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Recent Reports and Commentary
Updated 4.09.04
New Bush Space Policy Unveiled, Stresses U.S. Freedom of Action
Death Penalty: Latest Worldwide Statistics Released
by Amnesty
Internatonal
By abolishing the death penalty in law or practice over half the
countries in the world have set the path for the remaining states who
continue to violate the right to life, said Amnesty International today.
Read
the rest of the story>
Amnesty:
China, Iran and U.S. Top World Executioners
April
6, 2004
China, Iran, the United States and Vietnam were the world's top users
of
the death penalty in 2003, accounting for 84 % of known executions,
human
rights body Amnesty International said Tuesday.
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the rest of the story>
POLICE POWERS
5th Circuit erodes right against unreasonable search
April 6, 2004, Houston Chronicle, Editorial
In an era of war and terror, Americans' civil rights are threatened on
every side. Government agents can pry into a citizen's library, financial
and other personal records without a warrant and without telling the
citizen.
Read
the rest of the story>
The terrible toll of racism
in the U.S.
By Sharon Smith, March 19, 2004;
Socialist Worker
HALF OF all Black men in New
York City canÕt find a job, while Black teenage unemployment stands
at 37 percent nationwide. These statistics show a crisis among Black
Americans that should be setting off alarm bells in election year 2004.
Yet even John Kerry, the candidate whose partyÕs voting base includes
the vast majority of Blacks, has issued barely a sound bite.
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the rest of the story>
Free Market Debunked
By Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
March 17, 2004
Here are a couple of headlines for those who haven't
had the time to study both economics and history:
1. There is no such thing as a "free market."
2. The "middle class" is the creation of government
intervention in the marketplace, and wouldn't exist without it (as millions
of Americans and Europeans are discovering).
Read
the rest of the story>
Corporations Are Insane
By Ross Crockford, AlterNet
January 29, 2004
Enron. WorldCom. Bechtel. Halliburton. To the cheerleaders on MSNBC
and in The Wall Street Journal, such deceitful, profiteering companies
are a few "bad apples" in a healthy economic barrel, as rare as a murderer
in a convent. But a new documentary that premiered at the Sundance festival
film last week argues that these rogue companies aren't the exception,
they're the rule.
Read
the rest of the story>
HEBRON: The fence beside our door
by Art Gish
CPTnet (Christian Peacemaker Teams) January 26, 2004
Israeli Apartheid: Jewish settlers' ethnic 'purification' of Hebron
Just over a year ago, on Christmas day, 2002, Israeli soldiers constructed
a high fence and gate on our street right beside our door in Hebron,
cutting off access to Shuhada Street for us and everyone else in the
Chicken Market.
We then had to walk two blocks north to get to Shuhada Street and come
back down the street to walk south on that street from our apartment.
Members of our Christian Peacemaker Team wondered what the meaning
of that barrier was in the larger picture of what was happening in Hebron.
Now we have a clearer understanding. That tall fence and gate outside
our door is part of the wall being built all around the West Bank, walling
in (imprisoning) most of the Palestinian people into small areas (cantons
or reservations), and at the same time taking about half of the West
Bank. The Palestinian land on the outside of the wall is becoming Israeli
land.
Read
the rest of the story>
Where's the Apology? by
Paul Krugman
Published on Friday, January 30, 2004 by the New York Times
George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity
back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability.
Surely even supporters of the Iraq war must
be dismayed by the administration's reaction to David Kay's recent statements.
Iraq, he now admits, didn't have W.M.D., or even active programs to
produce such weapons. Those much-ridiculed U.N. inspectors were right.
(But Hans Blix appears to have gone down the memory hole. On Tuesday
Mr. Bush declared that the war was justified - under U.N. Resolution
1441, no less - because Saddam "did not let us in.")
So where are the apologies? Where are the resignations?
Where is the investigation of this intelligence debacle? All we have
is bluster from Dick Cheney, evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity
language from Mr. Bush - and a determined effort to prevent an independent
inquiry.
Read
the rest of the story>
Tyson Chicken subjects Chickens to Horrific
Cruelty
The written testimony
of a former employee alleges that workers at the Tyson Foods chicken
plant at Grannis, Arkansas, routinely abuse live, fully conscious chickens.
Cruel mistreatment includes tearing live birds apart, crushing them,
causing them to explode using dry ice, and other unthinkable acts. Click
here to read full testimony.
Authorities have failed to arrest and prosecute anyone, and it is reported
that, even after formal complaints were filed based on the former worker's
detailed testimony, workers at the facility continue to torture and
kill chickens!
Farm Sanctuary's Investigations Department has urged the sheriff to
make arrests and the prosecutor to seek serious penalties. It is essential
that no cruel person be paid to handle live animals on a daily basis.
Read
the signed statement of Tyson employee,
Virgil Butler
& get information on what you can do to help>
With a Whisper, Not a Bang
Bush signs parts of Patriot Act II into law —
stealthily.
By David Martin, The San Antonio Current, Wednesday
24 December 2003
On December 13, when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein,
President George W. Bush not only celebrated with his national security
team, but also pulled out his pen and signed into law a bill that grants
the FBI sweeping new powers. A White House spokesperson explained the
curious timing of the signing - on a Saturday - as "the President
signs bills seven days a week." But the last time Bush signed a
bill into law on a Saturday happened more than a year ago - on a spending
bill that the President needed to sign, to prevent shuttng down the
federal government the following Monday.
Read
the rest of the article>
2004 begins with massive military mobilization in US
cities
By David Walsh
3 January 2004
The new year began in the US under conditions of an unparalleled
mobilization of police, army and federal law enforcement agents in major
urban centers. Alleging a heightened threat of terrorist attacks and
operating under the Department of Homeland Security’s “Orange
Alert,” the Bush administration undertook measures such as were
never seen during the Second World War or at the height of the Cold
War.
Major events scheduled for New Year’s Eve and New
Year’s Day took place under bizarre circumstances. Homeland Security
chief Tom Ridge declared that Americans “need to go out and celebrate
New Year’s,” even as he banned flights over New York City,
Chicago and Las Vegas and ordered Black Hawk military helicopters to
hover over Manhattan’s Times Square, where some 750,000 people
gathered to welcome in the new year, the Las Vegas strip, and the Rose
Bowl football game in Pasadena, California.
Snipers manned the rooftops over Times Square, while New
York streets and its harbor were flooded with thousands of police, including
many plainclothes officers. Bomb-sniffing dogs were on duty in New York
and counter-terror units carried equipment to detect chemical, biological
or radiological contamination.
Read
the rest of the article>
Christmas Truce of 1914:
A little peace in the Great War
By Luke Harding; Berlin; November 12, 2003
A new book by a German historian has cast fresh light on one of the
most extraordinary episodes of World War I and revealed that the celebrated
1914 Christmas truce took place because many of the Germans stationed
on the front had worked in England.
The book, Der Kleine Frieden im Grossen Krieg, or The Small Peace in
the Great War, shows that the German and British soldiers who famously
played football with each other in No Man's Land on Christmas Day 1914
did not always have a ball. Sometimes they kicked around a lump of straw
tied together with string, or even an empty jam box.
According to previously unseen letters and diaries sent home by Germans,
the soldiers used sticks of wood, their caps and steel helmets as goalposts.
The games lasted about an hour. The sleep-deprived players then collapsed,
exhausted.
The book, by German author Michael Jurgs, is the first to be written
from a German perspective about the impromptu Christmas ceasefire that
spread across the Western Front - in defiance of official orders and
to the horror of the British high command - five months after the outbreak
of war.
Read
the rest of the article>
Iraq through the American looking glass
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad
The IndependentDecember 26, 2003
Something very unpleasant is being let loose in Iraq. Just this week,
a company commander in the US 1st Infantry Division in the north of
the country admitted that, in order to elicit information about the
guerrillas who are killing American troops, it was necessary to "instill
fear" in the local villagers. An Iraqi interpreter working for
the Americans had just taken an old lady from her home to frighten her
daughters and grand-daughters into believing that she was being arrested.
Read
the rest of the article>
A model of rectitude --
that's us
By Molly Ivins; Monday, Dec 29, 2003
Well! I am certainly glad to see that we are telling off the French,
Germans and Russians.
I couldn't agree more with the Bush administration that those treacherous,
undependable countries should be punished for their past cooperation
with Saddam Hussein by being shut out of the $18.6 billion in Iraqi
reconstruction contracts. No contracts for quislings!
Someone's got to uphold standards of morality and purity, and who better
than us? As the president so often reminds us, this is a fight between
good and evil.
Read
the rest of the article>
We
Caught The Wrong Guy
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday
15 December 2003
Saddam
Hussein, former employee of the American federal government, was captured
near a farmhouse in Tikrit in a raid performed by other employees of
the American federal government. That sounds pretty deranged, right?
Perhaps, but it is also accurate. The unifying thread binding together
everyone assembled at that Tikrit farmhouse is the simple fact that
all of them – the soldiers as well as Hussein – have received pay from
the United States for services rendered.
It
is no small irony that Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad, the monster
under your bed lo these last twelve years, was paid probably ten thousand
times more during his time as an American employee than the soldiers
who caught him on Saturday night. The boys in the Reagan White House
were generous with your tax dollars, and Hussein was a recipient of
their largesse for the better part of a decade.
Read
the rest of the story>
ABC
Narrows the Field: Did Kucinich's Criticism of Koppel Influence Decision?
Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting, 12/11/03
NEW
YORK - December 11 - A day after ABC's Ted Koppel moderated a debate
between the Democratic presidential contenders, the network decided
to withdraw three off-air producers from the campaigns of Dennis Kucinich,
Carol Moseley Braun and Rev. Al Sharpton.
ABC's
decision was attributed to the fact that these candidates are perceived
to have a slim chance of winning the Democratic nomination. An ABC spokesperson
explained (Boston Globe, 12/11/03) that "as we prepare for Iowa
and New Hampshire, we are putting more resources toward covering those
events." Appearing on CNBC with Kucinich (12/10/03), Time reporter
Jay Carney suggested that the decision could be due to the fact that
"all of the media organizations have limited resources. It's actually,
I think, pretty impressive that they had somebody on your campaign day
by day by day."
Somehow
it's hard to believe that the "limited resources" of the Disney
corporation (2003 revenues: $27 billion) explains ABC's call. ABC's
decision does seem to mirror the opinions of Koppel, who seemed frustrated
that these candidates were included in the debate at all. According
to the New York Times (12/7/03), Koppel "said he would have preferred
a slugfest among the six leading candidates." Koppel was quoted:
"You can't have a debate among nine people.... There is no such
thing. It's called a food fight."
"How
did Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun get into
this thing?" Koppel was quoted in the Washington Post (12/10/03).
"Nobody seems to know. Some candidates who are perceived as serious
are gasping for air, and what little oxygen there is on the stage will
be taken up by one-third of the people who do not have a snowball's
chance in hell of winning the nomination."
Read
the rest of the story>
Cluster bombs kill in Iraq, even after shooting
ends
By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY 12/10/03
BAGHDAD — The little canisters dropped onto
the city, white ribbons trailing behind. They clattered into streets,
landed in lemon trees, rattled around on roofs, settled onto lawns.
When Jassim al-Qaisi saw the canisters the size
of D batteries falling on his neighborhood just before 7 a.m. April
7, he laughed and asked himself: "Now what are the Americans throwing
on our heads?" (Interactive graphic: How
a cluster bomb works and more)
The strange objects were fired by U.S. artillery
outside Baghdad as U.S. forces approached the Iraqi capital. In the
span of a few minutes, they would kill four civilians in the al-Dora
neighborhood of southern Baghdad and send al-Qaisi's teenage son to
the hospital with metal fragments in his foot.
The deadly objects were cluster bomblets, small
explosives packed by the dozens or hundreds into bombs, rockets or artillery
shells known as cluster weapons. When these weapons were fired on Baghdad
on April 7, many of the bomblets failed to explode on impact. They were
picked up or stumbled on by their victims.
Read
the rest of the story>
Bush and Iraq: Mass Media, Mass Ignorance
by Jeff Cohen, CommonDreams.org, 12/1/03
That half or more Americans think Iraq was involved
in the 9/11 attack -- perhaps the most media-covered event in our history
-- stands as a horrific indictment of U.S. media today. Such levels
of ignorance can't be found in other countries.
Americans
who are fundamentally misinformed about 9/11 provide the bulk of those
tallied in polls as supporting Bush and the Iraq war. Subtract them
from polls and Bush is an unpopular president -- widely seen as having
accomplished a bait and switch, redirecting U.S. anger and vengeance
toward a country that did not attack us.
The
run-up to the Iraq war offers a case study in news bias: how mainstream
media, especially television, were incapable of getting the truth out
in the face of administration lies and innuendo about Iraq's 9/11 role
and weapons of mass destruction.
Read
the rest of the story>
Troop Families Go to Iraq on Peace Mission
By
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 29, 2003
SAN DIEGO
(AP) -- Relatives of U.S. service members said they were nervous but
hopeful Saturday as they embarked on a private peace mission to Iraq,
where they will bring their message of friendship and doubts about the
war.
The leader
of the 10-member group, Fernando Suarez del Solar, said it is important
for Iraqis to realize that not all Americans support the U.S. military
presence in Iraq. His son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar,
20, was killed in Iraq eight months ago when he stepped on an unexploded
American cluster bomb.
Read
the rest of the story>
Conserving
Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad
By Betsy Hartmann 12/10/03
The greening of
hate - blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color
- is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S.,
its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation,
and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness,
pollution, and so forth.
Internationally,
it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants
and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.
In the first instance,
the main policy ‘solution’ is immigration restriction; in the second
it is coercive conservation, the violent exclusion of local communities
from nature preserves. Both varieties of the greening of hate are about
policing borders. By stressing the negative role of population growth,
both target poor women’s fertility as the fundamental root of environmental
evil.
In the U.S. the
first big greening of hate wave occurred in the mid-1990s when conservative
anti-immigrant forces began mobilizing within the Sierra Club, the nation’s
largest membership-based environmental organization, to pass a ballot
initiative supporting a “reduction of net immigration” as a component
of a “comprehensive population policy for the United States.” An opposing
coalition of environmental justice, immigrant rights, and reproductive
rights advocates successfully challenged the initiative, and it was
voted down in 1998.
Read
the rest of the story>
U.S. Sees Evidence
of Overcharging in Iraq Contract
by
Douglas Jehl, 12/12.03, New York Times
Pentagon investigation has found evidence
that a subsidiary of the politically connected Halliburton Company overcharged
the government by as much as $61 million for fuel delivered to Iraq
under huge no-bid reconstruction contracts, senior military officials
said Thursday.
Read
the rest of the story>
Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning
by Kathy Kelly
November 27, 2003
On Sunday, November 23, I took part in a nonviolent civil disobedience
action at Fort Benning, GA, to protest the U.S. Army´s School
of the Americas (SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation – WHISC) Shortly after more than two dozen
of us entered Fort Benning and were arrested, US Military Police took
us to a warehouse on the base for "processing." I was directed
to a station for an initial search, where a woman soldier began shouting
at me to look straight ahead and spread my legs. I turned to ask her
why she was shouting at me and was ordered to keep my mouth shut, look
straight ahead, and spread my legs wider. She then began an aggressive
body search. When ordered to raise one leg a second time, I temporarily
lost my balance while still being roughly searched and, in my view,
‘womanhandled.’ I decided that I shouldn’t go along
with this dehumanizing action any longer. When I lowered my arms and
said, quietly, "I’m sorry, but I can’t any longer cooperate
with this," I was instantly pushed to the floor. Five soldiers
squatted around me, one of them referring to me with an expletive (this
f_ _ _ er) and began to cuff my wrists and ankles and then bind my wrists
and ankles together. Then one soldier leaned on me, with his or her
knee in my back. Unable to get a full breath, I gasped and moaned, "I
can’t breathe." I repeated this many times and then began
begging for help. When I said, "Please, I’ve had four lung
collapses before," the pressure on my back eased. Four soldiers
then carried me, hogtied, to the next processing station for interrogation
and propped me in a kneeling position. The soldier standing to my left,
who had been assigned to "escort" me, gently told me that
soon the ankle and wrist cuffs, which were very tight, would be cut
off. He politely let me know that he would have to move my hair, which
was hanging in front of my face, so that my picture could be taken.
I told him I’d appreciate that.
Read
the rest of the story>
The Miami Model
Paramilitaries, Embedded Journalists and Illegal Protests. Think This
is Iraq? It's Your Country
By Jeremy Scahill
MIAMI--We were loading our video equipment into the trunk of our car
when a fleet of bicycle cops sped up and formed a semi-circle around
us. The lead cop was none other than Miami Police Chief John Timoney.
The former Police Commissioner of Philadelphia Timoney has a reputation
for brutality and hatred of protesters of any kind. He calls them "punks,"
"knuckleheads" and a whole slew of expletives. He coordinated
the brutal police response to the mass-protests at the Republican National
Convention in Philadelphia in 2000. After a brief stint in the private
sector, Timoney took the post of Miami police chief as part of Mayor
Manny Diaz's efforts to "clean up the department."
We had watched him the night before on the local news in Miami praising
his men for the restraint they had shown in the face of violent anarchists
intent on destroying the city. In reality, the tens of thousands who
gathered in Miami to protest the ministerial meetings of the Free Trade
Area of the Americas summit were seeking to peacefully demonstrate against
what they consider to be a deadly expansion of NAFTA and US-led policies
of free trade. There were environmental groups, labor unions, indigenous
activists from across the hemisphere, church groups, grassroots organizations,
students and many others in the streets. What they encountered as they
assembled outside the gates to the building housing the FTAA talks was
nothing short of a police riot. It only took a few hours last Thursday
before downtown Miami looked like a city under martial law.
Read
the rest of the story>
U.S.= Champion of Democracy?
51 Dictators Supported by U.S. - a hyperlinked list with footnotes
Read
the article
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