Editor's note: Mike was at the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center because he's participating in the Voices for Creative Nonviolence's 30-day, 320-mile "Walk for Justice," from Springfield to North Chicago, Illinois, to reclaim funding for the common good and away from war.
Has This Country Gone Completely Insane?
June 30, 2006
by Mike Ferner
This afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee while sitting in the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center on Chicago's south side, a Veterans Administration cop walked up to me and said, "OK, you've had your 15 minutes, it's time to go."
"Huh?", I asked intelligently, not quite sure what he was talking about.
"You can't be in here protesting," officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt.
"Well, I'm not protesting, I'm having a cup of coffee," I returned, thinking that logic would convince Adkins to go back to his earlier duties of guarding against serious terrorists.
Flipping his badge open, he said, "No, not with that shirt. You're protesting and you have to go."
Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, "Not before I finish my coffee."
He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason. "Hey, listen. I'm a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I'm sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I'm not protesting and you can't kick me out."
"You'll either go or we'll arrest you," Adkins threatened.
"Well, you'll just have to arrest me," I said, wondering what strange land I was now living in.
You know the rest. Handcuffed, led away to the facility's security office past people with surprised looks on their faces, read my rights, searched, and written up.
The officer who did the formalities, Eric Ousley, was professional in his duties. When I asked him if he was a vet, it turned out he had been a hospital corpsman in the Navy. We exchanged a couple sea stories. He uncuffed me early. And he allowed as to how he would only charge me with disorderly conduct, letting me go on charges of criminal trespass and weapons possession -- a pocket knife -- which he said would have to be destroyed (something I rather doubt since it was a nifty Swiss Army knife with not only a bottle opener, but a tweezers AND a toothpick).
After informing me I could either pay the $275 fine on the citation or appear in court, Ousley escorted me off the premises, warning me if I returned with "that shirt" on, I'd be arrested and booked into jail.
I'm sure I could go back to officers Adkins' and Ousleys' fiefdom with a shirt that said, "Nuke all the hajis," or "Show us your tits," or any number of truly obscene things and no one would care. Just so it's not "that shirt" again.
And just for the record? I'm not paying the fine. I'll see Adkins and Ousley and Dubya's Director of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, if he wants to show up, in United States District Court on the appointed date. And if there's a Chicago area attorney who'd like to take the case, I'd really like to sue them -- from Dubya on down. I have to believe that this whole country has not yet gone insane, just the government. This kind of behavior can't be tolerated. It must be challenged.
Mike Ferner served as a Navy corpsman during Vietnam and is obviously a member of Veterans For Peace.
Friday, June 30, 2006
The Living And The Dead
by Mary Pitt
June 30, 2006
The living sing songs of inspiration, songs of praise for the superiority of their own nation, their own principles, and their own concept of God. They are the best of humans and they will triumph over all because their hearts are pure.
The dead are silent.
The living tell tales of great wars, of valiant men who have willingly laid down their lives in the pursuit of victory for their side, (whichever side that might have been), of men who still fought bravely though gravely wounded because their cause was just.
The dead remain still.
The living expound on the greater good of "our side" while exposing what they believe to be the shortcomings of others. "We" are good and "they" are evil so "they" must yield to "our" will, must become not only subject but subservient to "our" interpretations of fact because "we" are always right.
The dead say nothing.
The living mourn the loss of their loved ones and lament the circumstances of the passing of their dear departed friends and family members. They pray at the gravesides, beat their breasts, and shout out to the heavens for comfort in their pain while swelling with pride that they had sacrificed that beloved soul to the interest of "winning".
The dead do not reply.
The living march in parades; they listen to leaders expounding on the great heroism of those who gave their all in the cause of proving one group of people superior to others and bringing great honor and glory to their native land. They listen to the sounds of marching bands playing patriotic music that stirs the soul and they wave the flag of their nation in a great show of loyalty.
The dead lie still.
The living argue, struggle, and even fight over whether a war is worth fighting and how best to go about once again proving the reasons for asserting mastery over other men; over whether, when, and how to end the fighting and return to a brief period of peace before creating a situation in which yet another war will be begun.
The dead have no comment.
The living squabble and fight over whose God is the One True God, which Bible is literally true and which heretical, which nation is truly blessed, can do no wrong, and should rule over another.
The dead lie side by side in perfect peace and brotherhood for they know the answers.
How many more must die before we learn what the dead already know?
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Spreading Cancer
Depleted uranium turns Bush's lies into high-tech horror
by Robert C. Koehler
Published on Thursday, June 29, 2006 by Common Wonders
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0629-32.htm
The unending game of “pretend” that the U.S. media allow George Bush to play on the global stage, so often letting his lying utterances hang suspended, unchallenged, in the middle of the story, as though they were plausible — as though a class of third-graders couldn’t demolish them with a few innocent questions — feels like the journalistic equivalent of waterboarding. Gasp! Some truth, please!
I suggest the prez has forfeited the right to command a headline, or half a story, or an uninterrupted quote: “. . . we’ll defend ourselves, but at the same time we’re actively working with our partners to spread peace and democracy,” he said last week in Austria.
Surely “spreading democracy” should no longer be allowed to appear in print, between now and 2008, unless accompanied by a parenthetical clarification (“not true,” stated as profanely as local standards allow). And that, of course, would only be the media’s first step back into integrity with the public.
The occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the entire war (to promote) terror . . . please, please, can these no longer be trotted out in consequence-free abstraction, but as the high-tech malevolence they are, actively continuing the incalculable devastation of countries and their populations?
The bodies keep piling up, the toxic horrors spread. Hasn’t anyone in this place ever heard of depleted uranium? Is the health crisis in Iraq and, indeed, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, not to mention Kosovo and among returning vets for the last four American wars, somehow irrelevant to “the course” we’re asked to stay?
“Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with two cancers — one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney — he had three different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. . . . My wife has nine members of her family with cancer.”
This is Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the oncology center at the largest hospital in Basra, speaking in 2003 at a peace conference in Japan. Why is it that only peace activists are able to hear people like this? Why hasn’t he been asked to testify before Congress as its members debate the future of this war and the next?
“Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning,” he went on. “They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most. However, cancer of the lymph system, which can develop anywhere on the body and has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also common.”
Depleted uranium — DU — is the Defense Establishment euphemism for U-238, a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process and the ultimate dirty weapon material. It’s almost twice as dense as lead, catches fire when launched and explodes on impact into microscopically fine particles, or “nano-particles,” which are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin; it’s also radioactive, with a half-life of 4.468 billion years.
And we make bombs and bullets out of it — it’s the ultimate penetrating weapon. We dropped at least 300 tons of it on Iraq during Gulf War I (the first time it was used in combat) and created Gulf War Syndrome. This time around, the estimated DU use on defenseless Iraq is 1,700 tons, far more of it in major population centers. Remember shock and awe? We were pounding Baghdad, in those triumphant early days, with low-grade nuclear weapons, raining down cancer, neurological disorders, birth defects and much, much more on the people we claimed to be liberating. We weren’t spreading democracy, we were altering the human genome.
As we “protected ourselves,” in the words of the president, from Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, we opened our own arsenal of WMD on them, contaminating the country’s soil and polluting its air — indeed, unleashing a nuclear dust into the troposphere and contaminating the whole world.
“We used to think (DU) traveled up to a hundred miles,” Chris Busby told me. Busby, a chemical physicist and member of the British government’s radiation risk committee, as well as the founder of the European Committee of Radiation Risk, has monitored air quality in Great Britain. Based on these findings, “It looks like it goes quite around the planet,” he said.
While Bush mouths ironic whoppers — “We will be standing with the people of Afghanistan and Iraq until their hopes for freedom and liberty are fulfilled,” he told the U.N. General Assembly a while back — his actions pass, in the words of former Livermore Labs scientist Leuren Moret, “a death sentence on the Middle East and Central Asia.”
A war crime of unprecedented dimension is unfolding as we avert our eyes. Perhaps it’s simply too big to see, or to grasp, so we lull ourselves into the half-belief that the powers that be know what they’re doing and it will all turn out for the best. Meanwhile, the contagion spreads, the children die, the planet becomes uninhabitable.
Supreme Court rejects Guantanamo military tribunal
By James Vicini
6/29/06
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a major defeat for the Bush administration, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the military tribunal for a Guantanamo prisoner cannot proceed because it violates the Geneva Conventions.
"We conclude that the military commission convened to try (Salim Ahmed) Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate" the international agreement that covers treatment of prisoners of war, as well as U.S. military laws, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court majority in the 5-3 decision.
That part of the decision was a stinging blow for the administration in a case brought by Hamdan, who was Osama bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan.
At the White House, spokesman Tony Snow said, "We have no comment until we have read the decision but we will once we have read the decision."
Bringing It All Back Home:
The Bush War on Liberty Intensifies
Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=718
Glenn Greenwald has the goods on the all-out war that the Bush Regime and its bootlicking sycophants throughout the right-wing media are waging against the free press. The recent "controversy" over the New York Times report on the Regime's surveillance of bank records is, as Greenwald astutely notes, based entirely on outright falsehoods. It is also being deliberately stoked by the White House, whose lies about the non-existent "damage" the NYT story has done to national security are exposed here -- by their own words. Greenwald turns up quote after quote, going back years, many of them from Bush himself, detailing the same kind of information relayed in the Times' story. Yet, as Greenwald and others report (Atrios has been good on this as well), the Regime's hate campaign has now burst into the media mainstream, where calls for Times editors to stand trial for the capital crime of treason are routinely being aired, along with scarcely veiled exhortations for mob violence against the press. (But only the so-called "liberal" press. The fact that the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and other papers have also run stories on the banking records is ignored or dismissed by the hatemongers.)
Make no mistake: the Bush Regime intends to silence all dissenting voices and suppress all politically harmful information in the American establishment. It's a not a drive toward totalitarianism; they don't want or need to repress and control everything. They don't care if bloggers rant, or Harper's fulminates, or Michael Moore makes movies, or Noam Chomsky sells books (or even speaks at West Point). They are perfectly happy to allow isolated enclaves of dissent to float around out there somewhere -- as long they remain isolated and, above all, ineffectual. What they cannot tolerate -- and increasingly will not tolerate -- is any institution, organization or person in a position of genuine influence on the American power structure to undermine the presidential dictatorship that the Regime has established. (There will be more on this theme in the next Global Eye column.) Anyone within the power structure who attempts to report disturbing facts or "inconvenient truths" about the Regime's unconstitutional secret government will be attacked relentlessly. It begins with slander to destroy their credibility and effectiveness, to marginalize them, to destroy their public position -- and to frighten off anyone else who might support them or give them hearing.
In the past, this has usually been sufficient; there's been no need for recourse to sterner measures. You don't arrest Dan Rather, you simply drive him out of his job. You don't imprison John Kerry; you just Swift Boat him. But these are increasingly desperate times for the Bush Regime. It is vastly unpopular with the American people. Its war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. And the sheer bulk of its high crimes and misdemeanors has grown so large it can longer be hidden; rotten chunks of this mammoth slagheap are spilling out almost every day. They know that should the tide ever turn completely against them -- if anything even faintly resembling a constitutional republic is ever established again -- they face not just political oblivion but actual prosecution.
And as we all know, desperate times call for desperate measures. If slander and hate don't do the trick, if they are ineffective in cowing Establishment opposition, then the next step is the criminalization of dissent. Thus the not-so-subtle hints from Torturer General Alberto Gonzales about pursuing leakers -- and the leaked-to -- with federal charges. And thus the current trial balloons in the media about charging the NYT with treason. These are serious threats; but just in case they're not enough, we're also getting the increasingly open call for violence against Bush opponents, for the "outraged public" to "take the law into their own hands." These calls are couched -- for now -- as "concerns" about "what might happen" if Bush's opponents continue their "provocations;" they are being phrased -- for now -- as warnings of a fate that the commentators hope will not come to pass. But as the Regime's position grows more precarious, these "concerns" will give way to incitements. Indeed, you can already see this happening with people like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin -- hatemongers with ready and frequent access to the mainstream media.
I've said for years that the most dangerous time will come not when the Regime is flush with triumph but when this vicious gang of thugs find their backs against the wall. That time has come. No doubt Greenwald's warning will be dismissed by the comfortably numb as "typical liberal paranoia" (or ignored by fatuous fools too busy ranting about "blogofascism" to see their own republic disappearing before their eyes). "Come off it," they'll say; "do you really think the Administration will start prosecuting newspapers? They'd never cross that line." But the record clearly shows that the Bush Regime has crossed line after line after line, into depredations that no one could have imagined an American government embracing so openly, so brazenly, with such sinister gusto: torture, concentration camps, indefinite detention, rendition, mass surveillance, "extrajudicial killing," and aggressive war. Where exactly is the line they will NOT cross? They are "so far steep'd in blood" -- and you think they'd blanche at prosecuting newspapers?
As bad as these last five and half years have been, what we have seen so far is just the beginning. There is worse, much worse yet to come.
Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=718
Glenn Greenwald has the goods on the all-out war that the Bush Regime and its bootlicking sycophants throughout the right-wing media are waging against the free press. The recent "controversy" over the New York Times report on the Regime's surveillance of bank records is, as Greenwald astutely notes, based entirely on outright falsehoods. It is also being deliberately stoked by the White House, whose lies about the non-existent "damage" the NYT story has done to national security are exposed here -- by their own words. Greenwald turns up quote after quote, going back years, many of them from Bush himself, detailing the same kind of information relayed in the Times' story. Yet, as Greenwald and others report (Atrios has been good on this as well), the Regime's hate campaign has now burst into the media mainstream, where calls for Times editors to stand trial for the capital crime of treason are routinely being aired, along with scarcely veiled exhortations for mob violence against the press. (But only the so-called "liberal" press. The fact that the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and other papers have also run stories on the banking records is ignored or dismissed by the hatemongers.)
Make no mistake: the Bush Regime intends to silence all dissenting voices and suppress all politically harmful information in the American establishment. It's a not a drive toward totalitarianism; they don't want or need to repress and control everything. They don't care if bloggers rant, or Harper's fulminates, or Michael Moore makes movies, or Noam Chomsky sells books (or even speaks at West Point). They are perfectly happy to allow isolated enclaves of dissent to float around out there somewhere -- as long they remain isolated and, above all, ineffectual. What they cannot tolerate -- and increasingly will not tolerate -- is any institution, organization or person in a position of genuine influence on the American power structure to undermine the presidential dictatorship that the Regime has established. (There will be more on this theme in the next Global Eye column.) Anyone within the power structure who attempts to report disturbing facts or "inconvenient truths" about the Regime's unconstitutional secret government will be attacked relentlessly. It begins with slander to destroy their credibility and effectiveness, to marginalize them, to destroy their public position -- and to frighten off anyone else who might support them or give them hearing.
In the past, this has usually been sufficient; there's been no need for recourse to sterner measures. You don't arrest Dan Rather, you simply drive him out of his job. You don't imprison John Kerry; you just Swift Boat him. But these are increasingly desperate times for the Bush Regime. It is vastly unpopular with the American people. Its war in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. And the sheer bulk of its high crimes and misdemeanors has grown so large it can longer be hidden; rotten chunks of this mammoth slagheap are spilling out almost every day. They know that should the tide ever turn completely against them -- if anything even faintly resembling a constitutional republic is ever established again -- they face not just political oblivion but actual prosecution.
And as we all know, desperate times call for desperate measures. If slander and hate don't do the trick, if they are ineffective in cowing Establishment opposition, then the next step is the criminalization of dissent. Thus the not-so-subtle hints from Torturer General Alberto Gonzales about pursuing leakers -- and the leaked-to -- with federal charges. And thus the current trial balloons in the media about charging the NYT with treason. These are serious threats; but just in case they're not enough, we're also getting the increasingly open call for violence against Bush opponents, for the "outraged public" to "take the law into their own hands." These calls are couched -- for now -- as "concerns" about "what might happen" if Bush's opponents continue their "provocations;" they are being phrased -- for now -- as warnings of a fate that the commentators hope will not come to pass. But as the Regime's position grows more precarious, these "concerns" will give way to incitements. Indeed, you can already see this happening with people like Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin -- hatemongers with ready and frequent access to the mainstream media.
I've said for years that the most dangerous time will come not when the Regime is flush with triumph but when this vicious gang of thugs find their backs against the wall. That time has come. No doubt Greenwald's warning will be dismissed by the comfortably numb as "typical liberal paranoia" (or ignored by fatuous fools too busy ranting about "blogofascism" to see their own republic disappearing before their eyes). "Come off it," they'll say; "do you really think the Administration will start prosecuting newspapers? They'd never cross that line." But the record clearly shows that the Bush Regime has crossed line after line after line, into depredations that no one could have imagined an American government embracing so openly, so brazenly, with such sinister gusto: torture, concentration camps, indefinite detention, rendition, mass surveillance, "extrajudicial killing," and aggressive war. Where exactly is the line they will NOT cross? They are "so far steep'd in blood" -- and you think they'd blanche at prosecuting newspapers?
As bad as these last five and half years have been, what we have seen so far is just the beginning. There is worse, much worse yet to come.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Flag amendment fails by one vote
Compromise vote leaving Constitution unaltered also fails
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:08 p.m. ET June 27, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13579789/
WASHINGTON - A constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration died in a Senate cliffhanger Tuesday, a single vote short of the support needed to send it to the states for ratification a week before Independence Day.
The 66-34 tally in favor of the amendment was one less than the two-thirds required. The House surpassed that threshold last year, 286-130.
The proposed amendment, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, read: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."
Latest best bet
The resolution represented Congress' response to Supreme Court rulings in 1989 and 1990 that burning and other desecrations of the flag are protected as free speech by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Senate supporters said the flag amounts to a national monument in cloth that represents freedom and the sacrifice of American troops.
"Countless men and women have died defending that flag," said Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., closing two days of debate. "It is but a small humble act for us to defend it."
Opposition wins out
Opponents said the amendment would violate the First Amendment right to free speech. And some Democrats complained that majority Republicans were exploiting people's patriotism for political advantage in the midterm elections.
"Our country's unique because our dissidents have a voice," said Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, a World War II veteran who lost an arm in the war and was decorated with the Medal of Honor.
"While I take offense at disrespect to the flag," he said, "I nonetheless believe it is my continued duty as a veteran, as an American citizen, and as a United States senator to defend the constitutional right of protesters to use the flag in nonviolent speech."
Alternative also fails
The Senate also rejected an alternative put forward by assistant Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois. It would have made it against the law to damage the flag on federal land or with the intent of breaching the peace or intimidation. It also would have prohibited unapproved demonstrations at military funerals. The vote was 36-64.
The last time the Senate considered the amendment, in 2000, it fell four votes short of what was needed. Both sides predicted rightly before Tuesday's vote that it would get more support.
The last proposed constitutional amendment that Congress sent to the states for ratification was the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. The normal seven-year deadline for state ratification was extended to 1982, but the ERA couldn't muster the approval of more than 35 state legislatures, three short of the three-fourths of states required under the Constitution.
The 26th Amendment, guaranteeing 18-year-olds the right to vote, was approved by Congress in March 1971 and was ratified by the states less than four months later.
The 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992, was first proposed in 1789. It says pay raises that Congress votes for itself can't take effect until after the next election for members of the House.
Related action
The House also got into the July Fourth spirit Tuesday by passing on a voice vote a measure that would bar condominium and homeowner associations from restricting how the flag can be displayed.
Sponsored by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., the resolution would prohibit those groups from preventing residents from displaying an American flag on their own property. The Senate is considering whether to bring up the measure this year.
Monday, June 26, 2006
Musings From Tom Joad Country
By Sheila Samples
6/26/06
I've been reading about this "grass roots" phenomenon that's sweeping the country. It must not have "swept" down this far, because I scoured the prairies and plains of Oklahoma, and the only thing I came up with was a clump or two of Johnson grass, a few scraggly buffalo and some errant loco weed...
In fact, there's not much movement of any kind in Tom Joad Country. Maybe that's because Oklahoma has always been, or at least has had the reputation of being, not only poor but backwards both intellectually and culturally. If I were so inclined, I could probably debunk this fallacy, but I'd have to start in Tulsa and move east...
People west of Tulsa aren't too concerned with politics. We get involved and come alive for only a couple of things -- A six-pack of Bud Light and OU football. Tulsa denizens like to think of themselves as "cosmopolitan" and politically hip, but they have a tendency to look at issues through an oil prism. That's why we always end up with Stupid White Men like Don Nickles, Jim Inhofe, and Tom Cole. When you think about it, I guess it serves us right...
Okies are independent and "don't want the damned government bleepin' around in their business..." Their political ideology is based on this ONE issue -- Republicans want smaller government; ergo -- they vote Republican. They also have a tendency to believe whatever it is that the last person -- usually a preacher - -says to them. Since Democrats have no voice in Oklahoma, Okies believe Republicans and vote Republican.
I do not understand, however, how the elderly -- most of whom would have starved to death if it had not been for President Roosevelt and the Democrats -- could ever vote Republican. But in Oklahoma, they do, and are dadgummed proud of it.
I do not understand how any military -- and we have a large military presence throughout the state -- could vote Republican. Most military, especially lower enlisted, are in the services as a direct result of being unable to make a living anywhere else. The US military is the largest welfare program in the world. Lifers, such as Colin Powell, have never received a paycheck that wasn't drawn on the US government. Powell, and so many others like him, would not be where they are today if it had not been for government "affirmative action."
The same with civil servants -- government paychecks and retirement bennies come directly from Uncle Sam. I should know. Like Powell, I devoted my entire working life to the government and, although I don't make out like a bandit every month, thanks to Sam I can afford to put food on my family. But in Oklahoma, most of these retired military and civilian folks enthusiastically support programs that cut their own livelihoods -- literally foreclose on their children's future -- by voting Republican...
If we have a grass roots movement in Oklahoma, it is fueled by militant Christians -- mostly southern Baptists who have no clue about the intricacies of politics, but are told by their Christian right-wing brethern that Democrats are whoremongers who think every woman should have an abortion whether she wants one or not, and the gays are coming after their children. This is enough to drive them to the polls to vote Republican.
Okies love America, they love their born-again idiot president, and they are proud to be blind and brazen warriors in God's Very Own Army. Together, they and Bush are proudly in lockstep -- insanely marching to Zion...
But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net.
© 2006 Sheila Samples
Saturday, June 24, 2006
a government provocation
Miami “terror” arrests—a government provocation
By Bill Van Auken
24 June 2006
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j24.shtml
There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to “wage war on the United States” that suggest it, like so many previous “terrorist plots” announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.
None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.
There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat—described by some media outlets as “even bigger than September 11”—was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.
While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.
The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as “the al Qaeda representative.”
The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.
On Thursday, the government’s paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.
It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the “Seas of David,” which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI’s deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David “did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them.”
According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.
Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants “swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda.” Who administered this oath? The “al Qaeda representative,” AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.
Aside from this “loyalty oath” solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.
The only action with which this one individual is charged—all else is words—is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The “al Qaeda representative”—i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.
The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving “with the ‘al Qaeda representative’” to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.
In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a “list of shoe sizes.” Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.
Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been “more aspirational than operational.” In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.
“We preempted their plot,” declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.
At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened “in its earliest stages.”
So “early” was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government’s indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, “Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they’ve never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that’s ever gone beyond just talk.”
Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, “There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all.”
In his press conference, Attorney General Gonzales asserted that the Miami group represented a “new brand of terrorism” created by “the convergence of globalization and technology.”
What these words mean is anyone’s guess. There is no indication that those charged, who were living in a warehouse in the poorest city in America, had access to any technology, and their supposed contact to the wider world was an informer planted by the FBI. The suggestion that the seven men were a “home-grown” terrorist group inspired by contact with Al Qaeda elements over the Internet is supported neither by evidence nor the charges contained in the government’s own indictment.
R. Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney in South Florida, told the media that the defendants had “lived in the United States for most of their lives, but developed a hatred of America.” This is presented as though it constituted evidence of a crime.
It is hardly surprising for someone living in Liberty City to hate the poverty and oppression that prevail there, or for Haitian immigrants to despise the imprisonment and repression that Washington metes out to those attempting to escape the brutal conditions imposed by US imperialism upon their homeland.
What is highly noteworthy is that the federal government decided to intervene in this situation to concoct a phony Al Qaeda connection and trumped up “terror plot.”
What is the government’s motive in manufacturing such a plot? Whose interests are served? Under conditions in which the majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq war and support the withdrawal of American troops, the Bush administration is desperately attempting to once again link its neo-colonial venture in Iraq with a supposed “global war on terror” waged to defend the American people against another 9/11.
To sustain such a fiction, fresh evidence of terrorist threats is periodically required. And it has been forthcoming on a regular basis. Every several months another “conspiracy” is unveiled, invariably involving an FBI informant and hapless individuals ensnared in a plot orchestrated by the government.
Until now, these “sting” operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a “plot” that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant. The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.
Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.
These provocations and conspiracies are symptomatic of a government that is both ruthless and desperate. Confronting a population that is increasingly hostile to its political agenda of reaction at home and war abroad, it is driven to manufacture an endless series of terrorist threats aimed at disorienting and intimidating public opinion.
By Bill Van Auken
24 June 2006
World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j24.shtml
There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to “wage war on the United States” that suggest it, like so many previous “terrorist plots” announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.
None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.
There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat—described by some media outlets as “even bigger than September 11”—was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.
While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.
The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as “the al Qaeda representative.”
The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.
On Thursday, the government’s paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.
It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the “Seas of David,” which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI’s deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David “did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them.”
According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.
Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants “swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda.” Who administered this oath? The “al Qaeda representative,” AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.
Aside from this “loyalty oath” solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.
The only action with which this one individual is charged—all else is words—is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The “al Qaeda representative”—i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.
The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving “with the ‘al Qaeda representative’” to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.
In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a “list of shoe sizes.” Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.
Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been “more aspirational than operational.” In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.
“We preempted their plot,” declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.
At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened “in its earliest stages.”
So “early” was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government’s indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, “Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they’ve never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that’s ever gone beyond just talk.”
Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, “There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all.”
In his press conference, Attorney General Gonzales asserted that the Miami group represented a “new brand of terrorism” created by “the convergence of globalization and technology.”
What these words mean is anyone’s guess. There is no indication that those charged, who were living in a warehouse in the poorest city in America, had access to any technology, and their supposed contact to the wider world was an informer planted by the FBI. The suggestion that the seven men were a “home-grown” terrorist group inspired by contact with Al Qaeda elements over the Internet is supported neither by evidence nor the charges contained in the government’s own indictment.
R. Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney in South Florida, told the media that the defendants had “lived in the United States for most of their lives, but developed a hatred of America.” This is presented as though it constituted evidence of a crime.
It is hardly surprising for someone living in Liberty City to hate the poverty and oppression that prevail there, or for Haitian immigrants to despise the imprisonment and repression that Washington metes out to those attempting to escape the brutal conditions imposed by US imperialism upon their homeland.
What is highly noteworthy is that the federal government decided to intervene in this situation to concoct a phony Al Qaeda connection and trumped up “terror plot.”
What is the government’s motive in manufacturing such a plot? Whose interests are served? Under conditions in which the majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq war and support the withdrawal of American troops, the Bush administration is desperately attempting to once again link its neo-colonial venture in Iraq with a supposed “global war on terror” waged to defend the American people against another 9/11.
To sustain such a fiction, fresh evidence of terrorist threats is periodically required. And it has been forthcoming on a regular basis. Every several months another “conspiracy” is unveiled, invariably involving an FBI informant and hapless individuals ensnared in a plot orchestrated by the government.
Until now, these “sting” operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a “plot” that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant. The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.
Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.
These provocations and conspiracies are symptomatic of a government that is both ruthless and desperate. Confronting a population that is increasingly hostile to its political agenda of reaction at home and war abroad, it is driven to manufacture an endless series of terrorist threats aimed at disorienting and intimidating public opinion.
Bye-Bye Miss American (First Amendment) Pie
by Doris Colmes
6/24/06
Deputy District Attorney Richard Ceballos was outraged. He had just been disciplined after writing internal memos alleging that a police officer had blatantly lied in order to obtain a search warrant. But, when he continued to urge his supervisors to dismiss this pending criminal case because of the very specific police misconduct involved, Caballos’s advice was not only rejected, but he was transferred to a lesser job farther from his home, and denied a promotion.
The result of Caballos’s indignation with the apparent collusion between the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Court System was a lawsuit against county officials in which he alleged that those county officials, including then district attorney Gil Garcetti, had retaliated against him for speaking out within his office.
As reported by David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times, the case did not fly in Los Angeles County, and, eventually, wound up with the Supreme Court.
So, what’s the big deal about this kind of thing? Happens all the time: Employees find something either unethical or illegal being done by their employers, “blow the whistle,” the problem gets fixed and everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
Not this time: This time, the entire First Amendment was eliminated. When the Supreme Court was done with this case, the Constitutional Rights of the First Amendment which provides Americans with freedom of speech, was no longer available for public employees outraged by the misdeeds of their employers or co-workers.
As stated in Public Citizen on June 1, 2006, the Supreme Court came to a 5-4 decision in the case of Ceballos v Garcetti, deciding that, as of May 29, 2006, when this edict was handed down, government whistle-blowers will no longer be protected by the First Amendment
The Miami Herald, on June 5, 2006 said it all: “Informed, courageous workers who dare to point out malfeasance or dangerous conditions in their workplace do not have First Amendment protection for free speech in statements they make ‘pursuant to their official duties.’ This includes reporting any and all levels of guilt in every governmental system, including police, courts, public education and healthcare, along with all the others. Now, if someone inside the government rips us off, oh well, we’re just the tax-payers and therefore expendable.
Thus, for example, if a co-worker sees a public education official sexually abuse a child, or sees his cop cohorts stealing weed from the evidence room and then “lightin’ up” in the cruiser, it’s a no-go. And, if a worker within the welfare system witnesses the misappropriation of funds by a criminal employee, to the point that there is a significant cut in aid for the starving children of a homeless family, there will be no recourse. It is “put up with it and shut up about it” all the way.
Let’s take a look at the Court which handed down this edict: In the majority were Samuel A. Alito,Jr, (the court’s newest justice), as were Chief Justice John G. Roberts,Jr, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
The Bush administration, also, backed this decision whole-heartedly, citing “The U.S. Government’s interest as ‘the nation’s largest public employer.’”
Stephen Kohn, board chairman for the National Whistleblower Center, said, “It’s a devastating decision that, in practice, obliterates protections for about 90% of public workers.”
When Justices Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy and Thomas finalized the removal of First Amendment protection to over that 90% of public workers cited by Stephen Kohn, they effectively shut down all ability to bring to public knowledge any misdeeds whatsoever committed by our government and/or its employees.
So, why am I raising such a fuss about all of the above? Well, folks, once again, what is happening here and now in the United States of America -- our beloved democracy -- is exactly what happened in 1930’s Germany. In their final step towards complete empowerment, the Nazi party managed to take over Germany’s courts. Once that was done, no one, not anyone anywhere in that country had recourse to the legal system to pursue individual rights.
Loyalty oaths take precedence: Do these oaths define loyalty to whatever branch of corporation or government has hired the person – no matter how insanely or criminally corrupt it becomes? Or do these oaths define loyalty to the ethics, truth and honor that make for a stellar and valuable employee?
In Nazi Germany, loyalty oaths meant choosing either blind obedience or choosing death. The SS (Schutzstaffe, translation: “Protective Squadron” ) was formed as an elite unit, with its own ranks, insignia and uniforms, the duties of which were to protect Adolf Hitler personally and also to administer the concentration camps. At enrollment into their deliberately secretive training, each new, young SS candidate was given a little German Shepherd pup to mentor, train, play with and nurture: Making these pups become trusted and beloved companions was more than encouraged, it was applauded by the commanders.
At graduation, after more than a year-long training period, these S.S. candidates were lined up, with their young dogs sitting obediently at their feet, and were ordered to shoot them. Right then and there. Shoot them dead. And why? It was a simple test of loyalty. Either you live up to your loyalty oath and shoot the damn dog, while – finally – understanding what is meant by “blind obedience” or we do away with you, since you are obviously not a good Nazi. No dogs ever survived. And, thus, when it came to killing kids in the streets, or torturing people in those concentration camps, these men simply followed orders. They had learned the lesson of blind obedience well.
Is this what we are fostering here? Loyalty to a government that is obviously no
longer the democracy for the people and OF the people that it started out to be?
Fascism, like fog, creeps in silently till all views are obliterated. One tiny little step at a time, on those proverbial cat’s feet which don’t show claws until it’s too late – till the courts are taken over and there is no further recourse for anyone.
All this began well before May 29, 2006. Free speech, for example, had been ruled as permissible only in designated “free speech zones” -- on pain of being arrested -- just prior to last election’s party conventions. And now, the courts have been preempted. But the clincher for fascism, for dictatorship becoming a fact of life in America, has to do with those infamous “signing statements.”
What is a “signing statement?” According to John W. Dean, former presidential counselor: “Suppose a new law requires the President to act in a certain manner – for example, report to the Congress on how he is dealing with terrorism. Bush’s signing statement will flat out reject that law, and state that he will construe the law ‘in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive’s constitutional duties.’ The upshot? It is as if no law had been passed on the matter at all.” (www.Findlaw.com , January 13, 2006)
Since coming into office, President Bush has negated well over 750 (!) congressional bills that have reached his desk, simply because he didn’t like them. Using “signing statements” simply bolsters presidential powers. Are these powers now verging on dictatorship? Is the blatant arrogance of simply “signing away” laws of which he does not approve a rather significant “goose-step” in the march towards fascistic despotism? You decide.
And, just as in 1930’s Germany, there is no protest. Some eyeball rolling perhaps – and then back to watching “American Idol.” But that’s what Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro counted on: A nation of “Sheeple” whose primary value system is “NIMBY,” (“Not In My Back Yard.”) Meaning that, unless an individual employee is directly affected by not being able to speak up and inform others of governmental misdeed which he/she has directly witnessed and of which he/she has proof, it don’t matter a bit.
What’s next? Will persons be arrested for writing articles of dissent? Will persons be “disappeared” for exposing corruption a la Patrick Fitzgerald in the Plame incident? Hey, why not? That is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany: Dissent, speaking out, became a crime. And bringing one’s cause to court simply caused amusement for the judges. Just google Pastor Niehmueller….(that is, if our courts decide that we will still be allowed uncensored access to google within the foreseeable future.)
Monday, June 19, 2006
no flowers
The big news tonight is the two captured Americans in Iraq.
So, tell me again, why are we there?
no weapons of mass destruction
no threat to the United States
no threat to anyone
no ties to al-Qaeda
no flowers
BUT PLENTY OF THESE
things are what they are, and no amount of spin, or bullshit congressional resolutions, no babbling from the fantasy dreams of the president bush, no ranting from the bush acolytes, is going to change that. And what they are, is an obscene disaster. A crime.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Right-Wing Agenda
Majority Leader Boehner’s Confidential Strategy Memo For Thursday’s Iraq Debate
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/06/14/boehner-memo/
On Thursday, the House of Representatives will hold a debate on the Iraq war. Media reports say Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “hopes to match the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991.”
ThinkProgress has obtained a “Confidential Messaging Memo” from Boehner instructing his caucus to conduct a very different kind of deliberation. Here’s a quick summary:
1. Exploit 9/11. The two page memo mentions 9/11 seven times. It describes debating Iraq in the context of 9/11 as “imperative.”
2. Attack opponents ad hominem. The memo describes those who opposes President Bush’s policies in Iraq as “sheepish,” “weak,” and “prone to waver endlessly.”
3. Create a false choice. The memo says the decision is between supporting President Bush’s policies and hoping terrorist threats will “fade away on their own.”
You can read the confidential memo for yourself HERE.
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/06/14/boehner-memo/
On Thursday, the House of Representatives will hold a debate on the Iraq war. Media reports say Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) “hopes to match the serious, dignified tone of deliberation that preceded the Gulf war, in 1991.”
ThinkProgress has obtained a “Confidential Messaging Memo” from Boehner instructing his caucus to conduct a very different kind of deliberation. Here’s a quick summary:
1. Exploit 9/11. The two page memo mentions 9/11 seven times. It describes debating Iraq in the context of 9/11 as “imperative.”
2. Attack opponents ad hominem. The memo describes those who opposes President Bush’s policies in Iraq as “sheepish,” “weak,” and “prone to waver endlessly.”
3. Create a false choice. The memo says the decision is between supporting President Bush’s policies and hoping terrorist threats will “fade away on their own.”
You can read the confidential memo for yourself HERE.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Camps of ICE
August 26, 2005
From the web site: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index809.htm
Yurica Report Editor's Note: this article was written by a Russian citizen for a Russian audience. While we are not yet ready to accept terms that are considered inflamatory by many Americans, the over-all worth of this article is the revelation that Sorcha Faal brings to most of us that the Department of Homeland Security and its Bureau, ICE are planning to build temporary cities that will hold millions of undocumented aliens. The ramifications of these plans are mind numbing, especially if the best of intentions get way-laid. We urge you to download the PDF document titled "Endgame." It's worth the time and effort. The Yurica Report
http://www.ice.gov/graphics/dro/endgame.pdf
By: Sorcha Faal
Being the students of history that we are, one cannot help but to be terrifyingly fascinated by the current transformation currently underway in America, and which is the shockingly mirror image of what transpired in the 1930’s German Republic that saw a democratic government subsumed by the forces of Fascist Military rule, and not by force, but rather by the will of the people themselves.
For...Social Scientists who have long debated, and speculated upon, the exact mechanisms wherein free people gladly put upon themselves the yokes of oppressive rule, there is today no better example than the United States and its people, who while waging a Global War are also facing economic ruin.
To the many contradictions facing these Americans none is more apparent than their Military Leaders accelerated plans for the building of Concentration Camps, and coupled with their not ever believing that they will ever be forced into them, but as countless millions of Nazi German, former Soviet and present Chinese peoples could tell them that the only purpose of these camps are for the suppression of all dissent.
The American ...[o]rganization tasked with the building and maintaining of these camps goes by the most chilling of names, ICE, and which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Even more frightening is ICE’s ‘blueprint’ for their citizens, and that they do not even hide, and which they have titled “ENDGAME: Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan, 2003-2012"
Like the Germans under the Nazi Regime had done, the United States Military Leaders are likewise utilizing their citizen’s fears of foreigners to construct a series of Concentration Camps that by ICE’s own estimates are able to hold upwards of 5,000,000 human beings!
Where in the past the US Immigration authorities have detained their prisoners in various holding facilities, to include County Jails, Municipal Jails, Federal Prisons, they have embarked upon this ‘ENDGAME’ plan which will make them the largest jailer of human beings in all of history, exceeding the capabilities of both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russian combined.
To their efficient planning for the imprisonment of their people, the shocking language they use reads eerily similar to the laws of Nazi Germany, than to present day America, but as we can read for ourselves from this ENDGAME report, and which says; "Develop a National Custody Management Plan promoting the effective utilization of available bed space and alternative detention settings. In response to its fiscal stakeholders, DRO will develop a national custody management plan to ensure that the facility use is standard throughout the country and that bed space use is optimized for cost efficiency."
To the sweeping powers over the American people of this Secret Police Organization we can also read the description of their assigned duties, "Investigating threats, crimes and administrative violations; Deterring, interdicting, and removing threats; and policing and securing federal facilities; Provide air and marine support to minimize the damage, and assist in the recover from terrorist attacks."
As to who these ‘threats’ are that these ICE Secret Police Forces will ‘remove’ should not come as a surprise to these Americans as their own President has already stated that those who do not support their Global War on Terrorism are themselves terrorists. As history has all too often shown, the Leaders of Fascist Nations are never more popular to the masses than when they shout of war and protecting the ‘Homeland’. And all that remains to be done by these American Military Leaders is to provide the final ‘cataclysmic event’ that will galvanize their citizens to relinquish what little remains of their freedom, and to which the plans have already been put into place, and as we can read from the NewsMax News Service in their article titled “FEMA’s Plan for Mass Destruction Attacks" and which says;
"On June 19,[2003] FEMA posted a special bid notice for one of the agency’s largest contract awards ever – offering contracting firms $300 million for a five-year contract to simply prepare plans to create temporary housing on a scale never before imagined, and then stand by. This is reportedly one of the largest contracts ever awarded by FEMA for a disaster preparedness program. The name of the program is entitled "Standby Technical Assistance for Disaster Related Operations." FEMA officials met with the representatives of firms seeking the bids. Approximately 100 people attended the meeting. FEMA officials made very clear that the purpose of one of the most massive undertakings in the agency’s history was to prepare for potential mass destruction attacks on U.S. cities. Sources who attended the meeting tell NewsMax that most of the meeting dealt with how the firms should handle biological, chemical and nuclear disasters."
Reports from Russian Intelligent Analysts are stating that these preparations have now been completed and await only the ‘triggering event’ to take place. As to the exact nature of this ‘triggering event’ it is not to our knowing. But what is to our knowing, and history’s, is that the Military Leaders of the United States are capable, and willing, to destroy their own citizens to further their goals for Empire and Global Conquest, and we can read as exampled by the United States Military themselves in "The United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2" and which is;
"Under this plan for the deployment of Operation Garden Plot, the use of CIDCON-1 will be mandatory. This direct support of civil disturbance control operations is to be used by the Army, USAF, Navy, and Marine Corp. with an airlift force to be comprised of MAC Organic Airlift Resources, airlift capable aircraft of all other USAF major commands, and all other aerial reconnaissance and Airborne Psychological Operations. This is to include control communications systems, aero medical evacuation, helicopter and Weather Support Systems. If any civil disturbance by a resistance group, religious organization, or other persons considered to be non-conformist takes place, under Appendix 3 to Annex B of Plan 55-2 hereby gives all Federal forces total power over the situation if local and state authorities cannot put down said dissenters. Annex A, section B of Operation Garden Plot defines tax protesters, militia groups, religious cults, and general anti-government dissenters as Disruptive Elements. This calls for the deadly force to be used against any extremist or dissident perpetrating any and all forms of civil disorder."
To the masses of these American people realizing the dangers they are in there is no hope. So monstrous are the plans made for these once free peoples that their very minds cannot even conceive of the horrors and degradations soon to befall them. So precarious are these Americans situated, spiritually, emotionally, financially, that having neither prepared for, nor even having thought of preparing, they remain virtual hostages to these cataclysmic events. To the warnings of ourselves, others around the world and even those of their own countrymen they continue to turn their backs and their minds….almost as if in not facing the truth it will somehow change.
Even more confusing is that they do not even listen to their own rulers, one of which, Henry Kissinger stated to the New York Times in 1973, "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." That ‘longer’ has become today, and in America today the darkness of an evil so insidious as to cause one to turn away continues to permeate that once great land and its once great people. But they do not notice, not because they cannot see these truth things for themselves, but rather because in seeing them they would finally have to admit that their dreams of peace and liberty are truly dead and gone….and with only themselves to blame for this being so.
For truly these once great and mighty people have forgotten the words of warning of their greatest Statesman Thomas Jefferson, and who said, "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
Today in America that silence is deafening.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Support The Troops
By Sheila Samples
6/12/06
And it's up against the wall American Muthers,
6/12/06
And it's up against the wall American Muthers,
Barbara Bush, who raised her son so well.
Now Dubya's out there smirkin' in God's honky tonk,
Just kickin' soldiers' asses and raisin' hell.
~~apologies to Jerry Jeff Walker
Once a year, George Bush shows up at Arlington National Cemetery and tells a tightly controlled, thoroughly vetted audience that he 'preciates the sacrifice of those who volunteered to die "in freedom's cause." There, surrounded by silent tombstones and armed Secret Service Police, this most infamous of military deserters befouls not only the hallowed ground, but the very air, as he regurgitates words he babbled the year before...and the year before. He reminds us that America is a "reluctant warrior," but we are resolved; our will must not be broken, no matter how many sacrifices it takes.
During the annual photo-op, Bush reads exerpts of farewell letters allegedly from fallen soldiers and marines, all apparently honored to have died in Bush's noble cause. Their words passed on to us by Bush are eerily familiar -- stay the course -- complete the mission of ridding the world of evil -- spread freedom and democracy to the four corners of the earth. Then, after hoping that the slain heroes made peace with their Maker before being blown to bits, and a final admonishment to "support the troops," Bush cuts out until next year.
The camera never strays from Bush's twitching mouth, darting eyes -- never scans the audience so we might see who these people are who applaud him so vigorously. It must be members of his administration and those legislators who follow him around like whipped pups, for I cannot imagine mothers willing to either sacrifice their children to bolster Bush's poll numbers in a barbaric slaughterhouse that grows more bloody and chaotic every day, or to cheer him on. Somehow I cannot conjure up an image of mothers offering up their sons and daughters to a pathological narcissist killer, knowing if they are returned at all it will be either in pieces or in boxes.
Hiding the Troops
Either way, Bush is determined to protect us from seeing the steady stream of ghastly homecomings. That's what mothers are for. Bush says he wakes up every morning trying to figure out how to protect the American people, and -- like his mother says -- folks shouldn't have to worry their beautiful minds with such depressing images.
So Bush not only banned the media and the public from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware where dead soldiers are secretly shuttled back in country in the dead of night, but from military installations around the world.
Bush also restricted the media from covering funerals at Arlington, apparently deciding that the best way to support the troops is to "disappear" them from our view forever. Besides, if you've seen one aluminum transfer tube covered with the old red-white-and-blue, you've seen 'em all. Why bother parading 2,500 of them past a bored, disconnected, disinterested citizenry, most of whom have no children in this fight and could care less about other people's children...
General Tommy Franks, former Central Command Commander, who developed and executed the bloody Iraq fiasco, recently told the National Rifle Association that it wasn't important how many Americans died -- that those who count the increasing number of American soldiers killed in Iraq are missing the bigger picture. "What we're talking about is neither 2,400, 24,000 or 240,000 lives," Franks said. "Terrorism is a thing that threatens our way of life. It doesn't have anything to do with politics."
Americans fail to realize that words mean far different things to Bush, and apparently to Franks, than they do to coherent, rational people. To Bush, "support the troops" means don't criticize him when thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocents die in an illegal, bloody mess that he lied to get us into.
Bush brags that he's a war president. He says he sits in the Oval Office with war on his mind. He doesn't read --- doesn't need to because his gut makes all the decisions, and anybody who doesn't like that is aiding and abetting the terrorists.
So -- stick a yellow ribbon on your vehicle, shut up, and support the troops.
Supporting the Troops
In the only evidence of support I am aware of, just months after getting his war on, Bush opened a new $30 million, state-of-the-art, 70,000 square-foot mortuary at Dover to support the troops, or what is left of them, when they are sneaked back to the states under cover of darkness. Since then, he has sent America's sons and daughters unprepared and unequipped into a raging guerilla insurgency with orders to kill anything that moves.
Bush and his entire Iran-Contra war-criminal chickenhawk administration are devoid of ethos; incapable of empathy or compassion, and could care less about supporting troops. Bush has said on more than one occasion, "My attitude is, any time we put one of our soldiers in harm's way, we're going to spend whatever is necessary to make sure they have the best training, the best support and the best possible equipment."
That may be his attitude, but it is not the reality on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Far too many Americans Bush has put in harm's way are trying unsuccessfully to stay alive in soft-armored Humvees while wearing Vietnam-era flak jackets. Far too few of them have the Intercepter Vest designed in the late 1990's to protect its wearer with Kevlar lining and ceramic plates in front and back pockets to shield vital organs. Day after grinding day in the filth and horror of a war with the "front line" anywhere the enemy decides it will be, ill-trained and ill-equipped Americans are losing the battle to stay alive -- and there is no end in sight.
Most Americans neither know nor care about what is going on, but the mothers know. They are not only spending thousands of dollars sending critical armor, night-vision goggles, and other needed equipment to their children, but are sending food as well.
Journalist Bob Kerr writes in The Providence Journal that Marine Nick Andoscia called and asked his mother to send food. Kerr said Nick told his mother that he and the men in his unit had shed about 10 pounds in their first few weeks in Iraq. They were pulling 22-hour patrol shifts, and were getting only two meals a day -- not meals to remember. He said they were going to the Iraqis and literally begging for food.
The lack of support this administration gives its uniformed personnel is monumentally ruthless and evil. Since Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, nearly 12,000 soldiers have been evacuated because of disease. Some of the sickness can be attributed to Halliburton-KBR serving tainted water and rotten food in the mess halls, but most is undoubtedly from radiation poisoning due to the widespread use of the deadly Depleted Uranium.
Blaming the Troops
One of the more frightening things about wars, especially immoral wars like this one, is the enemy must be dehumanized so soldiers and marines can be kept under control and "up" for the killing they must do. Normal human beings can't turn cruelty on and off like a faucet; therefore, the troops must be also be dehumanized to the point of madness. They become predators without conscience -- drugged and brainwashed into a continuous white rage, not only willing, but eager to kill.
Their commander-in-chief is a ruthlessly self-centered, single-layered demon whose hypnotic cadence of kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill has succeeded in turning them into the monsters they must be for his world dominance aspirations to succeed. The US military are victims of a cruel fascist regime. They are used, then tossed aside to come to terms with what they have become on their own. It is a rare soldier who returns to find professional help available.
For many, the final battle with their predator leader is one too many. Because of the values they were taught from birth -- it all comes crashing down. Many can't cope with the magnitude of sheer evil that envelops them. Some commit suicide. Others become alcoholics, drug addicts, homeless, the walking dead.
When torture, murder and war crimes committed by Americans in places such as Guantanamo, Haditha, Abu Ghrab, Ishaqi and Fallujah, as well as in Afghanistan, comes to light, Bush and his criminal defense department initially try to conceal the atrocities. If forced to investigate themselves, they find no wrongdoing. When all else fails, Bush comes out, blames the troops and says the few bad apples will be brought to justice. Commanders stand silent, refusing to defend or protect those for whom they are responsible -- mute acknowledgement that, as Henry Kissinger said, "Soldiers are expendable -- dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."
Every single member of Congress, every single member of this filthy administration, every single commander on the ground, and every single member of the shameful corporate US media must be blamed for allowing George Bush's rampant maiming and destruction of American citizens and for the genocidal murder waged against innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Every single one of them should be forced to don Vietnam-era flak jackets, crammed into unarmored Humvees and ordered to drive across Iraq, fighting to stay alive while choking on depleted uranium dust. Then they might acknowledge who is to blame for this fiasco.
Is it the troops?
No way in hell.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net .
Once a year, George Bush shows up at Arlington National Cemetery and tells a tightly controlled, thoroughly vetted audience that he 'preciates the sacrifice of those who volunteered to die "in freedom's cause." There, surrounded by silent tombstones and armed Secret Service Police, this most infamous of military deserters befouls not only the hallowed ground, but the very air, as he regurgitates words he babbled the year before...and the year before. He reminds us that America is a "reluctant warrior," but we are resolved; our will must not be broken, no matter how many sacrifices it takes.
During the annual photo-op, Bush reads exerpts of farewell letters allegedly from fallen soldiers and marines, all apparently honored to have died in Bush's noble cause. Their words passed on to us by Bush are eerily familiar -- stay the course -- complete the mission of ridding the world of evil -- spread freedom and democracy to the four corners of the earth. Then, after hoping that the slain heroes made peace with their Maker before being blown to bits, and a final admonishment to "support the troops," Bush cuts out until next year.
The camera never strays from Bush's twitching mouth, darting eyes -- never scans the audience so we might see who these people are who applaud him so vigorously. It must be members of his administration and those legislators who follow him around like whipped pups, for I cannot imagine mothers willing to either sacrifice their children to bolster Bush's poll numbers in a barbaric slaughterhouse that grows more bloody and chaotic every day, or to cheer him on. Somehow I cannot conjure up an image of mothers offering up their sons and daughters to a pathological narcissist killer, knowing if they are returned at all it will be either in pieces or in boxes.
Hiding the Troops
Either way, Bush is determined to protect us from seeing the steady stream of ghastly homecomings. That's what mothers are for. Bush says he wakes up every morning trying to figure out how to protect the American people, and -- like his mother says -- folks shouldn't have to worry their beautiful minds with such depressing images.
So Bush not only banned the media and the public from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware where dead soldiers are secretly shuttled back in country in the dead of night, but from military installations around the world.
Bush also restricted the media from covering funerals at Arlington, apparently deciding that the best way to support the troops is to "disappear" them from our view forever. Besides, if you've seen one aluminum transfer tube covered with the old red-white-and-blue, you've seen 'em all. Why bother parading 2,500 of them past a bored, disconnected, disinterested citizenry, most of whom have no children in this fight and could care less about other people's children...
General Tommy Franks, former Central Command Commander, who developed and executed the bloody Iraq fiasco, recently told the National Rifle Association that it wasn't important how many Americans died -- that those who count the increasing number of American soldiers killed in Iraq are missing the bigger picture. "What we're talking about is neither 2,400, 24,000 or 240,000 lives," Franks said. "Terrorism is a thing that threatens our way of life. It doesn't have anything to do with politics."
Americans fail to realize that words mean far different things to Bush, and apparently to Franks, than they do to coherent, rational people. To Bush, "support the troops" means don't criticize him when thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocents die in an illegal, bloody mess that he lied to get us into.
Bush brags that he's a war president. He says he sits in the Oval Office with war on his mind. He doesn't read --- doesn't need to because his gut makes all the decisions, and anybody who doesn't like that is aiding and abetting the terrorists.
So -- stick a yellow ribbon on your vehicle, shut up, and support the troops.
Supporting the Troops
In the only evidence of support I am aware of, just months after getting his war on, Bush opened a new $30 million, state-of-the-art, 70,000 square-foot mortuary at Dover to support the troops, or what is left of them, when they are sneaked back to the states under cover of darkness. Since then, he has sent America's sons and daughters unprepared and unequipped into a raging guerilla insurgency with orders to kill anything that moves.
Bush and his entire Iran-Contra war-criminal chickenhawk administration are devoid of ethos; incapable of empathy or compassion, and could care less about supporting troops. Bush has said on more than one occasion, "My attitude is, any time we put one of our soldiers in harm's way, we're going to spend whatever is necessary to make sure they have the best training, the best support and the best possible equipment."
That may be his attitude, but it is not the reality on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Far too many Americans Bush has put in harm's way are trying unsuccessfully to stay alive in soft-armored Humvees while wearing Vietnam-era flak jackets. Far too few of them have the Intercepter Vest designed in the late 1990's to protect its wearer with Kevlar lining and ceramic plates in front and back pockets to shield vital organs. Day after grinding day in the filth and horror of a war with the "front line" anywhere the enemy decides it will be, ill-trained and ill-equipped Americans are losing the battle to stay alive -- and there is no end in sight.
Most Americans neither know nor care about what is going on, but the mothers know. They are not only spending thousands of dollars sending critical armor, night-vision goggles, and other needed equipment to their children, but are sending food as well.
Journalist Bob Kerr writes in The Providence Journal that Marine Nick Andoscia called and asked his mother to send food. Kerr said Nick told his mother that he and the men in his unit had shed about 10 pounds in their first few weeks in Iraq. They were pulling 22-hour patrol shifts, and were getting only two meals a day -- not meals to remember. He said they were going to the Iraqis and literally begging for food.
The lack of support this administration gives its uniformed personnel is monumentally ruthless and evil. Since Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, nearly 12,000 soldiers have been evacuated because of disease. Some of the sickness can be attributed to Halliburton-KBR serving tainted water and rotten food in the mess halls, but most is undoubtedly from radiation poisoning due to the widespread use of the deadly Depleted Uranium.
Blaming the Troops
One of the more frightening things about wars, especially immoral wars like this one, is the enemy must be dehumanized so soldiers and marines can be kept under control and "up" for the killing they must do. Normal human beings can't turn cruelty on and off like a faucet; therefore, the troops must be also be dehumanized to the point of madness. They become predators without conscience -- drugged and brainwashed into a continuous white rage, not only willing, but eager to kill.
Their commander-in-chief is a ruthlessly self-centered, single-layered demon whose hypnotic cadence of kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill has succeeded in turning them into the monsters they must be for his world dominance aspirations to succeed. The US military are victims of a cruel fascist regime. They are used, then tossed aside to come to terms with what they have become on their own. It is a rare soldier who returns to find professional help available.
For many, the final battle with their predator leader is one too many. Because of the values they were taught from birth -- it all comes crashing down. Many can't cope with the magnitude of sheer evil that envelops them. Some commit suicide. Others become alcoholics, drug addicts, homeless, the walking dead.
When torture, murder and war crimes committed by Americans in places such as Guantanamo, Haditha, Abu Ghrab, Ishaqi and Fallujah, as well as in Afghanistan, comes to light, Bush and his criminal defense department initially try to conceal the atrocities. If forced to investigate themselves, they find no wrongdoing. When all else fails, Bush comes out, blames the troops and says the few bad apples will be brought to justice. Commanders stand silent, refusing to defend or protect those for whom they are responsible -- mute acknowledgement that, as Henry Kissinger said, "Soldiers are expendable -- dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."
Every single member of Congress, every single member of this filthy administration, every single commander on the ground, and every single member of the shameful corporate US media must be blamed for allowing George Bush's rampant maiming and destruction of American citizens and for the genocidal murder waged against innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Every single one of them should be forced to don Vietnam-era flak jackets, crammed into unarmored Humvees and ordered to drive across Iraq, fighting to stay alive while choking on depleted uranium dust. Then they might acknowledge who is to blame for this fiasco.
Is it the troops?
No way in hell.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net .
© 2006 Sheila Samples
A tunnel without end
The US version of the Guantánamo suicides is disgraceful. The cause of death was gross injustice
by Zachary Katznelson
Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1795310,00.html
On Friday night, three prisoners in Guantánamo Bay committed suicide. Two Saudis and one Yemeni hanged themselves. In a desperate attempt at spin, the US claims this was an act of war or a public relations exercise. The truth is quite different. Islam says it goes against God to kill yourself. So what would drive a man to take his own life, despite his religious beliefs? The answer shames the US and its allies, Britain prominently included.
The 460-plus men in Guantánamo Bay have been held for longer than four years. Only 10 have been charged with a crime. Not one has had a trial. The men are not allowed to visit or speak with family or friends. Many have suffered serious abuse. Most are held on the basis of triple and quadruple hearsay, evidence so unreliable that a criminal court would throw it out. Yet the US says it can imprison the men for the rest of their lives. Imagine yourself in this environment, told you will never have the chance to stand up in a court and present your side of the argument. What would you do if no one would listen, if you had been asking for justice for four years and had nothing in return? How hopeless would you become?
Of these three men, little is known. They were in Camp I, a maximum-security area where prisoners are denied even a roll of toilet paper. But we do not know the dead men's stories. While most of the men in Guantánamo have lawyers who fight for their right to a fair trial, these men did not. Until May, the US refused to even tell us who was in Guantánamo. But before it finally released the names of everyone there, the Bush administration secured passage of a law barring lawsuits by the prisoners held in Guantánamo. That means that at last we know the prisoners' identities, but can do nothing legally to help them. The men who committed suicide found themselves in just this legal black hole. They had no legal recourse, just the prospect of a life in prison, in isolation, with no family, no friends, nothing. They took their lives.
So what now? President Bush stated this week that he wants to close Guantánamo, that he wants to give the men trials. Well, let's have them - immediately. The US has had over four years to gather evidence against the men. Surely that is enough time to prove guilt. And now it is time to show the world the evidence. As Harriet Harman, the British constitutional affairs minister, said yesterday, Guantánamo must be opened up to review or shut down. Will Britain do what is necessary to make this a reality? Because this is about even more than the fate of 460 people, it is about whether the US and its allies will lead the world by democratic example, or whether they will continue to give lip service to human rights and open societies, while denigrating those cherished notions with their actions.
If the men in Guantánamo (and the other US prisons around the world, such as the one at the Bagram air force base in Afghanistan, where over 600 men languish in Guantánamo's hidden twin) did something wrong, by all means punish them. But if they did not, they must be sent home.
Mohammed El Gharani, our client at Reprieve, was only 14 when he was seized in a mosque in Pakistan. He was only 15 when he arrived in Guantánamo Bay. Already twice this year he has tried to kill himself, once by hanging, once by slitting his wrists. Let us pray there is movement by the US to finally do justice, before Mohammed, truly only a child, or anyone else in Guantánamo Bay commits suicide.
Zachary Katznelson is senior counsel at Reprieve, which represents 36 Guantánamo Bay detainees zachary@reprieve.org.uk
by Zachary Katznelson
Monday June 12, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1795310,00.html
On Friday night, three prisoners in Guantánamo Bay committed suicide. Two Saudis and one Yemeni hanged themselves. In a desperate attempt at spin, the US claims this was an act of war or a public relations exercise. The truth is quite different. Islam says it goes against God to kill yourself. So what would drive a man to take his own life, despite his religious beliefs? The answer shames the US and its allies, Britain prominently included.
The 460-plus men in Guantánamo Bay have been held for longer than four years. Only 10 have been charged with a crime. Not one has had a trial. The men are not allowed to visit or speak with family or friends. Many have suffered serious abuse. Most are held on the basis of triple and quadruple hearsay, evidence so unreliable that a criminal court would throw it out. Yet the US says it can imprison the men for the rest of their lives. Imagine yourself in this environment, told you will never have the chance to stand up in a court and present your side of the argument. What would you do if no one would listen, if you had been asking for justice for four years and had nothing in return? How hopeless would you become?
Of these three men, little is known. They were in Camp I, a maximum-security area where prisoners are denied even a roll of toilet paper. But we do not know the dead men's stories. While most of the men in Guantánamo have lawyers who fight for their right to a fair trial, these men did not. Until May, the US refused to even tell us who was in Guantánamo. But before it finally released the names of everyone there, the Bush administration secured passage of a law barring lawsuits by the prisoners held in Guantánamo. That means that at last we know the prisoners' identities, but can do nothing legally to help them. The men who committed suicide found themselves in just this legal black hole. They had no legal recourse, just the prospect of a life in prison, in isolation, with no family, no friends, nothing. They took their lives.
So what now? President Bush stated this week that he wants to close Guantánamo, that he wants to give the men trials. Well, let's have them - immediately. The US has had over four years to gather evidence against the men. Surely that is enough time to prove guilt. And now it is time to show the world the evidence. As Harriet Harman, the British constitutional affairs minister, said yesterday, Guantánamo must be opened up to review or shut down. Will Britain do what is necessary to make this a reality? Because this is about even more than the fate of 460 people, it is about whether the US and its allies will lead the world by democratic example, or whether they will continue to give lip service to human rights and open societies, while denigrating those cherished notions with their actions.
If the men in Guantánamo (and the other US prisons around the world, such as the one at the Bagram air force base in Afghanistan, where over 600 men languish in Guantánamo's hidden twin) did something wrong, by all means punish them. But if they did not, they must be sent home.
Mohammed El Gharani, our client at Reprieve, was only 14 when he was seized in a mosque in Pakistan. He was only 15 when he arrived in Guantánamo Bay. Already twice this year he has tried to kill himself, once by hanging, once by slitting his wrists. Let us pray there is movement by the US to finally do justice, before Mohammed, truly only a child, or anyone else in Guantánamo Bay commits suicide.
Zachary Katznelson is senior counsel at Reprieve, which represents 36 Guantánamo Bay detainees zachary@reprieve.org.uk
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Hubub in Hibhib:
The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi
Written by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 08 June 2006
Empire Burlesque
http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=689&Itemid=1
Abu Musab Saddam Osama al-Zarqawi, the extremely elusive if not entirely mythical terrorist mastermind responsible for every single insurgent action in Iraq except for the ones caused by the red-tailed devils in Iran or the stripey-tailed devils in Syria, has reportedly been killed in an airstrike in Hibhib, an area north of Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced today.
Zarqawi, the notorious shape-shifter who, according to grainy video evidence, was able to regenerate lost limbs, speak in completely different accents, alter the contours of his bone structure and also suffered an unfortunate binge-and-purge weight problem which caused him to change sizes with almost every appearance, was head of an organization that quite fortuitously dubbed itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" just around the time that the Bush Administration began changing its pretext for the conquest from "eliminating Iraq's [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction" to "fighting terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here."
The name change of the Zarqawi gang from its cumbersome original – "The Monotheism and Holy War Group" – to the more media-sexy "Qaeda" brand was thus a PR godsend for the Bush Administration, which was then able to associate the widespread native uprising against the Coalition occupation with the cave-dwelling dastards of the bin Laden organization. This proved an invaluable tool for the Pentagon's massive "psy-op" campaign against the American people, which was successful in sufficiently obscuring reality and defusing rising public concerns about what many experts have termed "the full-blown FUBAR" in Iraq until after the 2004 elections.
However, in the last year, even the reputed presence of a big stonking al Qaeda beheader guy roaming at will across the land has not prevented a catastrophic drop in support for President Bush in general and the war in Iraq in particular. Polls show that substantial majorities – even those still psy-oped into believing the conquest has something to do with fighting terrorism – are now saying that the war "is not worth it" and call for American forces to begin withdrawing.
With the Zarqawi theme thus producing diminishing returns, the Administration has had another stroke of unexpected luck with his reputed sudden demise. Moreover, the fact that Zarqawi was killed in a military action means that Mr. Bush will not have to cough up the $25 million reward placed on the head of the terrorist chieftain. That money will now be given to Mr. Bush's favorite charity, Upper-Class Twits Against the Inheritance Tax, an Administration spokesman said.
Despite its fortuitousness, the reputed death of the multi-legged brigand came as no real surprise. After all, approximately 376 of his "top lieutenants" had been killed or captured by Coalition forces in the past three years, according to press reports, and some 5,997 lower-ranking "al Qaeda terrorists" have been killed in innumerable operations during that same period, according to Pentagon press releases. With the widespread, on-going, much-publicized decimation of his group, Zarqawi had obviously been rendered isolated and ineffective – except of course for the relentless series of high-profile terrorist spectaculars he kept carrying out, according to other Pentagon press releases.
News of the reputed rub-out brought bipartisan praise. "This enormous victory in the War on Terror is due entirely to the courage and wisdom of the president," squealed Senate Majority Leader Lick Spittle of Tennessee. "He has seen us through when so many of the flag-burning destroyers of marriage wanted to cut and run. I think this president is the best president the world has ever seen, and if I am ever fortunate enough to be chosen as president by the American people – minus the three million or so whose votes will be discarded, lost, inadvertently mangled or just ignored, of course – I promise I'll be a president just like him!"
"We must give credit where credit is due," said Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, in a rare television appearance. "I have my differences with the way the Administration is conducting this war, but the elimination of Zarqawi is, I believe, a turning point, comparable to the capture of Saddam Hussein, the first Iraqi elections, the second Iraqi elections, the formation of the first Iraqi government and the formation of the second Iraqi government. This is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it is, I believe, the end of the beginning. And no, I didn't plagiarize that. I made it up my own self."
The reputed end of Zarqawi's reign of terror comes a mere four years after U.S. forces had pinpointed his hideout and were prepared to destroy his entire operation, only to be forestalled by the White House. Before the war, Zarqawi and his band of non-Iraqi Islamic extremists had a camp in northern Iraq, in territory controlled by American-backed Kurdish forces, who had wrested it from the hands of Saddam Hussein. U.S. Special Forces, CIA agents and other American personnel had a free hand to operate there; indeed, anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles held open meetings in the territory, safe from the reach of the dictator.
In June 2002, American forces had locked in on Zarqawi's location. They prepared a detailed attack plan that would have destroyed the terrorist band. But their request to strike was turned down not once, but twice by the White House. Administration officials feared that such a strike would have muddied the waters in their public relations effort to foment war fever against Saddam's regime.
At every turn, the Bush team had painted a picture of Saddam Hussein as a powerful dictator able to threaten the entire world. They had implied, insinuated and sometimes openly declared that he was in league with al Qaeda. But this wildly successful psy-ops campaign would have been undermined by a raid on Zarqawi, which would have exposed the truth: that Saddam was a crippled, toothless despot who had lost control of much of his own land and couldn't even threaten vast enemy armies within his own borders – much less his neighbors or the rest of the world. It would have also exposed the fact that the only Islamic terrorists operating on Iraqi soil were in areas controlled by America and its allies – which, now that Mr. Bush's invasion has opened the whole country to extremist terror, is still the case.
With Zarqawi's Bush-granted liberty reputedly at an end, the Pentagon moved quickly to confirm the identity of the man killed in Hibhib today. At a joint press conference with Prime Minister Maliki, U.S. Gen. George Casey said Zarqawi's body had been identified by "fingerprints, facial recognition and known scars" after a painstaking forensic examination by Lt. Col. Gil Grissom and Major Catherine Willows.
In yet another amazing coincidence, the announcement of the death of Zarqawi or somebody just like him came just as Prime Minister Maliki was finally submitting his candidates for the long-disputed posts of defense and interior ministers, which then sailed through parliament after months of deadlock. The fortuitous death also came after perhaps the worst week of bad PR the Bush Administration has endured during the entire war, with an outpouring of stories alleging a number of horrific atrocities committed by U.S. troops in recent months.
Oddly enough, Zarqawi first vaulted into the American consciousness just after the public exposure of earlier U.S. atrocities: the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison in the spring of 2004. With story after story of horrible abuse battering the Administration during an election year, Zarqawi, or someone just like him, suddenly appeared with a Grand Guignol production: the beheading of American civilian Nick Berg. This atrocity was instantly seized upon by supporters of the war to justify the "intensive interrogation" of "terrorists" – even though the Red Cross had determined that 70 to 90 percent of American captives at that time had committed no crime whatsoever, much less been involved in terrorism, as the notorious anti-war Wall Street Journal reported. Abu Ghraib largely faded from the public eye – indeed, it was not mentioned by a single speaker at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks later or raised as an issue during the presidential campaign that year.
Today's news has likewise knocked the new atrocity allegations off the front pages, to be replaced with heartening stories of how, as the New York Times reports, Zarqawi's death "appears to mark a major watershed in the war." Thus in his reputed end as in his reputed beginning, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Iraq has, by remarkable coincidence, done yeoman service for the immediate publicity needs of his deadly enemy, the Bush Administration.
It is not yet known who will now take Zarqawi's place as the new all-purpose, all-powerful bogeyman solely responsible for every bad thing in Iraq. There were recent indications that Maliki himself was being measured for the post, after he publicly denounced American atrocities and the occupiers' propensity for hair-trigger killing of civilians, but he seems to be back with the program now. Administration insiders are reportedly divided over shifting the horns to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's already much-demonized head, or planting them on extremist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, or elevating some hitherto unknown local talent – or maybe just blaming the whole shebang on Fidel Castro, for old times' sake.
The announcement of the new bogeyman is expected sometime in the coming weeks.
***
UPDATE: It looks like the Twits might not get that reward money after all. Prime Minister Maliki said that those who helped locate Zarqawi, or someone just like him, in Hibhib, would get their reward later: "We believe in honoring our commitments." However, the (London) Times' man in Iraq, Ned Parker, tells us that Zazqawi might have been shopped to the Americans by Iraqi insurgents:
One of the most interesting things about the news of his death is the timing. There have been talks going on since the election last December by US and Iraqi officials to try to bring the homegrown insurgency back into the political process. Certainly there was tension between the homegrown Iraqi insurgency and Zarqawi's foreign fighters. So it's possible a deal was finally cut by some branch of the Iraqi insurgency to eliminate al-Zarqawi and rid themselves of his heavy-handed influence.
So if Bush does decide to pay off the informants -- and it's his money, after all, not Maliki's; in fact, in today's Iraq, any money that Maliki's government might still have left after three years of occupation rapine is Bush's money too -- but if Zarqawi's rumblers are paid off, then it's likely that Bush will be forking over $25 million to Iraq's Sunni insurgents. That will certainly keep them flush with IEDs for a long time to come. It's FUBAR every which way you turn in Bush's Babylon.
Friday, June 09, 2006
There Is No War on Terror
By Pachacutec , Firedoglake
June 6, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36934/
There is no "War on Terror."
There is, however, a "war" on the U.S. Constitution.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, we've learned that we can take a punch and move on. We've faced far worse threats to our national survival -- the Civil War, the War of 1812, World War II, to name a few -- but we never abandoned our Constitution.
Until now.
Terror is an emotion. Emotions are part of human nature and cannot be eradicated. A "War on Terror" is therefore a war on humanity. The Bush administration has exploited the fear and shock of a nation in the wake of a surprising and dramatic act of violence to keep our fear and paranoia at a constant boil. Why?
The evidence suggests the whole point has been to seize power and steal money. We are witnessing a creeping coup in the United States, the overthrow of the idea, promulgated by our founders, and by writers like Tom Paine, that the "Law is King":
But where says some is the king of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.
The Bush administration has explicitly denied this, claiming unlimited executive power under the president's war powers against civilians and citizens. The president is not your "commander in chief" if you do not serve in the armed forces. On the contrary, he works for you, and he works for your representatives in the Congress.
There is no "War on Terror." There is only a war on the law; a conscious destruction of the U.S. Constitution. This is not the first time right-wing interests have attempted to overthrow the U.S. government. An attempt was thwarted during the FDR administration. Then, as now, America's greatest enemies came from among the ranks of the ruling class.
Bushco has enslaved Americans into a psychological reign of "War on Terror" that amounts to a criminal protection racket. We are told we must be afraid. That is, we are told we must live in terror. This is to protect us from … terror. Then, because we feel terrified, we must give up our freedom -- freedom to write what we believe without fear of reprisal, freedom of due process and habeas corpus protection, freedom from secret intrusion into our private lives by government.
Monday was Memorial Day. On that day we remembered countless patriots who died and fought for those freedoms our president tells us we must abandon … in the name of "freedom."
If there were really a "War on Terror," an emotion, Wes Craven would be hiring a lawyer: He scares people. The "War on Terror" is a sham. You know what changed after Sept. 11th? We, the people of the United States, forgot how strong we are. We gave in to fear, when the only thing we should have feared was fear itself. Osama bin Laden wants you to be afraid. So does George Bush.
I know I'm not alone when I say I'm an American and I'm not afraid. I know I'm going to die. I accept that I'm going to die, no problem. What I do not accept and will not accept is the notion that I must live as a slave to fear for the purposes of craven, cowardly men who, in their time, pissed the bed instead of fighting an actual war, later to become powerful, using that power to line their pockets with my tax dollars. Give me liberty or give me death. Take your "terror" and shove it.
We went after the criminals who attacked us when we invaded Afghanistan, then quickly abandoned any pretense of being concerned with actual terrorists by fighting a ginned-up war of aggression against a tin-pot dictator for whom our chickenshit president and his buddies have always had a hard-on. If the U.S. were serious about thwarting terrorism or about minimizing our exposure to acts of violence designed to make us afraid, we would have rigorous port security and massive international goodwill and cooperation in the lawful identification of anarchic, violent networks. But we don't have that. We have our sons and daughters fighting to maintain bases in the sand near oil fields, sacrificing their lives, bodies and minds for a pack of lies.
Ann Coulter and other right-wing totalitarian cheerleaders like to talk about traitors to America. George Bush and the Republicans have betrayed America, the actual laws of America and the very idea of America. On Memorial Day, as we remember our sons and daughters who have sacrficed their lives in the blistering sands of Iraq, it does their memory due honor to point this out. Noble men and women have fallen; their blood cries out for lawful justice.
In each of our minds lies the beginning of our return to freedom. So please, say it after me: "There is no 'War on Terror.'"
It's high time for America and Americans to remember our strength. We need not be afraid. When we surrender to fear, we lose our country, we lose our faith in each other, we lose our future and we lose our freedom. The best way to honor the sacrfices of our nation's men and women killed in battle is to embrace, once again, that precious liberty.
It's time to be America again.
Pachacutec blogs at FireDogLake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)