The Descent into Tyranny

California Police Beat Man Nearly To Death For Asking To Read...

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:07:00 -0500

California Police Beat Man Nearly To Death For Asking To Read His Ticket

May 21 2013

A Berkeley truck driver is suing the California High Patrol for a brutal assault that brought him to the brink of death — provoked, according to a report by the local NBC affiliate, only by the man’s request to read the ticket he was being given before he signed it.

On September 2nd, 2011, Russian immigrant Olegs Kozacenko was driving his truck when he was pulled over by Officer Andrew P. Murrill of the California Highway Police. Murrill attempted to ticket him for driving too many hours in the truck. Kozacenko refused to sign the ticket before reading it.

At this point, NBC Bay Area reporters learned, Murrill decided he needed to make a “forcible arrest.” He and his partner, Officer Jim Sherman, claim that Kozacenko was “actively resisting” and “exhibiting extraordinary strength” in doing so. The consequences were “life-threatening injuries including a crushed left orbital eye socket, multiple facial fractures, a broken left arm, a concussion, unconsciousness and possible neurological damage.”

Kozacenko nearly died, as the nearest hospital did not have an emergency room advanced enough to treat his injuries.

According to court testimony obtained by NBC, Murrill concedes that Kozacenko was not even guilty of the offense he was attempting to ticket the driver for:

In his testimony during an evidentiary hearing on a defense motion to suppress evidence gathered after the ticket was written, officer Murrill admitted that he was confused, either by the law governing the hour limits for truck drivers or by reading the truck driver’s log book. Murrill also admitted on the witness stand that he was not a trained commercial vehicle specialist and did not call to ask for a commercial vehicle specialist to help at the scene. And he admitted on the stand that the hours Murrill was reading on Kozacenko’s truck driver log book were recorded two days earlier when Kozacenko was driving through Nebraska, Iowa and Wyoming.

NBC reports that “the Valley Division, where Murrill works, led the state in the number of disciplinary actions against officers for 2011, the same year of Kozacenko’s arrest.” Police officials claim that there is no video of the altercation and that all associated radio logs have been deleted by system malfunctioning for this time period.”

Murrill and Sherman remain employed by the CHP. Olegs Kocazenko is currently unemployed and seeking legal redress from both the Highway Patrol and the state of California.

Guatemala overturns former dictator’s genocide...

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:30:59 -0500

Guatemala overturns former dictator’s genocide conviction

Trial of Efrain Rios Montt, convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in 1980s, thrown into disarray

May 21 2013

Guatemala’s top court has overturned the genocide conviction of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, ordering that the trial be taken back to the middle of proceedings.

The ruling late on Monday threw into disarray a process that had been hailed as historic for delivering the first guilty verdict for genocide against a former Latin American leader.

The constitutional court secretary, Martin Guzman, said the trial needed to go back to where it stood on 19 April to resolve several appeal issues.

The ruling came 10 days after a three-judge panel convicted the 86-year-old former general of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in massacres of Mayans during Guatemala’s bloody 36-year civil war.

The panel found after two months of testimony that Rios Montt knew about the slaughter of at least 1,771 Ixil Mayans in the western highlands and did not stop it.

The tribunal sentenced Rios Montt to 80 years in prison, drawing cheers from many Guatemalans. It was the first time a former Latin American leader was convicted of such crimes in his home country and the first official acknowledgment that genocide occurred during the war – something the current president, retired general Otto Perez Molina, has denied.

Rios Montt’s lawyers immediately filed an appeal, and he spent three days in prison before he was moved to a military hospital, where he remains.

The court said on Monday it threw out his conviction because the trial should have been stopped while appeals filed by the defence were resolved.

Defensce lawyer Francisco Garcia Gudiel told the Associated Press by telephone he would seek the former dictator’s freedom on Tuesday.

“There is no alternative,” Garcia said. “The court has made a legal resolution after many flaws in the process. Tomorrow we will ask that they liberate the general, who is being imprisoned unjustly.”

Representatives of the victims who testified against Rios Montt ccould not be reached for comment.

The proceedings, which started in March, had moved back and forth since 18 April, when a Guatemalan judge ordered that the trial should be restarted just as it was nearing closing arguments.

Judge Carol Patricia Flores had been recently reinstated by the constitutional court after being recused in February 2012. She ruled that all actions taken in the case since she was first asked to step down were null, sending the trial back to square one.

On 19 April, the tribunal hearing the oral part of the trial asked the court to decide if proceedings should continue.

The trial was suspended for 12 days amid appeals and at times appeared headed for annulment. But it resumed on 30 April, and on 10 May the three-judge tribunal found Rios Montt guilty after more than 100 witnesses and experts testified about mass rapes and the killings of women and children and other atrocities committed by government troops.

Rios Montt ruled Guatemala in 1982-83 following a military coup.

Survivors and relatives of victims had sought for 30 years to bring punishment for Rios Montt. For international observers and Guatemalans on both sides of the war, the trial was seen as a turning point in a nation still wrestling with the trauma of a conflict that killed some 200,000 people.

The defence constantly claimed flaws and miscarriages of justice.

Courts solved more than 100 complaints and injunctions filed by the defence before the trial even started.

Rios Montt’s defensce team walked out on 18 April, arguing that they couldn’t continue to be part of such bad proceedings. When the three-judge tribunal resumed the trial, it ordered two public defenders to represent Rios Montt and his co-defendant, Jose Rodriguez Sanchez.

Rios Montt rejected his public defender and instead brought in Garcia, who was expelled earlier by the tribunal but reinstated by an appeals court.

Garcia had earlier been ordered off the case after he called for the three judges on the tribunal to be removed from the proceedings. He kept trying to have the judges dismissed. And the constitutional court ruled on Monday that the trial should have been suspended while his appeal was heard.

The trial “was unlawfully reopened”, Garcia said at the time.

anarcho-queer: Palestinian Activists Demolish Part of Israeli...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:04:04 -0500

anarcho-queer:

Palestinian Activists Demolish Part of Israeli Apartheid Wall Near Ramallah

On Friday 17th May, a group of young Palestinians and activists from the popular resistance movements demolished part of the Israeli apartheid wall in Abu Deis village near Ramallah.

One of the activists told PNN that dozens of Palestinians protested near the Israeli apartheid wall that was constructed between the Abu Deis and Al-Eizariya villages and that a number of youngsters demolished part of the wall.

He said that Israeli forces arrived to the area and started firing metal-coated bullets and tear gas canisters toward the protesters.

Several Palestinians were arrested while others were able to enter into Jerusalem while holding Palestinian flags, he added.

A 17-year-old Palestinian was injured with a rubber bullet in his head during clashes erupted in Abu Deis village.

Eyewitness said that the injured boy was transferred to Al-Maqased Hospital in the same village for treatment. His injuries were described as serious and severe after being shot by the IOF, according to medical sources.

Glenn Greenwald: Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:59:43 -0500

Glenn Greenwald: Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes

Yet another serious escalation of the Obama administration’s attacks on press freedoms emerges

May 20 2013

It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the newsgathering process in general.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests - something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist - something done every day in Washington - and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”.

The focus of the Post’s report yesterday is that the DOJ’s surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and - most amazingly - obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, “investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.” It added that “court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist”.

But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen - the journalist - committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information - something investigative journalists do every day - Rosen himself broke the law. Describing an affidavit from FBI agent Reginald Reyes filed by the DOJ, the Post reports [emphasis added]:

“Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, ‘at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator’. That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target. Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a ‘covert communications plan’ and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information… . However, it remains an open question whether it’s ever illegal, given the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so.”

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same “solicitation” theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can “charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.” When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:

“Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren’t typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to ‘nearly a dozen current and former officials’ to induce them to reveal information about Bush’s NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous ‘U.S. and foreign officials’ to reveal the details of the CIA’s ‘black site’ program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

“In sum, investigative journalists routinely — really, by definition — do exactly that which the DOJ’s new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal ‘conspirator’ in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with ‘espionage’ for publishing classified information.”

That’s what always made the establishment media’s silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That’s why James Goodale, the New York Times’ general counsel during the paper’s historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that “the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it’s absolutely frightening.”

Indeed, as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler noted recently in the New Republic, when the judge presiding over Manning’s prosecution asked military lawyers if they would “have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?”, the prosecutor answered simply: “Yes, ma’am”. It has long been clear that this WikiLeaks-as-criminals theory could and would be used to criminalize establishment media outlets which reported on that which the US government wanted concealed.

Now we know that the DOJ is doing exactly that: applying this theory to criminalize the acts of journalists who report on what the US government does in secret, even though there is no law that makes such reporting illegal and the First Amendment protects such conduct. Essentially accusing James Rosen of being an unindicted co-conspriator in these alleged crimes is a major escalation of the Obama DOJ’s already dangerous attacks on press freedom.

It is virtually impossible at this point to overstate the threat posed by the Obama DOJ to press freedoms. Back in 2006, Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales triggered a major controversy when he said that the New York Times could be prosecuted for having revealed the Top Secret information that the NSA was eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without warrants. That was at the same time that right-wing demagogues such Bill Bennett were calling for the prosecution of the NYT reporters who reported on the NSA program, as well as the Washington Post’s Dana Priest for having exposed the CIA black site network.

But despite those public threats, the Bush DOJ never went so far as to formally accuse journalists in court filings of committing crimes for reporting on classified information. Now the Obama DOJ has.

This week, the New Republic’s Molly Redden describes what I’ve heard many times over the past several years: national security reporters have had their ability to engage in journalism severely impeded by the Obama DOJ’s unprecedented attacks, and are operating in a climate of fear for both their sources and themselves. Redden quotes one of the nation’s best reporters, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, this way:

It’s a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn’t quite strong enough, it’s more like freezing the whole process into a standstill.”

Redden says that “the DOJ’s seizure of AP records will probably only exacerbate these problems.” That’s certainly true: as surveillance expert Julian Sanchez wrote in Mother Jones this week, there is ample evidence that the Obama DOJ’s seizure of the phone records of journalists extends far beyond the AP case. Recall, as well, that the New York Times’ Jim Risen is currently being pursued by the Obama DOJ, and conceivably faces prison if he refuses to reveal his source for a story he wrote about CIA incompetence in Iran. Said Risen:

I believe that the efforts to target me have continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States.”

If even the most protected journalists - those who work for the largest media outlets - are being targeted in this way, and are saying over and over that the Obama DOJ is preventing basic news gathering from taking place without fear, imagine the effect this all has on independent journalists who are much more vulnerable.

There is simply no defense for this behavior. Obama defenders such as Andrew Sullivan claim that this is all more complicated than media outrage suggests because of a necessary “trade-off” between press freedoms and security. So do Obama defenders believe that George Bush and Richard Nixon - who never prosecuted leakers like this or formally accused journalists of being criminals for reporting classified information - were excessively protective of press freedoms and insufficiently devoted to safeguarding secrecy? To ask that question is to mock it. Obama has gone so far beyond what every recent prior president has done in bolstering secrecy and criminalizing whistleblowing and leaks.

Goodale, the New York Times’ former general counsel, was interviewed by Democracy Now last week and said this:

AMY GOODMAN: “You say that President Obama is worse than President Nixon.

JAMES GOODALE: “Well, more precisely, I say that if in fact he goes ahead and prosecutes Julian Assange, he will pass Nixon. He’s close to Nixon now. The AP example is a good example of something that Obama has done but Nixon never did. So I have him presently in second place, behind Nixon and ahead of Bush II. And he’s moving up fast… .

“Obama has classified, I think, seven million — in one year, classified seven million documents. Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it’s classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they’re complicit, and they’re going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “What about the—

JAMES GOODALE: “It’s very dangerous. That’s why I’m — I get excited when I talk about it.”

That was before it was known that the Obama DOJ read James Rosen’s emails by formally labeling him in court an unindicted co-conspirator for the “crime” of reporting on classified information. This all just got a lot more dangerous.

Seattle Teachers, Students Win Historic Victory Over...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:49:46 -0500

Seattle Teachers, Students Win Historic Victory Over Standardized Testing

May 20 2013

After months of protest, teachers, students and parents in Seattle, Washington, have won their campaign to reject standardized tests in reading and math. In January, teachers at Garfield High School began a boycott of the test, saying it was wasteful and being used unfairly to assess their performance. The boycott spread to other schools, with hundreds of teachers, students and parents participating. Last week, the school district backed down, announcing that the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP test, is now optional for high schools, but those refusing the test must find another way to gauge student performance. We speak with Jesse Hagopian, a high school history teacher and union representative at Garfield High School.

Julian Assange reveals GCHQ messages discussing Swedish...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:45:44 -0500

Julian Assange reveals GCHQ messages discussing Swedish extradition

WikiLeaks founder uses subject access request to access British agency chatter, which allegedly calls extradition ‘a fit-up’

May 19 2013

Authorities at GCHQ, the government eavesdropping agency, are facing embarrassing revelations about internal correspondence in which Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is discussed, apparently including speculation that he is being framed by Swedish authorities seeking his extradition on rape allegations.

The records were revealed by Assange himself in a Sunday night interview with Spanish television programme Salvados in which he explained that an official request for information gave him access to instant messages that remained unclassified by GCHQ.

A message from September 2012, read out by Assange, apparently says: “They are trying to arrest him on suspicion of XYZ … It is definitely a fit-up… Their timings are too convenient right after Cablegate.”

The messages appear to contain speculation and chatter between GCHQ employees, but Assange gave little further explanation about exactly who they came from.

The WikiLeaks founder, who has spent the past 11 months in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid arrest and extradition to Sweden, claimed GCHQ had been unaware that it might have anything on him that was not classified.

“It won’t hand over any of the classified information,” he said. “But, much to its surprise, it has some unclassified information on us.”

“We have just received this. It is not public yet,” he added.

A second instant message conversation from August last year between two unknown people saw them call Assange a fool for thinking Sweden would drop its attempt to extradite him.

The conversation, as read out by Assange, goes: “He reckons he will stay in the Ecuadorian embassy for six to 12 months when the charges against him will be dropped, but that is not really how it works now is it? He’s a fool… Yeah … A highly optimistic fool.”

“This is what the spies are discussing amongst themselves,” Assange told the Spanish television presenter Jordi Evolé.

The Cheltenham-based agency said: “We can confirm that GCHQ responded formally to the subject who made the request. The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ’s policies or views in any way.

GCHQ is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. However, it is understood that Assange’s request was a subject access request, a mechanism under the Data Protection Act that can be used by individuals to obtain personal information that bodies hold about them.

On its website, the agency says : “As one of the UK’s intelligence and security agencies, we gather and analyse digital and electronic signals from many channels, from all corners of the world”.

“Converting this information into intelligence material, we play a significant role in informing national security, military operations, police activity and foreign policy.”

jaison96: thinksquad: More and more children being arrested...

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:07:57 -0500

jaison96:

thinksquad:

More and more children being arrested for trivial things…

#1 At one public school down in Texas, a 12-year-old girl named Sarah Bustamantes was recently arrested for spraying herself with perfume.

#2 A 13-year-old student at a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.

#3 Another student down in Albuquerque was forced to strip down to his underwear while five adults watched because he had $200 in his pocket. The student was never formally charged with doing anything wrong.

#4 A security guard at one school in California broke the arm of a 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.

#5 One teenage couple down in Houston poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up. Instead of being sent to see the principal, they were arrested and sent to court.

#6 In early 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith” was what she reportedly scribbled on her desk.

#7 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was handcuffed and sent to a mental facility after throwing temper tantrums at her elementary school.

#8 One student down in Texas was reportedly arrested by police for throwing paper airplanes in class.

#9 A 17-year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.

#10 In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security officer even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender.

#11 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.

#12 Back in 2009, an 8-year-old boy in Massachusetts was sent home from school and was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus on the cross.

#13 A police officer in San Mateo, California blasted a 7-year-old special education student in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture.

#14 In America today, even 5-year-old children are treated brutally by police. The following is from a recent article that described what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California a while back….

“Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old”.

#15 At one school in Connecticut, a 17-year-old boy was thrown to the floor and tasered five times because he was yelling at a cafeteria worker.

#16 A teenager in suburban Dallas was forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using foul language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.

#17 A few months ago, police were called out when a little girl kissed a little boy during a physical education class at an elementary school down in Florida.

#18 A 6-year-old boy was recently charged with sexual battery for some “inappropriate touching” during a game of tag at one elementary school in the San Francisco area.

#19 In Massachusetts, police were recently sent out to collect an overdue library book from a 5-year-old girl.

HERE ARE THE LINKS FOR THOSE WHO FEEL THIS PAGE MADE ALL THIS UP:

http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/latino-daily-news/details/texas-student-sarah-bustamantes-12-arrested-for-spraying-perfume/13250/

http://abcnews.go.com/m/blogEntry?id=15077292

Check out this video on YouTube:http://youtu.be/wk2b_twCCdw

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools?cat=world& type=article

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/18/new.york.doodle.arrest/index.html?hpt=C1

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2010/feb/11/port-st-lucie-schools-confines-6-year-old-with/

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools?cat=world& type=article

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/12/29/nc-high-school-senior-suspended-charged-possesion-small-knife-lunchbox/#

http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/2009/june09/zero-tolerance-states.html

http://m.tauntongazette.com/wkdTGazette/pm_/contentdetail.htm?contentguid

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Mateo-pays-family-of-boy-pepper-sprayed-by-cop-2384518.php

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/cops-called-for-school-kiss-657831

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2012/01/27/hercules-family-battles-playground-sex-assault-claim-against-6-year-old/

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2012/01/02/charlton-library-sends-police-to-collect-overdue-books-from-5-year-old/

Kids are fucked up these days…

Chris Hedges: Rise Up or Die May 19 2013 Joe Sacco and I...

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:40:20 -0500

Chris Hedges: Rise Up or Die

May 19 2013

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of government and corporate power.

Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.

The government’s fierce persecution of the press—an attack pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy Hammond—dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was once illegal—the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.

In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United States’ second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is 48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation’s agricultural workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.

Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It means saying no. To remain safe, to remain “innocent” in the eyes of the law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil. In his poem of resistance, “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our souls. McKay wrote:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”

Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die.

Iraq car bombings leave dozens dead The continuing violence...

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:11:57 -0500

Iraq car bombings leave dozens dead

The continuing violence fuels fears that Iraq is sliding back into chaos and on the verge of splintering.

May 20 2013

Car bombs around Iraq killed at least 65 people Monday amid the worst wave of violence in the country since U.S. troops withdrew a year and a half ago.

The attacks, which occurred along busy commercial streets in Shiite and Sunni areas, followed a string of bombings and other attacks last week that killed more than 200 people. The ongoing violence has stoked the impression among Iraqis that the country is sliding back into chaos reminiscent of the civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives between 2005 and 2008.

Citing a number of sources, the Associated Press put the death toll Monday as high as 95.

Among the most worrying of the day’s attacks were a pair of car bombings in the southern city of Basra that killed at least 10 people. The previous day, Basra’s security commanders asserted that they had imposed new protective measures in the region, home to the vast majority of Iraq’s oil production and exports.

The Basra attack drew attention to how even the south is no longer free from strife. The region, with its Shiite Muslim majority, has been relatively quiet compared with areas in the north such as Baghdad, where Shiites and the country’s Sunni Muslim minority live close together.

Sunnis, who believe they have been marginalized since the fall of President Saddam Hussein in 2003, have served as the backbone of a tenacious resistance to the country’s Shiite-dominated government.

The bloodshed, coupled with an intractable dispute between Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and Sunni protesters who are demanding a repeal of laws they say discriminate against them, has left many fearful that Iraq is on the verge of splintering.

Security forces opened fire on demonstrators late last month in the northern city of Hawija, sparking days of violence in central and northern Iraq. The United Nations put the death toll for April at 712, making it the deadliest month in Iraq since June 2008. The unrest raises the specter of Iraq imploding at a time neighboring Syria is being torn apart by civil war.

In the aftermath of Monday’s bombings, Maliki warned lawmakers to stay away from a parliamentary session scheduled for Tuesday by his rivals to discuss the spiraling violence. He accused politicians he refused to name of being behind the unrest, and he threatened to send their names to the courts for arrest if they were not already wanted, saying some instigators of violence were trying to hide behind parliamentary immunity.

Many Baghdad residents were shaken by the bombings and the political discord.

“We still have a dream that one day all of us could see Baghdad without an explosion. It seems that day will never come,” said grocery shop owner Aamer Abdullah, 55. “The citizens of Baghdad prefer to stay in their homes instead of going out and getting killed. We blame the politicians and the security forces equally for what happened.

“Iraqi now is heading to the abyss,” he added.

The situation remains tense between demonstrators and the government, particularly in the western province of Anbar, where security forces have demanded the arrest of three protest leaders in Ramadi over the late April killings of five security personnel. The protesters insist their leaders are innocent, while the government has amassed troops around Ramadi.

In the last week, the government raided the home of a prominent Sunni tribal leader, further fanning tensions. Gunmen kidnapped eight policemen near Fallouja over the weekend, and their corpses were found Monday. Demonstrators warned over the weekend that the government was pushing them toward seeking some form of regional autonomy or even taking up arms.

In his remarks Monday, Maliki advised those in Anbar, “We are ready.”

Glenn Greenwald — Washington gets explicit: its ‘war...

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:00:00 -0500

Glenn Greenwald — Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent

Senior Obama officials tell the US Senate: the ‘war’, in limitless form, will continue for ‘at least’ another decade - or two

May 17 2013

Last October, senior Obama officials anonymously unveiled to the Washington Post their newly minted “disposition matrix”, a complex computer system that will be used to determine how a terrorist suspect will be “disposed of”: indefinite detention, prosecution in a real court, assassination-by-CIA-drones, etc. Their rationale for why this was needed now, a full 12 years after the 9/11 attack:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight… . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US’s national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ‘At least 10 to 20 years.’ … A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

In January, former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson delivered a highly-touted speech suggesting that the war on terror will eventually end; he advocated that outcome, arguing:

‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the ‘new normal.’”

In response, I wrote that the “war on terror” cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of “terrorism”), and (2) the nation’s most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for “at least” another 10-20 years?

The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world’s largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Then there are the threats to Americans’ security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as “A Nation at War” and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years).

And then there’s the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

This war will end only once Americans realize the vast and multi-faceted costs they are bearing so that the nation’s political elites can be empowered and its oligarchs can further prosper. But Washington clearly has no fear that such realizations are imminent. They are moving in the other direction: aggressively planning how to further entrench and expand this war.

One might think that if there is to be a debate over the 12-year-old AUMF, it would be about repealing it. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who heroically cast the only vote against it when it was originally enacted by presciently warning of how abused it would be, has been advocating its repeal for some time now in favor of using reasonable security measures to defend against such threats and standard law enforcement measures to punish them (which have proven far more effective than military solutions). But just as happened in 2001, neither she nor her warnings are deemed sufficiently Serious even to consider, let alone embrace.

Instead, the Washington AUMF “debate” recognizes only two positions: (1) Congress should codify expanded powers for the administration to fight a wider war beyond what the 2001 AUMF provides (that’s the argument recently made by the supreme war-cheerleaders-from-a-safe-distance at the Washington Post editorial page and their favorite war-justifying think tank theorists, and the one being made by many Senators from both parties), or (2) the administration does not need any expanded authority because it is already free to wage a global war with very few limits under the warped “interpretation” of the AUMF which both the Bush and Obama DOJs have successfully persuaded courts to accept (that’s the Obama administration’s position). In other words, the shared premise is that the US government must continue to wage unlimited, permanent war, and the only debate is whether that should happen under a new law or the old one.

Just to convey a sense for how degraded is this Washington “debate”: Obama officials at yesterday’s Senate hearing repeatedly insisted that this “war” is already one without geographical limits and without any real conceptual constraints. The AUMF’s war power, they said, “stretches from Boston to the [tribal areas of Pakistan]” and can be used “anywhere around the world, including inside Syria, where the rebel Nusra Front recently allied itself with al-Qaida’s Iraq affiliate, or even what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called ‘boots on the ground in Congo’”. The acting general counsel of the Pentagon said it even “authorized war against al-Qaida’s associated forces in Mali, Libya and Syria”. Newly elected independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF:

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.”

Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who testified at the hearing, summarized what was said after it was over: Obama officials argued that “they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there”; that “they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities”; that “the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over”; and that “several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF.” Conveying the dark irony of America’s war machine, seemingly lifted right out of the Cold War era film Dr. Strangelove, Goldsmith added:

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

In response to that, the only real movement in Congress is to think about how to enact a new law to expand the authorization even further. But it’s a worthless and illusory debate, affecting nothing other than the pretexts and symbols used to justify what will, in all cases, be a permanent and limitless war. The Washington AUMF debate is about nothing other than whether more fig leafs are needed to make it all pretty and legal.

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they’re paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Related matters

Although I’m no fan of mindless partisan hackery, one must acknowledge, if one is to be honest, that sometimes it produces high comedy of the type few other afflictions are capable of producing.

On a related note: when Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the DOJ’s subpoeans for AP’s phone records - purportedly issued in order to find the source for AP’s story about a successfully thwarted terror attack from Yemen - he made this claim about the leak they were investigating: “if not the most serious, it is within the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen.” But yesterday, the Washington Post reported that CIA officials gave the go-ahead to AP to report the story, based in part on the fact that the administration itself planned to make a formal announcement boasting of their success in thwarting the plot. Meanwhile, the invaluable Marcy Wheeler today makes a strong case that the Obama administration engaged in a fear-mongering campaign over this plot that they knew at the time was false - all for the purpose of justifying the president’s newly announced “signature drone strikes” in Yemen.

The key lesson from all of this should have been learned long ago: nothing is less reliable than unchecked claims from political officials that their secret conduct is justified by National Security Threats and the desire to Keep Us Safe.

Most U.S. clothing chains did not sign pact on Bangladesh...

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:48:25 -0500

Most U.S. clothing chains did not sign pact on Bangladesh factory reforms

May 15 2013

Nearly all U.S. clothing chains, citing the fear of litigation, declined to sign an international pact ahead of a Wednesday deadline, potentially weakening what had been hailed as the best hope for bringing about major reforms in low-wage factories in Bangladesh.

Companies including Wal-Mart, Gap, Target and J.C. Penney had been pressed by labor groups to sign the document in the wake of last month’s factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed at least 1,127 people. More than a dozen European retailers did so. But U.S. companies feared the agreement would give labor groups and others the basis to sue them in court.

Wal-Mart had been under particular pressure because the company is one of the biggest buyers of clothes from Bangladesh and, as the largest retailer in the world, has broad influence over the industry. Instead, the retailer said this week that it would conduct its own inspections at its Bangladesh facilities.

Wal-Mart reiterated Wednesday that it would not sign the accord at this time, because it “introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”

The accord that’s on the table would likely cost retailers about $3 billion over the next five years, said Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, which supports the accord. Labor groups had set May 15 as the deadline to sign up.

“In the context of the broader industry, that’s a relatively small amount,” Nova said. “Bangladesh will export hundreds of billion of dollars worth of apparel in the next five years.”

So far, European retailers have said they are willing to pay that price. H&M, the largest buyer of clothes from Bangladesh, has agreed to the deal. So have Carrefour, the world’s second-largest retailer, Benetton, Marks & Spencer and El Corte Inglés. All told, 60 percent of garments produced in Bangladesh go to European retailers.

Most U.S. companies, however, balked at the language in the accord. Some said it would would expose them to excessive legal liability — particularly in America’s litigious courts. Written by labor groups, the agreement would require retailers who source clothing from Bangladesh to commit to pay for inspections, building upgrades and training — all enforced by binding arbitration.

Gap said this week it was “ready to sign the accord,” provided that the language on arbitration is removed. If that change were made, then any company that violated the terms of the agreement would simply be expelled from the plan rather than face legal liability.

The largest U.S. retailing association, the National Retail Federation, has said it would prefer to develop an alternative to the current proposal.

“It is a one-size-fits-all approach without any recognition as to how the industry operates around the world,” NRF president Matthew Shay said.

So far, the only major U.S. company to sign up has been PVH, which includes Calvin Klein.

Supporters of the accord say that the U.S. companies are simply trying to dodge an extra cost.

“It’s a smokescreen,” Nova said. “The agreement doesn’t create any additional legal liability. Companies only have to meet the terms of the agreement.”

Other experts are similarly puzzled by the worries over arbitration.

“You have major British companies like Marks & Spencer and Tesco signing up, respected companies from a legal system that isn’t all that different from our own,” said Janice Bellace, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at theWharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not clear why the U.S. companies think it will be so different.”

U.S. retailers are facing pressure to improve their safety standards. Last week, the International Labor Rights Forum and United Students Against Sweatshops launched a “Gap Deathtraps” Web site with photos of the factory collapse, urging Gap to sign the retailing agreement.

Gap has not been linked to Rana Plaza, the factory in question, although it does have contracts with 78 of Bangladesh’s 6,500 factories. In a recent statement, Gap reiterated that it has invested $1 million in fire safety and was ready to commit up to $22 million for further improvements in the context of a broader agreement.

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, said it had “committed to rigorous inspections of 100 percent of factories that supply private-label or goods directly to the company within six months.” The company contrasted this to the labor-backed agreement, which would commit to inspections for at least 65 percent of garment factories.

Other U.S. companies, such as J.C. Penney, are waiting to see the results of the alternative proposal put forward by the National Retail Federation.

The split among retailers could undermine the effectiveness of any new safety standards, Bellace, of Wharton, said. That’s because many garment shops in Bangladesh are small and face heavy pressure to keep costs down.

Without a single, clear agreement among global retailers, she said, “it’s unrealistic to think that these factories will be able to comply with the safety standards.”

Even if all of the major retailers can come to a single agreement, there will still be plenty of questions about enforcement, said Layna Mosley, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

One key question, she said, is whether local labor groups will be empowered to speak out against safety standards. The government of Bangladesh has proposed reforms to make it easier for workers to join unions, but it is unclear whether they will pass the legislature.

Green Movement activists live in fear as Iran’s...

Sun, 19 May 2013 22:44:54 -0500

Green Movement activists live in fear as Iran’s presidential election nears

A journalist and an activist tell of four years of struggle under the shadow of arrests, beatings and torture

May 17 2013

Nearly four years have passed since the birth of Iran’s green movement. Arising from the massive street protests against the official results of the 2009 presidential election, it endured brutal repression and finally receded in the face of arrests, beatings, and torture. Three of its most prominent figures – Mir-Hossein Mousavi, his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, and Mehdi Karroubi – have been under house arrest for more than two years. Other movement leaders are in prison or exile.

According to a recent report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iranian authorities are holding at least 40 journalists in prison as the June presidential election approaches, the second-highest total in the world. But what has become of others in the movement’s middle ranks inside the country, the political activists and journalists who stayed back?

I meet up with Arash – not his real name – by a newsstand on Tehran’s Enghelab Avenue. He has written for several of the newspapers that passersby are perusing on their way to work. As we walk to a nearby cafe, I ask what drew him to journalism. “Actually, I wanted to be a lawyer,” he replies. “But I was looking for an identity, I wanted to be a part of what the majority of Iranians were experiencing. I saw that in journalism.”

After the 1997 election, which swept the reformist Mohammad Khatami to the presidency, many young Iranians began to define their identities through social action. “Some joined political parties,” Arash explains, “others became involved in university associations. I started working as a journalist in the spring of 2000.”

Early that May, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vexed by the Khatami administration’s relaxation of state media control and censorship, ordered the judiciary to shut dozens of reformist papers in a single day; scores of prominent journalists were arrested in the raids. It was not a good time to set out in the field. Was he afraid?

Reformist journalists

“I wasn’t really afraid, at least not as much as I am today. We made up the second generation of reformist journalists. There was a strong sense of camaraderie and the fear was less intense because it was shared. There were giants who would take the brunt of the crackdowns, people like [journalists] Akbar Ganji, Shams ol-Vaezin, Masoud Behnood. We, the younger ones, were not the first in line when it came to arrests.”

We enter Cafe Godot, a modern coffee house whose young patrons are filling the air with cigarette smoke. As Arash lights up as well, he tells me about the summer of 2009, when the demonstrations first erupted. What he has to say surprises me.

“I didn’t participate in street protests. Basically, I didn’t believe in those tactics. I believed street presence would be fruitless by itself, that the regime had to be engaged in a dialogue. This point of view resulted in me becoming somewhat isolated among my friends.”

Still, he was not untouched by the crackdown that followed – his girlfriend was summoned to the ministry of information to answer for his writings. “It caused an emotional and ethical upheaval in me. I became more reclusive, more frightful, and in a way, a hostage to events, to fate.

“The self-exile of many of my journalist friends … I think that was the worst blow. I lost many of my friends, my emotional and professional supports … How long will it take to develop such friendships in my life again? All contacts with friends who have left Iran have been severed, because of my caution and their prudence. I have no contact with anyone on the other side. No one. And you certainly know our situation inside [Iran].”

Chain smoking, he is now on his fourth cigarette. “I feel such monotony,” he continues. “Each day is like the day before; not only do we have no psychological stability, we don’t even have financial security. This profession is the opposite of others. I mean, the more your professional rank rises, the more you’re in danger.”

So why does he persist? Or why not emigrate?

“You know, this job has become a part of my identity,” he says. “To tell you the truth, daily professional stress has become an addiction. Over the last three years I have become very stoic, and since censorship has made publications and dailies ineffectual, I have become more interested in research work.

“If I emigrate, I would be limited to Persian media outlets. And, well, I consider journalism at home more effective and more important,” he says, seemingly contradicting his preceding comment about the ineffectuality of the profession.

Social cohesion

In his view, the green movement is not “distilled in demonstrations and politics. It’s a form of social cohesion and solidarity… It has had many other effects, in the arts, in the society at large.”

I ask him about the upcoming presidential election and his hopes for the future. “Hope is not limited to elections,” he muses. “My hope rests on collective exercise of tolerance by the Iranian society and the political powers. Working to learn to listen … The elections are just a family feud within the ruling echelons. See, we are nobodies in these elections.”

Another day, in a distant corner of the city, I visit Ahmad, a political activist whose name has also been changed for this article.

Greeting me with a smile, he ushers me in to his one-bedroom apartment. Shelves filled with books on politics, sociology, and history line the walls; here and there a novel has slipped in.

“In my last year of high school and first year of university, I became attracted to politics,” he tells me. “Not in the sense in which I am involved today, but student activities. They drew me to politics – my first main foray was during the 2005 national elections.”

He worked at the reformist campaign headquarters, but Iranian voters, disenchanted by how little had changed during Khatami’s two terms in office, turned in other directions and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president.

Ahmad had been summoned by his university’s disciplinary committee that year for publishing a series of pro-reformist bulletins. “They gave me a written warning, which could have had dangerous consequences.” But he continued his political activism.

“While the price [of activism] wasn’t that high then, they were escalating step by step,” he says. “The first such toll is like an ugly stigma. When you break through that, then it becomes normal. For example, the summons by the disciplinary committee that year indeed carried a high price, but afterward, even expulsion, which also happened to me, was no longer a big deal. It had become routine. Receiving sentences from judges and spending time in jail also became routine.”

Ahmad says that he was involved in the presidential campaign during 2009 as well. “I had lots of hope. Until two days before the election, I had lots of hope.” He pauses, then carries on. “Two nights before the elections, I felt something was about to happen, [because of] things that Ahmadinejad said in the debates with Mousavi, Khamenei’s June 4 speech, and the way the government began treating the [reformist] campaigners.”

He describes a commentary he wrote, published just three days before the election, in which he called on Iranians to be vigilant to forestall an event like the CIA-sponsored coup d’etat of August 1953 that toppled the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh. “The evening of June 13, 2009, when they started announcing the election results, became one of the worst nights of my life. I was certain that there had been a coup.”

He says that the ensuing arrests of scores of political activists made him fearful, and he stayed away from his home for nearly 10 days until things settled down. “Later on, I discovered that the information ministry officials had been quite focused on me. I learned this from friends who had been summoned to the ministry.”

Political aims

He says that when it became clear that the green movement was not a fleeting phenomenon, he felt that his political activities had become truly meaningful: “I spent a lot of energy then. I believed that the movement had to continue on its path even if its political aims were not realized in the short term.

“As I had a history of detention, I tried to help people who were arrested … More importantly, we covered events and demonstrations – we would collect photos and videos and send them to foreign media outlets.”

Ahmad says that he was prepared to be arrested at any moment. “I was ready to spend two or three years in prison, and that was not a high price for me. I was ready to pay that cost.”

In December 2009, the government brought the hammer down on dissent, sanctioning savage attacks on street demonstrators. There were no more large-scale protests until spring 2011, after the Arab spring had created an opening. That revival was short-lived, in part due to the incarceration of Mousavi and Karroubi with which the government responded to the marches of 25 Bahman (February 14).

Ahmad concedes that he is no longer as politically active as he once was. “The main reason is that the communal energy has flagged. Not that I feel hopeless, like so many others whose lack of hope made them give up politics. In fact, the level of excitement among us activists is in direct proportion to society’s enthusiasm and dynamism, which, well, has subsided at the moment … But I still hold to the same vision I did prior to the 2009 election.”

Meanwhile, the developments of the last four years have affected him in more personal ways. “I have become a more sensitive person, which is normal. I’ve been detained twice during this period, interrogated and maltreated – events which affect you. My capacity to overlook daily incidents has diminished.”

He describes what it means to be a political activist in the Iran of 2013. “We really don’t have such a thing called politics as it exists in the real world – not when the slightest overt action results in arrests. Most of our activities are in the virtual world, in the domains of Facebook and the Internet. We disseminate the news, launch a tweeter cascade, and of course attend casual gatherings at each other’s homes.”

Rest and recuperate

While he sometimes takes a week or even a month off from all political activity to rest and recuperate, he says he is not about to give up on his activism, or on his country.

“The cost to my personal life has been high… but I never hold society at fault. I have never regretted the path I’ve embarked on. I am not arrogantly proud, but I think I am on the right path.”

What plans does he have for the few weeks remaining until the presidential vote?

“I don’t see much of a role for myself,” he replies. “My level of political activity usually doesn’t mirror society’s, where there is a rise in activity at the approach of elections and then it tapers off. I try to continue at my own tempo.”

At the same time, he observes, one has to take advantage of such moments, especially when it is clear that there are deep rifts within the ruling system.

Ahmad’s mood appears to have changed over the course of our conversation. Speaking with greater ease, he says that if all the progressive political forces in the country focus on a single candidate, he might become active in the campaign, despite all the hardships he has experienced.

Ultimately, he too contradicts himself.

“The reality is that our society’s development process is not one that will get somewhere quickly. We must use every opportunity, in any space that opens up for progress. These types of occasions are chances for resuscitation, for getting small creeks flowing again.

If we don’t take advantage of such opportunities, the society will in all likelihood end up politically incapacitated or dead, leaving a dark void with an unfathomable end. It has happened in other countries.

“I will certainly participate in the electoral sphere, to help nurture democracy even a little. What happened after the 2009 election may recur or a moderate president may come to power. It is a win-win game. Of course, we have to pay the price that comes with it.”

Star Trek Into Darkness - A Coded Manifesto to the Soldiers in...

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:53:41 -0500

Star Trek Into Darkness - A Coded Manifesto to the Soldiers in our Armed Forces. (Spoilers)

May 17 2013

Though rare, letters sent to prisoners of war are usually scrubbed clean of any potentially helpful information and sterilized, so to speak, prior to being delivered to the captive soldiers. A useful message may make it through if it is targeted to just the right people and disguised or coded well enough to evade detection.

Many of our men and women in the armed forces are stuck doing a job that they know to be morally deficient and an unjust expense of American treasure, blood and goodwill. They are, however, bound by their oath and service commitment to continue to follow the orders of their superiors - to see the mission through. In many cases, their superiors are stuck in the same position - having to execute a mission that they have no faith in and see as a betrayal of conscience. They are all in effect Prisoners of War.

I am one of them.

If you pay close attention to JJ Abrams newest Star Trek film you will note that he dedicates it to the men and women who have fought and sacrificed in the armed services since 9/11. Not to the victims of the attacks - to the soldiers who have carried out the response. You see Star Trek Into Darkness is a film that contains encoded messages telling these captive men and women of conscience that there is a path to redemption.

The most visible example is the discussion between Kirk and Spock on a shuttle en route to board the Enterprise. They had just been sent on a secret mission to kill a terrorist who just executed an attack on the Federation headquarters. In the distorted morality field of hollywood cinema I didn’t even recognize the problem until Spock pointed it out. Captain Pike, Kirks mentor, had been killed in the attack. Many innocent civilians were dead. They knew where the perpetrator was and they had the means to destroy him - movie logic dictates that they proceed to do just that. Spock, however, jars the audience back to reality by pointing out that execution of a criminal without trail is a betrayal of justice. Furthermore, the violation of the sovereign space of the Klingon home-world that would be required in such a mission was itself unjust and risked igniting a full blown conflict with the Klingons. Spock is emphatic and direct - to follow the orders they have been given would be wrong, immoral, unjust and places humanity in even greater danger.

Question your mission. Look at the broader picture. Apply the principles that you hold dear to the execution of your mission. Trust your conscience and be true to your convictions. These are the messages encoded into the scene. They are not the things that our military wants our soldiers to be doing.

Wow. I knew JJ Abrams was liberal, but we haven’t heard from the anti-war hollywood liberal camp in a while and it is refreshing to see them back in action. I had assumed they were all sucking on the teat of the Department of Defenses public relations program that grants exclusive access if you promote the right message of American exceptionalism, hubris and intervention (I am looking at you Kathryn Bigelow). It appears that if your movie doesn’t require the use of contemporary military sets, equipment or personell with which the military can tempt you then you can say what you really want to.

A second powerful moment is perhaps the scene which has the potential to have the greatest impact of all for service members. Chief Engineer Scotty has refused to sign receipt for weapons on board the Enterprise about which he does not know the makeup, purpose or potential. He protests to Captain Kirk and explains his rationale - that he would risk the lives of the entire crew if the weapons were to interfere with the reactor. Kirk does not share his concern and at a tense moment directly order Scotty to sign the receipt. Pause. This tiff over a seemingly innocuous bit of paperwork is, to me, the most important scene of the film. Scotty has the option here of simply signing the forms and absolving his own conscience. He could simply state that he was ordered to sign the form and so the consequences that may follow would be upon the head of his Captain - not on his own. That is what I expected Scotty to do. That is what we ask our soldiers to do - perform the mission and let the higherups worry about whether it is justified or moral. Brilliantly, Scotty does not just follow the order - After a short pause he states that rather than obey a direct order from his Captain against his judgement he would resign his post. There is an awkward stop where Kirk has to take a moment to consider the fact that his Engineer feels such strong conviction about the matter that he is willing to sacrifice his career for it. Kirk starts to convince Scotty that the issue is not worth resigning over - but Scotty interrupts and reaffirms - “Do you accept my resignation or not?” It was all that I could do not to stand up and cheer in the theater. Kirk reluctantly accepts the resignation - but it is clear that the exchange has taken him by surprise.

You have the power to act on your conscience. You have the power to say no. The armed services are not a collective following the directives of a single commander in chief. It is composed of individuals who each have a spark of humanity and a spirit of conscience which informs them of right and wrong. What ever contract you have signed, whatever obligation you owe - when faced with an order that violates what you know to be right - you can choose not to be the weapon in the hand of the oppressor. There is no way the military would approve of a scene like this in one of it’s sponsored propaganda pieces.

Finally the message that the movie closes with really drives home the point of the film. In a speech at the opening of a new federation headquarters Kirk says something the effect of: “Despite the anger and outrage that we feel when attacked - by abandoning all of our principles, our morality and our conscience in pursuit of the enemy, we risk becoming the very monster that we despise.” This is one of the last lines of the films and you are hit with the dedication to our servicemen and women just a few moments later. The close proximity of this message and that dedication are no accident. This film is meant for the military - for the prisoners of war.

There is much more to analyze about the film and it’s message to the troops. The transformation that Kirk undergoes as he acknowledges the revenge and hatred that was his motivation and listens to his conscience (Spock), his own decision to disobey orders and take a morally sound path to fulfilling his mission and his willingness to confront his superiors when he knows their actions to be wrong all carry powerful signals to those who are accustomed to command structure and the impulse to follow order without question or introspection.

After the Anti-war film Oblivion and this latest Star Trek offering with a message of conviction and conscience I am eagerly hopeful that the liberal peace loving Hollywood has returned. Before discovering the philosophy of liberty I never thought that I woud be a peace loving hippy. Though I find myself in the armed services now (despite my best efforts to get out) I proudly wear that title.

Seizure of AP Phone Records Continues Obama Admin’s Attack...

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:00:23 -0500

Seizure of AP Phone Records Continues Obama Admin’s Attack on Whistleblowers

May 17 2013

Mark Seibel (McClatchy Newspapers): Seizure of a news organization’s phone records should be illegal as it limits the ability of journalists to investigate and report - something guaranteed by the Constitution

The Biggest Obama Scandals Are Proven and Ignored There is clear...

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:39:24 -0500

The Biggest Obama Scandals Are Proven and Ignored

There is clear evidence that he has broken the law on multiple occasions. And not even Republicans seem to care.

May 17 2013

Prompted by Peggy Noonan’s claim in The Wall Street Journal that “we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate,” Andrew Sullivan steps forward to defend Pres. Obama’s honor. “Can she actually believe this?,” he asks incredulously. “Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?”

An Obama critic, having overplayed her hand, gave Sullivan an opening to respond with what amounts to, “It isn’t as bad as Watergate, nor as bad as George W. Bush.” Let’s concede those points. I don’t much care what Obama’s Republican critics say about him. The scandals they’re presently touting, bad as two of them are, aren’t even the worst of Team Obama’s transgressions.

I have a stronger critique. Sullivan hasn’t internalized the worst of what Obama’s done, because his notion of scandal is implicitly constrained by whatever a president’s partisan opponents tout as scandalous. If they criticize Obama wrongly, he defends Obama proportionately.

To see what he’s forgotten as a result, let’s run once more through the first questions in Sullivan’s latest Obama apologia.

Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes?

Yes, President Obama has broken the law on multiple occasions. Despite clearly stating, in a 2008 questionnaire, that the commander-in-chief is not lawfully empowered to ignore treaties duly ratified by the Senate, Obama has willfully failed to enforce the torture treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and duly ratified by the Senate, that compels him to investigate and prosecute torture. As Sullivan put it earlier this year, “what Obama and Holder have done (or rather not done) is illegal.”

Obama also violated the War Powers Resolution, a law he has specifically proclaimed to be Constitutionally valid, when committing U.S. troops to Libya without Congressional approval. Or as Sullivan put it in 2011, “I’m with Conor. The war in Libya becomes illegal from now on. And the imperial presidency grows even more powerful.”

On the subject of war crimes, Sullivan wrote that “Obama and attorney-general Eric Holder have decided to remain in breach of the Geneva Conventions and be complicit themselves in covering up the war crimes of their predecessors - which means, of course, that those of us who fought for Obama’s election precisely because we wanted a return to the rule of law were conned.” In a separate entry, he went so far as to say that Obama is “a clear and knowing accessory to war crimes, and should at some point face prosecution as well, if the Geneva Conventions mean anything any more.” That seems rather farther than Noonan went in her column.

Obama has not, as Sullivan points out, traded arms for hostages with Iran, or started a war with no planning for the inevitable occupation that would follow. But there are different questions that could be asked about Obama that would perhaps be more relevant to his behavior.

Has he ordered the assassination of any American citizens in secret without due process? Did he kill any of their teenage kids without ever explaining how or why that happened?

Has he refused to reveal even the legal reasoning he used to conclude his targeted killing program is lawful?

Has he waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers?

Has he spied on millions of innocent Americans without a warrant or probable cause?

Does he automatically count dead military-aged males killed by U.S. drones as “militants”?

Did he “sign a bill that enshrines in law the previously merely alleged executive power of indefinite detention without trial of terror suspects”?

There is more, as Sullivan knows, and it all amounts to a scandalous presidency, even if it happens that few Republicans care about the most scandalous behavior, and have instead spent almost a year* now obsessing about Benghazi. The IRS scandal and Department of Justice leak-investigation excesses are worrisome, but the biggest scandals definitely go all the way to the top, and are still largely ignored even by commentators who have acknowledged that they’re happening. Sullivan has noted the stories as they broke, and seemed, for fleeting moments, to confront their gravity, noting the violation of very serious laws, and even once stating that Obama deserves to be prosecuted! Yet in response to Noonan, he writes, “So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.” How inexplicably they forget.

And Sullivan is hardly alone. At the New York Times, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and beyond, exceptional journalists take great care to document alarming abuses against the rule of law, the separation of powers, transparency, and human rights perpetrated by the Obama Administration. On a given subject, the coverage leaves me awed and proud to be part of the same profession. But when it comes time for synthesis, bad heuristics take over. Confronted with the opportunism and absurdity of the GOP, Obama’s sins are forgiven, as if he should be graded on a curve. His sins are forgotten, as if “this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.”

Yes. He. Has.

DOJ Releases Completely Blacked-Out Memo on Surveillance of Text...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:29:31 -0500

DOJ Releases Completely Blacked-Out Memo on Surveillance of Text Messages

May 17 2013

The Justice Department has released 15 pages of completely blacked-out material in response to a request for information about how text messages from cellphones are intercepted. The American Civil Liberties Union says the Obama administration is reading emails and other electronic communications without a warrant, despite a court ruling against the practice. In response to a recent Freedom of Information Act request on the issue, the Justice Department released a memo with black rectangles covering every bit of text except the title, sender and recipient. ACLU spokesperson Josh Bell told ABC News: “We got very little information about the policy on text messages. [The document] does not even show the date, let alone what the policy is.”

Obama Worse Than Nixon? Pentagon Papers Attorney Decries AP...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:20:30 -0500

Obama Worse Than Nixon? Pentagon Papers Attorney Decries AP Phone Probe, Julian Assange Persecution

May 17 2013

The Justice Department’s disclosure that it had secretly subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press has prompted a wave of comparisons between President Obama and Richard Nixon. Four decades ago, the Nixon administration attempted to block The New York Times from publishing a secret history of the Vietnam War leaked to the newspaper by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Two days after the Times first published excerpts of what became known as the “Pentagon Papers,” the Nixon government asked for and received a Supreme Court injunction against the newspaper, arguing that publication of the documents posed a “grave and immediate danger to the security of the United States.” We speak to James Goodale, the general counsel at The New York Times during the Pentagon Papers crackdown. Goodale is a leading legal expert on the First Amendment and has just published a new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.” Goodale said he wrote the book in part because of the work of Julian Assange of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, and how he is likely being targeted by the U.S. government in an ongoing grand jury probe. “My book is meant to be a clarion call to the journalist community: Wake up! There’s danger out there,” Goodale says. “You may not like Assange, but wake up! The First Amendment is really going to be damaged. If Obama goes forward and succeeds, he will have succeeded where Nixon failed.”

“Astoundingly Disturbing”: Obama Administration...

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:04:59 -0500

“Astoundingly Disturbing”: Obama Administration Claims Power to Wage Endless War Across the Globe

May 17 2013

A Pentagon official predicted Thursday the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates could last up to 20 more years. The comment came during a Senate hearing revisiting the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, enacted by Congress days after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. At the hearing, Pentagon officials claimed the AUMF gives the president power to wage endless war anywhere in the world, including in Syria, Yemen and the Congo. “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here,” said Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine. “You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution here today.” We play excerpts of Thursday’s Senate hearing and our recent interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new bestseller, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.”

its-salah: Following his release from Guantanamo Bay, Sami...

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:03:02 -0500

its-salah:

Following his release from Guantanamo Bay, Sami Al-Hajj, a (former) Guantanamo Bay detainee, dashes towards his eight year old son Mohammad and swoops him up in his arms, hugging him and planting tender kisses on his face in their first reunion after seven years.

After being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for seven years, during which he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured, including being physically, sexually, and psychologically abused, Al Hajj was released without any charges held against him.

Al Hajj, a journalist for the Al Jazeera network, was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 while on his way to do camerawork for the network concerning the war that had recently broken out in Afghanistan. It has been speculated by both Al Hajj’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, and Reporters Without Borders that the main reason that he was incarcerated for so long was due to the US Miliary’s desire to make him an informant against Al Jazeera, as most of Al Hajj’s interrogations consisted of American interrogators questioning him about the (Al Jazeera) network.

While in Guantanamo, Al Hajj wrote a poem titled Humiliated in Shackles to his son Mohammad:

When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees,
Hot tears covered my face.

When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed
A message for my son.

Mohammad, I am afflicted.
In my despair, I have no one but Allah for comfort.

The oppressors are playing with me,
As they move freely around the world.

They ask me to spy on my countrymen,
Claiming it would be a good deed.

They offer me money and land,
And freedom to go where I please.

Their temptations seize
My attention like lightning in the sky.

But their gift is an empty snake,
Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom,

They have monuments to liberty
And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.

But I explained to them that
Architecture is not justice.

America, you ride on the backs of orphans,
And terrorize them daily.

Bush, beware.
The world recognizes an arrogant liar.

To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears.
I am homesick and oppressed.

Mohammad, do not forget me.
Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man.

I was humiliated in the shackles.
How can I now compose verses? How can I now write?

After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears,
How can I write poetry?

My soul is like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish,
Violent with passion.

I am a captive, but the crimes are my captors’.
I am overwhelmed with apprehension.

Lord, unite me with my son Mohammad.
Lord, grant success to the righteous.

Palestinians Mark 65th Anniversary of Nakba (Catastrophe of...

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:44:20 -0500

Palestinians Mark 65th Anniversary of Nakba (Catastrophe of 1948)

May 16 2013

On Nakba day, Palestinians commemorate the annual anniversary by holding rallies asserting their right of return. 65 years have passed since historic Palestine was occupied in 1948