preventing the desecration of graves and should be held responsible. If they continue to hold these remains they are participating in a continuing conspiracy to be in possession of stolen property.
In 2006 Harlyn Geronimo wrote to President Geoge W Bush to ask for his help in recovering the bones of his great grandfather so that they may be buried near his birthplace in the Gila Wilderness.
“Geronimo died as a prisoner of war, and he is still a prisoner of war because his remains were not returned to his homeland,” said Harlyn. “According to our traditions the remains, especially in this state when the grave was desecrated, need to be reburied with the proper rituals. With the higher learning of these individuals, I don’t know why they could resort to desecrating something that’s very sacred to Native American people.”
Two years later, the President has not responded.
Sign this Petition to Congress and demand the skull from the Bones!
Let Geronimo’s spirit rest in peace!
Go here for Geronimo petition.
[Michael Dickinson, whose artwork graces the covers of Dime’s Worth of Difference, Serpents in the Garden and Grand Theft Pentagon, lives in Istanbul. He can be contacted via his website, or at: michaelyabanji@gmail.com.
Source. / counterpunch
Thanks to Jeff Jones / The Rag Blog
