The Rag Blog

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Nov. 24) – Its most virulent critics have dubbed it “Terror High” and 12 U.S. senators and a federal commission want to shut it down.

The teachers, administrators and some 900 students at the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax County have heard the allegations for years – after the Sept. 11 attacks and then a few years later when a class valedictorian admitted he had joined al-Qaida.

Now the school is on the defensive again, with a report issued last month by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom saying the academy should be closed pending a review of its curriculum and textbooks.

Abdalla al-Shabnan, the school’s director general, says criticism of the school is based not on evidence but on preconceived notions of the Saudi educational system.

The school, serving grades K-12 on campuses in Fairfax and Alexandria, receives financial support from the Saudi government and its textbooks are based on Saudi curriculum. Critics say the Saudis propagate a severe version of Islam in their schools.

But al-Shabnan said the school significantly modified those textbooks to remove passages deemed intolerant of other religions. Among the changes, officials removed from teachers’ versions of first-grade textbooks an excerpt instructing teachers to explain “that all religions, other than Islam, are false, including that of the Jews, Christians and all others.”

At an open house earlier this month in which the school invited reporters to tour the school and meet students and faculty, al-Shabnan seemed weary of the criticism.

“I didn’t think we’d have to do this,” he said of the open house. “Our neighbors know us. They know the job we are doing.”

They came in their tens of thousands, in their hundreds of thousands. They came from schools, from colleges, from universities, from teachers’ unions and trade unions, and from the Social Missions concerned with education. They came in their red shirts with different names but all saying the same thing, Si in the referendum. Here in Venezuela learning is on the order of the day. Everyone is studying in one way or another, everyone is a student, so they came in all ages.

We gathered in the Plaza de Venezuela and as each minute passed we grew in numbers. In all parts of the gathering crowd there were sound systems belting out different rhythms and people were dancing, singing and shouting slogans. It was a carnival atmosphere with a serious message. The small group of students also dressed in red but with No placards quickly disappeared after having been confronted by revolutionary students shouting “No pasaran”, they shall not pass.

We moved off chanting slogans such as “Eduacion Primero para el hijo del obrero; Educacion después para el hijo del burgues” (Firstly, the children of workers should be educated and only then the children of the bourgeoisie), “Obreros y Estudiantes, Unidos en Combate” (Workers and Students united in Struggle) and very importantly “Alerta, Alerta, Alerta Camarada, Que ya esta Preparada la Resistencia Armada” (Watch out Comrades, Armed Resistance is Ready). As the slogans were shouted red flags were being waved.

The size of this march will dishearten the opposition. Last week opposition students had gathered in numbers perhaps reaching 50,000. They claimed that students were against Chavez and the proposed constitutional changes. Here were at least 300,000 stating Si and for Chavez. Many different schools and universities were present – UCV (Central University of Venezuela), ULA (University of the Andes), UNEFA (National University of the Armed Forces dressed in blue and white uniforms) and UDO (University of the West) among others. Now we know the forces that can be mobilised.

We moved up the incline from the Plaza to Avenida Andres Bello, on to Avenida Urdaneta at the end of which is the Miraflores Palace. The gates were open for marchers to sit on the steps and rest before the speeches began. We had met at midday and now it was approaching 6pm and still the Chavista forces were arriving.

Two events were being celebrated today, November 21st. Firstly, it was the Day of the Student, el Dia de los Estudiantes. In the year 1957 there was the first student strike against the electoral fraud of the dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jiménez and it was bloodily repressed. The strike started in the Central University and quickly spread to other centres of learning. In the aftermath students were imprisoned, but in early 1958 the regime fell.

Secondly, it was the first opportunity that students had had to show their support for the reform of the constitution, and for Chavez. And didn´t they show their support! At around 6.30 pm the man himself appeared on the platform. He thanked the students for their support and asked them to continue the fight for a Yes vote. The Chavez government has been the first in the history of Venezuela to allow groups of students into the Miraflores Palace.

Welcome to the jackboot state, not to mention the jackboot campus, anno domini 2007. A doctor gives verbal advice to protect the life of an unconscious man and she duly gets hit with attempted felonies by vindictive campus cops, with the connivance of the University of Michigan. Jury selection for her trial starts on Monday in a county courthouse in Ann Arbor.

This case began with an on-campus talk about Iran last November 30 by Raymond Tanter, a former Reagan administration foreign policy advisor and nutball cofounder of the Committee on the Present Danger. More recently he’s co-founder of the Iran Policy Committee. Tanter has said publicly on more than one occasion that nuking Iran wouldn’t be a bad idea.

The audience at November 30 event was lively and contentious. On the campus that Columbia’s Lee Bollinger once ran there’s an elaborate policy about free speech, but those precepts were promptly flouted. As is now the fashion at many universities, the U of M campus guards are gun-toting goons who decided to wade in aggressively at the behest of the event’s organizers.

Here’s how Wilkerson described what happened next, on this site on March 13 of this year.

I heard a commotion in the hall and stepped out of the room. In the hall I saw the same huge cop on top of the second protester who’d come to the first victim’s aid. The cop had the man, a relatively small guy in his forties, pinned down, arms pulled behind his back, getting handcuffed. The cop used PPCT against this person also, not once but twice. The man writhed and cried out in pain.

The cop used his far-greater strength and body weight, along with the force of his knee on his victim’s back to press his chest against the floor. It would be impossible for a person to inflate his lungs pressed against the floor with his hands cuffed behind his back like that. Asphyxiation being a well-known cause of death of people in custody, when the man started calling out that he couldn’t breathe, I approached, identified myself as a doctor, and instructed the cop to turn him over immediately. The victim went limp. The cop turned him onto his back. I saw that the victim had a wound on his forehead and blood in his nostrils. He was unconscious. Reiterating numerous times that I was a doctor, I tried to move to where I could assess the victim for breathing and a pulse. The cop shoved me, until finally, after my imploring him to allow me to render medical care to the victim, he allowed me to determine that the victim was alive. But he refused to remove the cuffs despite my requests. A person lying with hands cuffed beneath his body risks nerve damage to the extremities and, moreover, cannot be resuscitated. I continually re-assessed the man, who had now become my patient, and who remained unconscious.

Eventually an ambulance arrived, along with the fire department and a contingent of Ann Arbor police officers. While the paramedics went about their business, the first thing being to have the cop un-cuff the patient, I tried to fulfill my obligation to my patient. I tried to oversee what the paramedics were doing, which, contrary to protocol and the normal relationship between physician and paramedic, was all that I was allowed to do. I was forced to stay away. What I witnessed in the course of their treatment appalled me. When the patient didn’t respond to a sternal rub, one of the paramedics popped an ammonia inhalant and thrust it beneath the patient’s nostrils. If you’re interested in what’s wrong with that, google Dr. Bryan Bledsoe, foremost authority on paramedicine, and read his article condemning this dangerous practice. That it’s “just bad medicine” is sufficient to make the paramedic’s actions unacceptable, but what happened next made my blood curdle. He popped a second inhalant and a third, then cupped his hands over the patient’s nostrils to heighten the noxious effect. “You don’t like that, do you?” he said.

At that point I issued a direct medical order for him to stop, but he ignored me. “What you’re doing is punitive,” I said, “and has no efficacy.” Then as the patient retched, rather than rolling him onto his side to avoid the chance of his choking on his own vomit, a firefighter held his feet down and yelled, “don’t spit.” In thirty years of doctoring, I have never witnessed such egregious maltreatment of a patient. Again I spoke up, “this is punitive.” I hoped to shame the paramedical into stopping his unethical behavior.”

Please note that at no point did Wilkerson do anything other than offer verbal advice.

The police–by now not just campus but also city cops were on the scene — ordered her to leave. As she was doing so, a city cop seized her and put her under arrest. His superiors soon determined there were no grounds for arrest and she was released without having been handcuffed or requested to produce ID.

Wilkerson has made her career serving low-income patients. For the last 5 to 6 years she’s worked at a community medical clinic. She takes the U.S. Constitution seriously and filed a complaint about the incident alleging police misconduct. It took seven weeks for the cops to answer the charges, which they did by the expedient of filing a report plump with mendacity about Wilkerson’s conduct the night of the arrests. The Washtenaw County Prosecutor, Brian Mackie, at the apparent request of the UM police, charged her with two attempted felonies based on “attempted interference” with the police officer who had seized her.

Her attorney, civil rights lawyer Buck Davis, tells me that that county judge Elizabeth Pollard Hines recently threw out two subsequent charges, claiming that Wilkerson had tried to interfere with the campus police as well as the police officer.

This coming week Wilkerson faces jury trial at the 15th District Court in Ann Arbor. Wilkerson’s lawyers will bring in eyewitnesses to the events on November 30, 2006, plus expert witnesses including Brian Bledsoe, a Texas attorney who has testified in cases across the country on the use of ammonia. (Ammonia was involved in the death of Martin Lee Anderson at a juvenile ‘boot camp’ detention facility in Florida.)

Buck Davis tells me that “ten or fifteen years ago this case would have been a slam dunk, on First Amendment and medical privilege arguments, with no physical contact with the cops, all in liberal Ann Arbor.” Wilkerson would have been swiftly acquitted.

“But now people are scared to death. They know the social system is falling apart. They no longer have a generous spirit. I’ve learned that the erosion of the economic and social fabric means people want to believe the cops. They’re frightened. So I’m not as arrogant about ‘slam dunk’ cases as I once was.”

The case will probably run all week, except Thursday. If you can, show up in court to support Catherine Wilkerson.

11/23/07 “ICH” — – THE ANNAPOLIS conference is a joke. Though not in the least funny.

Like quite a lot of political initiatives, this one too, according to all the indications, started more or less by accident. George Bush was due to make a speech. He was looking for a theme that would give it some substance. Something that would divert attention away from his fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. Something simple, optimistic, easy to swallow.

Somehow, the idea of a “meeting” of leaders to promote the Israeli-Palestinian “process” came up. An international meeting is always nice – it looks good on television, it provides plenty of photo-opportunities, it radiates optimism. We meet, ergo we exist.

So Bush voiced the idea: a “meeting” for the promotion of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Without any preceding strategic planning, any careful preparations, anything much at all.

That’s why Bush did not go into any details: no clear aim, no agenda, no location, no date, no list of invitees. Just an ethereal meeting. This fact by itself testifies to the lack of seriousness of the entire enterprise.

This may shock people who have never seen close up how politics are actually conducted. It is hard to accept the intolerable lightness with which decisions are often made, the irresponsibility of leaders and the arbitrary way important processes are set in motion.

FROM THE MOMENT this idea was launched, it could not be called back. The President has spoken, the initiative starts on its way. As the saying goes: One fool throws a stone into the water, a dozen wise men cannot retrieve it.

Once the “meeting” had been announced, it became an important enterprise. The experts of all parties started to work frantically on the undefined event, each trying to steer it in the direction which would benefit them the most.

* Bush and Condoleezza Rice want an impressive event, to prove that the United States is vigorously promoting peace and democracy, and that they can succeed where the great Henry Kissinger failed. Jimmy Carter failed to turn the Israeli-Egyptian peace into an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Bill Clinton failed at Camp David. If Bush succeeds where all his illustrious predecessors have failed, won’t that show who is the greatest of them all?
* Ehud Olmert urgently needs a resounding political achievement in order to blur the memory of his dismal failure in the Second Lebanon War and to extricate himself from the dozen or so criminal investigations for corruption that are pursuing him. His ambition knows no bounds: he wants to be photographed shaking the hand of the King of Saudi Arabia. A feat no Israeli prime minister before him has achieved.
* Mahmoud Abbas wants to show Hamas and the rebellious factions in his own Fatah movement that he can succeed where the great Yasser Arafat failed – to be accepted among the world’s leaders as an equal partner.

This could, therefore, become a great, almost historic conference, if …

IF ALL these hopes were something more than pipedreams. None of them has any substance. For one simple reason: no one of the three partners has any capital at his disposal.

* Bush is bankrupt. In order to succeed at Annapolis, he would have to exert intense pressure on Israel, to compel it to take the necessary steps: agree to the establishment of a real Palestinian state, give up East Jerusalem, restore the Green Line border (with some small swaps of territory), find an agreed-upon compromise formula for the refugee issue.

But Bush is quite unable to exert the slightest pressure on Israel, even if he wanted to. In the US, the election season has already begun, and the two big parties are bulwarks standing in the way of any pressure on Israel. The Jewish and Evangelistic lobbies, together with the neo-cons, will not allow one critical word about Israel to be uttered unpunished.

* Olmert is in an even weaker position. His coalition still survives only because there is no alternative in the present Knesset. It includes elements that in any other country would be called fascist (For historical reasons, Israelis don’t like to use this term). He is prevented by his partners from making any compromise, however tiny – even if he wanted to reach an agreement.

This week, the Knesset adopted a bill that requires a two-thirds majority for any change of the borders of Greater Jerusalem. This means that Olmert cannot even give up one of the outlying Palestinian villages that were annexed to Jerusalem in 1967. He is also prevented from even approaching the ‘core issues” of the conflict.

* Mahmoud Abbas cannot move away from the conditions laid down by Yasser Arafat (the 3rd anniversary of whose death was commemorated this week). If he strays from the straight and narrow, he will fall. He has already lost the Gaza Strip, and can lose the West Bank, too. On the other side, if he threatens violence, he will lose all he has got: the favor of Bush and the cooperation of the Israeli security forces.

The three poker players are going to sit down together, pretending to start the game, while none of them has a cent to put on the table.

THE MAJESTIC mountain seems to be getting smaller and smaller by the minute. It’s against the laws of nature: the closer we get to it, the smaller it seems. What looked to many like a veritable Mt. Everest first turned into an ordinary mountain, then into a hill, and now it hardly looks like an anthill. And even that is shrinking, too.

First the participants were to deal with the “core issues”. Then it was announced that a weighty declaration of intentions was to be adopted. Then a mere collection of empty phrases was proposed. Now even that is in doubt.

Not one of the three leaders is still dreaming of an achievement. All they hope for now is to minimize the damage – but how to get out of a situation like this?

As usual, our side is the most creative at this task. After all, we are experts in building roadblocks, walls and fences. This week, an obstacle larger then the Great Wall of China appeared.

Ehud Olmert demanded that, before any negotiations, the Palestinians “recognize Israel as a Jewish state”. He was followed by his coalition partner, the ultra-right Avigdor Liberman, who proposed staying away from Annapolis altogether if the Palestinians do not fulfill this demand in advance.

Let’s examine this condition for a moment:

The Palestinians are not required to recognize the state of Israel. After all, they have already done so in the Oslo agreement – in spite of the fact that Israel has yet to recognize the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own based on the Green Line borders.

No, the government of Israel demands much more: the Palestinians must now recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”.

Does the USA demand to be recognized as a “Christian” or “Anglo-Saxon state”? Did Stalin demand that the US recognize the Soviet Union as a “Communist state”? Does Poland demand to be recognized as a “Catholic state”, or Pakistan as an “Islamic state”? Is there any precedent at all for a state to demand the recognition of its domestic regime?

The demand is ridiculous per se. But this can easily be shown by analysis ad absurdum.

What is a “Jewish state”? That has never been spelled out. Is it a state with a majority of Jewish citizens? Is it “the state of the Jewish people” – meaning the Jews from Brooklyn, Paris and Moscow? Is it “a state belonging to the Jewish religion” – and if so, does it belong to secular Jews as well? Or perhaps it belongs only to Jews under the Law of Return – i.e. those with a Jewish mother who have not converted to another religion?

These questions have not been decided. Are the Palestinians required to recognize something that is the subject of debate in Israel itself?

According to the official doctrine, Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state”. What should the Palestinians do if, according to democratic principles, some day my opinion prevails and Israel becomes an “Israeli state” that belongs to all its citizens – and to them alone? (After all, the US belongs to all its citizens, including Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans, not to mention “Native-Americans”.)

The sting is, of course, that this formula is quite unacceptable to Palestinians because it would hurt the million and a half Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. The definition “Jewish state” turns them automatically into – at best – second class citizens. If Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues were to accede to this demand, they would be sticking a knife in the backs of their own relatives.

Olmert & Co. know this, of course. They are not posing this demand in order to get it accepted. They pose it in order that it not be accepted. By this ploy they hope to avoid any obligation to start meaningful negotiations.

Moreover, according to the deceased Road Map, which all parties pretend to accept, Israel must dismantle all settlements set up after March, 2000, and freeze all the others. Olmert is quite unable to do that. At the same time, Mahmoud Abbas must destroy the “terror infrastructure”. Abbas can’t do that either – as long as there is no independent Palestinian state with an elected government.

I imagine Bush tossing and turning in his bed at night, cursing the speechwriter who put this miserable sentence into his mouth. On their way to heaven, his curses must be mingling with those of Olmert and Abbas.

WHEN THE leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine were about to sign the Declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, the document was not ready. Sitting in front of the cameras and history, they had to sign on an empty page. I am afraid that something like that will happen in Annapolis.

At least 20,000 U.S. troops who were not classified as wounded during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found with signs of brain injuries, according to military and veterans records compiled by USA TODAY.

The data, provided by the Army, Navy and Department of Veterans Affairs, show that about five times as many troops sustained brain trauma as the 4,471 officially listed by the Pentagon through Sept. 30. These cases also are not reflected in the Pentagon’s official tally of wounded, which stands at 30,327.

The number of brain-injury cases were tabulated from records kept by the VA and four military bases that house units that have served multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One base released its count of brain injuries at a medical conference. The others provided their records at the request of USA TODAY, in some cases only after a Freedom of Information Act filing was submitted.

The data came from:

• Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, where troops evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan for injury, illness or wounds are brought before going home. Since May 2006, more than 2,300 soldiers screened positive for brain injury, hospital spokeswoman Marie Shaw says.

• Fort Hood, Texas, home of the 4th Infantry Division, which returned from a second Iraq combat tour late last year. At least 2,700 soldiers suffered a combat brain injury, Lt. Col. Steve Stover says.

• Fort Carson, Colo., where more than 2,100 soldiers screened were found to have suffered a brain injury, according to remarks by Army Col. Heidi Terrio before a brain injury association seminar.

• Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where 1,737 Marines were found to have suffered a brain injury, according to Navy Cmdr. Martin Holland, a neurosurgeon with the Naval Medical Center San Diego.

• VA hospitals, where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been screened for combat brain injuries since April. The VA found about 20% of 61,285 surveyed — or 11,804 veterans — with signs of brain injury, spokeswoman Alison Aikele says. VA doctors say more evaluation is necessary before a true diagnosis of brain injury can be confirmed in all these cases, Aikele says.

Soldiers and Marines whose wounds were discovered after they left Iraq are not added to the official casualty list, says Army Col. Robert Labutta, a neurologist and brain injury consultant for the Pentagon.

“We are working to do a better job of reflecting accurate data in the official casualty table,” Labutta says.

Most of the new cases involve mild or moderate brain injuries, commonly from exposure to blasts.

More than 150,000 troops may have suffered head injuries in combat, says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force.

“I am wary that the number of brain-injured troops far exceeds the total number reported injured,” he says.

Former prime minister Jean Chretien says one of the major victories in his career was standing up against pressure to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

During an exclusive interview with Canada AM’s Beverly Thomson, Chretien says he doesn’t worry about what kind of legacy he has left, saying that’s up to other people to decide.

“People always talk about legacy — what do you want as a legacy? But people should not worry too much about it because there’s no control you can have over that. You do your best and at the end of the day the people will conclude certain things,” he says.

However, Chretien, who has just published his memoir “My Years As Prime Minister,” says there are moments in his long career that he is especially proud of, such as keeping Canada out of the Iraq invasion.

“For the independence of the country, saying no to the Americans on the war was a great moment for Canada,” Chretien says.

“Of course it was not without risk. Suppose the war in Iraq had been a great success, I think it would have been a bit embarrassing for me. But I thought they were wrong and I said so.”

On Tuesday November 20, Adel Abdul Hakim, a former Guantánamo detainee from Xinxiang province in the People’s Republic of China, took another step towards reconstructing his shattered life by applying for asylum in Sweden.

The 33-year old, an ethnic Uyghur from a state where the repression of his people is widespread, made his claim for permanent resident status during a visit from Tirana, the capital of Albania, where he had been living, in a UN refugee camp, since his release from Guantánamo with four other Uyghurs in May 2006. After negotiations conducted by his US lawyers, various NGOs and lawyers in Sweden, he had been granted a four-day visa, to attend a human rights conference, and, finally, to be reunited with his sister and her family, who are part of a large Uyghur community in Sweden, one of the leading countries in the world in fulfilling international obligations to accept refugees.

The five men – and 13 of the other 17 Uyghurs, who are all still in Guantánamo, despite having been cleared for release – had fled the well-chronicled oppression in their homeland, and were living in a ruined village in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, when the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001. Although they indulged in nothing more sinister than renovating the settlement’s ruined buildings, and occasionally firing a bullet from their only weapon, an aging AK-47, while dreaming of rising up against their oppressors, they were targeted in a US bombing raid – in which several of their companions died – and were then captured by enterprising Pakistani villagers after making their way to the Pakistani border.

They were subsequently sold to the Americans, who soon realized that they were not involved with al-Qaeda, but who decided to hold them for their supposed intelligence value. In The Interrogator’s War, a book written by a former military interrogator at the US-run prisons in Afghanistan, the author, writing under the pseudonym of Chris Mackey, explained that the arrival of the Uyghurs triggered a frenzy of activity in the upper echelons of the administration. “[T]he requests for follow-up questions flooded in from Washington,” Mackey wrote, “and every query that came in made it clear that US intelligence was starting from practically zero with this group.”

After their transfer to Guantánamo, the US authorities obligingly allowed Chinese intelligence operatives to visit the prison to question the men, which was, understandably, an experience that some of them found disturbing. Dawut Abdurehim, one of those still held at Guantánamo, said after the visit that he was vaguely threatened, but reported that “some other Uyghurs had conversations with bad, dirty language,” in which they were told by the Chinese delegation that, “when we go back to the country, we’d be killed or sentenced to prison for a long time.” It later became clear that the US administration’s cooperation with the Chinese authorities, which included branding the Uyghur separatist movement (the East Turkistan Islamic Movement) as a terrorist organization, was intimately tied to securing China’s support – or lack of opposition – to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Despite this arrangement, it was the very real threat that the men would be tortured or even killed if they were returned to China that led to the US administration seeking out a third country that would accept the men after they had been cleared of all wrong-doing in the tribunals at Guantánamo – the Combatant Status Review Tribunals – which were established to determine whether, on capture, they had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants.” Despite the US administration’s best efforts at cajoling or bribing other countries to accept the men, however, Albania – a Muslim country, but one of the poorest states in Europe – was the only country that could be prevailed upon to accept them.

Although Adel and his companions found their new life in Albania frustrating, as there are no other Uyghur speakers and there was also no prospect of work, they were fortunate to have been cleared and released. Their 13 companions not only remain in Guantánamo, but some were also subjected to multiple tribunals, as the administration revealed another facet of Guantánamo’s prevailing injustice by reconvening tribunals when they produced what was regarded as the wrong result.

For Adel, at least, the opportunity to rebuild his life in earnest is now a possibility. It is, for the moment, the one bright light in the stories not only of the Uyghurs, but of all the other dispossessed men, captured and imprisoned through chronic failures of intelligence, many of whom are, sadly, still languishing in Guantánamo.

[Note: I am immensely grateful to Sabin Willett, one of Adel’s lawyers, for informing me about his visit to Sweden].

I don’t know why I was so shocked listening to Keith Olbermann’s insulting, degrading and uninformed remarks about President Hugo Chavez yesterday. Perhaps because Olbermann is the only man on commercial television who has so far had the guts to make a frontal attack on Bush and his coterie of war criminals. I suppose I thought his articulate and courageous stand against the Republicans, his criticism of their comrades, the spineless Democrats and other collaborators with the Bush regime, indicated a superior knowledge, analysis and understanding of politics in general. I hoped that his bold commentary indicated a suspicion of a system glued together by massive lies. Sadly, it appears that I was wrong.

On his November 20th program Keith Olbermann referred to a “news” story in which Chavez, trying to make his way to the bathroom past a reporter, reportedly said, “I have to go. Do you want me to pee on you?”

First of all, it’s a tragic commentary on the state of “news” and journalism that bodily functions become major news stories, be they sexual or excretory, especially when people like Chávez have so many more interesting features worthy of discussion, most notably, ideas. That Olbermann would stoop to the news cycle at its most base level is, itself, a disappointment. But his comment after the reference to “peeing on” someone was more so: “Maybe you should have asked that before you started doing that to your own country’s laws and citizens.”

To what is Mr. Olbermann referring when he states that Chávez is “peeing on” the laws and citizens of Venezuela? Is he referring to Chávez’s dozen or so electoral victories, all declared clean and fair by international observers (including ex-President Carter)? Is it Chávez’s stand for the dignity and independence of Latin America? Is it Chávez’s internationalism which has not only taken him to Cuba and Iran but also caused him to discount heating oil for the poor in the U.S.? Could it be the clinics Chávez has set up around the country, Barrio Adentro, guaranteeing Venezuelans free health care? Or the Bolivarian Universities he’s funding to enable three million people, without means, resources, hope or future, to study and win degrees and new possibilities? Was Chávez “pissing on the laws” when he allowed a referendum on his presidency to go through and which he won handily in 2004?

Mr. Olbermann needs to get his facts straight and he could start off by reading Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval’s study published in July of this year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled, “The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years” (http://www.cepr.net/content/view/1248/8/ ) wherein they show that “Real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has grown by 76 percent since the bottom of the recession in 2003.” Indeed, once the pressures of a U.S. inspired coup, U.S.-backed oil strike and Referendum (all funded by Olbermann’s and our local nemesis, Bush) were soundly defeated by Chávez and his supporters, Weisbrot and Sandoval agree that “it appears that the Venezuelan economy was hit hard by political instability prior to 2003, but has grown steadily and quite rapidly since political stability began improving in that year.”

The economy has grown, but that new wealth has not merely trickled, or gushed, upwards into the pockets of the rich, as it always seems to do in the U.S. In Venezuela the poverty rate has dropped 31% under Chávez, (extreme poverty from 53% to 9.1 percent) but the authors acknowledge that this current poverty rate “does not take into account the increased access to health care or education that poor people have experienced. The situation of the poor has therefore improved significantly beyond even the substantial poverty reduction that is visible in the official poverty rate, which measures only cash income.” This is not to mention, as the authors also point out, the “increased health care benefits to the poor, since in the absence of these benefits, most poor people would simply have gone without health care, and therefore suffer from worse health, lower income, and lower life expectancy.” And those health benefits are substantial: “In 1998 there were 1,628 primary care physicians for a population of 23.4 million. Today, there are 19,571 for a population of 27 million.

Given these facts, and your absence of them, Mr. Olbermann, could you explain exactly on whom Chávez has been pissing? If not, perhaps in the future you could drop the subject or deal with something a bit more substantial when talking about Chávez than urine.

In other words, put up or piss off.

Gertrude Winter, a char lady in her sixties who works at a government office, will have a turkey after all this Thanksgiving. At one stage yesterday, it seemed a close run thing. As she sat in the hallway of the Bread for the City charity a rumour swept the place that they were out of turkeys.

Agitated, another woman said: “The lady says there are no turkeys left, what are we going to do?” In fact the turkeys were already on their way from another warehouse and what might have degenerated into a mini-riot, reverted instead to the good-natured banter of strangers.

Thrown together by poverty and the pinched generosity of the United States, they waited to be interviewed to see if they were eligible for a free turkey and a bag of groceries. Mobile soup kitchens are keeping the homeless on the streets fed, but it is the working poor and those with young and old dependants who patiently line up at Bread for the City. Even with the help of government food stamps, most earn less than $7,000 (£3,400) a year, not nearly enough to survive on. They have long overcome the shame of queuing up every week in public for free food

“I used to come here all the time when my kids were growing up,” said Ms Winter, “and now I’m back because everything is so expensive out there”.

Today as millions of Americans sit down to their turkey dinners with all the trimmings, the safety net of hundreds of food banks and pantries that put food on the table of the nation’s poor is creaking and torn as a result of sharply reduced donations. From New England to California warehouses that should be groaning with surplus foodstuffs are going half empty.

“We’re bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with home heating fuel prices at record highs in the north-east,” said Mark Quandt of the regional food bank in New York. “People living in poverty or near poverty just can’t sustain those types of increases.”

America’s obsession with energy independence from Middle East oil may be to blame. The country’s farmers have brought in the greatest corn harvest since the Second World War, but their surpluses which once were bought by the government and sent to food banks are no longer available. Instead the corn is turned into heavily subsidised ethanol and less land is available to grow food.

And the corn syrup that turns up in almost every product found on a US supermarket shelf is in short supply. A cheap dollar means that food exports are booming and a crippling two-year drought in the south has left fruit and vegetables withered and useless.

Unnoticed by most Americans, as they drop off their old canned goods and surplus food at schools and church halls for the Thanksgiving food drives, the entire system may be heading for collapse.

A visit to three of Washington’s largest charities – a shelter for 300 men, a community kitchen that feeds 4,000 every day and a food bank that supplies the basic needs of 108,000 people a year – revealed sharply reduced donations and a sense of desperation for the future. In the gleaming workspaces of DC Central Kitchen, half a mile from the White House, fresh vegetables were being chopped by volunteers from Georgetown University Law School. DC Central’s culinary institute turns homeless drug addicts into professional chefs and provides hot meals for thousands of homeless people in shelters all over the city. Mike Curtain, its executive director, could pass muster as a US version of Jamie Oliver. “I don’t think as a nation we are who we think we are,” he says. “When I see the money wasted overseas in Iraq and knowing what it could do here, it makes me sick. I think Bush is a criminal for what he is doing.

“People in the world hate us, and rightly so, because of the way we treat our own people,” he continued, “poverty would soon disappear if we invested some of that money on a living wage, healthcare and education. ”

For now he is looking to the future by diversifying the DC Kitchen’s food sources away from hotels and restaurants by negotiating directly with farmers. “I know donors that look at us as a way to keep their trash hauling costs down,” he said. “Of the 80 trays of food we received from the company, 60 went into the dumpster.”

In the south-east of the city, where the murder rate is rising and substance abuse seems uncontrollable, Jarval Green runs a homeless shelter for 300 people that focuses on addicts. It is funded by a Catholic charity and the numbers seeking emergency shelter keep growing.

“Now we are seeing veterans from the war showing up,” he said, ” the real problem here is poverty especially among men who are substance abusers.”

Part of the reason food banks are running low on supplies is the absence of direct government spending. There is a political culture in the America that abhors spending taxpayers’ money on the poor, even as the amount president Bush is spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approaches a trillion dollars.

Many Americans are hurting because of the collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market, but the country has never been wealthier. There has been an explosion in the number of millionaire American households in recent years. Those earning $1m, $10m, $100m have more than doubled over the past decade and the wealthy of America are wealthier than most countries, with the top one per cent controlling $17trn.

But none of this wealth seems to have trickled down to the poor despite the promises from supply-side economists that it would.

George Jones, who runs Bread for the City, says the new rich also seem more interested in donating to the arts and universities than in giving their fellow Americans a leg up. Bread for the City is finding that law firms which once gave generously have cut their donations in half.

This week some 35.5 million Americans lined up at soup kitchens and food stamps offices to feed their families for the holiday. The look of panic that flashed across Gertrude Winter’s face, when she though she was not getting a turkey, is being seen elsewhere in the country.

Now the homeless poor are having their ranks swelled further by war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly 200,000 veterans were homeless on any given night last year and their numbers make up a quarter of the US homeless population – a figure that has been called “shockingly disproportionate”.

Life below the poverty line is seen almost as boot camp for the shiftless. But if American taxpayers have been conditioned to reject any form of social welfare, they seem to accept that they cannot ignore hunger.

As a result a vast and complicated system has grown up over the years – part private charity, part government aid – to help the neediest get fed. The US social welfare system is miserly at best. Food stamps – a maximum of $3 per person a day – are given to the needy. In all it has 15 separate food assistance programmes which go though some $53bn a year, making it America’s largest welfare programme

Now Congress is arguing with President Bush over a farm bill, which both unlocks cash to buy food for the poor and guarantees million-dollar cheques for some food producers.

“We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what we are hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with demand so high, ” Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest hunger relief group, “One of our food banks in Florida said demand is up 35 per cent over this time last year.”

At the Society of St Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati, clients now get three or four days’ worth of food instead of six or seven. “We are trying to stretch our resources to help more people,” said Liz Carter, executive director of the society. “But it’s so difficult when you see the desperation and have to tell them you just don’t have enough to give them what they need.”

When George Bush pitched up in southern Virginia this week there was nothing to indicate that food banks were in trouble. The food bank he visited, the media were blandly informed, sends millions of pounds of groceries to needy families each year. Mr Bush walked past stacks of peanut butter, green beans and tinned soup. Then for the cameras he lifted a few crates of oranges, potatoes and macaroni and cheese on to a cart, telling the pastor: ” C’mon man, let’s go.”

Then it was off to the banks of the James river and site of America’s first official Thanksgiving. In 1619 Captain John Woodlief and his crew of 37 men fell to their knees and read a proclamation stating that the day of their ship’s arrival should be “yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God”.

Presidents typically make light work of the Thanksgiving holiday, but Mr Bush decided to dedicate an entire speech to it: “Our nation’s greatest strength is the decency and compassion of our people,” he said. ” As we count our many blessings, I encourage all Americans to show their thanks by giving back.”

America’s working people are increasingly unable to say where their family’s next meal is coming from and demand is so outstripping supply that many food banks have had to cut back on portions. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I can’t believe how much worse it gets month after month,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, of Second Harvest.

The shortages being experienced indicate a burgeoning crisis in feeding the poor, caught in a vice of rising food prices, rent, healthcare and petrol. Another problem, says Mr Curtain of DC Central Kitchen, is that food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are getting better at managing their surplus food and are donating less to charity.

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap, says many dump unwanted inedible food on shelters. He recalls his days running a food bank when “no food donation was too small, too strange or too nutritionally unsound to be refused”.

“I remember the load of nearly rotten potatoes that we gratefully accepted at the warehouse loading dock and then shovelled into the dumpster once the donor was safely out of sight.”

At this time of the year Americans are at their most giving. The annual Thanksgiving turkey drive at a food bank Mr Winne founded in Connecticut has had its annual appeal for “A turkey and a 20 (dollar bill)”. It collected 14,000 turkeys and $400,000 from the public in the richest state in the union. “At least at this time of the year they are prepared to give generously but the worry is that a system based on charity will mean that the supply of donated food will always ebb and flow,” he said. ” We may be entering one of those perfect storms where everything goes wrong but if we depend on food charity rather than ending poverty, this is what is bound to occur.”

As Carlos Salgado walked out of the Radio Cadena Voces station in Tegucigalpa around 4 p.m. on Oct. 18, two gunmen fired seven shots at him and killed him instantly.

The murder of the 67-year-old creator of the popular satirical program “Frijol, El Terible” is being seen across Honduras as the latest example of brutal repression of journalists by the administration of president Manuel Zelaya Rosales.

Two weeks after Salgado’s murder, the head of Radio Cadena Voces, Dagoberto Rodriguez, fled to the U.S. with his family after being informed by police of a tip that he would be assassinated within 72 hours. Police reportedly said his would-be assassins were not connected to the killers of Salgado. Though the department obviously has inside knowledge of the planned murder, there have been no arrests made.

Rodriguez said he had been followed by a car with mirrors continuously in recent weeks, and other journalists at Radio Cadena Voces have also reported receiving death threats and harassment from people they believe to be linked to the government.

For example reporter Edgardo Escoto said he got a call on his cell phone while covering a funeral in September saying, “If you carry on pissing us off, we will bury you like this.”

The station’s website was also hacked and sabotaged; at one point the content was replaced with pornography.

Meanwhile on Sept. 7, Channel 13 TV reporter Geovanny Garcia was shot during broad daylight and hit in the hand. Garcia, who left the country after the attack, had reported on official corruption related to street paving and repair contracts.
Also in September, Martin Ramirez, a reporter for La Tribuna newspaper, received multiple threats after running a story on maras (gangs) and their ties to police. The threats intensified after police publicly identified Ramirez.

Journalists and human rights groups in Honduras say the attacks are likely precipitated and tolerated by government officials in response to media reports on government corruption.

“The murder of Carlos Salgado confirms the deterioration in press freedom in Honduras,” says a statement from the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders. “The worsening and terrible climate between the government of Manuel Zelaya and the media unfortunately contributes to this situation.”

Most Americans have succumbed to tradition and advertising and stuffed their bellies with unhealthy food and stuffed their shopping carts with unnecessary stuff. Now, here are some tough facts about the sad state of the American economy from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, as revealed recently by the Economic Mobility Project.

Anyone who still gives thanks for the classic American dream of rising from poverty to riches is not facing reality. Research has documented that only 6 percent of children born to parents with family income in the bottom fifth of the income spectrum move to the top fifth. The rags to riches story is garbage. Meanwhile, an amazing 42 percent of children born into that lowest fraction remain stuck in that lowly economic class, not even making into middle class status. At the other end, four out of 10 children born to rich parents stay rich.

Looking more generally at economic mobility this is reality: 34 percent of Americans make more than their parents’ family income and move up at least one rung on the economic ladder. But more experience downward mobility, with 38 percent moving down the economic ladder.

What about black Americans?

Only 31 percent of black children born to middle-income parents make more than their parents‟ family income, compared to 68 percent of white children. Almost half (45 percent) of black children whose parents were solidly middle income end up falling to the bottom of the income distribution, compared to only 16 percent of white children.

For every parental income group, white children are more likely to move ahead of their parents’ economic rank while black children are more likely to fall behind.

What about women versus men?

47 percent of daughters born to parents on the bottom rung stay on the bottom rung, compared to 35 percent of sons.

And here is the really bad news for American men: In contrast to data on family income, the personal income of men has been almost perfectly flat for the past three decades. The better incomes of working women have caused apparent increases in family or household incomes.

Inflation-adjusted median income for men ages 30-39 actually fell by 12 percent between 1974 and 2004, from $40,000 a year to about $35,000 a year in constant dollars.

When it comes to America’s democracy and economy, keep dreaming.

More than 40% of the foreign fighters who entered Iraq to join the insurgency in the past year were citizens of Saudi Arabia, America’s key partner in the Middle East, according to detailed information seized from a camp used by them. Documents and computers found by the US army at Sinjar, on the Iraqi-Syrian border, revealed that the other single largest group came from Libya, which is now being rehabilitated as a reliable western ally.

Overall, US officials reported that the number of foreign fighters entering Iraq this year dropped from 80-110 a month in the first half of the year to around 40 in October, partly due to the Sinjar raid.

After the raid the number of suicide bombings in Iraq fell to 16 in October – half the number seen during the summer months and down from a peak of 59 in March. US military officials believe that 90% of such bombings are by foreigners.

The captured data has been described as an intelligence treasure trove that included biographical details and the hometowns of the more than 700 fighters who entered Iraq since August 2006. Of those 307, or 41%, were Saudis and 137, or 18%, Libyans, senior US military sources told the New York Times.

Saudi Arabia, former home of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers, has cracked down hard on al-Qaida in recent years. Saudi intelligence works closely with its US counterparts, but there have long been suspicions that the country’s most dangerous jihadis have gone to Iraq. “The border with Iraq is much more carefully controlled than it was 18 months ago,” said one British official. The Saudis also run extensive programmes “re-educating” and rehabilitating fighters who have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan to see “the error of their ways”.

The US, Britain and others have praised the Saudis for their efforts, pointing especially to a recent appeal by the kingdom’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Asheik, who condemned “mischievous parties” who send young Saudis abroad to carry out “heinous acts which have no association with Islam whatsoever”.

The presence of a large number of Libyans among the insurgents in Iraq suggests that the regime of Muammar Gadafy has pushed its violent Islamist enemies abroad, having cleaned up its own act by renouncing support for terrorism and surrendering its chemical and nuclear arsenal after the US invasion of Iraq.