SFPJ POST

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS BEWARE: MIRANDA RIGHTS RESTRICTED -- Another Constitutional Right flies out the Door

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 11:23:42 -0700

By Marti Hiken

The words we hear in so many movies and television shows when someone is arrested, “Read him his Miranda rights,” no longer have meaning. These rights are dead because the courts have “interpreted” them out of existence. Throughout our country, if you don’t say the right words during police interrogations, your rights to remain silent and to a lawyer don’t kick in. This leads to unfettered police power when any arrestee tries to protect herself in a powerless situation when confronted by the police. And in a courtroom, all your statements are admissible against you.
This is about the only phrase left to ensure that you retain your rights: “I want to remain silent. I want a lawyer.” Again, another way: “I don’t want to speak to you anymore without my lawyer being present.” It is important not to answer further questions after asserting these rights; instead, merely repeat the statement.
The reason for the Miranda warnings in the first place was that the torture and cruelty inflicted on prisoners in this country decades ago and especially in the South, brought a public outcry. It resulted in the Miranda v. Arizona, (384 U.S. 436) decision in 1966.
In that decision, the Court attempted to strike the appropriate balance between law enforcement interests in obtaining a confession and a suspect’s Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. “….[T]he decision mandated that the suspect be informed prior to any custodial interrogation that he has the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney and that no interrogation can occur until the suspect waives these rights. Moreover, the suspect can assert these rights any point during the interrogation and, if he does, questioning must immediately cease.” (Strauss, Marcy, “The Sounds of Silence: Reconsidering the Invocation of the Right to Remain Silent Under Miranda,” “William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal,” March 2009. In her article Strauss lists the status of the courts’ interpretations of Miranda warnings state-by-state.)
Custodial police interrogations can go on for hours on end and the Miranda Court “recognized that they were so inherently coercive as to create a presumption that a resulting confession was involuntary unless the suspect was explicitly told prior to questioning that he need not answer questions and that he had the right to consult with an attorney for advice.” (Ainsworth, Janet, “'You have the right to remain silent…’ but only if you ask for it just so: the role of linguistic ideology in American police interrogation law.” The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, Vol. 15.1, 2008, p. 3)
The problem is that “ambiguous” statements aren’t enough, and in actuality, everything you say will be interpreted by the courts to be ambiguous other than the sentences: “I want to remain silent. I want a lawyer.” Invoking the Miranda rights means clear, unequivocal and unambiguous declarations in the interrogation room. Of course, in jail there is a power disadvantage in that the tempo, timing, and level of brutality are set by the police.
So, no hedged or indirect language invokes the rights.
- No theoretical comments about the availability of counsel, such as
   “Could I get a lawyer?” or “May I call a lawyer?”
- No language that softens the demand for a lawyer:
   “It seems like I need a lawyer.”
- No logistic questions:
       “Could you get me my wallet and bring my lawyer’s business card to me?”
- No imploring ambiguous language:
       “I don’t want to talk about it.” or “I won’t talk anymore.”
- No being and remaining silent (you must be definite and utter words)
- No combining demands:
  “Screw you, talk to my lawyer.” or “I don’t feel like I can talk with you without any attorney sitting right here to give me some legal advice.”
The situation becomes bleaker, however, in the case Davis v. United States (1994) U.S. 452:
-    “Give me a lawyer” or “I want a lawyer” are not deemed by the police or courts as kicking in your constitutional rights. (Note that wanting and requesting a lawyer is not the same thing as your right to remain silent by taking the Fifth.)
-     Refusing to sign a form indicating a waiver of your rights when coupled with incriminating statements to the police does not invoke your rights. (The incriminating statements obtained by the police are proof that your rights were waived.) To state simply: Make an incriminating statement and your rights are waived.
Underlying all of this is that judges now have no compunction regarding the role of unlimited and brutal interrogation, torture, and intimidation by the police. They also ignore the context that language plays when someone communicates in an abusive situation. Finally, the social context of the arrestee and his intentions become blurred by language. Losing our Miranda rights is simply another step in the wrong direction.
Marti Hiken is the executive director of Progressive Avenues. She can be reached at mlhiken@comcast.net

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Students for Peace & Justice: Working to Better Our World Through Social Change

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:25:11 -0600

By Ashly Barlau for her Ethnographic Methods Class, University of Colorado at Boulder

“In the last half-century, students have been at the forefront of efforts to realize progressive social change. With this in mind, Students for Peace and Justice was organized as a vehicle for student action to achieve an end to U.S. militarism and to achieve an increasingly peaceful and just world. After all, the U.S. military-industrial complex won’t dismantle itself. Peace and justice won't establish themselves. These goals can only be achieved when people organize and act together to make it so.”
Students for Peace and Justice Mission Statement

Out of one-hundred and eight or so organizations and associations at the University of Colorado Boulder, there were only a few out of the ordinary. Some looked relatively universal such as the language clubs and Greek clubs. And others looked interesting, but daunting because entre into a group was not going to be an easy task. I ultimately went with a group called Students for Peace and Justice (SFPJ) - the group not even listed in the 108 on the University webpage. The organizations goals, as can be gathered from their mission statement, is to help create community in order to work towards a more equal and peaceful world. The organization consists of students, both graduate and undergraduate, from two universities- the University of Colorado in Boulder, and Naropa University (also located in Boulder). They have additional members from the surrounding community as well as from other similarly focused organizations. They have several organizations they work closely with, one of the main being the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Students for Peace and Justices’ mission statement intrigued me, and I was immediately drawn to them for their work during the Democratic National Convention (DNC), in addition to other projects the group took on. Initially I had hoped to meet with this group in order to learn more about their events at the DNC, however, after reading their website and talking with a few of the members, I realized I didn’t want to focus on just one project. My focus then shifted towards the effectiveness of the practice of civil disobedience. Having realized that this was too large a subject to attempt to research in three interviews, I attempted to concentrate more on the logistical aspects of the group. With this aim I attempted to better understand how the group formed, how they maintained membership, and how they decided which social movements to work towards. I chose this group for many reasons: having known the originator personally I felt I could gain some rapport with the group before entering into interviews. I also chose it because I appreciate and respect what the organization strives to do.

As somewhat eluded to above, my research aim was to learn more about their organizational logistics, but also what their goals were, and how they felt they completed those goals. I hoped to better understand how a university sanctioned organization is created, and maintained, and also, how projects are managed. I was still curious how they used civil disobedience as a practice, but that was not my main focus. Some of my central questions were: What are the member’s involvements in the group, how is the group maintained as far as information sharing and gaining membership, and what is the effectiveness of the group’s campaigns? My methods were mostly informal, but I believe they worked well.

My methods varied greatly. It was strange because having performed interviews and research for my job I thought I had a really good idea of what I was doing, what I wanted to ask, and how I would go about performing these tasks. Somehow all that knowledge and confidence went out the window when attempting to create this research project. I referred to Spradley (pp. 26-35) in order to begin the research process. The “research cycle” he has defined in this article helped in visualizing what my steps would be. I attempted to contact one group called the Rotaract Club at CU, when beginning this project, and they impassively ignored my emails for over a week. This, I believe, is where I first felt a little bit unprepared for this research venture. After having experienced somewhat of a flop, I moved onto the group I knew a little bit more about not, admittedly, without the advice of a friend and co-worker of mine who gave me ideas of who I could interview and how I might go about doing so. This friend has been in research for many years and knew a good deal about the group I researched, so I had full trust in her counsel. Once I decided on moving away from the original group and onto Students for Peace and Justice, I contacted my friend and prior co-worker, who I knew was one of the leading founders of the group, and I asked for his help. From this I believe he forwarded my cries for help in a mass email to the group as I awaited responses. The first response I got was from one member who was not a student, and not a core member. In her email she explained how she did not think she would be a good interviewee as she had been somewhat of an inactive member, but she did want to help me in framing research ideas. In my initial email to the group’s founder, I had asked if there were any items that were of specific interest to any of the members and this warranted the conversation with the first respondent. This member I spoke with let me ask her questions about the group, and we bounced ideas off each other as far as what might be a good research aim. Very similar to Michael Agar’s article, I had taken this first, informal interview, and used it as an initial data collection method (Agar, 1996:140). I did not play the role of interviewer because I did not have any preconceived set of questions. This first informant and I talked on the phone for probably forty-five minutes. She started out by telling me things she wanted to know more about the group, thinking that this would give me some path to follow when creating my interview guide. In some ways it was very helpful because it gave me a base knowledge with which to continue my interviews. It was obvious these were items the informant wanted to know about the group and she was hoping I could be the outlet for getting these questions answered. The informant hoped I would focus on a few key questions: “What values are being met and still need to be met in order to create community and cohesion,” “How successful is the group both internally and externally,” and “How do we increase the effectiveness of this group?” This conversation did help me to formulate questions and I hope that some of her answers were achieved through my research. The next stage was participant observation.

My next method involved attending a meeting with SFPJ, and performing some participant observation. This was a daunting task because I did not know what to expect- was it going to be 20 members or just a few, were they going to be ok with my presence or were they going to be uncomfortable? These sorts of thoughts entered my head as I envisioned my first meeting with the group. I looked to Spradley (1980: 53-62) for inspiration in this case because his explanation for participant observation helped me think of this task in a different light. The meeting was set at a local coffee shop which I thought was a great place for casual discussion and meeting. When I walked into the coffee shop, however, it was filled with people and I did not know where the group might be meeting. I sat down at one of the tables near the front hoping the one person I knew would walk in the door. After about ten minutes, I asked the barista if he knew where they tended to meet and he informed it was the back room. So I set-up my computer in one of the corners and waited for people to arrive. One member showed up, unbeknownst to me, and pushed a few tables together as a few other members began showing up and sitting at this now elongated table. I overheard them talking about the “girl who was supposed to be interviewing the group.” At that moment I didn’t know if I should have introduced myself, because I wasn’t sure what my plan was. At some point my main informant entered, we spoke for a few minutes and he introduced me to the rest of the group. From that point on everything was very formal, however not “stuffy” in the sense that I felt strange by attending. My main informant became the facilitator for the meeting and we went around introducing ourselves. This process consisted of giving our name, one of our heroes and an explanation why, and agenda items if we had any to add to the already generated list. The rules were then set as far as how the meeting would proceed; everyone had to raise their hands and would be called on before speaking. At this point the facilitator asked if anyone had objections to me attending the meeting. I explained my project and expressed how everyone would be kept anonymous when I made my report. Everyone agreed it was ok I was there and the meeting continued. An interesting note is that when this discussion of my presence came up one member whispered to another which led to the facilitator to ask what they were talking about. They had joked that perhaps I was the “cop” that may be infiltrating their group. I gathered that due to the somewhat controversial activities that this group participates in, they felt this could actually happen (or perhaps already did, I wasn’t sure of the exact context). This method was particularly helpful in the overall project for several reasons. In much the same way Bernard (2006:342-386) discusses participant observation, my experience was mostly data collection of the qualitative type. It gave me the opportunity to meet everyone, in person, which I think helped in scheduling my interviews. Because I explained how this project was one of my last activities before graduation, I believe it provided me sympathy from group members who were familiar with my situation or who would soon be in my same position. I also gathered more knowledge about the group’s activities which helped in my writing of the interview guide. Lastly, it gave me an idea how well the group interacts with one another, who comes to meetings, and how they are facilitated. What Bernard (2006) points out in the end of his chapter is that participant observation allows a researcher to collect data with which to write the interview guide, and helps focus the endeavor.

The meeting was a very enjoyable experience. It turned out I was not the only person there attending my first SFPJ meeting, and that made me feel more at ease in the group. An interesting note about this gathering was that only about six people (including myself) were in original attendance. As the night progressed, more people showed up, ending with eleven people. Four separate events were discussed in the meeting however, one was seemingly the priority. Another interesting aspect of the meeting was a hand gesture used by the group members. It consisted of both hands doing a kind of waving motion. It appeared, although I never did ask, that the hand gesture was used collectively as a way to show agreement among group members. The steps following the participant observation stage was writing my interview guide.

The process for writing my interview guide was rather straightforward. I had a few ideas about questions I wanted to ask from the conversation with informant one. Also, the ideas I gathered from attending the weekly meeting helped in the formulation of the guide. Lastly, after receiving feedback from the professor on my research aims, I understood that I was trying to accomplish too much in a short period of time, with few interviews, so I attempted to write my interview guide with that in mind. I started with general demographic questions and got more focused throughout. Below is a copy of my interview guide, the structure of which is: main questions then probes.

Interview Guide:

1.) Are you from Boulder?

2.) How did you hear about Student’s for Peace and Justice and what made you want to get involved?
a. What brought you to this group?

3.) How are you involved?
a. Are you a core member?
b. A Volunteer?
c. How many meetings do you tend to participate in during a semester?

4.) How are the turn-outs at meetings?
a. Is it always the same people pretty much?
b. Does a meeting ever get out of hand when discussing certain projects?
c. How do/DO you work around student schedules?
d. Does this ever affect a project that’s being worked on?

5.) What is the membership for this group like?
a. How many people are in the group?
b. Is it all students?
c. If not all students, what is the age range?
d. Balanced in male/female members?
e. Would you like to see more student or young people interaction? Why?
f. How do you advertise for membership or for the various projects? (I.e. flyers, e-mails, rallies?)

6.) Who maintains the website and manages the e-mail accounts?
a. Does that change when students come and go?
b. How do they get information to send out? Do people from the group send the e-mail guy the stuff and then he sends it to the group like a listserv?

7.) What is the effectiveness of your campaigns?
a. Can you give me an example of a campaign that was rallied for and you saw results?
b. What do you feel creates collaboration and cohesion?
c. Do you try to keep it to only a few projects at once and how do you maintain efficiency when there is so much going on? (I.e. lots of projects, students in school, etc.)
d. How difficult or easy is it to gain support from outside the organization for example from the community?

8.) What kind of risks do you run by being a part of this organization?
a. Have you ever been arrested because you’ve participated in civil disobedience
b. How do you feel about civil disobedience as a practice?

9.) Is there anything I’ve left out that you would like to add about the organization?

As is seen, this was a more structured type set-up. Other questions did come up as the interviews progressed; however, every question on here was asked to every interviewee. I wanted to have a more structured interview guide so I knew I was collecting the same data from every informant. This was an important goal of mine as throughout class I was always troubled by how subjective ethnography as a subject is viewed. If the interviews are conducted in the same manner, with the same structure and questions, I hoped that would legitimize the data. Each interview was about an hour long, which is what I intended when I wrote the guide. In addition, I was sure to have consent forms for each interview with the hopes that having the reassurance that their names would be kept anonymous, that they would be more comfortable in doing the interview. I also just felt as though this was a good idea so that if there are any discrepancies any of the interviewees can contact me. Each interview was recorded using a basic digital recorder. I made sure each interviewee received a copy of the consent form with my signature, and I kept a copy as well. I used the digital recorder method, expecting that analysis would be an easier task come time to write the paper.

These interviews, although structured, were very casual. It was important to me that they were as casual as possible so that the interviewees felt comfortable in talking with me. I believe my method was very similar to the way Bryman discussed qualitative interviewing (Bryman 2004: 318-344). Although I had what I thought was a structured interview guide, I wanted participants to talk about anything that they felt important. I did this by ending the interview with the very open ended question “is there anything else?” I also explained how the interviews would be about an hour long, but did not stop any interviews due to time constraints. One interview I performed at a nearby restaurant and the other I performed at a local coffee shop. Had I the opportunity to do this again, I would probably have gone somewhere, still casual, but where there was not as much background noise because the recorder picked up just about everything. Overall I performed three interviews, in addition to the participant observation and phone call I had with informant one.

The interviewee selection was relatively random with the exception of the main informant. I spoke with the first three people to respond to my emails. I would have liked, viewing this in hindsight, to have had four interviews, getting information from two males and two females. In my research I interviewed two males and one female. The structured interview method was additionally a good method in this case because I was able to number my notes according to question numbers on my interview guide, which aided in my data analysis. Field notes, I will add however, were a difficult part of this research. I attempted to follow a method similar to Bernard (2006: 387-412) in that I kept “jottings” aside from my regular notes. These helped me return to questions I wanted answered, and aided in the writing of my results. This also sort of pre-coded my notes for analysis. I did not, however, keep a log or a journal because it didn’t seem necessary given the size of the project. Although I numbered the interview, and attempted to takes notes numbering the responses, I found that I had notes that ran all over the page, and often times they were cut short, as if I couldn’t quite complete my note before the next interesting thing came up. It was for this reason I digitally recorded the responses, allowing me to go back and make sure I had things right. Perhaps when I attempt ethnography again, I will follow more of an approach like Bernard (2006) or like that of Sanjek (1990: 92-121). And although I did learn a bit about styling field notes, and organizing field notes from these two authors, I learned that ultimately the ethnographer must just come up with their own system that they are comfortable with, and I believe this takes a lot of practice. The results of this research, using these methods was very interesting.

One of the main conclusions I gathered from this research was that it is difficult to maintain a university club. It was mentioned by all three informants that everyone in the group, especially the core membership, was and is highly dedicated. They defined dedication by explaining how people attended meetings on a regular basis, participated in the events, and were generally motivated in the ideal of social change. Although the dedication was high, members explained how many things hindered participation such as school, work, and the participation of members in other clubs. Another example of the difficulty of maintaining the organization is that, all interviewed members agreed, membership is quite high at around five-hundred members. Of this, however, only about 15-24 were core members and regularly participated. This means that only between three percent and almost five percent of the full membership is in regular attendance and participating in regular discussion. One informant blamed this on high turnover, which relates back to the previous issue, that other commitments get in the way. Their suggestion as to how to fix this was that instead of simply sending out emails to the general list, phone calls should be made, making it more personalized so that people would feel more included, and as a result participate more.

Another interesting item drawn from this research is that each informant had themes as far as what they would like to see in the future for the organization. The first is a higher membership, but more importantly a more balanced membership. Being that the group strives for social change towards justice, members would like to see that the membership be all-inclusive as far as race, gender, and socio-economic status. One very interesting observation was that when I asked both male informants if the membership was gender balanced, they both said yes, for the most part; however, in the history of SFPJ one informant believed at one time there were more woman than men. When speaking with the female respondent, she explained how it was most definitely male dominated, but was slowly becoming more balanced. Increasingly interesting was that when I attended the meeting it was male dominated almost four to one. This situation led me to recall what Powdermaker (pp. 65-75) argued in her article. I wondered if my being a woman had anything to do with the responses of the males, and in the same regard with the female. As far as further makeup of the group, respondents felt it was predominately white and middle to upper class.

Another agreement made by all three informants was that they wanted to see an interest in social change among a younger demographic. The logic, agreed upon by all informants, that the younger the members start, the longer they are able to participate. It was a general consensus that a younger membership would facilitate better discussion because it would bring in a fresher outlook, as opposed to older college-level students which already have their opinions pretty well defined.

There was agreement that the group was a bit too over-stretched as far as what they were taking on. All three members mentioned how it was great that people were interested in various projects but how it was difficult to maintain a decent focus on each project if there were too many taken on at once. One suggestion for how to overcome this challenge was to continue having weekly meetings, but to additionally create sub-committees which would allow members to focus only on projects that fit their interests.

Lastly, the members all mentioned how they would like to be able to track their progress better. One interviewee expressed how they would like to be able to count, or at least get an idea of how many people participated in each event. Another member mentioned how they would like to be able to count how many new members they received from their events. Also, being able to track how people have learned about SFPJ, would allow the group to see which method of advertisement worked best.

The results in regards to efficiency varied. It was clear in speaking with the group members that they all felt they were making a change, and continued working towards more change. I asked each informant to describe for me one instance they felt was successful, explaining how I wanted them to define “success” in their own terms. One informant described success with regards to one particular project which occurred during the Democratic National Convention (DNC). In this event they put together a concert, planned to follow the concert with a march in order to gain the attention of candidates running for office. The concert, the informant explained, was attended by almost as many as 10,000 people. This member believed that of that 10,000 people, as many as 8,000 participated in the march once the concert had ended. They marched from the Denver Coliseum to the Pepsi Center, which the informant explained was a distance of four miles. Once they got to the Pepsi Center, the DNC center of operations, they wanted to present to running candidate, Barack Obama, a letter with three goals: 1.) Troops home now, 2.) Education and healthcare for troops when return home, and 3.) Preparations for Iraqi reparations. When they first arrived they were told that they were going to be unable to speak to Obama. When they heard that they were going to be unable to present their letter, about 1,000 people in the remaining group practiced civil disobedience. In the end they were finally able to present the letter. From this event, the informant defined success in several ways. He felt the event was a success because they stuck with their morals, and their aims of remaining non-violent. There was not, at any point, during the concert, march, or participation in civil disobedience any violence. Additionally, they were successful in that their actions led to their presentation of the letter to President Obama. The interviewee explained how it was very emotional to present the letter to Obama, and they felt when Obama gave his speech, he was seemingly speaking directly to their letter, the group, and their movement. Lastly, the informant explained that success was seen also in how many people they educated, their ability to build the community, and from this, many people joined their organization.

Another informant discussed an entirely different project in which they felt success. In this project, the organization placed white flags all over Norlin Quad to demonstrate the number of people who lost their lives in the Iraq war. The goal of this event was to raise enough money to purchase enough flags to place on the Capital’s lawn in Washington D.C. This memorial, as the organization calls it, has traveled to several campuses and has been on the University of Colorado, Boulder campus for three consecutive years. Although not originally a creation of SFPJ, the informant explained how they felt this was such a great success because it created such a great presence. Furthermore, the informant felt the success in the event came from the diverse group of people the memorial reached.

Another informant thought that an event called “Procession for the Future” was one of the organization’s greatest successes. This event ran for three days, attempting to bring awareness to several global issues including: fair trade, climate change, militarism, and many more. According to the informant, the group was seeking a large participation and believes that they received that, which made it a successful event. Another definition of success that this informant gave me with regards to Procession for the Future, was that it was not only community building, but also educational for the members of SFPJ. The interviewee believed the event also helped build skills which were beneficial for future events and created cohesion amongst participants and other members.

In meeting with this group, I believe they are very successful. They have put on 24 events so far and in only two years, and the events are no small feats. While I do not know specifically the success of each of these events, I am convinced that the group is cohesive, collaborative and they all have intense dedication in seeing social change. I gathered this from interviews as well as my participation in the weekly meeting. One interesting caveat to that is that when I met with two of the informants they both agreed that very few if any disagreements ever were raised during meetings. When meeting with the third informant, however, they said there have certainly had meetings that got somewhat contentious. I’m not entirely sure where the disconnect originates, although one informant who thought there had been little or no disagreements has only been a member for a short time, whereas the other member, who does remember disagreements, has been around since near the groups inception. In my attendance of the meeting, however, it was very well structured- everyone was given a chance to speak and it was kept very professional. It’s clear that members are animated about the causes they are working towards, but they all work together in achieving their goals. Some projects that the organization does take on seem to get postponed and may take a back-seat so to speak, with regards to other projects. From speaking with the members, however, it is always unanimously agreed upon as far as what takes priority. One example of this is the “Lockheed Murder Campaign” which is somewhat of an ongoing project that has had several smaller events, but never has been a large project or focus (according to group members). Every informant agreed, however, that the project was important and others needed to be dealt with first because of their more timely nature.

The group, although not well known throughout the University of Colorado in Boulder, has done a fantastic job of building their membership, creating community both within their organization as well as outside, and has certainly educated people on important issues and worked towards a general direction of social change. This project was a great experience in many ways, an eye opening experience, with some struggle.

In my research design I did not have a problem to solve, or qualitative data to collect because it was mostly qualitative. My analyses with regards to this research were simple and informal, much like what Fetterman describes in his article (Fetterman 1998: 92-110).

My overall experience with ethnographic research I think was good. I was able to learn a lot with regards to the process of ethnography, as well as about the group I studied. Without question, I would have liked to have had more time with which to meet more members and attend more meetings. In performing these interviews, each respondent had questions about their own group they would have liked to see answered, and I don’t know if I was able to provide that for them. I found that I became very motivated to help the group better understand themselves, while in the process I learned a lot about myself (as cliché as it sounds). Everyone I spoke with was very helpful, and provided a good amount of information so I never felt like I struggled with that. It was great to see that everyone was excited to talk about what their organization was about, explain their goals, and talk about their successes.

I believe ethnographic research is an interesting endeavor, although an important one. Much like Mead (2003: 3-10) ethnography helps save history that might otherwise be lost. I believe it elicits information that may not be available otherwise. So although many do not believe ethnographic research is a precise science, it is still a necessary science.

It is not easy to perform ethnography, as I quickly found out. The main challenge I faced was coming up with a research aim. Although I had help from informant one, there were so many great events the group was creating and participating in that it was hard to focus on any one topic. I’m certain that writing proposals is a difficult aspect of ethnography because having a defined research aim I’m sure is one of the most tedious pieces to getting funded. Even after writing my interview guide, and thinking that I had a good set of questions, I found myself wanting to ask more and more. The research certainly is never ending! The other challenge I faced is that when an informant would start answering a question and I felt it was going to make for good results in my paper, I noticed I would attempt to keep them on that topic. I felt, looking at this in hindsight, that maybe I was leading them for specific answers. I feel this is very similar to what Agar (1996: 142-143) explains is “baiting.” I don’t think I did it necessarily consciously, but I know that in each interview, different questions were focused on more so than others based on the interviewee’s knowledge or interest in the topic. It makes me wonder, though, maybe it works reversely, the interviewees may have been leading me as well into topics they wanted researched more. I know that was certainly the case with informant one, who although I didn’t interview, had a plenty of suggestions of what I should be studying. Furthermore, I hope that my translation of what my informants told me is indicative of how they said it. In other words, I revert back to Spradley’s (161-171) article which discusses translation of notes. In this way I hope that I did not misconstrue anything that was said by any informants. In the end, I believe that both my goals and the goals of the informants were met; at least I hope so.

Another large challenge I foresee with ethnography is it’s very difficult to remain completely objective. This was the topic of discussion in many of our readings throughout class. Because it is not an exact science it is difficult to say for certain what the results might have been. This is why, as mentioned above, I attempted to keep my interviews very structured. This was in attempt to keep the interviews relatively uniform. Although as explained above, that didn’t happen to its full capacity. I wish that there were a way that ethnography could be viewed in a more scientific light, although given the short time I had for this project I don’t know how that can be accomplished. Much of my dismay about ethnographic research is seen in LeCompte and Goetz (2001: 100-132) article regarding reliability. It’s very unlikely that an ethnographer will go into the field, make connections, collect data, and write analysis in such a way that another ethnographer could come into the same group, under the same pretenses, make the same connections, collect the same data, and come to the same conclusions. This was seen undeniably by the controversy between Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman. They studied the same group, but that was about the only similarity between the two studies. So as LeCompte and Goetz discuss, how is the researcher able to justify their research (2001)? This leads to another fear I have regarding future ethnographic work.

One challenge I think could occur with ethnography is getting people to participate. When I started with the first group I didn’t receive a response for over a week. While I realize that simple email contact may not be enough to generate interviews, it was certainly a challenge to this project which was on such a short deadline. The group I did manage to meet with was very helpful. I received emails almost immediately following my initial email and scheduling was less difficult than anticipated. If I had the opportunity to do this over again, I would have preferred the project be structured differently. I think having chosen the group at the beginning of the semester would have provided more time to contact members and set-up interviews. Then in-class work could have been done on writing research aims, proposals, and interview questions. It is difficult to get people to participate when they already have so many other commitments, and these interviews were completed within the last few weeks of the semester, near and during finals. Also, if this were done at the beginning of the semester, then we could have performed more interviews, eliciting more data, and learning more overall with regard to the process of ethnography. I ran into a lot of issues with my own schedule as well because I had two finals the Saturday before this paper was due, and studying for those the days prior. So I had little time to write this. Clearly, when and if I do continue with ethnography I will have all my time dedicated to this so it will be somewhat easier to complete in that sense. Fetterman (1998: 111-128) explains in his article how writing ethnography can be the hardest part, and I must say I agree. It’s difficult to know where the line is drawn as far as what is included, what is excluded, etc, and having never written in this way before made it a very difficult task.

This project was not all challenges, however. Having done this project certainly has given me confidence in pursuing further research endeavors. I found I got very into the project. Even if I was having a bad day, knowing that I was getting to go do interviews cheered me up. The interviews were very fun, and I always looked forward to learning more about the group. Perhaps I lucked out because the weather was nice, and all the interviews took place in rather casual settings so it never became uncomfortable, like some of the ethnographers report. I have to say that this was one of my favorite papers of perhaps my college career because it allowed me to ponder, reflect, and analyze, when most college papers expect a regurgitation of what was already learned, or facts and findings from someone else’s research. Fetterman (1998) talks about the style of writing by ethnographers; I am not entirely sure what my style is as of yet, but this paper allowed me to start thinking about the idea.

Works Cited

Agar, Michael H. 1996. The Professional Stranger. An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. 2nd Edition. San Diego: Academic Press, Chapter 3 “Getting Started,” pp. 73-90.

Agar, Michael H. 1996. The Professional Stranger. An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. 2nd Edition. San Diego: Academic Press, Chapter 6 “Beginning Fieldwork,” pp. 113-166.

Bernard, Russel H. 2006. Research Methods in Anthropology. Qualitative and Quantitative Approahces. 4th Edition. Oxford: AltaMira Press, Chapter 13 “Participant Observation,” pp. 342-386.

Bernard, Russel H. 2006. Research Methods in Anthropology. Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. 4th Edition. Oxford: AltaMira Press, Chapter 14 “Field Notes: How to Take Them, Code Them, Manage Them,” pp. 387-412.

Bryman, Alan. 2004. Social Research Methods. 2nd Edition. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, Chapter 15 “Interviewing in qualitative research,” pp. 318-344.

Fetterman, David M. 1998. Ethnography. Step by Step. 2nd edition. Applied Social Research Methods Series Vol. 17. Thousand Oaks: Sage, Chapter 5 “Finding Your Was Through the Forest: Analysis,” pp. 92-110

Fetterman, David M. 1998. Ethnography. Step by Step. 2nd Edition. Applied Social Research Methods Series Vol 17. Thousand Oaks: Sage, Chapter 6 “Recording the Miracle: Writing,” pp. 111-128.

LeCompte, Margaret D., and Judith Preissle Goetz. 2001. Problems of Reliability and Validity in Ethnographic Research. In A. Bryman (Ed.), Ethnography. Vol. 3. London: Sage, pp. 100-132.

Mead, Margaret. 2003 (1st Edition 1974). Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words. In P. Hockings (Ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology. (3rd edition). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 3-10

Powdermaker, Hortense. A Woman Going Native. In A.C.G.M. Robben & J. A. Sluka (Eds.), Ethnographic Fieldwork. An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 65-75.

Sanjek, Roger. 1990. A Vocabulary for Fieldnotes. In R. Sanjek (Ed.), Fieldnotes. The makings of anthropology. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, pp. 92-121.

Spradley, James P. 1980. Participant Observation. Forth Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., Part one, Chapter three “The ethnographic research cycle,” pp. 26-35.

Spradley, James P. 1980 Participant Observation. Forth Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., Part two, step two “Doing participant observation,” pp. 53-62.

Spradley, James P. 1980 Participant Observation. Forth Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., Step twelve “Doing participant observation,” pp. 161-171.

The Learning Curve of the Teachers vs. the Honduras Coup

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:35:06 -0600

AUGUST 23, 2009, SABA, HONDURAS: The classrooms were empty but the assembly hall was full. Last Thursday afternoon, more than two hundred striking schoolteachers and other members of the civil resistance from the northeastern state of Colón gathered at the city high school to chart their next steps.

“Compañeros, are you tired?” a speaker called out.

“No!”

“Are you going to go home?”

“NO!”

“Are we going to win?”

“Sííííííííííííí!”

They marched out of the assembly hall, clapping, cheering, and started their engines. More than eighty vehicles were counted as they noisily entered the street – honking horns, waving anti-coup placards out the windows - for the first of two afternoons, Thursday and Friday, of vehicular caravans against the coup regime. Up and down the main streets of Sabá they paraded while resistance coordinator Wilfredo Paz sat down with members of the Narco News team to talk shop.

“Today we evaluated our progress to date,” he shared. “We consider the seven-day march to San Pedro Sula last week a grand success, for the quantity of people who participated, for the solidarity we found in every town along the road where people brought food, drink, shoes and medicines for the marchers, and for the 30,000 participants in the final day of the march in that city. We also notice a deepening of our level of organization that has united us with those in other states.”

Periodically during the interview the noisy caravan would pass by to remind all ears that the resistance to the unpopular coup regime simply does not stop.

“As we speak, campesino organizations have had the government agricultural bureau offices in Tocoa occupied for nearly 25 days,” said Paz. “And beginning today every town and city is sending delegations to the capital, Tegucigalpa, to provide information to Judge Balthazar Garzón of Spain, who prosecuted Pinochet for his war crimes in the Chilean coup, and also the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States. This is a little difficult because the regime has ordered the bus companies not to rent us transportation so we have to organize other means to get there.”

Sabá, at 400 kilometers and nine hours drive from Tegucigalpa (a trip that used to be a about an hour shorter until an earthquake last year toppled a highway bridge that allowed a shortcut through the state of Yoro), is almost as far as one can get from the capital and still be in a city. Three other cities in the state of Colón – Tocoa, Trujillo and Bonito Oriental – are yet a little bit farther out, all toward the northeast corner of Honduras. To travel farther east than that – into what is known as the Mosquitia region and the state of Gracias a Dios (the name of the state means “Thank God”) – one needs a four-wheel drive truck to navigate the mud and dirt roadways, or a boat to reach its outposts via the Caribbean sea.

In this tropical banana producing region, the highway blockades of July were of longer duration – some for as long as 60 or 70 consecutive hours – than in other parts of the country (see also Belén Fernández’s related report from the region, Honduras Reports Lack of Towns Named for Oliver North) and faced less interference from repressive forces. “There is more respect here from the police and the Army,” Paz explained, and by respect it’s clear that he means a healthy fear of provoking this population.

Colón – like Olancho to the south, and much of eastern Honduras – has a farming and ranching populace many of whom possess weapons for hunting and protection. And while the resistance here, too, is nonviolent, the locals do have a nationwide reputation for self-defense. One of the first and biggest stores one sees upon entering Tocoa, population 53,000, is called “La Armería” – “The Gunshop” - and displays large hand painted images of the weapons and bullets on sale inside. As in the rural regions of the United States, sportsmen are a big part of the culture, as are omnipresent cowboy hats men wear. That this region’s civil resistance has remained pacific is evidence of the self-discipline maintained so far by its movement’s most important sectors.

Helping to lead the resistance in this region are the mayors of its four largest cities: Mayor Adán Fuentes of Tocoa’s 53,000 citizens, Mayor Adelmo Rivera of Sonaguera (population 34,000), Mayor Luis López of Trujillo (43,000) and Mayor Clemente Cardona of Bonito Oriental (22,000). In the days after the June 28 coup d’etat, the Armed Forces raided the home of Tocoa Mayor Fuentes, who had been the regional coordinator of the nonbinding referendum campaign for a Constitutional Convention that the coup was designed to prevent coming to a vote that same day.

Luis Agurcia, a coordinator of civil resistance efforts in Trujillo, a public schoolteacher, told us that the Armed Forces had “militarized” the schools of that city from July 13 to to August 13. Uniformed troops had been sent to each of the schools daily to keep watch on teachers, who have been on strike an average of two or three days per week in protest of the coup. On the days that there were studies, students literally had to navigate around the heavily armed uniformados to walk to and from class. The militarization included the “Escuela Normal” in Trujillo that prepares 1,300 youths to become schoolteachers and also includes a grade school for 300 younger students whom the teachers-in-training educate as part of their own education.

“We brought two attorneys here on Monday, August 10. The Colonel accused me of ‘indoctrinating children.’ But the lawyers explained to them the law and they backed down.” The schools have thus been freed at last of a military presence that itself served, if not as a uniformed indoctrination of schoolchildren, certainly, at minimum, a heavy handed attempt at intimidation.

Schoolteachers throughout Honduras are a backbone of the resistance and, through the national teachers unions and their 57,000 members, a key communications conduit between the local resistances across the country. President Manuel Zelaya – forcibly exiled at gunpoint by the coup regime – had raised schoolteacher salaries by eight Lempira per hour (about 45 cents). The average schoolteacher works 27 hours a week in the classroom. The sixteen percent pay hike raised an average $71-per-week salary by an extra $12 dollars. By Honduran standards that’s an important gain that the teachers consider worth fighting to maintain. They believe the coup regime wants to roll back the gains they and other workers won before Zelaya was kidnapped 56 days ago.

Since the June 28 coup d’etat, the golpista media has waged a daily smear campaign against the movement with constant accusations – undocumented, supported only by rumor and innuendo - that those who march in the streets do so because they are supposedly being paid cash to protest. The source of such funds is inevitably claimed, without a shred of evidence offered, to be the government of Venezuela, and even the embargo-stricken isle of Cuba, the coup regime’s sources of much paranoia and obsession. For the schoolteachers, though – and indeed among all Honduran workers who saw the minimum wage raised by 60 percent under Zelaya – they do have financial interest in defending the elected government from the coup regime. That interest does not come in some shadowy bag of cash, but, rather, is fully and transparently disclosed: the pay raises that they and other sectors of workers won fair and square the democratic way through government action. That also explains why they continue to demonstrate, day after day, that the coup regime is not in control of the country's population.

The gossipmongers that spread those malicious and unproved accusations of a cash-directed movement only demonstrate their own inability to grasp that the self-organization of workers for better pay is not a corruption but, rather, a basic building block of any free society. The pay raises are fully disclosed, and a struggle to defend them is recognized as wholly legitimate by all societies that aspire to be authentically democratic.

The struggle by schoolteachers – now agglutinated in six unions and united under the banner of the Honduran Federation of Teachers Organizations (FOMH, in its Spanish initials) – has been long. It has survived previous military coups in 1954 and 1973 and won important gains mainly through the tactics of strikes, marches and road blockades: Among them the 1968 passage of obligatory public education for grade and middle school students.
“Many compañeros don’t know the history of the country, of the union movement or that of the teachers,” Jeremías López, a union organizer in Catacamas, Olancho since the 1970s. He believes the emphasis on strikes, marches and blockades against the coup has been too narrow: “We agree that we have to change tactics. We mus t avoid taking up arms, and I say that as a former guerrilla fighter. What we need to do is educate and mobilize the general public.”

López and two other organizers, out of their own pockets, recently launched a weekly program titled “The Best of the Resistance” on the Super 10 radio network that broadcasts in the geographically large states of Olancho, El Paraiso and Gracias a Dios. It costs them 2000 Lempira (about $104 US dollars) a month to rent that airwaves space. In recent days the local resistance brought a radical theater troupe to Catacamas from San Pedro Sula, and subsequently the topical musical group Café Guancasco to that same city square.

“Often, when we schoolteachers print a flyer or communiqué for the public, it is written in a fine Castilian Spanish that common people don’t relate to,” says López. “You have to speak in the language of the people.” The increasing emphasis on theater, song and live radio is aimed to expand the movement beyond its union and organizational bases.

López notes that in his region the resistance has also – like those in the state of Colón and elsewhere – adopted the tactic of car caravans in recent days. “Last night we had 800 vehicles parade and make noise throughout Catacamas and Santa María Real throughout the evening against the coup.” Similar caravans are underway in the cities of Tela and San Pedro Sula, reports Radio Progreso.

On Friday afternoon, back in the Northeast corner of the country, the Trujillo teachers union invited two of your reporters to the Escuela Normal for a meeting of sixty of its union leaders. As the reporters sought to interview the locals, the locals were more eager to interview the reporters. They wanted to know: In our reporting from other countries and civil resistance movements, what strategies and tactics had we learned about that might be useful to them?
One of the union leaders shared his concern aloud – one that we’ve heard echoed throughout the country from resistance organizers - that that the Honduran civil resistance’s emphasis on protest marches over the past 56 days risks its falling into a predictable pattern: The movement convenes a march or a blockade, the action is attacked violently by police and the Army, with a toll of wounded and arrested participants, and to denounce the violations of human rights the movement then takes to the streets with another march, which is similarly beaten by the repressive forces, so on and so forth, in a vicious circle that can lead to frustration, fatigue and diminishing returns.

From that a conversation ensued about, among other examples, the African National Congress – the movement that toppled the apartheid regime in South Africa – that spent the 1960s and 70s as an armed guerrilla insurgency but had then transformed into a victorious nonviolent campaign when it had shifted its emphasis to community organizing techniques of house-to-house persuasion and education. From 1994 to the present, the ANC has led the elected government of that country. The big change in the ANC’s tactics came based on the advice the ANC, during its guerrilla stage, had received in the late 1970s from the leaders of Vietnam’s successful armed resistance to US colonial invasion.

The South Africans had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) hoping to impress the Vietnamese with how many insurgent troops it had trained and armed, and to gain their strategic and tactical support. One ANC delegate who was present at those meetings told Narco News earlier this year that it was the Vietnamese – possibly the most successful armed guerrilla movement in world history - who convinced the South Africans that they weren’t at all ready to wage a successful armed insurgency because they had not engaged in sufficient public education and community organizing to build civilian support for it. (The late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was legendary for his attention to the details and minutia of community organizing and educating the citizenry.) The South African shift to strategies and tactics of community organizing, in the end, eliminated the need for armed struggle and brought victory through nonviolent methods. From that emerged a discussion about the public communications and relations needs of the Honduras anti-coup movement, which includes large sectors of labor and farmer organizations – like the teachers union – whose members are already highly politicized but that do not always expand their public education or organizing efforts to the rest of the population.

Other historical examples similarly informed the discussion, from Serbia’s ten-year struggle that toppled the dictator Milosevic to the organizing techniques of the Zapatista and indigenous movements in Mexico, to the blockades by the coca growers of Bolivia, among others.

Reflective of that growing desire to expand the strategic and tactical moves by the civil resistance, the Trujillo schoolteachers then headed out of the meeting, started their engines, and paraded through the city, as their counterparts in Sabá and other cities had done the previous day and repeated again on Friday. They then joined with anti-coup car caravans from Bonito Oriental, from Sabá, from Sonaguera, and from the small towns in the region, converging Friday night on the state’s largest city of Tocoa for a mega-caravan of voluminous protest.

Police agencies and the Armed Forces have not as yet figured out a method by which to stop the sudden epidemic horn-honking protest caravans, which move too fast for the usual repressive weapons of teargas and nightsticks. The cacophonous caravans likewise do not stay in one place long enough to allow the actions of provocateurs, infiltrators or the misguided machos that often leech upon large protests to engage in actions that the pro-coup media then predictably uses as fodder to paint the entire resistance as somehow threatening to the general public.

The caravan rides day and night like a pony express – east, west, north and south – from its decentralized focal points throughout Honduras, heralding the news to the populace that the coup regime lacks the people’s consent. It is also evidence that important movement sectors, like the teachers unions, have decided to reach out beyond their own members to the larger and less organized public. Which only goes to show that they may be teachers, but in Honduras, they are also learning.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/3381/learning-curve-teachers-vs-honduras-coup

This Isn’t Reform, It’s Robbery

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:29:35 -0600

by Chris Hedges

Percentage change since 2002 in average premiums paid to large US health-insurance companies: +87%
Percentage change in the profits of the top ten insurance companies: +428%
Chances that an American bankrupted by medical bills has health insurance: 7 in 10
—Harper’s Index, September 2009

Capitalists, as my friend Father Michael Doyle says, should never be allowed near a health care system. They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care. The sick do not have a choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health. And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.

The current health care debate in Congress has nothing to do with death panels or public options or socialized medicine. The real debate, the only one that counts, is how much money our blood-sucking insurance, pharmaceutical and for-profit health services are going to be able to siphon off from new health care legislation. The proposed plans rattling around Congress all ensure that the profits for these corporations will increase and the misery for ordinary Americans will be compounded. The corporate state, enabled by both Democrats and Republicans, is yet again cannibalizing the Treasury. It is yet again pushing Americans, especially the poor and the working class, into levels of despair and rage that will continue to fuel the violent, proto-fascist movements leaping up around the edges of American society. And the traditional watchdogs—those in public office, the press and citizens groups—are as useless as the perfumed fops of another era who busied their days with court intrigue at Versailles. Canada never looked so good.

The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health care reform legislation. “Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time,” says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, “so there is a vacuum on the outside.” And these lobbyists have already killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing profits and capacity for abuse.

“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. “Next the government will tell us a Pinto in every garage, a lead-coated toy to every child and melamine-laced puppy chow for every dog.”

“Health insurance is not a race to the top; it is a race to the bottom,” he told me from Cambridge, Mass. “The way you make money is by abusing people. And if a public-option plan is not ready and willing to abuse patients it is stuck with the expensive patients. The premiums will go up until it is noncompetitive. The conditions that have now been set for the plans include a hobbled public option. Under the best-case scenario there will be tens of millions [who] will remain uninsured at the outset, and the number will climb as more and more people are priced out of the insurance market.”

The inclusion of these corporations in the crafting of health care legislation has not stopped figures like Rick Scott, the former head of the Columbia/HCA health care company, from attempting to sabotage any plan. Scott’s company was forced to pay a $1.7 billion fraud settlement—the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history—for stealing hundreds of millions from taxpayers by overbilling for medical care. Scott, who made his money primarily from Medicare, is now saturating the airwaves in a reputed $20 million ad campaign that is stoking the anger and fear of many Americans. His ads are coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the “Swift boat” attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

“They are using our money to campaign against us,” Dr. Himmelstein told me. “The money for these commercials came from health care interests that collect fees from American patients. We experienced this before in Massachusetts. We ran a ballot initiative for universal health care in 2000 and the insurance industry spent $5 million on it, including the insurance company I am insured by. They used my premiums to smear an idea that 70 percent in Massachusetts, according to polls, favored before this smear campaign. Universal health care was narrowly defeated.”

The bills now in Congress will, at best, impose on the country the failed model in Massachusetts. That model will demand that Americans buy health insurance from private insurers. There will be some subsidies for the very poor but not for anyone above a modest income. Insurers will be allowed to continue to jack up premiums, including for the elderly. The bankruptcies due to medical bills and swelling premiums will mount along with rising deductibles and co-payments. Health care will be beyond the reach of many families. In Massachusetts one in six people who have mandated insurance still say they cannot afford care, and 30,000 people were evicted from the state program this month because of budget cuts. Expect the same debacle nationwide.

“For someone my age who is making $40,000 a year you are required to lay out $5,000 for an insurance premium for coverage that covers nothing until you have spent $2,000 out of pocket,” Himmelstein said. “You are $7,000 out of pocket before you have any coverage at all. For most people that means you are already bankrupt before you have insurance. If anything, that has made them worse off. Instead of having that $5,000 to cover some of their medical expenses they have laid it out in premiums.”

The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care—$7,129 per capita—although 45.7 million Americans remain without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered. There are 14,000 Americans a day now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third, 31 percent, of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. But the proposed America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (H.R. 3200 in the House) will, rather than cut costs, add an estimated $239 billion over 10 years to the federal deficit. This is very good for the corporations. It is very bad for us.

The lobbyists have, as they did with the obscene bailouts for banks and investment firms, hijacked legislation in order to fleece the citizen. The five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of this year. The Washington Post reported that up to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single-payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations.

Obama and the congressional leadership have shut out advocates of single-payer. The press, including papers such as The New York Times, treats single-payer as a fringe movement. The television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of doctors favor single-payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is another sad testament to the power of our corporate state.
“We are considering a variety of striking efforts for early in the fall,” Dr. Himmelstein said, “including protests outside state capitals by doctors around the country, video links of conferences in 70 or 80 cities around the country, with protests and potential doctors chaining themselves to the fence of the White House.”

Make sure you join them.

Strategies of Dissent Evolving in Burma

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:23:37 -0600

Activists Find Political Breathing Room in Humanitarian Nonprofit Groups
Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, August 24, 2009

RANGOON, Burma -- Call it the evolutionary school of revolution.

After years of brutally suppressed street protests, many Burmese have adopted a new strategy that they say takes advantage of small political openings to push for greater freedoms. They are distributing aid, teaching courses on civic engagement and quietly learning to govern.

"We are trying to mobilize people by changing their thought process," said an entrepreneur in the city of Mandalay who is setting up classes on leadership. He added half in jest, "Civil society is a guerrilla movement."

Government critics including many Burmese say opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's return to house arrest this month underscores the junta's resolve to keep her out of reach of the population ahead of parliamentary elections next year that many dismiss as a sham. But a growing number of educated, middle-class Burmese are pinning their hopes on what they call "community-based organizations," finding outlets for entrepreneurship and room to maneuver politically in a country with one of the world's most repressive governments.

At first light on a recent Sunday, a dozen doctors piled into two old vans, stopped for a hearty breakfast of fish stew and sticky rice, then headed out to dispatch free medicine and consult villagers an hour outside Rangoon. The group first came together two years ago to care for demonstrators beaten by security forces during monk-led protests. When Tropical Cyclone Nargis hit in May 2008, killing an estimated 140,000 people, the doctors joined countless Burmese in collecting emergency supplies for survivors while the junta rebuffed foreign aid dispatches.

Like many of those ad hoc groups, the doctors have since developed an informal nonprofit organization, meeting regularly and volunteering at an orphanage and in villages near Rangoon. The group's leader secured funding from a foreign nonprofit agency and named his team "Volunteers for the Vulnerable," or V4V.

But to avoid having their activities labeled as activism, the leader negotiates weekly with the authorities for access to the villages under cover of an anodyne Burmese fixture -- the abbot of a local Buddhist monastery.

For their own safety, the V4V founder said, "not even all our members know the name of the group."

Successive military governments in Burma since 1962 have clamped down on civil society and forbade associations of more than five people. Burmese say they have come to see the activities of semi-illicit groups such as V4V as rare outlets for entrepreneurship and for maneuvering politically.

"There is still room to change at the small scale," said an AIDS activist, sipping juice in a teashop. "Many people say civil society is dead. But it never dies. Sometimes it takes different forms, under pretext of religion, under pretext of medicine."

A 32-year-old writer here said his father was a local township representative for Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, which won 1990 elections but was never allowed to take power. Suu Kyi has been confined to house arrest for 14 of the past 19 years, and the number of political detainees is estimated at about 2,000.

But the young writer sees a role for himself beyond the opposition party.

He said his life was transformed after he took a three-month course at a Rangoon nonprofit agency called Myanmar Egress, which runs classes for Burmese interested in development. Like many of the people interviewed for this story, he spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

He then quit his job at a business journal to freelance opinion columns under a pseudonym and has co-founded a nonprofit with other Egress alumni.

"I came to realize my daily life is being involved in politics, in the political economy," he said, a resolve triggered by the scenes of poverty he witnessed along his daily commute on a creaking, overcrowded bus through Rangoon. "My belief is that without political knowledge . . . people will just go around town and get shot. I am doing what I can as an educator and a journalist."

Civic Duties

Many people in Rangoon expressed feeling a similar sense of duty as they have watched their military rulers decimate the education system and deepen poverty through mismanagement of the economy. In the past 50 years, Burma has fallen from among the richest countries in Asia to the bottom of regional development rankings.

"In Burma, the middle class is very thin," said a 38-year-old graphic designer who in 2004 helped found an undercover nonprofit group that recruits potential political leaders. "We need to grow, strengthen that. Most democratic countries have a broader middle class. It is the only way to go forward."

Such groups have also allowed urbanites to network in ways previously inconceivable.

Humanitarian and Political

On a recent afternoon, students crowded into a musty hotel conference room for a three-hour lecture on civil society sponsored by Myanmar Egress.

Ten minutes before the class was to begin, barely a seat was vacant and still the students poured in, laughing, chatting or rifling through notes that curled at the edges in the damp heat. "They have a thirst for knowledge. They want to know. . . . They don't even take a break," said a 28-year-old Egress teacher, observing the 105 young adults from the back of the room. "This place is quite free, the only place we can talk about these things."

Some members of the groups reject any political motive in their activities, describing them as purely humanitarian. But others say that in Burma the two are intrinsically linked.

"At every meeting of nonprofits, the solution is always, in the end, political," said a Rangoon scholar who works with a foreign development organization.

The scholar is associated with a loose circle of influential academics, writers, negotiators between the junta and restive ethnic minorities, and businessmen at home and abroad who share a goal of finding a way through the political impasse.

"It's not that we oppose the NLD, but at least we take advantage of the opening space. . . . The NLD can't set a course. We have to find an alternative," said the scholar, who served 15 years in prison for writing about human rights.

But Suu Kyi's trial has made him less sanguine about prospects for change in next year's elections, the country's first since 1990. Going forward, he said, the key is "to prime the population for the transition."

Bush critics: still evil, crazy extremists

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:20:53 -0600

Time's Joe Klein was at a beach party last weekend and was confronted about his recent, vague statement that "there are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection." The person doing the confronting was Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog -- who also happens to be the granddaughter of I.F. Stone (which ends up being relevant to the confrontation) -- and she masterfully recounts the revealing and hilarious Klein outburst that ensued, during which, among other things, he accused me of being "evil," a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and "crazily anti-national security."

Much of this is just standard Klein. He's been "accusing" me for years of being what he calls a "civil liberties extremist" or "monomaniacal on the subject of civil liberties" -- as though that's some type of insult, when I view it as being exactly the opposite. For reasons I recently explained -- in response to to Michael Massing's Chuck-Todd-echoing accusation in The New York Review of Books that I fail to take into account "practical considerations" when advocating various views -- it's impossible to believe in constitutional principles and the rule of law without being "extremist" and even "absolute" because that is the nature of those guarantees.

But the more significant aspect of Klein's outburst is its relationship to the lesson revealed by Marc Ambinder's similar outburst earlier this week, in which Ambinder insisted that those who were right about Bush extremism and criminality nonetheless deserved to be ignored and marginalized because they were such hate-driven extremists (Politico's Mike Allen, on right-wing radio, similarly called such people "left-wing haters"). Paul Krugman aptly summarized the meaning of the Ambinder episode:

It was clear from any serious analysis of that record that the Bush people consistently relied on lies and misinformation to sell their policies, consistently abused power for political gain. . . . [I]t’s really sad that those who missed the obvious, who failed to see what was right in front of their noses, still consider themselves superior to those who got it right.

Just think about this: Joe Klein is someone who went on Meet the Press in February, 2003 and urged that the U.S. invade Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings. Once the war went bad, he lied and claimed he never supported it. In February, 2002, he bitterly mocked Europeans for complaining about torture at Guantanamo; insisted the U.S. would never do any such thing; and said Gitmo detainees should "be dressed in pink tutus, to give them an appreciation of the freedoms accorded western ballerinas." In 2006, he went on national television and grotesquely said we should consider a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran, and then apologized the next week only because his phraseology was "a technical violation of a long-standing [diplomatic] protocol" for how such ideas should be expressed -- as though rules for how government officials speak bind him as a "journalist." And when George Bush got caught breaking the law by spying on Americans with no warrants, Klein immediately demanded that Democrats do nothing to oppose it and then even infamously proclaimed that he supports the spying program even though he has virtually no idea what the program does.

Yet someone with that record -- the U.S. is not torturing!; put Gitmo detainees in tu-tus; start a pointless war that slaughters hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings; incinerate Iran with nuclear weapons; Bush has the right to break the law -- can and does still parade around, and be treated, as the Serious responsible centrist. Conversely, those who opposed all of that are -- to use Klein's words -- Evil Extremists and Crazy Absolutists. And Klein is hardly unique in that regard. Much of the Beltway political and media establishment supported all of those same things and yet still considers itself the sane, responsible centrists -- as Atrios recently said, nobody lost their job over any of this (other than the war-and-media-criticizing Ashiegh Banfield). The overriding Beltway dogma, still, is that the true irresponsible extremists are the "leftists" who stood in opposition to all of that (as I detail in the post below from earlier today, exactly the same thing is happening now in the health care debate, as the conventional Beltway wisdom has ossified that it is the childish, petulant ideological Left that, as always, is to blame for the intractable health care dispute).

Speaking of Chuck Todd and his "30,000 feet" mentality, the superb journalist Jeremy Scahill was on Bill Maher's HBO show on Friday night -- along with Todd, Jay Leno, and Rep. Jan Schakoswky -- to talk about Blackwater (about which Scahill wrote the definitive book), but Scahill used the opportunity to take Todd to task for, among other things, the comments he made in his interview with me dismissing criminal investigations as pie-in-the-sky Leftist naïveté . The first part of the discussion can be seen here, but the Scahill-Todd exchange begins with this clip [Video clip blocked by You Tube at HBO's request; a snippet of the video can be seen here]:

Searching for the Depression—And Finding It!

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:14:41 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

Economic Stress Is Hidden, But It’s There in a Recovery That Isn’t.
by Danny Schechter

Last week I was telling a visiting filmmaker from overseas about the financial crisis and how it was getting worse. He looked at me askance. The market had just gone up, he said, and the White House was talking about an emerging recovery.

“I have been in New York before, he said, and it looks the same.”

A lot of the pain is hidden, I told him, hidden behind the deceptive spin in our media or buried in the denial and delusions of many people on the streets who have not taken the trouble to try to understand the nature of the calamity they are living through.

On the elevator, we pass the offices of City Harvest, a charity that collects excess food from restaurants and distributes it to shelters and programs for the hungry. An employee explains that with the restaurant business way off, they have less to donate. What about the demand by the hungry, I ask? With a shrug, he tells me the need is way up. (AP is reporting, “The nation's food banks, struggling to meet demand in hard times, are turning to prison inmates for free labor to help feed the hungry.”)

Out in the street, you soon notice fewer cabs and town cars. More people are walking or using public transportation, even though the fares recently went up. Even that is deceptive because there are still a lot of tourists in Midtown to complicate the picture. New Yorkers have other things on their minds. There are retail vacancies on every block. Other stores are discounting everything. The fast food places have their specials going for $2-5 dollars. Many of the clothing stories look like good will shops. When a JC Penny opened a store in Midtown, 15,000 people applied for 500 jobs.

As we walked downtown, we passed nearly empty bars and restaurants, a sign that the most customers are staying away. Media reports are now confirming what I saw. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Major retailers reported that American consumers are continuing to hunker down, casting a cloud over the durability of the U.S. recovery and underscoring the importance of overseas demand in restoring the world economy to health. Retailers across the spectrum provided foreboding reports.”

Down where I live, you also pass new buildings with empty stores and unsold apartments. The foreclosure crisis is already hitting New York’s condos and co-ops. You just can’t see it from the street the way you can in a suburban tract. When you read the auction notices, you realize its real. A new wave of foreclosures is expected and not just in poor homes. The middle class and commercial real estate is affected.

Almost every block on 8th Avenue in Chelsea has a new bank branch. It’s like ATM heaven except most are not crowded. There was a report last week that banking industry opened 10,000 branches over the last five years. Most were based in shopping areas or concentrated in affluent neighborhoods. Only a small number are in poorer communities, especially those victimized by predatory subprime lending. The New York Times reported this week that 91,100 NY households hide their savings in closets, in pillows — even in brown paper lunch bags, just not at a bank

Meanwhile, every week, more banks are going bust and being taken over and sold by the FDIC. There are reports that the FDIC itself is insolvent.

And as for the markets, cooler heads prevailed when the wisemen realized that consumer demand has fallen up as defaults and delinquencies rise

Inequality is mounting in social and racial terms. Recent statistics: cited in a Times study: "From the first quarter in 2008 to the first quarter in 2009, the national unemployment rates for blacks rose from 8.9 percent to 13.6 percent, compared to a rise for whites of 4.8 percent to 8.2 percent. In NYC, it was even worse: from 5.7 percent to 14.7 percent, compared to 3.0 percent to 3.7 percent for whites.”

Remember these statistics notoriously undercount those not looking for jobs that are not there. Unless you are following the trajectory of this crisis you might not know that economist Nouriel Roubini, who was among the first to predict it, still sees it as far more serious that most of us realize:

“This is the worst US and global recession in 60 years. If the US recession were—as is most likely—to be over at the end of the year, it will have been three times as long and about fives times as deep—in terms of the cumulative decline in output—as the previous two.” Notice he is not quite predicting its end, using the “If” word to mask his own uncertainty. The Financial Times cautions against optimism taking refuge in the term “caution.”

Here in the Big Apple, The City’s top money man, Controller Bill Thompson says, “108,000 jobs evaporating citywide between August, 2008 and May, 2009. Typically, unemployment continues to climb even after the economy bottoms out and begins to recover. I expect the number of unemployed in New York City to reach 400,000 in 2010, for the first time in decades.”

Still invisible are the impact of cutbacks on city services and the educational system.

Income disparities are growing, according to a new study but how do I show that to my visitor since people with credit cards can still charge it even as credit limits are being cut back and interest rates rise. At the same time, A Bank of America Merrill study shows the Middle class is being hit hardest.

The LA Times reports, “The consumer debt problem in the economy really is a debt problem for the middle class. The need to work off a chunk of that debt will sap middle-class family spending power for perhaps years to come. By contrast, the upper 10% of income earners face a much smaller debt burden relative to income and net worth. Those people should have ample spending power to help fuel an economic recovery.”

And don’t think the end of the recession will bring back many of the jobs that are gone. Economists are now getting us used to a new term: “jobless recovery.”

Already employers are introducing compulsory furloughs, as the Christian Science Monitor reveals: “For millions of Americans, this might be the year of the furlough. Over the course of a month or so, workers—both white-collar and blue—may have to take several days off whether they want to or not. Call it a temporary pay cut—an action that is sold by management as a way to help save some jobs.”

Another new study finds, “Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers "truly amazing."

It's all amazing, all devastating to our lives and futures, and yet you can’t necessarily see it if you don’t look, or know what to look for. No one is talking about our economic pain—not the right or the left, perhaps because it is not an “event” that you can cover live at a town hall.

It’s there but, for many, it’s invisible and seen as a personal problem, not a social issue. This crisis didn’t just happen; it was caused. Will those responsible ever be held accountable? Out of sight is out of mind. The hope is that if we ignore it, it will go away.

If you think that, think again.

Mediahannel.org News Dissector Danny Schechter is finishing a book and film on the financial crisis as a crime story. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/20-4

Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:03:16 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

Welcome to the Land of the Free. But who has the freedom, and who is being locked, day after day, into economic shackles?

By Paul Craig Roberts

"In a little time [there will be] no middling sort. We shall have a few, and but a very few Lords, and all the rest beggars." –R.L. Bushman

"Rapidly you are dividing into two classes–extreme rich and extreme poor." –"Brutus"

Americans think that they have "freedom and democracy" and that politicians are held accountable by elections. The fact of the matter is that the US is ruled by powerful interest groups who control politicians with campaign contributions. Our real rulers are an oligarchy of financial and military/security interests and AIPAC, which influences US foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

Have a look at economic policy. It is being run for the benefit of large financial concerns, such as Goldman Sachs.

It was the banks, not the millions of Americans who have lost homes, jobs, health insurance, and pensions, that received $700 billion in TARP funds. The banks used this gift of capital to make more profits. In the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs announced record second quarter profits and large six-figure bonuses for every employee.

The Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy is another gift to the banks. It lowers their cost of funds and increases their profits. With the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, banks became high-risk investment houses that trade financial instruments such as interest rate derivatives and mortgage backed securities. With abundant funds supplied virtually free by the Federal Reserve, banks are paying depositors virtually nothing on their savings.

Despite the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy, beginning October 1 banks are raising the annual percentage rate (APR) on credit card purchases and cash advances and on balances that have a penalty rate because of late payment. Banks are also raising the late fee. In the midst of the worst economy since the 1930s, heavily indebted Americans, who are losing their jobs and their homes, are to be bled into bankruptcy by the very banks that are being subsidized with TARP funds and low interest rates.

Moreover, it is the American public that is on the hook for the TARP money and the low interest rates. As the US government’s budget is 50% or more in the red, the TARP money has to be borrowed from abroad or monetized by the Fed. This means more pressure on the US dollar’s exchange value and a rise in import prices and also domestic inflation.

Americans will thus pay for the TARP and low interest rate subsidies to their financial rulers with erosion in the purchasing power of the dollar. What we are experiencing is a massive redistribution of income from the American public to the financial sector.

And this is occurring during a Democratic administration headed by America’s first black president, with a Democratic majority in the House and Senate.

Is there a government anywhere that less represents its citizens than the US government?

Consider America’s wars. As of the moment of writing, the out-of-pocket cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is $900,000,000,000. When you add in the already incurred future costs of veterans benefits, interest on the debt, the forgone use of the resources for productive purposes, and such other costs as computed by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes, "our" government has wasted $3,000,000,000,000–three thousand billion dollars–on two wars that have no benefit whatsoever for any American whose income does not derive from the military/security complex, about which five-star general President Eisenhower warned us.

It is now a proven fact that the US invasion of Iraq was based on lies and deception of the American public. The only beneficiaries were the armaments industries, Blackwater, Halliburton, military officers who enjoy higher rates of promotion during war, and Muslim extremists whose case the US government proved by its unprovoked aggression against Muslims. No one else benefitted. Iraq was a threat to no one, and finding Saddam Hussein and executing him after a kangaroo trial had no effect whatsoever on ending the war or preventing the start of others.

The cost of America’s wars is a huge burden on a bankrupt country, but the cost incurred by veterans might be even higher. Homelessness is a prevalent condition of veterans, as is post-traumatic stress. American soldiers, who naively fought for the munitions industry’s wars, for high compensation for the munitions CEOs, and for dividends and capital gains for the munitions shareholders, paid not only with lives and lost limbs, but also with broken marriages, ruined careers, psychiatric disorders, and prison sentences for failing to make child support payments.

What did Americans gain from an unaffordable war in Iraq that lasted far longer than World War II and that put into power Shi’ites allied with Iran?

The answer is obvious: nothing whatsoever.

What did the armaments industry gain? Billions of dollars in profits.

What about President Obama? "A corporate marketing creation," sums up the distinguished British journalist John Pilger.

Obama is the presidential candidate who promised to end the war in Iraq. He hasn’t. But he has escalated the war in Afghanistan, started a new war in Pakistan, intends to repeat the Yugoslav scenario in the Caucasus, and appears determined to start a war in South America. In response to the acceptance by US puppet president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, of seven US military bases in Columbia, Venezuela warned South American countries that the "winds of war are beginning to blow."

Here we have the US government, totally dependent on the generosity of foreigners to finance its red ink, which extends in large quantities as far as the eye can see, completely under the thumb of the military/security complex, which will destroy us all in order to meet Wall Street share price expectations.

Why does any American care who rules Afghanistan? The country has nothing to do with us.

Did the armed services committees of the House and Senate calculate the risk of destabilizing nuclear armed Pakistan when they acquiesced to Obama’s new war there, a war that has already displaced two million Pakistanis?

No, of course not. The whores took their orders from the same military/security oligarchy that instructed Obama.

The great American superpower and its 300 million people are being driven straight into the ground by the narrow interest of the big banks and the munitions industry. People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars.
Will Americans, smashed and destroyed by "their" government’s policy, which always puts Americans last, ever understand who their real enemies are?

Will Americans realize that they are not ruled by elected representatives but by an oligarchy that owns the Washington whorehouse?

Will Americans ever understand that they are impotent serfs?

Demand that AG Holder Investigate All Torture

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:17:12 -0600

Those who have been responsible for ordering or perpetrating torture - a war crime - must be held responsible. If these crimes are not fully investigated and prosecuted, these despicable practices will surely come back to haunt what remains of our democracy.

Furthermore, if we are to have a functioning criminal justice system, we must begin opposing the de facto existence of two standards of justice in this country - one for the elite and well-connected (which usually means a slap on the wrist, if any consequences are meted out at all), and one for the rest of us (which means if you ain’t really rich, you ain’t gonna get much justice.)

Voters for Peace has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that he appoint a special prosecutor to investigate torture - and not just those low-level privates and corporals who did the actual torturing - but far more importantly, those who created policy and provided supposed legal justification for the torture that those policies condoned.

Yesterday, I sent a letter to the attorney general warning him that a limited investigation into torture would violate the law. The Convention Against Torture (CAT), signed by President Reagan, requires him to investigate and hold accountable all those involved in torture.

The letter, submitted on behalf of 150 organizations, carefully analyzed CAT to underscore that Mr. Holder has no discretion to ignore its mandates. CAT is written in mandatory language. It requires the investigation of all acts or torture and the prosecution of all those who conspired to and did commit torture.

The media has reported that Mr. Holder is reluctant to prosecute torturers because most of them were "following orders." The letter to Holder points out hard facts. CAT specifically prohibits reliance on extraordinary circumstances or the orders of superiors as justifications of torture. Every history student knows from the Nuremberg trials that there is no 'I was just following orders' defense allowed for war crimes. However, this is the precise argument now being used to argue against prosecution for the war crime of torture.

Please take action by clicking here to send a letter to Attorney General Holder. Urge him to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the facts and apply the law wherever they lead. Click here

Attorney General Holder took an oath to uphold the law. He repeatedly promised to remain above politics and restore the integrity of the DOJ. To do this, he must appoint a special prosecutor to follow the evidence where it leads without restriction. The Rule of Law applies to all Americans, no matter what office they hold.

The letter warns against a limited investigation that selectively prosecutes only some of those involved in torture and excludes those who developed the torture policy. Such a limited investigation would violate the law and would likely to lead to litigation.

Please support our efforts to ensure torture accountability by clicking here and donating now

Thank you for taking action.

Sincerely,

Kevin Zeese
Executive Director
VotersForPeace.US

This is a copy of the full letter:

Holder Warned that Limited Investigation and Selective Prosecution Would Violate the Law and Further Undermine Credibility of DOJ

Washington, DC: Yesterday, the Disbar Torture Lawyer coalition, consisting of more than 150 NGOs representing over a million members, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder calling on him to appoint a special prosecutor, independent of the Justice Department, to fully investigate the use of torture, and to prosecute all officials and employees who advocated, ordered and committed acts of torture against people held by the United States.

The letter, see below, signed by coalition attorney Kevin Zeese, who is Executive Director of Voters for Peace, carefully analyzed the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), which was signed by President Reagan, to underscore that Mr. Holder has no discretion to ignore its mandates. CAT is written in mandatory language, and it requires the investigation of all acts or torture and the prosecution of all those who conspired to and did commit torture.

The media has reported that Mr. Holder is reluctant to prosecute torturers because most of them were “following orders.” The letter to holder points out that CAT specifically prohibits reliance on extraordinary circumstances or the orders of superiors as justifications of torture. CAT provides no discretion, if torture occurred countries must investigate and prosecute those responsible.

“Selective prosecution of low-level officials who conducted some acts of torture, while ignoring those who created the policy and facilitated torture would violate the law,” noted Zeese. “Every history student knows from the Nuremberg trials that there is no ‘I was just following orders’ defense allowed for war crimes, yet this is the precise argument now being used to argue against the prosecution for the war crime of torture. Mr. Holder took an oath to uphold the law, and repeatedly promised to remain above politics and restore the integrity of the DOJ. He can accomplish these by appointing a special prosecutor to follow the evidence where it leads without restriction. The Rule of Law applies to all Americans, no matter what office they hold.”

The letter concludes: “You can restore our moral high ground and the Department of Justice’s reputation as an agency that follows the law by appointing a special prosecutor, independent of the Department of Justice, with the very clear mandate – investigate the facts and apply the rule of law wherever it leads – as required by the Convention Against Torture.”

The letter warns that a limited investigation that selectively prosecuted only some of those involved in torture, and excluded those who developed the torture policy, would violate the law and would likely to lead to litigation.

* * *

August 10, 2009

Attorney General Eric Holder
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Re: The Convention Against Torture Requires the Investigation and Prosecution of Torture by an Independent Prosecutor Mandated to Investigate the Facts and Apply the Law. Selective Prosecution of Some Instances of Torture, or Limiting Prosecution to Low Level Officials, Will Not Satisfy the Requirements of the Convention Against Torture or Other Laws Proscribing Torture.

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I am writing as the attorney for the Disbar Torture Lawyers Campaign, a coalition of more than 150 organizations representing over a million members, in order to request that you appoint a special prosecutor to fully investigate all aspects of the torture issue, and to then follow where the evidence leads. We are concerned, based on various media reports quoting anonymous sources in your office, that you will soon announce a very narrow probe focusing limited instances of torture rather than the full investigation required by law. If the Department of Justice is going to restore its credibility and America’s reputation as a nation of laws, then it must even handedly apply the rule of law, especially in tough situations such as torture.

Our coalition has been involved with this issue for some time, and we recently filed disciplinary complaints against 15 lawyers who were instrumental in formulating and advocating the use of torture, including all those who prepared the now rescinded OLC memos. The critical law proscribing torture, which the United States must follow, is the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), adopted by the United States and signed by President Ronald Reagan. CAT is written in mandatory language in order ensure that prosecutorial discretion does not come into play when dealing with state sponsored torture. I have attached a copy of CAT and highlight key portions in this letter.

In the Preamble, CAT notes that that it was enacted to “make more effective the struggle against torture….” Article 1 defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.” Emphasis added. Because torture under CAT requires “instigation, consent, or acquiescence” of a government official, the selective prosecution of a few government employees who followed orders, while giving immunity for government officials who gave those orders, would undermine our bedrock rule of law that it applies equally, no matter what position a person holds.

Article 2(2) lays out our position in very clear terms: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” [Emphasis added.] In the case of torture by the United States, it has been said by various officials from both parties that, in light of the shock of 9/11, extreme means were necessary and that officials “were scared” and had to act to stop additional attacks. But CAT specifically prohibits such justifications.

Article 2(3) underscores our position: “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.” The media is reporting that you do not intend to investigate and prosecute the public officials who created the torture policy of the previous administration, and that you do not intend to investigate or prosecute those who followed the OLC memoranda because they were complying with legal opinions and orders issued by the DOJ. But this type of justification is precisely what the CAT forbids. Indeed, the DOJ involvement with justifying torture is one reason why it is critical that the prosecutor be a special prosecutor independent of the DOJ. If legal memoranda could be used to change the definition of torture – which is quite clear under CAT – and justify torture, then the Convention would be meaningless because a government that wanted to use torture would merely have their legal officials provide memoranda to allow it.

Moreover, the “I was just following orders” defense, made famous in the Nuremberg trials after World War II, has been rejected for decades. Nuremberg Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." This "defense of superior orders" is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty.

Article 4(1) states: “Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.” The United States has complied with this by enacting a criminal statute prohibiting torture under 18 USC 2340. This is clearly an enabling statute that cannot be ignored. Moreover, in order to comply with Article 4(2) to prohibit “complicity” to torture, the Patriot Act, passed during the same time period as much of the torture of detainees, added this language to Section 2340 under subsection (c): “Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.” Clearly, those who conspired to torture, such as those who used their official position to justify and order it, cannot be excused from the dictates of CAT Article 4 or Section 2340.

Article 5 requires the establishment of jurisdiction over persons covered under Article 4, including citizens of that country, and in cases where the persons are not extradited to face prosecution for torture in another country under Article 8. Clearly, this gives you jurisdiction to prosecute American citizens who committed torture and places the burden on you to do so unless you intend to rely on Article 8 to extradite Americans who may be indicted for torture by a foreign State Party.

Article 6 requires, “after an examination of information available,” that a person who committed torture be taken “into custody” and then that “a preliminary inquiry into the facts” be immediately undertaken. There have been vast amounts of information released, leaked and uncovered, which document who ordered and who committed torture. No doubt an independent investigation would find more evidence of who was responsible for committing these crimes. In our ethics complaints, we included over 600 pages of exhibits, including both the Senate and Red Cross detainee treatment reports and many of OLC memos. See www.DisbarTortureLawyers.com for copies of all exhibits filed. Clearly, this and your own internal “examination of information available” require that you take the known torturers into custody and conduct a more thorough investigation.

Article 7 requires a State Party, unless it extradites a torturer to another country for prosecution, “to submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.” Again, this is not discretionary. In order to follow the law you must investigate and prosecute all those involved with torture and not selectively prosecute certain low level officials involved in only some acts of torture. In the case of American torturers, despite the widespread torture of hundreds of individuals, including at least 98 deaths, not a single case has been submitted for prosecution, “Command's Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan” by Hina Shamsi and Edited by Deborah Pearlstein, Human Rights First, February 2006 http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/etn/dic/exec-sum.asp.

Article 8 states that torture is a required extraditable offense between State Parties. It may be that you do not intend to prosecute American citizens for torture in the United

States because a foreign State Party has notified you of an impending indictment and you intend to extradite those indicted. If that is the case, please confirm that in writing. It has been widely reported that other countries are well on their way to initiating torture charges against Americans.

Article 9 requires each State Party to assist each other in connection with torture prosecutions, “including the supply of all evidence at their disposal necessary to carry out the proceedings.” The United States must therefore, once notified, provide all torture evidence in its possession to foreign State Parties working on torture prosecutions.

Articles 10 requires the education about the rules against torture of all persons involved with detainees, and Article 11 requires the review of all interrogation and custody rules for detainees “with a view to preventing any cases of torture.” This is another powerful reason why the “I was just following orders” defense cannot be used to provide immunity to people who committed torture and why officials who created the torture policy must also be investigated and prosecuted.

Article 12 provides the strongest language for the appointment of a special prosecutor: “Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and

impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.” Clearly, in the case of torture by American citizens, there is indisputable evidence in various official reports and news articles to require an impartial investigation by a special prosecutor.

Article 13 requires a State Party to investigate all complaints of torture made by persons who have been tortured. Clearly, your office has received many complaints about torture either directly, such as in the case of Jose Padilla, or through proxies such as attorneys representing Guantanamo prisoners, the Red Cross, ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Amnesty International. Because victims have complained, you must appoint a special prosecutor with broad authority to investigate all acts of torture.

Mr. Attorney General, you have repeatedly stated, in your confirmation hearings and in public statements, that your Department of Justice “will follow the law.” That law, as specified by CAT, outlined above, not only prohibits the use of torture, but requires the investigation and prosecution of those who committed or conspired to commit torture. Applying the rule of law evenly is a key component of our American jurisprudence, and that is why the scales of justice should not be weighted in favor of those who hold positions of power. Our nation suffered a grievous blow to her reputation and moral standing when the previous administration intentionally violated the law by advocating and instituting wholesale torture of detainees. You can restore our moral high ground and the Department of Justice’s reputation as an agency that follows the law by appointing a special prosecutor, independent of the Department of Justice, with the very clear mandate – investigate the facts and apply the rule of law wherever it leads – as required by the Convention Against Torture.

American citizens who ordered and committed acts of torture should be prosecuted in the United States where they will be given the full panoply of legal protections under our Constitution. At trial, they should be allowed to present any defense under the law, and they should be able to argue whatever mitigating factors are applicable during sentencing. They should also be allowed to ask for a pardon or commutation from the President after conviction. However, they should not be granted immunity from prosecution, tantamount to amnesty, in advance of a complete criminal investigation.

Failure to hold those accountable for torture will have numerous repercussions. We believe that anything less than a full torture investigation mandated by your office will result in indictment of American citizens by other CAT State Parties, which will then require you to extradite those citizens and provide evidence against them. It is also likely to result in litigation requesting that the federal court compel your office to comply with your duty to follow the dictates of CAT. We also believe that the failure to prosecute will embolden other Party States and non-party states to ignore international treaties and laws protecting Americans, resulting in future atrocities against our own citizens. Failure to prosecute will also create a de facto exception for future administrations that may decide that torture, or any other atrocity, should be U.S. policy.

In closing, we strongly urge you to quickly appoint a special prosecutor, independent of the DOJ, to investigate and prosecute torture wherever the facts lead, as required by CAT. If I can be of assistance in your investigations, please contact me.

Sincerely,

Kevin B. Zeese
Attorney

Kevin Speaks with Jared Polis on KGNU

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:30:40 -0600

Submitted by Kevin

I got a chance to grill Polis on the radio a bit this morning. In addition to complaining about "the disadvantages of being the senate majority" (whatever that means), and articulating beautifully the inability of a "representative" body like the Senate to do anything other than pander to the needs of Big Business, he went on to lie blatantly in response to my questions, claiming that human rights abuses by School of the Americas graduates are somehow a thing of the past.

http://ncronline.org/news/global/honduran-coup-leader-two-time-soa-graduate
http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=1699

and that the Senate killed the horribly expensive and outdated F-22 program

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=437332&no=385503&rel_no=1.

Lies, lies, and more lies.

To listen to Polis himself, follow this link and skip ahead to the interview:
http://kgnu.org/cgi-bin/play.m3u?show=MorningMagazine&date=2009-08-06

The Case Against the Good War

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:15:04 -0600

Submitted by Duke

"Afghanistan, the Case Against the Good War"
By Jonathan Neale.
Published Oct 2008

I don't think the American Left / antiwar movement has to this date ever been able to overcome the fact that a majority of anti-Iraq war activists, and liberals in general, have tacitly or overtly agreed with George Bush and now Barak Obama that the war in Afghanistan is some kind of "Good War" that we need to support. Meanwhile, a lot of people, like myself, who have opposed the Afghan war from the start have found access to details, history, and cold hard facts with which to argue few and far between.

This article is a brillant and solid analysis of the history of American intervention in Afghanistan from the 70s on to today. I think it makes painfully clear the point that allying a (real or imagined) "feminist" and "modernizing" political agenda to helicopter gun ships and airstrikes is NO way forward for any country. It didn't work for the Russians I don't think it will for the United States.

I believe that all talk of re-building an antiwar movement is complete hogwash unless we focus dead center on the place where Obama is escalating it the fastest- and with potentially the worst consequences. It is precisely here that the voice of the American "Left" has for too long been characterized by a deafening silence of timidity, apathy, and general ignorance. This is not of course to depreciate the actions of any of you whose ongoing principled work I have come to know and respect. But it is, I am sure you will agree, accurately descriptive of the national landscape.

In Solidarity,

Christian

PS Please forward this around to people you know / repost online, etc... if you think this is making sense.

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=481&issue=120

Indigenous Groups Reasserting Themselves Too

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:47:41 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

Battle for the Amazon: People vs the Government

The largest indigenous movement in decades battles to save the Amazon Basin from oil exploitation Pt 1

Gold, Impunity & Violence in El Salvador

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:41:31 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This is an interesting video about the continuing struggle for social and economic justice in Latin America, in this case El Salvador.

It would seem that many countries are learning a similar lesson at the same time (including ours), namely, that crimes that go unpunished merely encourage more crimes.

Accountability - applied to all, regardless of wealth, influence, or power - must be the bedrock of any legal system if it is to be a legal system in anything but name.

How to Tell People They Sound Racist

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:43:48 -0600

We had a pretty interesting conversation last night at The Cup about racism, what racism is and is not, and how it differs from prejudice and bigotry. Duke sent this link, so I’m posting it here. This video doesn’t really talk about what racism is, but rather differentiates between racist words and actions as opposed to a racist person, and how to focus a conversation on what you perceive to be racist words and/or actions.

Toppling a Coup

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:33:27 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

The fourth in Al Giordano’s series on the tactics of civil disobedience, and violent versus non-violent action.

Back in 1986, paper mill workers in the US state of Maine went on strike. A great multitude gathered one night in one of the mill towns to hear then-US presidential candidate Jesse Jackson speak in solidarity with the workers.

In the middle of Jackson’s oration, a commotion could be heard from the bleachers of the school gymnasium where the talk had been held. A chant of “Scab! Scab! Scab!” arose and I saw workers shaking fists and pointing fingers at one scrawny longhaired guy who had apparently crossed the picket line but still wanted to hear Jackson speak. The scab made a beeline through the crowd toward the exit sign, passing right in front of your correspondent. I’ll always remember the look of fear on his face. This was a burly crowd capable of tearing him limb from limb.

“Brothers and sisters,” thundered Jackson from the podium. “Let not one lost sheep lead the whole flock astray!” He may have saved the guy’s life, or at least a limb or two. The strike meeting continued without incident. And the newspapers had no chaotic acts to sensationalize the next morning

(Maybe I’m remembering this story today because the fellow community organizer that had invited me to that gymnasium, Renny Cushing, now a state representative in New Hampshire, is coming to visit somewhere in a country called América, and sends a hello to all the clams and our other friends in New England.)

The lesson of the lost sheep applies today in Honduras, where the pro-coup media is abuzz with gloating obsession over two acts of property destruction yesterday that happened near an otherwise peaceful protest march in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.

Here’s how the golpista media is portraying it:

Hoard of Zelaya Supporters Unleash Chaos in Tegucigalpa

Peaceful demonstrations that were hoped for yesterday in the Honduras capital turned into vandalism by sympathizers of deposed president Manuel Zelaya, who yesterday morning marched to the presidential palace to demand the return of the ex-president. But upon their arrival in Tegucigalpa, they unleashed chaos, according to information from the daily El Heraldo.

A urban bus and fast food restaurants were set on fire by groups of Zelaya supporters who put up barricades and shouted for the restitution of the deposed governor.

Elements of the Army arrived to break up the protesters who planted terror in their path.

Now, as anyone can see from the photograph above, the attack on a fast food restaurant (only one experienced fire) was demonstrably not the act of a “hoard.” It was few young men, three in this photo, who visibly are not near any multitude of demonstrators.

And yet the dishonest elements of the media are eager to portray the incidents as if tens of thousands of marchers suddenly mounted torches and pitchforks to stampede upon Popeye's New Orleans Cajun Fried Chicken and Biscuits! (Use your head: a hungry crowd after a 200 kilometer six-day march wouldn't torch any food source without dining on it first.)
The French Press Agency (AFP) – no byline is on the story so one wonders where its professional simulator Francisco Jara was yesterday – similarly claims:

A demonstration in support of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya turned violent when a group of protesters set fire to a fast-food restaurant, an AFP reporter witnessed.

The protesters were returning from a mass march near the presidential palace when some began hurling rocks at a Popeyes fried chicken restaurant, and then set fire to the establishment, the reporter said.

Now, that’s a novel journalistic trick: an agency quoting its own reporter as its unnamed source. What could be the pretext for not naming its own reporter? Fear of retribution from his employer? (The news agencies have rule books instructing under what circumstances a source can go unnamed, and this is not one of them.) How lame is that? Note that even AFP admits that the incident occurred after the march was already over.

The German Press Agency (DPA) echoed the fantasy version of what happened:

After a demonstration turned violent late Tuesday, militant groups attacked a series of restaurants owned by US companies, pelting them with stones and smashing in doors and windows. One restaurant was set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail.

Local press reports said there were no injuries. However, a bus was also set ablaze.

Those three “reports” and others each obscure and distort the real story: that the destructive acts of solitary grouposcules were not those of the much larger multitude of peaceful anti-coup protesters. (Note also the repetition with which simulating media refer to anti-coup backers as “Zelaya supporters,” when its been well documented that the majority of Hondurans against the coup includes a great many that never supported Zel aya, including many that don’t involve themselves in electoral politics at all.)

Radio Globo countered by describing those who set the two fires as “infiltrators and provocateurs.”

And yet it’s also possible that, far from being coup regime agents, the deeds were committed by hotheaded young males of the sort that have similarly plagued post-Seattle anti-globalization demonstrations and other movements, such as the 2006 popular assembly movement in Oaxaca, Mexico, by using the shadow of peaceful demonstrations as a non-consenting cover to engage in Molotov cocktail tosses at property or police.

What is clear – because the photographs don’t lie – is that the arsons were not the act of the vast majority of protesters and did not even happen in close proximity to the march.

The problem for the movement becomes – and this is why Radio Globo and others often reasonably infer that they are acts of the regime aimed to discredit a movement – that the dishonest elements of the media and other pro-coup voices are always gleeful when aberrations like those happen. It allows them to portray an entire movement as “violent” even when, as yesterday, 99.9 percent of the people in the streets adhered successfully to nonviolent practice.

One of the English-language promoters of such knowing falsehoods in Honduras is an anonymous blogger that claims to be a “gringa” (US citizen) woman living in the tourist Mecca of La Ceiba, Honduras. On her (or his, because nobody knows the identity of this deranged disinformation peddler) blog, titled “La Gringa Blogocito” or “the little blog of the gringa,” she or he portrayed the vandalism as the act of all “Zelayistas” (Zelaya supporters) who are all, according to his or her colonialist spin, “terrorists”:
Zelayistas provoke chaos in Tegucigalpa

How nice. The Zelayistas were led by former first lady Xiomara Castro and her daughter Hortensia. If they aren't speaking out as leaders strongly against this senseless violence and vandalism, we have to assume that they approve of it.

The first lady has stayed in the US Ambassador's house. Members of the violent Frente Nacional de Resistencia group met with the US Ambassador Hugo Llorens over the weekend, though reportedly the Ambassador will not meet with members of the government.
Are these criminals the ones that Honduras should bend to? Are these poor misunderstood delinquents the ones who the human rights people should be worried about or all of the poor people who just want to go about their life, earning a living, going to school, without worrying about being attacked or having their means of earning a living destroyed.

Open your eyes, world. Honduras is being held hostage by terrorists.

Ugly Americans – not to be confused with the decent ones, that also exist - are everywhere on the planet and in Latin America tend to congregate in ex-pat ghettos in tourist destinations. Many come merely for the lower cost of living: they couldn’t afford servants, gardeners and chauffeurs back home, but in the Third World they can live like viceroys. Many have been here for twenty years or more and still don’t speak good Spanish, so immersed in the ex-pat bubble as they are. They tend to view “the help” with contempt and the images through the TV set of thousands that look like their maids and nannies taking to the streets is inherently threatening to them. I’ve written here of the Oligarch Diaspora: well, here’s its evil twin: The Ugly American Diaspora.

You can see from that Ugly American’s anonymous blog the over-the-top and hysterical words like “terrorists” and "criminals" to describe marchers, 99 percent of whom are nonviolent and break no law at all.

I should disclose that on that blogger’s private email list last month, on July 17, “La Gringa” issued a communiqué – sent along by one of its recipients - against Narco News and me, by name, for having the temerity to report that pop-star Juanes had cancelled his July 26 “concert for peace” in Tegucigalpa. Juanes had cited “political manipulation” by coup supporters of what he had originally intended as a nonpartisan event.

She or he wrote:

I was just trying to point out that Narco News is very unreliable…

He (Giordano) or someone who was (sic) impersonated him was harassing me for awhile (sic) on my blog, too, trying to spread disinformation in the comments.

Fact: I’ve never left a comment on that blog, and that is easily verifiable because on Blogspot, where it is hosted, the log automatically registers any gmail user by name as the identity of the commenter. And after all, why would I want to comment on any blog with so much smaller a readership than we gather here already? Especially if its dominated by the Ugly American Diaspora that isn’t persuaded by anything but its own racial bigotries and class prejudices. (Cue up the predictable chorus of “but, but, but, I’m married to one, and some of my best friends are my servants!”)

I wrote to the blogger last month to request a correction, which was never made. So much for someone who talks about “disinformation” while singularly dedicated to spreading knowing falsehood and without the ethics or honesty to correct an error even when demonstrated to be wrong.

Since I post my name to everything I publish, one can agree or disagree with my conclusions but at least have the ability to research who I am and confirm that there are no undisclosed conflicts of interest behind my reporting.

Not the case when it comes to anonymous cowards like La Gringa Blogocito.

I’m tempted to offer, from my own pocket, a $100 cash reward for information leading to the accurate identification of that blogger’s name and sources of income. That’s various weeks’ pay in Honduras. It wouldn’t take much effort (or incentive) to crack the ex-pat channels of gossip, addiction, loose lips and innuendo in a tourist town like La Ceiba and find out all kinds of illuminating information about the disinfo peddler. Would inquiring minds like to know who this is that is so dedicated to disinformation in support of a coup d’etat in a land that is not her own but too cowardly to sign it with a first and last name? Anyway, feel free to drop a dime that might deepen the inquiry: narconews@gmail.com

Oh, and despite “La Gringa’s” protestations to the contrary, the July 26 Juanes concert never happened, as we had originally reported on July 16. So much for the credibility, huffing and puffing of “La Gringa.”

But back to the matter of other lost sheep: Whether or not yesterday’s isolated acts of vandalism (nobody was physically harmed, thankfully) were the result of infiltrators, provocateurs or macho youths that sought to place themselves at the vanguard of a crowd they did not organize, any social movement or civil resistance may consider it a necessity to similarly identify such actors, investigate, deduce where they’re coming from, and if need be sit them down and read them the riot act about how their actions become convenient excuses to tarnish an entire struggle.

(There is something particularly cowardly when such actions are done near a peaceful protest: Of all the hours to choose to engage in such provocations, to do so near a multitude that, to the contrary, has vowed to remain pacific, constitutes an anti-democratic imposition upon the movement, while also seeking to hide under its skirt. It also endangers the great majority of civil resisters who want no part of it.)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a clear example last week of how to deal with that particular species of lost sheep after an overzealous supporter threw a tear gas canister into the offices of a commercial TV station: His government arrested the individual and the President himself announced on national television that the perpetrator would have to “feel the full weight of the law” calling the act “counterrevolutionary” and one that only served to fuel enemy arguments against his cause.

Social movements that don’t pay attention to the imperative of isolating and self-managing their own “lost sheep” tend to end up becoming hijacked by them again and again (whether or not the offenders are infiltrators or provocateurs or not is not that relevant because the manner to deal with them, for a movement, is pretty much the same; identify, isolate and contain). The failure to do so proved a fatal flaw in the post-Seattle milieu of anti-globalization protests that helped cause them to peter out, as they began to become defined publicly by the acts of a small minority.

That doesn’t appear to be the case in the Honduras civil resistance, as Narco News correspondent Belén Fernández reports today from Tegucigalpa. Upon receiving news about the bus that was burned, movement organizers from Olancho took pains to inform our reporter that it had been done by “a small group.” It was not something they were associated with, or wanted to be. The vast majority of Honduran coup opponents remain committed, in word and deed, to their chosen path of nonviolent resistance. It is a flock that will not allow itself to be led to the slaughterhouse.

Update: From the national coalition that organized the marches:

“The National Front Against the Coup is not responsible for these incidents. On principle the Front supports peaceful marches, peaceful demands and peaceful mobilization. At no point do we use or call for violent acts. It appears that these incidents are the responsibility of groups interested in ruining the social mobilization and they have taken it upon themselves to provoke this situation for which we categorically deny any responsibility.”
In case anyone was confused, there it is.

USA 2009 = Berlin 1933

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:03:36 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

The word “fascism” has recently been transformed into a general, all-purpose epithet, kind of like “jerk,” devoid of precise meaning, that people apply to anyone they don’t like. Just witness recent right-wing crazies calling Obama a “socialist” in one breath, and in the very next, calling him a “fascist,” without the least realization that these two philosophies are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, and are in many cases mutually exclusive.

But “fascism” does actually mean something. It is a far-right political philosophy that usually marries an authoritarian government with corporate interests. Furthermore, it also usually creates an uneasy alliance between oligarchical elites and disenfranchised, usually uneducated street-thugs. (Hence witness the confusion of “socialist” and “fascist” without the least realization of the ridiculousness of this contradiction by followers of demagogues like Glenn Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, Palin, etc.)

If one takes a cooler, more analytical approach, however, one can see that fascism is a distinct entity with its own distinct criteria. And unfortunately, it seems that we’ve seen the emergence in US public life of one of its last, and most characteristic features.

Published on Tuesday, August 11, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
My 1933 Nightmare

by CommonDreams.org
by David Michael Green
The events of recent decades have been ominous.
The events of recent weeks more so.
It's not so much, I guess, the visage of obese, over-fifty, white men angrily wrecking even the tattered remnants of the democratic process in this country that is most disturbing. We've seen that before.
I think it's the willful ignorance translated into incoherent, and in fact ironically self-defeating, rage that I find most discouraging. Can we really live in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction? Can the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world's stage possibly be so incredibly backward at its core?
Consider this passage: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
These words were written by a person who might well now be vice-president of the United States, had the economic crash of our time come a few months later. And who, had that in fact transpired, and had one old man named McCain sometime later then met his actuarially not-improbable death, could have become the American president and leader of the free world.
So, okay, maybe that horror scenario is not so novel. After all, Nixon was in the White House for six years. And what was George W. Bush, really, other than Sarah Palin in trousers?
But what seems to me new about this moment is the political road rage, the thuggishness of masses of Americans who not only are venting about insane nonsense, not only are undermining their own interests acting as marionettes of laughing corporate predators, and not only are taking down democracy around themselves in order to do so, but are in fact also destroying the entire Enlightenment project of rationality-based management of public affairs as well. The single most frightening characteristic of this movement, to my mind, is that fact that no amount of evidence or logic could persuade these folks to abandon the lies they've attached themselves to, like a pit bull clamped to the leg of some poor SOB's pants.
What does it take to get someone to the point that they believe that the US Congress is passing a healthcare reform bill that will allow the government to exterminate seniors? What does it take for them to impute that motive to a president from the feeble Democratic Party? And, at that, one of the most Milquetoastian creatures to hit Washington since Hubert Humphrey ran for president acting like he was a guy named Hubert Humphrey? From Minnesota, no less.
What do you have to do to humans to get them so stupefied that they believe Obama's Hawaiian birth was some sort of conspiracy, replete with fake 1961 newspaper announcements? What sort of powerful drugs does one have to be on to make the argument that this rather considerably conservative president is a socialist? And then to call him a fascist in your next breath, blissfully unaware that the chasm separating the two ideologies not only makes them wholly different, but, indeed, oppositional. (You know, like in World War II. Maybe they've even heard of that.)
In fact, this is not a matter of stupidity, though there's loads of that to go around. But I bet that when it comes to finding arcane deductions to insert into their tax forms, these folks are actually quite clever. I bet a lot of them could reel off sports statistics or bible verses that would put your head in a fog. No, it's not stupidity. Something else is going on here.
It's certainly not a matter of factuality, either. It's astonishing to imagine that anyone might perceive the hopelessly flimsy Obama administration – even if it wasn't directly following the folks who brought you the Dick Cheney vision of executive power – as some sort of dictatorial Bonapartist project. Are we even talking about the same human being here? Do they really mean the Obama who keeps trying to be bipartisan while Republicans trash him viciously at every juncture (including even members of Congress questioning the legitimacy of his American birth)? Do they really mean the guy who continually defers to Congress to shape the major legislative initiatives he claims to be in favor of? Are talking about the dude who lets a handful of Blue Dog Democrats roll him at every turn? This, even after eight years of Bush, we're supposed to believe is some sort of totalitarian imperial president hell-bent on bringing fascism to America???
No, this isn't about lack of intellect or the remotest correspondence to reality. It seems pretty clear to me that this is almost entirely about fear. This is the empire crashing, and the former master class within it crashing as well. Both are falling to ordinariness and worse. They always were ordinary, of course, and always tools for exploitation by economic predators, but at least back in the day it wasn't such a struggle to be middle class. And, most importantly, they could always feel good by telling each other that at least they were better than the hated bitches, darkies and fags. Oh, and Arabs. Beating them up, literally and figuratively, was (and remains) a good way to remind yourself of that superiority.
But now even that small bit of compensation is gone. Your country can't win a war against a bunch of third world ragheads. Your boss is cutting your salary again. The womenfolk have their own source of income now, and no longer have to put up with your blundering sexual advances to keep a roof over their heads. Perverts are marrying each other left and right. And now – WTF? – there's some Harvard-educated spade in the White House, along with, even worse, his uppity-looking Harvard-educated all-superior-like even spadier woman.
Of course, this has been going on since the 1970s, as America's post-war hegemony began to erode internationally, and within the country white males were being challenged for their domestic dominance as well. These "Reagan Democrats" – i.e., consummately selfish pricks who were happy to take government largesse when it was helping to bring them into the middle class, but then immediately pulled the ladder up behind themselves afterwards, demanding tax cuts – began to lash out politically, responding to any line of crap that would harmonize with their embarrassing victimization trope by promising a feel-good response offering the muscular bludgeoning of women and dark people, both at home and abroad. In reality, of course, they were voting for a political movement that was talking tough-guy nationalism and scapegoating gays and other out-groups, but purely as a mask for further savaging the prosperity of these very idiot voters supporting their own undoing. In exchange for some cheap rhetoric and the occasional third-world war, they lost their unions, they lost their good jobs to cheap overseas (and, of course, violently non-organized) labor, they lost government benefits like inexpensive higher education, and they lost a society where the gap between the middle class and economic elites wasn't on the order of a standard-issue banana republic.
So what's different today? I think there are big differences – at least of degree – on six fronts.
First, there is a marriage of convenience today between the economic oligarchy and regressive politicians which makes the era of Dwight Eisenhower look like Sweden by comparison. I would say the single most fundamental fact of American politics in our time is that economic elites have walked away from the long-standing grand bargain of the 1930s through the 1970s. They are, simply put, no longer satisfied to be ridiculously wealthy, and now demand to be obscenely so. Instead of looking at the middle class as a source of national pride, it is for them an irritant to see even that small pittance of money in other people's hands. And, thus, they are trying (and succeeding) at reversing the basic deal that brought so much prosperity to so many American families in the mid-twentieth century, seeking a return to the good old days of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge. Today's Republican Party has become simply an instrument of that process – all the rest is window-dressing for marketing purposes. Perhaps the best exemplar of this imperative was the (so far) unsuccessful play at privatizing Social Security. Wall Street looks at that sitting mountain range of money – within view, but just beyond reach – in sheer ball-busting frustration. It is one of the few government activities (as opposed to healthcare, military hardware, prisons, etc. etc.) that the overclass hasn't yet been able to profitize. Why should seniors have that money, they growl over brandy and cigars, when billionaires could instead? In short, the whole purpose of the political right has shifted dramatically in the past three decades. Now, it's entirely about the money.
Second, the level of deceit has grown exponentially. Americans are now being told lies of astonishing proportions, as both the ‘birther' and ‘deather' movements of recent weeks make plain. Before those it was Obama the socialist, Obama the fascist, Obama the sell-out apologist for America, Obama the secret Muslim, Obama the underminer of national security, Obama the pal of terrorists, and so on, and so on. It's to the point now that I feel sorry for satirists (including me). What can you possibly make up to top these amazing idiocies? Obama the Martian imposter of a homo sapien? Obama the JFK assassin? Obama the twentieth 9/11 hijacker? (Who secretly parachuted out at the last moment, and was picked up in the Hudson by a nuclear-powered speedboat driven by Saddam, and then transferred onto a black helicopter that landed minutes later on the roof of the UN!)
Third, the sophistication of presentation has grown dramatically. The right has really learned how to market its nonsense in a barrage that only enhances credibility from repetition. You get it on the radio, on TV, from politicians, at church, on your computer and cell phone, in your mailbox and at the school board meeting. This is a full-court press by clever people who know how to market soap flakes and the human kind as well. There are many examples of this, but one of the most clever has been the defining of wholly corporate center-right political figures like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as extreme leftists, and the defining of the mainstream media as hopelessly biased toward liberalism. Perhaps as much as any other factors, these moves have employed framing and intimidation to effectively eliminate any real progressive ideas from the national political discourse. Bravo, boys. If it all wasn't so sickeningly pernicious, I'd have to give them a standing ovation for cleverness and, sadly, success.
Fourth, the level of credulity is breathtaking. In the past, you could understand why a few crackers in ‘Bama, third-grade education and all, could be seduced into blamin' the niggrahs for their lousy low-rent lives and joining up with the KKK. But look at the audiences today for Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest of the scary monsters all over television and radio. These are giant crowds of tens of millions, especially collectively counted, and I don't think these people are watching and listening just to laugh at the bozos on the air.
Speaking of whom, what in the world are these freaks doing on the air? What in the world happened to this country such that, fifth, all this massive deceit has gone mainstream in the media and the Republi-con Party? It's astonishing today, from the perspective of prior decades, what comes out of the mouths even of leadership figures in one of America's two major political parties, and what goes unchallenged as conventional wisdom. There have always been regressive predators about in American politics, to be sure. But in years past they would have been identified as such and marginalized accordingly. Today, they are more likely to become president or Speaker of the House, and a slavishly obedient media dares not correct even the most obscene lies having the most dangerous consequences (can you say "Iraq"?).
Finally, unlike prior decades, the progressive counter-narrative has all but vanished from the mainstream. The Democratic Party is nothing more than the sorta not-Republican Party, and stands for nothing other than a quieter and more slowly-unfolding version of the GOP's crimes. Nobody ever votes Democratic anymore. They vote against the Republicans when they rise to their very most noxious worst behavior. We have a president who is supposed to be a radical leftist, and says almost nothing to combat the fascist tide of thuggery now threatening the country. Instead, he continues to seek approval from Republicans who never give it to him, game him at every turn, and repay his conciliatory efforts by asking for investigations into his birth certificate. Senator Chris Dodd responded to last week's Reichstag-burning events with this helpful bromide: "It's a challenge, no question about it, and you've got to get out there and make the case. This is not the time for the faint-hearted." After which he continued to lead the very faintest-of-heart in their deafening silence. Even supposedly liberal activist groups don't demand very much anymore, other than the protection of the status quo. For example, there is pretty much no serious player in or out of government right now talking about a single-payer system at this once-per-century occasion of momentous potential change in the American healthcare system.
The upshot of all this is a predatory-when-not-defunct political system going so far off the rails that it is now migrating from insanity to violent insanity. Just ask your (former?) local abortion provider. Just ask your congressional representative, if you can penetrate the police escort now necessary to keep these people from becoming the victims of mob rule.
This should not be taken lightly. There is huge anger out there, being stoked incessantly by those who profit from it, in one way or another. Most frightening of all, it is, as far as I can see, completely impervious to rational discourse. Suppose you could put a mountain of indisputable evidence in front of the eyes of those who believe Obama is seeking to murder seniors. Does anyone think any of these folks could actually be persuaded to abandon that shockingly absurd fallacy?
And this is, at the end of the day, the scariest aspect of all concerning the current political moment. America now possesses a massive cohort of people who have simply transcended rational discourse – the sine qua non of democracy, and the real deity worshiped by Enlightenment figures like those who founded the country. Two-and-a-half centuries later, and we're moving rapidly backwards, toward the seventeenth century, and away from democracy, rule of law and the marketplace of ideas, debated and thoughtfully considered.
Everybody talks about fascism nowadays, not least those on the right who remarkably manage to call Barack Obama a fascist in the same breath as they label him a socialist. The term has been beaten into near meaninglessness from ubiquitousness of application. (Could this be another extremely clever semantics ploy of the right-wing marketing machine, taking the term out of use now that it is legitimately applicable, by over- and ab-using it? Damn, these guys are good.)
Still, I've seen the video clips from the congressional constituent meetings last week. I saw the ones from the Sarah Palin rallies in 2008. I remember the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot, one of the most despicable acts in American history, which resulted – because of one of the most cowardly acts in American history – in shutting down vote-counting in Miami. I saw at least two purple-hearted American war heros turned into national security threats by a team of cowards who avoided war when it was their turn. None of the rabble on the right could make the Grand Canyon size leap to see that for what it plainly was. Today I see the incoherent rage, the senseless foaming at the mouth that not only doesn't fit reality, but in fact runs completely contrary to it. I see the current attempts to intimidate the government and to shut down the discussion of issues.
And I have to ask, do those people not resemble Brown Shirts more than anything else one can bring to mind?
And is our current political moment not beginning to stink of Berlin, 1933?
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net .

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/11

Boycott Israel

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:45:02 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

International boycotts of South Africa ultimately proved successful in helping bring down the Apartheid regime, but it took dedication and perseverance. Can the same tactics be successfully used against the apartheid regime in Israel and the occupied territories? Only time will tell, but Medea Benjamin and Code Pink are already at work trying to gain support for a boycott of goods produced in the occupied territories by Israeli companies.

Bringing Down A Dictator

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:19:19 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This was originally on PBS, and is a film about how Milosevic was kicked out of power in the former Yugoslavia. It’s also interesting in that it gives some indication of US involvement in the “color revolutions” - eg, the “orange revolution” in the Ukraine, and more recently, perhaps, the “green revolution” in Iran.

Give Those in Authority a New Headache Every Day

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:12:13 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This is a really interesting article about the tactics of protest and people’s movements. It talks about other resistance movements that have successfully challenged illegitimate power. Highly recommended!

Last Saturday, at a hastily called public meeting in Tegucigalpa, more than one hundred rank and file participants in the Honduran civil resistance and some of its known leaders came out to speak with Ivan Marovich, the Serbian resistance veteran who had been invited by local and national anti-coup organizations to share his experiences.

It was one of three such sessions, and the only public meeting of the three. Almost immediately upon the completion of the screening of the film Bringing Down a Dictator (you can watch it via YouTube in six parts beginning here) about the Serbian movement that toppled the government of Slobodan Misolevic, a wind storm outside brought down a light pole, and with it the electric wires that lit the auditorium.

The Q & A session was thus held in darkness, and yet nobody left. Every attendee stayed for more than an hour with questions and comments to share. The lack of light in the windowless auditorium provided the feel of an underground meeting of the resistance.
One of the questions was:

A. How can we cause a headache for the dictatorship?

Marovich replied:

That is a very good question because now we’re getting down to the dynamics of popular resistance.

During our struggle, every morning when we would get together we would ask ourselves the same question: how can we give the regime a headache today?

What matters now is who is going to make the next move.

If the regime makes the next move, you have to react.

If you make the first move, then they have to react.

The whole game is to calculate the next steps, to put the adversary in a position where he can’t react well.

You can see how this develops over time. When we were still small, maybe ten people, and the existing opposition leaders had been run out of the country or arrested, we were a very small organization. If we could get this many people in one theater we would have been happy. What we wanted was a small but powerful provocation. And this is when we used street theater. What we wanted to have is something that is going to provoke a response and make the regime look stupid.

This is what we called a “Dilemma Action.”

Dilemma actions are actions that put the opponent in a dilemma.

Let me tell you a Serbian folk tale. The story is called The Dark Realm, and it goes like this:
There once was a king that went with his friends on a journey. And they entered a land which was totally dark. You couldn’t see anything. They came across some small stones. Someone heard a voice and it said, “anyone who takes some of those stones will regret it, and those that don’t take the stones, they will regret it also.” So they didn’t know what to do.
Some said, “I’m going to regret it so I better not touch it.” Others said, “I’m going to regret it anyway so I better take some stones.”

And when they left the dark land they looked at the stones and they realized that they were diamonds. And those that took none regretted it. And those who took them, they regretted that they didn’t take more.

So what we wanted to have is a dilemma action in which the opponent is going to regret whatever he does.

The fist thing that we did, when we were still ten people, is we took a big barrel and a baseball bat. We wrote on the barrel: “Money for Milosevic.” It said we’re collecting money for Milosevic’s retirement. If you have money, put in the barrel. If you don’t have money, beat on the barrel. And Milosevic’s photo was on the barrel. So we put it on the street and walked away.

People walking by read the sign and began banging the barrel. Because of that noise, four more people came. And when they read it everyone started banging the barrel. This made a very loud noise. Finally somebody called the police. The police came and asked, “Who’s barrel is this?” Nobody knew. The police didn’t know what to do.

If the police had left the barrel there, people would keep banging the barrel. If they took the barrel, well, that is not their job. Finally somebody ordered them to take the barrel. We took photos of them and gave them to the media which reported, “POLICE ARREST BARREL.” So whatever they would do, they were going to regret it. And they regretted it because the very next day every town in the country had a barrel in its town square.

This is an example of how you create headaches for the adversary. The system, the regime, they have procedures. They have the way they do things. They don’t rely on creativity. They don’t rely on taking initiative. They totally rely on their procedures and on following orders. They don’t know how to react in certain situations. And that’s when they start making mistakes.

As the saying goes, never interrupt your opponent when he’s making mistakes.

One thing the system likes is demonstrations. They know how to react to demonstrations. They know how to count many people are in the street, how many police are needed, how much tear gas, maybe a water cannon. They know all that. But if they see a barrel in the streets and they arrest it and then there are barrels all over the place, they don’t know what to do.

The importance of taking initiative to put the adversary – the coup regime – on the horns of a dilemma is a tactic that is increasingly being implemented by the Honduras civil resistance, often on a decentralized level.

After their highway blockades that had paralyzed the country on three successive Thursdays and Fridays in July began to have diminishing returns when the National Police and the Armed Forces attacked and dispersed them violently, the civil resistance moved to a new kind of protest that began on Wednesday and is taking place along twenty different routes throughout the most populated corridors of Honduras. All of these marches will converge early next week on the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, which are four hours apart from each other.

The agreement from all the local organizations along the tributaries of the march is that they will not block traffic this time, but, rather, walk along the side of the road, and that they will travel about 20 kilometers (12 miles) a day to reach their destinations. In each town along the way, they'll hold public events and call on the local folks to join them in the march. Already, tens of thousands are walking along the side of all the major roads in Honduras.

quot;MsoNormal">“We don’t even know how far we will get today, but we want to advance 20 kilometers and on the road people are already beginning to join us,” said walker Esly Banegas to the newsletter of Radio Progreso:

At 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, Father Andrés Tamayo of the Catholic Church began walking with others from his state of Olancho toward Tegucigalpa. “We don’t have any security forces,” he told the radio station, “our safety is peace.”

From the eastern end of the Atlantic coast, another march left from La Entrada, Copán. Another branch of the march left from Tela, in the state of Atlántida. Both were headed toward San Pedro Sula. A call has been issued to the members of the public to support the march along the way with food, water and medicine.

As you can see from the photos here of just one tributary of that march, sent to Narco News by lay Catholic missionary John Donaghy, along the route between Santa Rosa de Copán and San Pedro Sula, the marchers are keeping to the side of the road. They’re not blocking traffic.

The dilemma they provide for the coup regime is this: If it sends police and military to attack the peaceful march, the regime looks not just authoritarian but stupid. If it does not send repressive forces to attack the march, the sheer numbers of people who will converge in the two biggest cities next Tuesday will be earthshaking and again demonstrate, as on July 5, that many times more Hondurans, hundreds of thousands, are mobilized against the coup than have shown up for all pro-coup rallies combined.

Sometimes a dilemma action can turn the enemy’s initiative against it to put the regime on the defensive.

An example of how the tables of initiative are turned is the story this week about the regime’s order to shut down Radio Globo and its 15 stations throughout Honduras.

There, the regime took the initiative. It delivered a letter saying "you must stop broadcasting." Radio Globo chose to react in a way that turned the horns of the dilemma back against the regime. It ignored the order. You can listen live online – click where it says “Escuchanos Aquí” - and confirm for yourself that three days later, the “closed” radio station is still broadcasting, still taking live phone calls from the public, still breaking the information blockade as a national clearinghouse for information on the civil resistance from every corner of the country.

If the regime is going to shut it down it is going to have to do it by force, which will cause it a national and international scandal and further reveal that its claims to be protecting freedoms and democracy are objectively false. If the regime, likewise, does not invade the station by force, it reminds all that it is weak, that it can’t enforce its own orders, and that it is not really as in control as it pretends to be. And every day that a radio station operates under threat of closure, it has more and more listeners, because there is an added drama of listening to see when or if it gets shut down. The regime is thus on the horns of a dilemma.

Another example: Yesterday, the Air Traffic Controllers Meteorologists union in Honduras began a strike in all the country’s airports, expressly in protest of the coup d’etat. Its workers refused to sign the paperwork on each plane scheduled to fly in or out or within the country, in accordance with international aviation laws and treaties. This stopped all air traffic for at least four hours last night. (And now you might deduce one of the reasons why your correspondent, having duties to comply with this week in another country, slipped out of Honduras the day before.)

The air traffic meteorologist strikers have put the regime in another dilemma: It could leave the strike alone and have a country without access or escape by air, crippling important business interests and express mail services. Or it could send in coup regime troops to do a job they are not trained to do, which means that if mistakes are then made and god forbid public safety of passengers or people on the ground becomes threatened, it will be on the regime’s head.

The regime has sent in the uniformed scabs now to direct commercial air traffic, a job they are not trained to do, in violation of international aeronautics treaties and laws. Now the international airlines are placed in their own dilemma: to continue flying in and out of the country in more dangerous and illegal conditions, or to ground their flights.

The same has happened with the hospital workers’ strike that began last week. Most of the hospitals in Honduras are now filled with military soldiers, purportedly to do the job of doctors and nurses. Whether they can actually do that job remains to be seen. Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers in an army of only 9,000 are thus diverted from the usual tasks of repressing and attacking the peaceful opposition.

The regime’s bad choices in how to respond to the dilemmas posed by the air traffic controllers and hospital workers have led it to spread its limited forces of repression thin. This in turn gives other theaters of the civil resistance a little more elbow room to maneuver.
One thing that became crystal clear from my reporting from Comayaqua, Tegucigalpa, Catacamas, San Pedro Sula and points in between, through talks with members of the civil resistance, is that the best organizers among them are beginning to wake up each morning with that same question: How do we create a headache for the regime today?

These headaches, growing in number and from decentralized locations begin to deliver “the death of a thousand cuts” to the regime, whose only hope to remain in control is to keep the national and international community convinced that, whether legitimate or illegitimate, it at least is in control. But the fast growth of these “dilemma actions” are painting a more compelling picture of a coup regime that very much is not in control, that it is unable to govern.

That reality – and not arguments over whether the coup was “legal” or not – is the most devastating thing for any regime. Once it becomes clear that a regime is not in control, the perception that it can ride out the unrest diminishes considerably, and it begins to lose the first layer of its illusory support: the consent by silence of those sectors that simply want to back the eventual “winner” of the conflict.

The coup regime - support for it or grudging acceptance of it - is built on an illusion, one that claims it is “in control.”

The dilemma actions from the grassroots are demonstrating, with greater frequency and volume every day, that the coup regime is very much not in control, and is losing its grip daily.

Next we will discuss how the support (and apathy) that prop up a coup regime resemble the form of an onion, and how successful civil resistance movements - with examples of how this is working in Honduras - design their actions to effectively peel away the layers of that onion until the coup plotters are left divided, isolated, alone, abandoned, and very soon after that, expelled from power….

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/toppling-coup-part-i-dilemmas-honduras-regime

Downing Street Memo Pt 2

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:51:36 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This is Obama’s worst mistake, or failure. His unwillingness to hold Bush Administration officials accountable for crimes - not “policy differences” - will ultimately undermine any chance he has for effective reform.

Downing Street Memos Pt.1

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:44:37 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This is basically a recap of the Downing Street Memos, in case you’re not familiar with them, or have forgotten about them.

What these memos unequivocally show is that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al are WAR CRIMINALS.

Can we realistically hope to get our democracy and Republic back if we are unwilling or incapable of prosecuting those who are clearly guilty of the GREATEST CRIMES KNOWN TO HUMANITY?

Just another example of how there are two forms of justice in this country: one for the elites, and one for the rest of us.

PS For some reason, the first couple of seconds of this video are cut off on youtube. To see the video in its entirety, go to

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4099

Honduran “coup”

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 11:55:28 -0600

Submitted by Jane

Dear Jeff,

Im gonna send ya a bunch of emails/links/etc about the coup--below is an email from my cousin ernie that explains very well why we should not be calling it a "coup"--ill also send ya some more, but if you could post this comment on the website, that would be killer cool,

thank ya bud

***
On June 28th it is said that a "military coup" took place in Honduras. (just google it if you are unaware of the sitch) ----I just want to comment on the use of the term "military coup". At least two articles in the Honduran constitution call for the immediate removal, without the need of a judicial procedure, for any public official who even speaks of the idea of reforming the constitution in matters related to re-election. According to the constitution, if such a public official were to speak of these matters (in the capacity of a representative of the government) then they would automatically loose their job, and not be able to exercise any form of governmental service for the following 10 years.

With this in mind, the supreme court of Honduras, following an investigation initiated by various attorneys spearheaded by congress, removed Zelaya from office on June 28. The military acted solely on the orders given to them by the highest legislative and judicial institutions of the country. Thus, it is not correct to refer to what happened in Honduras as a military coup. For this event to be considered a military coup, the initiative and directive of what went down would have had to originated in the military, and the defacto government would undoubtedly be the highest ranking military officer, and not the leader of cogress (Michelleti). Thus, what went down was allowed for in terms of constitutional jurisprudence.

Keep in mind that a week before Zelaya was exiled, Zelaya illegaly removed the highest ranking military official from office, after this general refused to distribute the materials for Zelaya's "poll", and keep in mind that this general refused to hand out the materials because he was instructed by the supreme court that to do so would be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the general stepped down quietly, and waited for the supreme court to reinstate him as leader of the armed forces (thus he waited for the proper legal procedures to unfold). This removal of the general is just one of the many penal charges that are presented against Zelaya, and that form the backbone of why congress ordered the military to remove him.

Having said that, the military acted stupidly and illegaly in exiling Zelaya. The constitutional thing would have been to start criminal procedures against him on Honduran soil. They allege they sent him to Costa Rica to protect his life. Who knows.

Anyhow, again, let me just restate that I dont meant to dismiss the abuses being carried out by the current government. These need to be reported on, denounced, and investigated through proper chanels. Despite this, I think it is necessary not to be misled by the international community and believe that what took place was a military coup. To conceptualize the Honduran situation as such is to diminish the sovereingty of Honduran people's right to exercise their own governmental matters, as it is dictated by their own Magna Carta.

All the best,

Ernesto.

More G20 Resistance Info

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 11:51:19 -0600

Submitted by Kevin

Wednesday, July 22 2009 @ 11:21 PM CDT
Contributed by: Anonymous
Views: 1,158

The following was consensed to by the general assembly of the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project. This strategy update includes more detailed info on plans for the Sept. 22-25 period and some general guidance for the type of events we're encouraging.

Sept 22-25: Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Strategy Update

The Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project (PG20RP) exists as a space to aid coordination and actualize resistance to the G20 summit happening this September 24-25 in Pittsburgh, PA. The group has coalesced around a shared desire to deepen ongoing social resistance locally, to demonstrate and build new and existing alternatives to the worldview represented by the G20 and the direct policies it promotes, and to disrupt the summit and undermine its attempts to gain legitimacy.

Towards these collective goals, the PG20RP is creating a strategy that recognizes the unique opportunity created by an influx of outside supporters during the four-day period around the summit and the challenges presented by the incredible amount of state resources that will be directed against us. We are steadily addressing how to effectively focus on and integrate these four days into the bigger picture of ongoing local social resistance.

On Tuesday, September 22, the PG20RP and allies will host an Anti-G20 Community Gathering in the East End of Pittsburgh and are encouraging other groups to hold similar gatherings in neighborhoods throughout the city. These events will work to bring together community members already active against the G20 with their neighbors, and locals with out-of-towners who care enough to come to Pittsburgh to resist the G20. This is a chance to create webs of solidarity between the people of Pittsburgh and the world. This is not a protest; this is a chance to directly tell our story of the world for which we’re fighting. The gathering will involve the sharing of food, music and stories.

On Wednesday, September 23, other Pittsburgh organizations are tentatively holding a major march, followed by an evening concert. We are calling for a Red and Black contingent within this march. In accordance with the Pittsburgh Principles, this anti-authoritarian presence will not be a black bloc and will not be masked. Later that night there will be a spokescouncil (a meeting of representatives from groups participating in street actions) to discuss the following day’s schedule.

On Thursday, September 24, we will meet at 2:30pm in a location TBA in the East End to “March on the G20” summit at David Lawrence Convention Center downtown. This event is a space for the active expression of diverse forms of resistance by all those wishing to oppose the G20. This is not a state-sanctioned event. We hope to also create a way to coordinate the participation of those with varying risk levels, and those who may not want to participate in more direct actions themselves but would like to stand in solidarity with those do.

On Friday, September 25, events will begin at high noon with dozens of simultaneous actions that connect the struggle against the G20 to a broader arena of local and international social resistance. The aim is an event that puts dozens of groups in motion, drawing on the strengths of coordination, decentralization, diversity of tactics and differing risk levels. Individual groups will choose what they do and while we’ll be unaware of what is planned, we have faith that people will act creatively and effectively in ways based on respect for the principles driving the overall mobilization and the Pittsburgh Principles. We’ll soon put out a list of a hundred or so places already being resisted in Pittsburgh and some generic ideas, and we’ll come up with a way for groups to avoid going to the same places. Afterwards, groups will converge at Fifth and Craft avenues in Oakland to participate in the march and rally being organized by our allies, the Thomas Merton Center Anti-War Committee. Although we would like to march as a PG20RP contingent, we would ask people to avoid police provocations and ensure their actions during the march stay consistent with the Pittsburgh Principles. After the conclusion of the march, we will move as a group to begin a jail solidarity encampment outside the local jail and wherever they hold folks arrested during the summit.

In general, we are calling on individuals and groups to participate in, and self-initiate, efforts consistent with the following goals:

* Defend our communities and contest state control of space in our neighborhoods.
* Occupy to reclaim space from the clutches of neo-liberalism, before, during and after the summit.
* Confront and disrupt the G20 and its political, corporate, and institutional enablers throughout the city.
* Connect the G20 to local and global struggles.

The PG20RP is actively working to:

- Provide a mobilization infrastructure and an information clearinghouse
- Create and distribute publicity and educational materials
- Create space for folks interested in resisting the G20 through articulation of a broad action framework
- Ensure that some of this space is utilized through actions organized and carried out by the PG20RP and supportive individuals and groups
- Build hype and momentum through a series of lead-up actions directed at local supporters of the G20 and its agenda (such as the Allegheny Conference), and state-organized propaganda events designed to present the illusion of community support that lay the groundwork for repression of dissent.

More details will be released as the Action Working Group and General Assembly flesh out more specifics.

http://www.resistg20.org

Hillary Clinton demands accountability for war crimes

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 11:44:46 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

A blog pointing out (yet again) the hypocrisy of the US and its policies. Hilary Clinton was in Kenya telling them that their leaders need to be help accountable. Meanwhile...well, you know.

I won't have much time to write until later today or tomorrow, but I did want to note this one point:   Blackwater expert Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation that "a former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company" alleged in a sworn statement:

that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

Though these are allegations at this point, the various abuses and crimes of Blackwater are well-documented, and nobody has done a better job of doing that than Scahill. Prince, a supporter of the most extremist right-wing Christian groups including Focus on the Family, built what can only be described as a large private army that the U.S. Government uses, one that -- as Scahill put it -- "has operatives deployed in nine other countries around the world, can boast of a force of 20,000 men to call on at a moment’s notice, has a fleet of aircrafts." About these reports, a reader, Carolyn Clark, makes this point via email:

What if the situation were reversed, if this country was invaded and occupied by a Muslim country? What if mercenaries were loosed on our population, with the purpose of killing as many of us as possible, sent by the democratically-elected government of this Muslim country, with no ensuing outcry from the citizenry as atrocity after atrocity is reported?

Would this not be seen as a war crime of the highest order, and would not the citizens of this country be responsible for complicity in these crimes?

I think we know what would happen if that occurred -- there would be vehement demands for accountability and war crimes trials. Just consider what Hillary Clinton today, in Kenya, is saying and doing regarding allegations that Kenyan politician officials participated in acts of violence during civil strife in that country. From today's New York Times, headlined:  "Clinton Calls for Accountability in Kenya":

Some of the headlines greeting Mrs. Clinton on her first morning in Kenya focused on American pressure to set up a special tribunal to try the perpetrators of election-driven bloodshed early last year that left more than 1,000 people dead.

“Clinton lands as U.S. breathes fire,” one said. “Quit lecturing Africa on politics, says Raila,” said another, referring to Raila Odinga, the Kenyan prime minister who narrowly lost the disputed election that set off the violence. . . .

Despite strong pressure from its own citizens and Western donors, the Kenyan government has refused to begin work toward a separate tribunal, saying that it would try perpetrators through existing institutions instead. Kenya’s judicial system, however, has done little to pursue suspects in the post-election violence and is often accused of perpetuating the nation’s culture of impunity.

Many people fear that the Kenyan government will take no action.

“We are waiting, we are disappointed,” Mrs. Clinton told a news conference.

She reminded Kenyans of how the United States played a large role in brokering a peace treaty last year between Kenya’s warring political parties but said that “unfortunately, resolving that crisis has not yet translated into the kind of political process the Kenyan people deserve.”

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court at the Hague have vowed to get involved if the Kenyan government fails to prosecute the top suspects, possibly including government ministers. On Wednesday, the Kenyan foreign minister said that this was still an option.

But Mrs. Clinton said Kenya should handle the process itself. It is “far preferable that prosecutors, judges and law enforcement officials step up to their responsibility,” she said.
“To resolve this issue internally is preferable to losing control of this.”

But she said she recognized the obstacles ahead. “I know this is not easy; I understand how complicated this is,” she said. “How do you go about prosecuting the perpetrators without engendering more violence?”

Mrs. Clinton said that the United States was not demanding that all suspects be hauled into court immediately but that “there needs to be a beginning; that’s what we are looking for.”

We need to teach those Kenyans that if they don't prosecute their criminals in high office, then they'll perpetuate their "culture of impunity," and that would be awful.  Those Kenyans apparently fail to understand that if you immunize high political officials when they commit crimes, that creates a "culture of impunity" -- I love that phrase -- which ensures future rampant criminality in the political class. How can those Kenyans not realize this?

Clinton's sentiments echoed what Obama told Africans when he spoke in Ghana last month, when he demanded that they apply "the rule of law, which ensures the equal administration of justice" and vowed that "we will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable" -- meaning African war criminals. As we send murderous, crusading civilian units around the world to accompany our invading armies -- while ushering a regime of torture wherever we go -- and then announce we will only Look to the Future, Not the Past, when their crimes are exposed (despite our best efforts to keep them concealed), do we actually expect anyone to take these sermons seriously?

UPDATE:  I just remembered that it's not only Kenya that is plagued by a "culture of impunity."  That is the exact phrase which, in May, The New York Times also applied to Iraq, when lamenting that country's pattern of failing to prosecute politically powerful people when they commit crimes:

The real problem is the difficulty of prosecuting people for corruption, which is so widespread that it has become one of the main obstacles to stability and progress in Iraq, according to Iraqi and American officials. Among the barriers, the officials say, are laws that give ministers the right to pardon offenders, as well as partisan and sectarian interference, pressure, infighting, vendettas, blackmail and death threats. . . .

Iraq’s culture of impunity on corruption was illustrated last week when commission officials, accompanied by Iraqi soldiers, went to the Trade Ministry — itself far from the most-accused ministry on the commission’s list — to arrest nine people, including two of the minister’s brothers. They were implicated in large-scale embezzlement and fraud related to the ministry’s $5.3 billion public ration program.

A firefight erupted between the ministry’s guards, led by one of the minister’s brothers, and the force sent to make the arrests. That unit retreated after arresting only one of the people who were wanted, the minister’s spokesman.

A NYT search reveals that the phrase "culture of impunity" has never been applied to the United States. Thankfully, then, Americans will probably never know what it's like to live in a country where politically powerful people are free to break the laws with impunity.  According to the NYT, though, such a terrible dynamic does prevail in Iraq and Kenya.

-- Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/05/kenya/index.html

The Real World: Mercenaries, Murder, and the American Way

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 11:37:15 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

Former Blackwater employees have testified that Eric Prince (owner) is a genocidial maniac who thinks he is on this earth to destroy Islam. Everyone should be aware of this.

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD
WEDNESDAY, 05 AUGUST 2009 22:10
Who could possibly have suspected this? A Beltway-wired mercenary company hired by the American government to act as freebooting muscle in the war of aggression against Iraq has been accused -- in sworn affidavits from company insiders -- of operating a murder and gun-running racket in order to push its hard-right owner's religious extremism. Can such a thing even be contemplated? Why, the next thing you know, they'll be telling us that good, clean-limbed, all-American agents used KGB-derived torture tactics against helpless captives or something!  And yet, incredible as it may seem, insiders from the company once known as Blackwater (and now going under the brand-name disguise of Xe) have given sworn statements implicating the company and its founder, Eric Prince, in killing Iraqi citizens for God and profit (as if there were any difference between the two amongst our gilded militarists), running guns to various militant factions in the conquered country -- and murdering potential witnesses who might testify in investigations of Blackwater's nefarious doings.  The intrepid Jeremy Scahill is on the case in The Nation (here, via Anti-war.com). Scahill has been on Blackwater's case for a long time, penetrating deep into the bowels of the military-industrial-security complex that dominates, by bribery and brute force, the American political system. This is truly courageous work on Scahill's part, for not a few incisive divers in these murky waters have woken up dead over the years.  In his latest report, Scahill has unearthed some scathing testimony against Blackwater and its well-connected founder. You should read the whole piece, but here are just a few key highlights: 
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-U.S. Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

...These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct.

...The former employee, identified in the court documents as “John Doe #2,” is a former member of Blackwater’s management team, according to a source close to the case. Doe #2 alleges in a sworn declaration that, based on information provided to him by former colleagues, “it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct.”

...he two declarations are each five pages long and contain a series of devastating allegations concerning Erik Prince and his network of companies, which now operate under the banner of Xe Services LLC. Among those leveled by Doe #2 is that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe”:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

...Both individuals allege that Prince and Blackwater deployed individuals to Iraq who, in the words of Doe #1, “were not properly vetted and cleared by the State Department.” Doe #2 adds that “Prince ignored the advice and pleas from certain employees, who sought to stop the unnecessary killing of innocent Iraqis.” Doe #2 further states that some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy “unfit men” and sent them back to the U.S. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were “the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to ‘kill ragheads’ or achieve ‘kills’ or ‘body counts,’” as well as “excessive drinking” and “steroid use.” However, when the men returned to the U.S., according to Doe #2, “Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to ’stop costing the company money.’”

...Doe #1 states that “Blackwater knew that certain of its personnel intentionally used excessive and unjustified deadly force, and in some instances used unauthorized weapons, to kill or seriously injure innocent Iraqi civilians.” He concludes, “Blackwater did nothing to stop this misconduct.” Doe #1 states that he “personally observed multiple incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using unnecessary, excessive and unjustified deadly force.” He then cites several specific examples of Blackwater personnel firing at civilians, killing or “seriously” wounding them, and then failing to report the incidents to the State Department.

...Doe #2 expands on the issue of unconventional weapons, alleging Prince “made available to his employees in Iraq various weapons not authorized by the United States contracting authorities, such as hand grenades and hand grenade launchers. Mr. Prince’s employees repeatedly used this illegal weaponry in Iraq, unnecessarily killing scores of innocent Iraqis.” Specifically, he alleges that Prince “obtained illegal ammunition from an American company called LeMas. This company sold ammunition designed to explode after penetrating within the human body. Mr. Prince’s employees repeatedly used this illegal ammunition in Iraq to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis.”

...Blackwater has gone through an intricate rebranding process in the twelve years it has been in business, changing its name and logo several times. Prince also has created more than a dozen affiliate companies, some of which are registered offshore and whose operations are shrouded in secrecy.
 In that last paragraph, we see how the merging of militarism with the rapacious crony capitalism that has brought the world economy to its knees. Prince -- and many, many other operators in the shadowlands where crime, terror, corruption, covert ops and high affairs of state all mix and mingle -- have been able to use the collapse of regulatory power over high finance to hide their criminal activities and war atrocities. What we have seen over the past few decades, in fact, is the expansion of the BCCI system -- "the largest criminal organization in the history of the world," as the US Senate called it -- into the "normative" system of global affairs: the "way of the world." For a much more detailed look at this system, please see The Bomb in the Shadows: Proliferation, Corruption and the Way of the World.  What will come of these latest sworn allegations against Blackwater? A very likely scenario is that nothing will happen: Scahill's story will be swept away by the tsunami of trivia and idiocy that swamps the American political discourse day after day, year after year, and Blackwater - or Xe, or whatever new moniker the company's PR whizzes come up with -- will continue to gorge itself on public money and innocent blood in various countries around the world.   Or who knows? It may be that Prince and his boys have ended up on the wrong side of some factional tussle in the imperial backrooms, and will be trussed up as a sacrifice -- one of the periodic burnt offerings our leaders make to make the rubes back home believe that "the system still works." In some ways, this would be unjust; after all, Blackwater was just doing exactly what it was sent to do in Iraq -- which was exactly what the American military was sent to do in Iraq: i.e., kill a bunch of "ragheads" and impose America's "unipolar domination" on world affairs. Or, as Thomas Friedman put it with his customary eloquence, to tell the Ay-rabs to "Suck. On. This." Why should Eric Prince be punished for playing such a key role in what no less than Barack Obama himself has called "an extraordinary achievement" in Iraq?   Again, it is likely that Prince and Blackwater will get away clean, or at most with a light wrist tap for some minor infractions here and there. But even if they are found guilty of these heinous accusations, it is certain that the true architects of the mass murder of more than one million innocent human beings in Iraq -- who would be be alive today if not for the American invasion and the continuing occupation -- will never pay for their vastly greater crimes.   And the system that spawned these crimes will go on and on, "surging" into new atrocities and unnecessary deaths around the globe -- even while praising itself constantly, obsessively, pathologically, as a "force for peace" in the world.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1811-the-real-world-mercenaries-murder-and-the-american-way.html

G-20 Resistance Plans

Wed, 5 Aug 2009 15:33:55 -0600

Submitted by Jane

The G-20 is a group of finance ministers, heads of central banks, and governmental leaders. They come together at least once a year to discuss Global Economic Issues. This September they will be meeting here in Pittsburgh to discuss so-called green economies and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF is the Market manager of the world. The G-20 has plans to "reform the IMF".

The hierarchy of the world we live in dictates that the market is above all others. This value system created the G-20 and the IMF to ensure that no other value systems -- solidarity, dignity, respect, love -- could compete. In this monopoly: oppression. The G-20 exists to be the managers of our oppression. Their policies of bio-devastation, economic imperialism, and manufactured desire dictate the world economy, which in turn keep us working for the future that they are creating without our consent. The summit ensures their power and with that, a future without health care, a livable earth, a sense of purpose, or freedom.

They have a claim that they chose Pittsburgh to showcase our "recovery" from the economic woes, and showcase our commitment to a green economy. Pittsburgh has been in a population decline for the past 60 years, losing roughly 10% of its population every decade. Pittsburgh also has the worst air quality in the United States. It is pretty clear that they just came here to party and that they do not give a fuck about any of us.

So we are stuck with this gigantic, disrespectful monster that has plans to ravage our city and use it as a playground.

But we will not be bullied! As the City of Champions, we have time and again shown our commitment to our working class values. We are crafting the future world that we want to live in, on our own terms. We are working for a world worth living in: one free of their rule over our lives.

In this, we will be creating space for our values, our desire, and we will be taking to the streets to express our anger and our rage against the conditions they are imposing on us. We will be out there for our love and solidarity with our friends, family, and neighbors. We are not listening or making demands. We are pushing through to a sustainable future, one with limitless possibilities where we can get up everyday and find value in breathing in a world that we have shaped, one where our opinions matter, one where we determine our conditions.

Against absurdity, for a self-determining future:
The Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project. resistG20.org

Sept 22-25: Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Strategy Update!
Wednesday, July 22 2009 @ 11:21 PM CDT
Contributed by: Anonymous

The following was consensed to by the general assembly of the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project. This strategy update includes more detailed info on plans for the Sept. 22-25 period and some general guidance for the type of events we're encouraging.

Sept 22-25: Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Strategy Update

The Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project (PG20RP) exists as a space to aid coordination and actualize resistance to the G20 summit happening this September 24-25 in Pittsburgh, PA. The group has coalesced around a shared desire to deepen ongoing social resistance locally, to demonstrate and build new and existing alternatives to the worldview represented by the G20 and the direct policies it promotes, and to disrupt the summit and undermine its attempts to gain legitimacy.

Towards these collective goals, the PG20RP is creating a strategy that recognizes the unique opportunity created by an influx of outside supporters during the four-day period around the summit and the challenges presented by the incredible amount of state resources that will be directed against us. We are steadily addressing how to effectively focus on and integrate these four days into the bigger picture of ongoing local social resistance.

On Tuesday, September 22, the PG20RP and allies will host an Anti-G20 Community Gathering in the East End of Pittsburgh and are encouraging other groups to hold similar gatherings in neighborhoods throughout the city. These events will work to bring together community members already active against the G20 with their neighbors, and locals with out-of-towners who care enough to come to Pittsburgh to resist the G20. This is a chance to create webs of solidarity between the people of Pittsburgh and the world. This is not a protest; this is a chance to directly tell our story of the world for which we’re fighting. The gathering will involve the sharing of food, music and stories.

On Wednesday, September 23, other Pittsburgh organizations are tentatively holding a major march, followed by an evening concert. We are calling for a Red and Black contingent within this march. In accordance with the Pittsburgh Principles, this anti-authoritarian presence will not be a black bloc and will not be masked. Later that night there will be a spokescouncil (a meeting of representatives from groups participating in street actions) to discuss the following day’s schedule.

On Thursday, September 24, we will meet at 2:30pm in a location TBA in the East End to “March on the G20” summit at David Lawrence Convention Center downtown. This event is a space for the active expression of diverse forms of resistance by all those wishing to oppose the G20. This is not a state-sanctioned event. We hope to also create a way to coordinate the participation of those with varying risk levels, and those who may not want to participate in more direct actions themselves but would like to stand in solidarity with those do.

On Friday, September 25, events will begin at high noon with dozens of simultaneous actions that connect the struggle against the G20 to a broader arena of local and international social resistance. The aim is an event that puts dozens of groups in motion, drawing on the strengths of coordination, decentralization, diversity of tactics and differing risk levels. Individual groups will choose what they do and while we’ll be unaware of what is planned, we have faith that people will act creatively and effectively in ways based on respect for the principles driving the overall mobilization and the Pittsburgh Principles. We’ll soon put out a list of a hundred or so places already being resisted in Pittsburgh and some generic ideas, and we’ll come up with a way for groups to avoid going to the same places. Afterwards, groups will converge at Fifth and Craft avenues in Oakland to participate in the march and rally being organized by our allies, the Thomas Merton Center Anti-War Committee. Although we would like to march as a PG20RP contingent, we would ask people to avoid police provocations and ensure their actions during the march stay consistent with the Pittsburgh Principles. After the conclusion of the march, we will move as a group to begin a jail solidarity encampment outside the local jail and wherever they hold folks arrested during the summit.

In general, we are calling on individuals and groups to participate in, and self-initiate, efforts consistent with the following goals:

* Defend our communities and contest state control of space in our neighborhoods.
* Occupy to reclaim space from the clutches of neo-liberalism, before, during and after the summit.
* Confront and disrupt the G20 and its political, corporate, and institutional enablers throughout the city.
* Connect the G20 to local and global struggles.

The PG20RP is actively working to:

- Provide a mobilization infrastructure and an information clearinghouse
- Create and distribute publicity and educational materials
- Create space for folks interested in resisting the G20 through articulation of a broad action framework
- Ensure that some of this space is utilized through actions organized and carried out by the PG20RP and supportive individuals and groups
- Build hype and momentum through a series of lead-up actions directed at local supporters of the G20 and its agenda (such as the Allegheny Conference), and state-organized propaganda events designed to present the illusion of community support that lay the groundwork for repression of dissent.

More details will be released as the Action Working Group and General Assembly flesh out more specifics.

http://www.resistg20.org

A Great Example of Effective Direct Action

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 16:16:49 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

Some of you may have already heard about this, but Dave Carroll, a musician on a United Airlines flight looked out his airplane window to see ground crew throwing his expensive guitar onto the tarmac. He complained, but of course, United refused to pay for his broken guitar. So Dave took matters into his own hands, made this video, and posted it.

Soon, United Airlines was getting a publicity black eye, and by one estimate, the company lost 10% of its market value once Wall Street got wind of the viral video and online shit-storm of bad publicity.

Cheers to Dave, who showed just one more way in which people with grass-roots messages can empower themselves and fight the man!

By the way, United is now offering to pay for his guitar.

Workers occupy UK factory

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 15:46:52 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

A group of workers in England, upon hearing they were going to be fired, occupied a building.

James Illingworth looks at the impact of an occupation at a British wind turbine factory.

August 4, 2009

ABOUT TWO dozen British workers have been occupying a factory on the Isle of Wight, just off the south coast of England, in a fight to save more than 600 jobs.

The workers are employees of Vestas Windsystems, a Danish company that recently announced it intended to close the plant--the only wind turbine factory in Britain. But rather than allow the factory to close on July 31, these workers decided to take over a first-floor office, and have remained there for nearly two weeks.

The Vestas workers have every reason to be angry. Although their bosses claim that demand for the turbines is falling across northern Europe, the company recently reported a 59 percent increase in sales to over $1.4 billion. Even more ironically, the British government had just announced a subsidy of more than $10 million to help Vestas build a new research-and-development facility.

While the company is raking in the money, the closure of the Vestas plant--which is one of the largest employers of skilled labor in the region--would have a devastating impact on the local economy.

Vestas is doing everything it can to break the occupation. On July 28, the company announced it had fired 11 workers suspected of taking part in the action. To add insult to injury, these workers received their redundancy letters hidden under slices of pizza delivered to the factory for their evening meal.

Vestas and the local police have prevented supporters from bringing food and water to the workers, leading to difficult conditions inside the plant. When one worker chose to leave the factory, he was checked for low blood-sugar levels and advised to go to the hospital for further checks. Several people have been arrested outside the plant, apparently for attempting to supply the occupation.

But Vestas isn't getting everything its own way. The day after the firings were announced, a local court rejected the company's attempt to get an eviction order for the protesting workers. This means that the occupation will continue at least into the first week of August, well beyond the planned closure date of July 31.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THE VESTAS workers have made a clear attempt to link the fight for jobs to the fight for sustainability and environmental justice. They have demanded that Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary in Gordon Brown's New Labour government, travel to the factory and speak with them "face to face."

Like Barack Obama's Democratic Party administration in the U.S., New Labour has committed itself to creating thousands of "green jobs" while allowing the recession to throw millions out of work. The situation at Vestas shows that these governments' commitment to free-market principles is incompatible with a serious effort to prevent climate change.
Significantly, the solidarity campaign for the Vestas workers demonstrates the potential for concrete collaboration between labor and the environmental movement.

Activists from the British organization Campaign against Climate Change have played a leading role in protests to support the occupation, and they have been joined by the left-led National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT). The union's leader, Bob Crow, said that the planned closure made "a mockery of the government's stated objectives on green employment and renewable energy."

Although Vestas is not a union shop, the occupation reveals the ability of workers to fight back, and shows how struggles like this one can give confidence even to those who have never thought of themselves as militants.

A small number of Vestas workers joined the RMT union and began to organize in the factory. When the closure was announced, this group was able to win larger numbers of workers to their strategy for a fightback.

"I've never done anything like this in my life, and there was that part of me that thought they're a big company, and they're going to annihilate us in court," one of the workers told a BBC reporter. "But to hear that news [of the court victory] yesterday was absolutely fantastic and boosted everyone's morale."

The Vestas occupation is the latest in a ripple of factory occupations that has spread around the world. In December, workers at Chicago's Republic Windows & Doors won a huge victory when they took over their factory to demand severance pay after the plant was closed.

In a similar action, workers at three Visteon auto parts plants in Britain occupied their factories in March and April after they were given just a few minutes' notice that their factory was being shuttered. Like the workers at Republic, their militant action won much-improved redundancy payments. France has seen similar protests, and workers at the SsangYong Motor factory in South Korea are currently in occupation, and have engaged in determined self-defense against police attempts to evict them.

Beyond this, the Vestas occupation reveals the ways in which the ongoing Great Recession not only threatens the livelihoods of millions of workers, but also contributes to the environmental crisis. Factory closures such as this one are a major obstacle for the development of a sustainable economy.

But the occupation also hints at the power of workers to challenge layoffs--and lead the movement against climate change.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/08/04/workers-occupy-uk-factory

Obama Sends a Signal to the Few Remaining Suckers Who Believe in the Rule of Law

Tue, 4 Aug 2009 15:40:12 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

I've calling Obama Obusha for a while now, due to his Bush like tendencies. After reading this blog I'm trying to think of an Obama Cheney hybrid.

Written by Chris Floyd
Monday, 03 August 2009 22:29
For anyone still harboring a few scraps of vestigial hope that the change of administration effected by the 2008 election would restore even a thin, weak, straggly lineament thin of the rule of law in the United States, the recent opinion piece by Barack Obama's hand-picked CIA chief, the doleful Establishment water-toter Leon Panetta, will tell you all you need to know.  In the friendly confines of the authoritarian newsletter known as the Washington Post -- Panetta, the weak reed appointed precisely because of his weakness and reedness by Obama, who then surrounded the little puppet with some of the most complicit torture mavens of the Bush Regime to really run the CIA show -- delivered himself of one of the most cringe-worthy performances by a high public official since the ritual abasements of Stalin's 1930s show trials. In this case, however, Panetta was not making a ludicrous, outrageous confession of false crimes he never committed; instead, he was making a ludicrous, outrageous defense of real crimes committed by Obama's predecessors -- and in the process justifying his boss's craven (if entirely predictable) failure to faithfully execute the laws of the United States, as he swore to do in front of so many swooning millions just a few months ago, and prosecute the top Bushists for their manifest (not to mention openly confessed) high crimes.  In the piece, Panetta followed the Dick Cheney party line that the Obama Administration has adopted whole cloth. Anyone fooled by the stilted kabuki theater staged in the past few months -- i.e., a purported "great conflict" between Obama and Cheney over torture and other Terror War issues -- has, as they say, rocks in the head. For Obama has pushed the Cheney line at every turn -- in speeches, in policy decisions and in court actions. And what is that line? In brief, that Bush and Cheney were noble public servants whose every possible excess can be excused by their zealous love and concern for the American people. That's the broad overview; getting down to brass tacks, the Cheney line is that any act of the Bush Administration that on the surface appears to be a flagrant violation of settled U.S. law was in fact perfectly justified by legal memos written, to order, by White House lawyers.  This is the sum total of the arguments advanced by Cheney and various other Bush apologists in recent months. Can anyone deny that these are the precise positions also taken by the Obama Administration? Well, if it wasn't specific enough for you before, Panetta has made it crystal clear. He writes: 
The time has come for both Democrats and Republicans to take a deep breath and recognize the reality of what happened after Sept. 11, 2001. The question is not the sincerity or the patriotism of those who were dealing with the aftermath of Sept. 11. The country was frightened, and political leaders were trying to respond as best they could. Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong. But that should not taint those public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided.
 The only minor point of disagreement between Cheney and Obama on this point can be found in Panetta's milksop concession the "some" of the "judgments" made by the Bush Administration were "wrong." But this is simply the usual factional quibbling seen around any imperial court. The core argument is the same: the attacks on September 11 justified any and all reactions in response, however illegal, heinous, murderous and atrocious.   (I would just like to interject a personal note here. I am an American citizen, and I was not "frightened" after the September 11 attacks. Nor was I "frightened" by the London attacks on July 7, 2005, even though I was in London that day. I have never been so "frightened" of terrorist attacks -- not even in the first minutes and hours after September 11 -- that I was willing to jettison the U.S. constitution, not to mention all rational judgment and common and moral sense, and let the government do "whatever it takes" to protect me. I have always deeply resented this constant imputation of base cowardice to the entire American people by American leaders year after year. I have no doubt whatsoever that the coddled, well-wadded sons of bitches who feed at public trough in Washington are themselves base cowards of the highest order; but Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, I do get tired of them projecting their own wiggly fears onto me.)  Look, it's very simple. The American republic ended for good a long time ago, more than a decade before I was born. Its last vestiges were wiped out with the creation of the National Security State signed into being by President Harry S Truman in 1947, and strengthened in a series of directives in the subsequent months. Such as the secret National Security Council directive NSC 10/2, signed in June 1948, which, as James Douglass notes, gave the newly created American security apparat the power to carry out "propaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures, subversion against hostile states including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerillas and refugee liberation groups." It also directed that these covert ops were to be "so planned and executed that any US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and that if uncovered the US government can plausibly deny responsibility for them."   In other words, Panetta's CIA -- and the plethora of other secret agencies and armies that have sprung up in the blood-drenched muck of the National Security State -- is specifically empowered to break the law and lie about it.   So what are we to make of Panetta's rationalization of Obama's cowardice in confronting the crimes of his predecessor, when he says:  
...the Obama administration made policy changes in intelligence that ended some controversial practices... Yet my agency continues to pay a price for enduring disputes over policies that no longer exist.
 Let's leave aside the glaringly obvious fact that an alleged cessation of a crime in no way mitigates or absolves its past commission. Or to put it another way: if a serial killer stops killing people, he is still culpable for the murders he committed before he "reformed." Yet we are constantly told that the government could fall and the world could end if anyone in power acknowledges this simple, self-evident fact.  But as I said, put that aside for the moment, and consider this: When the head of an agency that was created and empowered specifically to break the law and tell lies about it tells us that his agency no longer breaks the law -- are we supposed to believe him? Should such a person from such an agency be given the benefit of the doubt? Or should not our first, rational, logical, and fully justified-by-history reaction be: "This guy is lying, and I will continue to assume that he is lying -- since that is his job -- until he proves, conclusively, otherwise."   This operation of reason and logic is given the pejorative term "cynicism" these days, especially among those of "progressive" hue, some of whom are still painfully contorting themselves in order to "give Obama a chance." We also hear sometimes that, like John Kennedy, Obama must move carefully against powerful, entrenched interests in the military-industrial-security complex. But there is no indication that Obama is in the least interested in moving "against" this complex; on the contrary, there are relentless, manifold indications that he eagerly embraces the National Security State and the militarist empire for which it stands, and seeks to extend its power. The op-ed by Panetta is yet another chunk in this mountain of evidence. For again, does anyone out there seriously believe that Panetta would be green-lighted to publish such a piece if it did not reflect the views of Barack Obama?   So you want to know what Obama thinks? He thinks, like Cheney, that you are a sniveling little coward who was glad to sign over your liberties to an authoritarian regime. He thinks, like Cheney, that any crime -- torture, murder, aggressive war -- can be countenanced if the Leader and his minions order it to be done. He thinks, like Cheney, that the decades-old National Security State must be protected -- at all costs -- from any vestige or ghostly revenant of the vanished Republic and its laws.  That is what Barack Obama believes. That is what his policies imply. And that is what his shallow mouthpiece, Leon Panetta, has just told you, openly, brazenly, to your face.  Note: Stephen Webster has more at Raw Story.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3-articles/1809-obama-sends-a-signal-to-the-few-remaining-suckers-who-believe-in-the-rule-of-law.html

Tim Geithner Lives at 32 Maple Hill Drive, Larchmont NY 10538

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 11:49:20 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

So, Tim Geithner, US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs alum, the guy who helped give away trillions of our tax dollars to his cronies at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, is apparently having a hard time selling his house. Not only that, but Geithner says that US taxpayers don’t have the right to know where that TARP money went or how it was spent. (This is the guy who has basically declared Class War against America’s working and middle classes - remember, “Jobless Recovery” means rich Wall Streeters get richer, while the rest of us get screwed.)

After watching this, I was pretty energized, so I started doing some looking on the internet, and sure enough, with a little effort, I found his address. I started thinking, since Tim’s having such a hard time, and no doubt he’s going to have a much harder time once he loses his job because his stimulus package failed because it was so laden with corruption and give-aways to the ultra-rich, that paradoxically, he might be in need of some help soon himself.

So I thought, maybe we should send Tim a care package, just to let him know that we’re concerned about the hard times that are, apparently, affecting even him. Maybe this care package should contain some really good food - you know, the kind we’ve been getting out of dumpsters behind Lucky’s and Whole Foods.

What do you think? This could be a really cool direct action. We could dumpster dive, use what we find to make a care package, send it off to Tim’s home address, and make a viral video about it. Could be really cool, and fun, and funny.

All Power to the People!!!

Ideas for DIRECT ACTION!?!

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 11:40:46 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This is a video from an Australian TV show in which John Yoo, aka Dr. Yes, Dr, Torture, Dr. Treason, is confronted about his advocacy of torture under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” (There’s a real obscenity, eh - if John Yoo were subjected to the same techniques that he advocated, I bet he’d call it torture then.)

Anyway, the idea behind this video is clever, easy, and funny - something that’s difficult to achieve when talking about torture.

I’m going to start posting some viral videos that have been pretty effective. Please comment or email about ways we can take the fight to the man!

Peace and Justice, or, Peace Only With Justice

Enough to go around

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 11:33:21 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

This article is from the Socialist Worker and, while it doesn't go into too much depth, it tries to debunk the overpopulation/ not enough stuff to go around arguements.

The arguments that scarcity and overpopulation are responsible for poverty and famines don't stand up to the facts.

August 3, 2009

ONE OF the arguments made by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels is that capitalism has created the conditions of material abundance that has eliminated scarcity and created conditions for the end of class division, inequality and poverty--provided capitalism is superceded by socialism.

As wrote Engels in The Housing Question:
It is precisely this industrial revolution, which has raised the productive power of human labor to such a high level that--for the first time in the history of humanity--the possibility exists, given a rational division of labor among all, to produce not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also to leave each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture--science, art, human relations--is not only preserved, but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and further developed.

This isn't "common sense." Common sense is that there isn't enough to go around, and it's this scarcity in our society that accounts for famines and poverty.

There is no doubt that such arguments serve capitalism well. The belt must be tightened! Not their belts, mind you--they get bonuses and bailouts--but ours.

Are such arguments about scarcity true, or was Engels right?

First of all, it is obvious that the wealth of the world is not fairly distributed. We only have to note the fact that in 2005, the wealthiest 20 percent of people in the world accounted for 76.6 percent of total private consumption, whereas the poorest fifth accounted for 1.5 percent. That means, by the way, that the three-fifths accounted for 21.9 percent of consumption, and four-fifths for 23.4 percent!

The not-enough-to-go-around crowd would tell us that while this may be true, doling everything out more equally would only mean that we'd all share scarcity together. Hence, though it may be a hard pill to swallow, inequality must remain.

The late neo-Malthusian biologist Garrett Hardin, went even further. "Sharing wealth globally according to the formula 'to each according to his needs' amounts to embracing a commons of distribution," he wrote.

"But a commons-driven distribution system eventually ends in total ruin. A 'just' sharing of the world's wealth among all the inhabitants...would result in a continual, exponential growth of the human population," creating even more suffering.

If this piece of nonsense were true, then the birth rate would increase as we went up the income chain, an idea flatly contradicted by reality. But it's convenient to have a trained biologist able to explain solemnly and with a straight face that income redistribution is bad for the poor as well as the rich.

Admittedly, pointing out that wealth is obscenely distributed to a tiny number of extremely rich people at the expense of the rest of us isn't doesn't fully discredit the not-enough-to-go-around argument. But it's a good start.

If the issue is a superfluity of mouths to feed, then a strong case can be made, notwithstanding Hardin's crackpot theories, that the do-nothing idle rich deserve less than poorly paid workers and farmers, who produce something useful and whose labor allows the tiny minority at the top to consume so much.

The world's billionaires--497 people (about 0.000008 percent of world population)--were worth $3.5 trillion, or over 7 percent of annual world GDP in 2005. They would still be filthy rich even if they gave up 90 percent of that wealth. Let them eat cake.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IT'S COMMON sense to say that there isn't enough food to feed the world's growing population. The argument is wrong. According to the WorldHunger.org Web site:
World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day. The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

That makes it all the more disturbing that 6 million children die every year from hunger-related diseases. The fact is that these deaths are preventable.

This fact is only surprising if we ignore that there has been, along with the industrial revolution, an agricultural revolution that has tremendously increased agricultural output per area of land and per unit of labor.

In the U.S., for example, one of the world's biggest agricultural producers, half the population lived on farms in 1900. In 1940, there were more than 30 million farmers in the U.S.; today, only 960,000 people claim farming as their principle occupation. Seventy-five percent of total agricultural output today is produced on only 125,000 farms. Yet agricultural output has increased enormously--it is 152 percent higher than it was in 1948.

That is why the neo-Malthusians--so named because their arguments echo the ideas of the 19th century economist Thomas Malthus--who claim that population growth is putting pressure on food supplies are so wrong.

The argument assumes that new people on the planet are nothing more than new mouths to feed, forgetting that they are also new hands able to produce, and that we have the technical capacity to produce more food than ever before. The new Malthusians never bother to explain how it is that there can be more food available for everyone when fewer and fewer people are producing it.

Finally, the Malthusians are wrong because they invert the relationship between poverty and population growth. As many studies show, poverty tends to lead to increasing rates of population growth, and increased affluence tends to reduce them--as a comparison of demographic trends in, for example, Sub-Saharan African versus Japan would show.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
KARL MARX had a much more fruitful approach to the question of population and overpopulation. He wrote that overpopulation is "a historically determined relation in no way determined by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited rather by specific conditions of production [along with] the conditions of reproduction of human beings."

So, for example, a group of small foraging bands can experience overpopulation if they over-hunt the animals and over-forage the plants on which they depend. Such a society will have to adapt new sources of food, and if those sources become depleted, they must either move to new territory or, barring that, turn to new techniques, such as agriculture or domestication, in order to survive. But these new methods of production, in turn, allow for larger populations to thrive.

Under capitalism, surplus population is not a product of scarcity, but of unemployment--the fact that the growth of the productive forces and the accompanying growth of human labor power leads to a tendency for capital to employ, per unit of investment, less and less labor.
In spite--or even because--of the great abundance associated with capitalist production, labor becomes superfluous, and there develops what Marx called a "reserve army of labor."
This isn't to downplay the serious threats to our environment that jeopardize our ability to sustain life on the planet. But these are problems not of population, but of the way in which production and distribution is organized under capitalism. As Engels wrote:

As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.

In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.

This blind drive toward profit-making has meant that capitalists have treated world resources as things to be plundered without thought and its ecosystems as sinks to dump waste, leading to the environmental crisis we face today.

Yet we possess the technology, the tools, the ideas and the resources necessary to reorganize production and plan it in such a manner that all can live decent lives--without hunger and want--in a way that is sustainable for ourselves and our environment.

http://socialistworker.org/2009/08/03/enough-to-go-around

Living in Tents, and by the Rules, Under a Bridge

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 11:24:40 -0600

Submitted by Ryan
Hey, I try not to post too much from mainstream sources, but - as you've said - sometimes they do something good. This is an article from the times about a tent city in Rhode Island that is being run almost like some kind of commune or community space or something. Check it out.
By DAN BARRY
PROVIDENCE, R.I.
The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon: a boozy brawl, the wielding of a knife taped to a stick. But the community handled it, he says with pride, his day’s first cigar already aglow.
By community he means 80 or so people living in tents on a spit of state land beside the dusky Providence River: Camp Runamuck, no certain address, downtown Providence.
Because the two men in the fight had violated the community’s written compact, they were escorted off the camp, away from the protection of an abandoned overpass. One was told we’ll discuss this in the morning; the other was voted off the island, his knife tossed into the river, his tent taken down.
The chief flicks his spent cigar into that same river. There is talk of rain tonight.
Behind him, the camp stirs. Other tent cities have sprung up recently around the country, but Rhode Island officials have never seen anything like this. A tea kettle sings.
A heavily pierced young person walks by without picking up an empty plastic bottle, flouting the camp compact that says everyone will share in the labor. The compact may be as impermanent as this sudden community by the river, but for now it is binding. The chief speaks, the bottle is picked up.
The chief, John Freitas, is 55, with a gray beard touched by tobacco rust. He did prison time decades ago, worked for years as a factory supervisor, then became homeless for all the familiar, complicated reasons.
Layoffs, health problems, a slip from apartment to motel room. His girlfriend, Barbara Kalil, 50, lost her job as a nursing-home nurse, and another slip, into the shelter system. A job holding store-liquidation signs beside the highway allowed for a climb back to a motel, but it didn’t last.
Weary of shelters, the couple pitched a pup tent in Roger Williams Park, close to a plaque bearing words Williams had used to describe this place he founded: “A Shelter for Persons in Distress.” But someone complained, so Mr. Freitas set off again in search of shelter. The March winds blew.
Down South Main Street he went, past the majestic court building and the upscale seafood restaurant, over a guardrail to a gravelly plot beneath a ramp that once guided cars toward Cape Cod. Foul-smelling and partially hidden, a place of birds and rodents, it was perfect.
He and Ms. Kalil set up camp with another couple in early April. Word of it spread from the shelters to Kennedy Plaza downtown, where homeless people share the same empty Tim Hortons cup to pose as customers worthy of visiting that doughnut chain’s restroom. The camp became 10 people, then 15, then 25. No children allowed.
“I was always considered the leader, the chief,” Mr. Freitas says. “I was the one consulted about ‘Where should I put my tent?’ ”
By late June the camp had about 50 people. But someone questioned the role of Mr. Freitas as chief, so he stepped down. Arguments broke out. Food was stolen.
“There was no center holding,” recalls Rachell Shaw, 22, who lives with her boyfriend in a tidy tent decorated with porcelain dolls. “So everybody voted him back in.”
The community also established a five-member leadership council and a compact that read in part: “No one person shall be greater than the will of the whole.”
It is now late afternoon in late July, a month after nearly everyone signed that compact. The community remains intact, though the very ground they walk on says nothing is forever. Here and there are the exposed foundations of fish shacks that lined the river long ago.
Some state officials recently stopped by to say, nicely but firmly, that everyone would soon have to leave. The overpass poses the threat of falling concrete, and is scheduled for demolition. The officials have shared the same message with a smaller encampment across the river.
For now, a game of horseshoes sends echoing clanks, as outreach workers conduct interviews and raindrops thrum the tent tops. The chief lights another cigar and walks the length of the camp to tell residents to batten down, explaining its structure as he goes.
Here at the end, nearest the road, are the tents of young single people and substance abusers; this way, rescue vehicles won’t disrupt the entire compound.
Here in the center are a cluster of couples, including two competing for the nicest property, with homey touches like planted flowers. Here too are the food table, the coolers, the piles of donated clothes — what can’t be used will be taken by camp residents to the Salvation Army — and the large tent of the chief. Plastic pink flamingos stand guard.
Farther on, the recycled-can area (the money is used for ice and propane); the area for garbage bags that will be discreetly dropped in nearby Dumpsters at night; and, behind a blue tarp hung from the overpass, a plastic toilet. The chief says the shared task of removing the bags of waste tends to test the compact.
Finally, near some rocks where men go to urinate, live a gay couple and some people who drink hard. Timothy Webb, 49, who says he used to own a salon in Cranston called Class Act, cuts people’s hair here. Then, at night, he and his partner, Norman Trank, 45, sit at a riverside table, a battery-operated candle giving light, the moving waters suggesting mystery.
“It’s what you make of it,” Mr. Trank says.
Dark clouds have brought night early to Providence. Heavy drops thump against tarp. Water drips from the overpass, onto the long table of food.
In the last couple of hours the chief has resolved a conflict about tarp distribution, hugged a pregnant woman who mistakenly thought she had been kicked off the island, conferred with outreach workers and helped with dinner preparations. He is also thinking about tomorrow.
Tomorrow, an advance party for the chief will leave to claim another spot across the river that turns out not to be on public property. Many in the camp will decide it’s time to move on anyway, to a spot under a bridge in East Providence. Camp Runamuck will begin its recession from sight and memory.
At least tonight there is a communal dinner: donated chicken, parboiled and grilled; donated corn on the cob; donated potatoes. People line up with paper plates.
The rain falls harder, pocking the river’s gray surface, surrounding the dark camp with a sound like fingers drumming in impatience. The chief hears it, but what can he do? He finishes his dinner and lights another cigar.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/us/31land.html?th&emc=th

Submedia.tv

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:24:44 -0600

Submitted by Kevin

Check out these links for more episodes

www.submedia.tv

www.submedia.tv/stimulator

Nickelsville fights to survive

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:20:48 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

This is an article in the Socialist Worker about a tent city in Seattle that keeps being forced to move. There are some interesting facts in it; for example, it costs more to keep people homeless (more cops, ambulances, unpaid hospital bills, etc) than to house them.

Leela Yellesetty reports on the battle of a Seattle homeless community to keep from being evicted once again.

July 30, 2009

FACING EVICTION from the empty state land it was occupying, the Seattle homeless community of Nickelsville moved on July 23 to what residents hope will be their permanent home at Terminal 107 Park last Thursday.
But the very next day, the Port of Seattle issued a notice for the homeless to vacate the property.
This is unfortunately nothing new for Nickelodeans (as residents refer to themselves), who have moved seven times since setting up last September. The camp was originally set up on city land to draw attention to Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' policy of sweeping the homeless--and providing no assistance at all.
As Revel Smith, communications director for the homeless newspaper Real Change, says:
When he was originally doing the sweeps, the phone number people were given for social services was a dead line. It's a very, very cruel and difficult system.
People need a stable place to stay. A lot of people at Nickelsville are able to retain jobs, get back on their feet. Otherwise, they're left with the downtown shelter system, which is inadequate to handle the 2,500 or so people that don't fit on a regular basis. Nickelsville's intent is to keep a stable, self-organized, self-sufficient community where people have their basic needs met and can find work, come home, sleep, have their possessions in one place and have a roof over their heads. They can't get that anywhere else.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DONNA BEAVERS and her husband have been at Nickelsville since the beginning. Donna became homeless a year ago due to domestic violence. Before coming to Nickelsville, she was sleeping on sidewalks and in doorways, due to lack of available shelters.
Taking a break with her dog while residents and supporters hustle to pack up tents and supplies, Donna says:
Nickelsville is a good encampment. We're all like a family. The mayor doesn't like us, though. We even tried to go meet the mayor one time, and he heard we were coming, so he shut the elevators down so we couldn't go up to see him, and then he sent the security down to tell us to leave the property.
I think the mayor should be trying to help homeless people, instead of trying to sweep them out. Nickelsville is trying to solve a problem by giving people a place to live who can't afford housing because it's so expensive. To all your readers, please tell them to help support us. Write the governor, write the mayor, tell them to give us permanent land. We're citizens, too.
Randy Pellam, who's been at Nickelsville for the past six weeks, had the same message:
We're basically trying to get the government to take responsibility and allow them to live without criminalizing homelessness.
Really, it's killing people. Seattle's proud of the fact, though they would never admit it, that the average age of death for a homeless person here is 47 years old. They lose 30 years or more of their life because the living is so hard. People think they're lazy or bums or whatever. I've had hard jobs. Being homeless is 10 times harder than most jobs. And it kills you.
In addition to the difficulty of sheer survival, the homeless are particularly vulnerable to violence. Pellam describes a time when he was sleeping on a park bench, and a group of young people came up and hit him on the head with beer bottle, looking for a fight. Luckily, one of the group said to leave him alone. As Pellam remembers:
They didn't want to go against their friend, so they left, but otherwise, who knows what could have happened. A lot of the attacks are never reported. A lot of people have friends they knew who were murdered because they were homeless. We've had some horrific ones in this state, like a man in a wheelchair who was set on fire in an alley--just horrible.
Unfortunately, because the government portrays us as criminals, people who don't know any better think it's okay for them to victimize us, too.
Tearing into the idea that homeless people are criminals or drug addicts or have something else wrong with them, Randy cites numerous studies showing no such correlation.
"The biggest reason people become homeless in this country is economic," he said. "It's because of the lack of affordable housing. Years ago, there was more affordable and subsidized housing, but it's been cut back. It's getting wiped out by developers, especially in this area, where even people with full-time jobs can't afford the rent."
He brings up another study that found it costs far more to keep people homeless than in housing--the estimate is it costs 10 times more to the taxpayer, due mainly to increased police and emergency services. Randy continues:
So they go on portraying the homeless as being deserving of this type of punishment and then charging the taxpayer for it, it's ridiculous.
You know I talked about subsidized housing. The truth is they haven't actually done away with it. Now they subsidize the rich instead of the poor. They just shift it. The whole emphasis is on shifting the cost onto the little guy and fattening the bank accounts of the few guys at the top.
That's what the lawmakers, the politicians, the companies have been doing for decades, and they're doing it to even a greater extent and getting better at it, and it's putting the whole world in jeopardy, frankly.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DESPITE THE tough conditions, Nickelsville in some ways feels like a welcome alternative to the ruthless inhumanity of capitalist society. The camp is run completely on volunteer labor, and all decisions and elected positions are voted on by residents. What meager resources Nickelodeans have are often shared freely. In fact, the encampment is so well self-managed and peaceful that crime rates tend to fall in neighborhoods where it's located.
In a letter in to the Port Commissioner, Nickelodeans emphasized that their camp stands in a long tradition:
Our Nickelsville community has resolved to take a stand on a historic piece of land. The Duwamish People have called it many things. One name was Yil-eq'-qud--where the horse clams are. People have lived where we are now for over 1,400 years. Within 30 years of the first settlers of European ancestry settling on this land, in the 1930s, squatters and shantytowns were here. That is how those people survived that depression.
Right now, Nickelsville is working frantically to build public and legal pressure against being forced to move yet again. The local Veterans for Peace Chapter 92 has been instrumental in Nickelsville's legal campaign since the start. As VFP organizer Gerry Condon explained:
The number one reason we're involved with Nickelsville is that 25 percent of the homeless nationwide are veterans. That percentage is roughly true for the people here at Nickelsville. People are sent off to fight very dubious imperialist wars, and with all this ra-ra, and politicians yelling support the troops, but then when they come back with PTSD and other serious problems, they're basically thrown out, used and abused.
We also see billions of dollars being poured like there's no tomorrow into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and these illegal occupations. That money could be used here for affordable housing; for health care, including mental health care for the veterans; education; jobs. But when we start talking about social issues, like single-payer health care and stuff like that, suddenly there's no money.
Something is way skewed. What we're looking at really is a perpetual war of the rich against the poor, and Nickelsville is one front of that.
Not only do they need and deserve our support, but especially those who are organizing themselves, like the people at Nickelsville, can ultimately become the cutting edge of the struggle. They can really start to expose the gross inequality and racism and militarism of the U.S. government. So just being with them, letting them know they have support makes a big, big difference.
I was impressed and glad to see the number of different progressive organizations out here, so they obviously get it. I'm proud to be part of an organization that sees that, too.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
Please call or e-mail the Port of Seattle Director Tay Yoshitani and Port of Seattle Commissioners, and tell them to let the Nickelodeons stay and negotiate with them: CEO Tay Yoshitani [1], 206-728-3000; Commissioner Bill Bryant [2], 206-728-3034; Commissioner John Creighton [3], 206-728-3034; Commissioner Patricia Davis [4], 206-728-3034; Commissioner Lloyd Hara [5], 206-728-3034; Commissioner Gael Tarleton [6], 206-728-3034; Mayor Greg Nickels [7], 206-684-4000.
Donations are welcome. Supplies are needed, including nails, plywood, 2-by-4s, food and water. Nickelsville also has a need for used bicycles in good working condition to ride to and from bus stops.
Please drop bicycles and other supplies at the camp at Terminal Park T-107, 4700 West Marginal Way SW. To get there: take the #21 bus from 1st and Pine and get off at the Harbor Island Terminal. Walk one mile south on West Marginal Way.
You can make a tax-deductible monetary donation to help pay for cell phones and other expenses at the Veterans for Peace Chapter 92 [8] Web site.

Obama Admin Expands Law Enforcement Program 287(g), Criticized for Targeting Immigrants and Increasing Racial Profiling

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:18:09 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

The Obama administration has expanded the controversial 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement agencies to enter into agreements with Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, effectively giving local police the powers of federal immigration agents. The agreements have been widely criticized for increasing racial profiling and singling out immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. We speak to Aarti Shahani of Justice Strategies and Roberto Lovato of New America Media.

Symbol for Sale: Obama Cashes Cronies' Chips

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:13:52 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

Written by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 22:36
The only difference, the only real change, that Barack Obama brings to the White House is the color of his skin. As I've said before, this racial factor does have symbolic significance (see below); but in substance, there is no real difference between Obama and any of the other run-of-the-mill greasy pole-climbers seeking temporary management of the imperial machinery, with all of the fleeting power -- and lifelong perks -- that comes with it. As Carl Ginsburg aptly notes in Counterpunch: 
There is absolutely no doubt that soon after the conclusion of his presidency, Mr. Obama, like Bill Clinton, will have a hundred million bucks in the bank as a result of books, lectures and related appearances on the subject of responsibility. That’s what’s called the spoils of “today’s winner-take-all economy,” a quote from Audacity of Hope, here taken way out of context, I suppose. “Fill up the old coffers,” is the way George Bush put it, in his twisted but somehow unambiguous way.
 Like the rest of the pole-climbers, Obama has come in to reward his cronies and backers, and protect the interests of a small, rapacious elite. And like his predecessors, he seems far more concerned with preserving and expanding the encroachments of executive power than with husbanding the liberties of the common people. Of course, anyone who looked beyond his skin color to the actual policies he was proposing during the campaign -- and especially at who his advisers, aides, and chief backers were -- will have seen all this long ago, and will not be surprised or "betrayed" by his conduct in office.  Still, in an age where the media whirlwind tears away at the facts and makes them harder and harder to retain, it is always salutary to be reminded of the grubby reality of our gilded Potomac geese. Scott Horton at Harper's shows yet another small but telling example of Obama's wretched "continuity" with his illustrious Oval Office forbears: his selling of ambassadorships. Indeed, as Horton notes, Obama is already outstripping the Texas Twerp in this regard: 
As the Los Angeles Times noted in a recent editorial, the United States is the only major country that regularly hands out choice ambassadorships as a favor for campaign funding bundlers. The process cheapens our diplomatic relations and sends a bad message to the states to which these ambassadors are sent. And it’s getting cruder and greedier. A cynic studying the latest batch of nominees might conclude that the price of an ambassadorship has soared from roughly $200,000 under the Rovian regime to $500,000 under Rahm Emanuel.

Under Barack Obama, the process of political payoff through ambassadorial appointments has matched and appears poised to exceed the already extremely abusive system that Karl Rove put in place under the Bush Administration. In his first six months, Obama has forwarded 58 ambassadorial nominees to the Senate for confirmation. Retired career diplomat Dennis Jett reports in the Daily Beast that 32 of these nominees—55% of the total—are political appointees.

Political appointees are not per se objectionable. In fact, some of the most distinguished ambassadorial appointees in recent decades have been political appointees—not career diplomats... But the Obama political appointees are of a different caliber. What distinguishes them is not a career in public service or finance, much less foreign relations or foreign area expertise, but rather something far grubbier: raising substantial sums of money for the Obama campaign.

A prominent example is Louis Susman, named as Obama’s ambassador to the Court of St. James. Susman was John Kerry’s campaign fundraising chair in 2004, heading an effort that yielded $247 million for Democratic coffers; he was among the earliest fundraisers for Obama, and his zeal continued after the election, when he pulled together $300,000 for the inaugural festivities. (Susman thus dwarfs the fundraising power of Bush’s ambassador in London, California auto dealer Robert Tuttle, who raised a measly $100,000 for the 2004 campaign and $100,000 for the inauguration.) When queried on Susman’s qualifications for the post, a White House spokesman quipped that “he speaks the local language.”
 Ha, ha, isn't that funny? But it is inadvertantly revealing. For Susman most definitely "speaks the local language" -- the language of the imperial Potomac court, that is: money. That's the only speech that matters in those exalted precincts, the only language that will get you a seat at the table and a piece of the action.  But Obama's pick for Germany was even more insulting. (See if you can guess which sliver of the rapacious elite this appointee comes from.): 
Another is Phil Murphy, a Goldman Sachs executive who served as the Democratic Party’s national finance chairman, tapped to represent the United States in Berlin. The Murphy appointment so troubled German leaders that they held up agrément–the diplomatic process under which the receiving nation agrees to accept the ambassadorial designee–so that Chancellor Angela Merkel could press the case for a career diplomat or serious political figure. Merkel made her appeal at the G-8 meeting at L’Aquila, but Obama was unswayed. The Germans finally relented and grudgingly accepted the appointment.
 For more on the constructive role that Goldman Sachs has played in American affairs, see the now-famous article by my old Moscow Times colleague, Matt Taibbi: "Inside the Great American Bubble Machine."  Again, none of this base venality is really news -- except, of course, to those millions who depend on "The News" (i.e., the corporate media) to tell them what's going on.   II. Regarding the abovementioned symbolic significance of Obama's election, here are some excerpts from a post I wrote after the 2008 vote, which itself excerpts a post I wrote following Obama's nomination: 
As I write this at nearly 3 a.m. in England, it seems very likely that Barack Obama will be the next U.S. president. I have no great words of considered wisdom to offer on this development at the moment. However, having looked briefly at the right-wing reaction to the vote, I will venture one quick observation:

The outpouring of open, virulent racism that many feared would arise during the campaign -- and in the secrecy of the voting booth -- never really manifested itself. But I think that it will emerge much more strongly now, in the aftermath, as part of a carefully cultivated dolchstosslegende even now being perpetrated by the rightwing media machine. Fox News and Karl Rove are already pushing stories about "Black Panthers" intimidating voters and widespread vote fraud among the worthless darkies whose votes have propelled Obama to victory. (These would be the same worthless darkies whom the rightwingers also blame for the global economic catastrophe.) There will be much, much more of this in the days and weeks to come.

It will not hurt Obama, of course; he will have the power he has sought, and the upsurge of ugly, unrepentant racism on the Right will only make his "progressive" allies far less willing to criticize his actions -- especially those mysterious "highly unpopular policies" that Joe Biden has promised Obama will adopt in the face of a guaranteed foreign policy crisis sometime next year. (Not to mention the promised escalation of the quagmire in Afghanistan.] But ordinary African-Americans will bear the painful brunt of this pouring of old hatreds into new wineskins. As always, black people will be blamed for all the nation's ills by the overclass that actually controls the machinery of power, and has been grinding its bootheel on the neck of black Americans for centuries.

[From the nomation piece:] The symbolic significance of Obama Barack's nomination victory is not insubstantial. In a land where, not so long ago, having the slightest drop of "Negro blood" in your genetic inheritance was enough to bar you -- legally and formally -- from many jobs, educational opportunities, places of residence, medical care, full participation in society, etc. (and where these obstacles still persist, in practice if not in law, for many people), it is striking to see a man whose father was not only black but also a "full-blooded African" (cue the psychosexual "Mandingo" anxieties of generations of trembly white folk) on the doorstep of the White House. At the very least -- until the novelty wears off (and novelty wears off very, very quickly in America)-- if Obama wins the presidency, there will be some aesthetic relief in seeing a different kind of face on the tee-vee mouthing various pieties, refusing to take any options off the table, etc., in place of the long procession of pasty white males of Northern European descent.

As for the substantial significance of Obama's nomination win, there is none. The only thing that really matters is what the human being named Barack Obama will do with power (if he gets it), and not his skin color. Or to put it another way: What difference did Colin Powell's status as a non-white person in the highest cabinet office make when the question of aggressive war was on the line? None. He was later replaced not only by another non-white person, but by a non-white female, Condi Rice. What difference did Rice's ethnicity and gender make to her collusion with the Bush faction's brutal policies of aggressive war, torture, rendition, state terror, etc.? None.

....Will Obama -- in the White House or on the campaign trail -- denounce the "War on Terror" for what it really is: a war of state terror, waged almost entirely against civilian populations? He has not done so; indeed, on his website he calls for fighting the War on Terror in a "smarter way". (There will be no inefficient, cluttery state terrorism when Obama is on the job!) He wants an even bigger, more powerful, more "stealthy" military...

So here is the significance of Obama's nomination: More Terror War. More murder -- directly, by proxy, by remote control. More manufactured enemies. A continued military presence in Iraq (all "combat troops" withdrawn, eventually, maybe, but other troops left there to "target al Qaeda in Iraq"). No reparations. A bigger, faster, more far-reaching military wrapping the globe. No options taken off the table -- ever.

Hey, you know what? The novelty is wearing off already.

British Foreign Secretary: Clinton threatened to cut-off intelligence-sharing if torture evidence is disclosed

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:09:59 -0600

Submitted by Ryan

What possible justification is there for actively concealing evidence of war crimes?
Glenn Greenwald
Jul. 30, 2009 |
I've written several times before about the amazing quest of Binyam Mohamed -- a British resident released from Guantanamo in February, 2009 after seven years in captivity -- to compel public disclosure of information in the possession of the British Government proving he was tortured while in U.S. custody. At the center of Mohamed's efforts lie the claims of high British government officials that the Obama administration has repeatedly threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing programs with the U.K. if the British High Court discloses information which British intelligence officials learned from the CIA about how Mohamed was tortured. New statements from the British Foreign Secretary yesterday -- claiming that Hillary Clinton personally re-iterated those threats in a May meeting -- highlight how extreme is this joint American/British effort to cover-up proof of Mohamed's torture.

In August 2008, the British High Court ruled in Mohamed's favor, concluding in a 75-page ruling (.pdf) that there was credible evidence in Britain's possession that Mohamed was brutally tortured and was therefore entitled to disclosure of that evidence under long-standing principles of British common law, international law (as established by the Nuremberg Trials and the war crimes trials of Yugoslav leaders, among others), and Britain's treaty obligations (under the Convention Against Torture). But as part of that ruling, the Court redacted from its public decision seven paragraphs which detailed the facts of Mohamed's torture -- facts which British intelligence agents learned from the CIA -- based on the British Government's representations that both the Bush and Obama administrations had threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if those facts were disclosed, even as part of a court proceeding.

The British government's claims about these threats led the British High Court to conclude that it could not disclose those facts in good conscience because the U.S. was, in essence, threatening to put the lives of British citizens at risk by terminating intelligence-sharing over terrorist threats. When re-affirming its decision (.pdf) to withhold that information in light of American threats, the Court pointedly wrote:

We did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials or officials of another State where the evidence was relevant to allegations of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.

Ever since this controversy became public, there have been disputes over exactly what threats the Bush and Obama administrations were really issuing. Were the threats real; were they contrived and issued at the request of the British government in order to give them a pretextual weapon to bully the British High Court to keep the torture facts concealed; or was it some combination of both? What has been clear from the start is that the British Government, at its highest levels, insists that it was threatened this way by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

In May, The Washington Times' Eli Lake reported that an extraordinary letter sent to the British by the Obama administration proved that "the Obama administration [said] it may curtail Anglo-American intelligence sharing if the British High Court discloses new details of the treatment of a former Guantanamo detainee."  That same day, I obtained the court documents filed by the British Government (.pdf) which purported to include that letter sent by the Obama administration, and I wrote about that letter here.

The letter explicitly threatened that the U.S. would cut off intelligence-sharing with the British in the event of disclosure of these torture facts by the British court. The letter expressly warned that such action "could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the United Kingdom's national security" and "it is almost certain that the United Kingdom's ability to identify and arrest suspected terrorists and to disrupt terrorist plots would be severely hampered." In other words: if you let your courts describe how we tortured Mohamed -- even if your laws, your treaty obligations and decades-old international law compel such disclosure -- we may purposely leave your citizens vulnerable to future terrorist attacks by withholding information we obtain about terrorist plots aimed at your country.

New facts emerged yesterday about the threats issued by the Obama administration. Back in February, the British Foreign Minster, David Miliband, denied that he was explicitly threatened by the Bush administration. But now, The Guardian reports that -- at least according to Miliband -- threats were issued by the Obama administration not only in the form of that previously disclosed letter, but also personally by Hillary Clinton in a May meeting with him and other British officials:

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today. . . . David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has repeatedly told the court that the US would stop sharing intelligence with the UK if the CIA material was published. . . Today, it heard how Miliband met Clinton in Washington on 12 May this year.
In a written statement proposing a gagging order, Miliband told the court that she "indicated" that the disclosure of CIA evidence "would affect intelligence sharing". Pressed repeatedly by the judges on the claim yesterday, Karen Steyn, Miliband's counsel, insisted that Clinton was indeed saying that if the seven-paragraph summary of CIA material was disclosed, the US would "reassess" its intelligence relationship with the UK, a move that "would put lives at risk".

Whatever the truth here is about these threats, it is undeniably clear that the U.S. and British Governments are working in collusion to keep concealed the evidence of Mohamed's torture. In February, the Obama administration issued a public statement praising the British Government for convincing its High Court to keep these facts concealed and said that this concealment would "preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens" -- certainly an implied threat that the opposite would happen in the event of disclosure. And in the U.S., the Obama administration has engaged in its own extraordinary efforts to deny Mohamed a day in court, invoking the "state secrets" privilege to argue that the torture program which victimized him must be kept secret, and then after the Obama DOJ lost in the Ninth Circuit, trying to get that decision reversed by the full Circuit court.

What could possibly justify this full-scale joint effort by the Obama administration and the British government to cover-up evidence of Mohamed's torture? In April, when I interviewed one of Mohamed's lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, he pointed out:

Covering up evidence of torture is a criminal offense for which you can go to prison here in Britain, and I imagine in the US but I'm not quite sure about that. And the idea that the British government would conspire with the US or be threatened by the US to do this is again an independent violation of the law.

It's one thing to try to impede prosecutions of those responsible for torture by invoking the inspiring mantra that we Must Look to the Future, Not the Past. It's another thing entirely to actively cover-up evidence of that torture and block the victims from their day in court. There is now a very active controversy over exactly what role the Obama administration and British government is each playing in the issuance of these extraordinary threats. But there is no doubt that both governments are actively attempting to keep this evidence concealed.

In February, Andrew Sullivan wrote about the Mohamed case:  "with each decision to cover for their predecessors, the Obamaites become retroactively complicit in them." In May, Sullivan wrote:

Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predecessors' war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to prosecute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt his successor.

Also in May, The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin -- in a column entitled "President Obama Joins the Cover-Up" -- wrote: "The president who came into office promising to restore our international reputation and return responsibility to government now seems to be buying into the belief that covering up our sins is better than coming clean."

This has gone well beyond a passive failure to apply the rule of law (and comply with our treaty obligations) by prosecuting.  Instead, these are now active efforts to cover-up war crimes. The British Foreign Secretary insists that Obama's Secretary of State personally threatened that the U.S. would conceal information about terrorist plots from the British if the facts of Mohamed's torture were disclosed, while the Obama administration actively seeks to block American courts from examining the same evidence.  Can anyone justify that?

US Military Spying on Peace Activists

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:25:01 -0600

Here it is. Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman talks with activists about their discovery of being spied on by John Towery, aka John Jacob. Revelations include Towery’s employment by the US military, probable violations of posse comitatus laws, and the use of Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) FUSION centers by the US military in cahoots with local law enforcement agencies. Goodman also discusses the need for a new Church Committee-type investigation.

Military Is Spying on US Peace Groups

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:27:16 -0600

Well, well, well. It turns out that the US military, often in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus law, are illegally spying on US peace groups. Those of us who have been involved in the antiwar movement are already aware of a good number of these activities. The photograph above was taken of US government agents surveilling a peace rally in Stoneham, Colorado. Neither of the individuals pictured were ever identified or tried for their illegal and unconstitutional activities.

by Amy Goodman
Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the city of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn's union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a "John J. Towery II," who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist "John Jacob."
Dunn told me: "John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He said he was an anarchist. He was really interested in SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me."

"Jacob" told the activists he was a civilian employed at Fort Lewis Army Base and would share information about base activities that could help the PMR organize rallies and protests against public ports being used for troop and Stryker military vehicle deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, PMR activists have occasionally engaged in civil disobedience, blocking access to the port.

Larry Hildes, an attorney representing Washington activists, says the U.S. attorney prosecuting the cases against them, Brian Kipnis, specifically instructed the Army not to hand over any information about its intelligence-gathering activities, despite a court order to do so.

Which is why Dunn's request to Olympia and the documents he obtained are so important.
The military is supposed to be barred from deploying on U.S. soil, or from spying on citizens. Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: "In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents [and some would watch] every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics." Pyle later investigated the spying for two congressional committees: "As a result of those investigations, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished, and all of its files were burned. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to stop the warrantless surveillance of electronic communications."

Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others are pushing for a new, comprehensive investigation of all U.S. intelligence activities, of the scale of the Church Committee hearings, which exposed widespread spying on and disruption of legal domestic groups, attempts at assassination of foreign heads of state, and more.

Demands mount for information on and accountability for Vice President Dick Cheney's alleged secret assassination squad, President George W. Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, and the CIA's alleged misleading of Congress. But the spying in Olympia occurred well into the Obama administration (and may continue today). President Barack Obama supports retroactive immunity for telecom companies involved in the wiretapping, and has maintained Bush-era reliance on the state secrets privilege. Lee and Holt should take the information uncovered by Brendan Dunn and the Olympia activists and get the investigations started now.

Casualties of War, Part II: Warning signs

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:21:01 -0600

Part II of the Colorado Springs Gazette’s story on the destruction of US soldiers’ minds and morality in an illegal and brutal war of oppression.

DAVE PHILIPPS
2009-07-24 17:27:36
After coming home from Iraq, 21-year-old medic Bruce Bastien was driving with his Army buddy Louis Bressler, 24, when they spotted a woman walking to work on a Colorado Springs street.
Bressler swerved and hit the woman with the car, according to police, then Bastien jumped out and stabbed her over and over.
(A word of caution about the language and content of this story: Please see Editor's Note)
It was October 2007. A fellow soldier, Kenneth Eastridge, 24, watched it all from the passenger seat.
At that moment, he said, it was clear that however messed up some of the soldiers in the unit had been after their first Iraq deployment, it was about to get much worse.
“I have no problem with killing,” said Eastridge, a two-tour infantryman with almost 80 confirmed kills. “But I won’t just murder someone for no reason. He had gone crazy.”
Hear the prison interviews with Kenneth Eastridge.
All three soldiers belonged to the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, part of Fort Carson’s 4th Brigade Combat Team. The 500-soldier infantry battalion nicknamed itself the “Lethal Warriors.”
They fought in the deadliest places in the war twice — first in the Sunni Triangle, then in downtown Baghdad. Since their return late in 2007, eight infantry soldiers have been arrested and accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter. Another two soldiers from the brigade were arrested and accused of murder and attempted murder after the first tour. Others have committed other violent crimes. Others have committed suicide.
Many of the soldiers behind bars and their family members say the violence at home is a consequence of the violence in Iraq. They came home angry, confused, paranoid and depressed. They had trouble getting effective mental heath care. Most buried their symptoms in drugs and alcohol until they exploded.
The Army is seeking new ways to care for returning soldiers and keep the violence from returning — crucial now, because the unit shipped out in May to Afghanistan, where the monthly coalition casualty rate has doubled since the beginning of the year. Soldiers are scheduled to return to Colorado Springs in spring 2010.
The first step toward solving the problem, the post’s most recent commander said, is to understand it.
Maj. Gen. Mark Graham took command of Fort Carson in September 2007, just before the worst of the violence. He said that after studying the murders, he saw that soldiers rarely snap without warning. Guys who get in big trouble often get in little trouble first, and the problem grows until it explodes.
Graham calls this pattern “the crescendo.”
It may start with a soldier showing up to work reeking of booze, getting arrested for domestic violence, or mouthing off to an officer.
“When a guy who had it together starts showing little problems, it could be a sign of something much bigger,” he said.
Most of the soldiers now behind bars back up Graham’s theory of the crescendo.
Before Bastien stabbed a woman in 2007, he was arrested three times on suspicion of beating his wife and burning her with cigarettes.
Before Bressler shot two soldiers in Colorado Springs in 2007, Eastridge said, he assaulted his commanding officer and tried to kill himself.
Before Jomar Falu-Vives, 23, allegedly gunned down three people in Colorado Springs in two drive-by shootings in 2008, his wife said she called his sergeants to warn he was liable to “take someone’s life.”
Before John Needham, 25, allegedly beat a woman to death in 2008, his father said, he tried repeatedly to get treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
The pattern of trouble is clear in hindsight, Graham said, but hard to spot when it is developing.
“Our challenge is to catch it early, so we can help these soldiers,” he said. “We are educating young commanders on taking care of their soldiers. But it’s a very tough problem.”
Graham, who had one son killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq a year after his other son committed suicide while training to be an officer, made mental health a focus after taking command of Fort Carson.
He said suicide and homicide are “different reactions to the same or similar problem. You treat both in the same way.”
Under his watch, Fort Carson more than doubled the number of mental health counselors. A new Army program will soon give each brigade a “master resiliency trainer” to strengthen troops’ psychological fitness the way drill sergeants strengthen their muscles. A special unit has been created to track soldiers who are too physically or psychologically wounded to stay with their battalions. Soldiers visiting a doctor at Fort Carson for even a sprained ankle are now screened for symptoms of PTSD and depression. And perhaps most important, Graham said, in the Army, where mental illness has long been taboo, commanders at Fort Carson are being trained to tell soldiers it is OK to seek treatment.
“There is a culture and a stigma that need to change,” Graham said.
It is unclear if the new measures can counter the entrenched Army culture or the effects of repeated deployments. Though some of the new programs have been in place for two years, the violence has not stopped.
Colorado Springs police arrested a Fort Carson soldier from the Lethal Warriors in May in the killing of a 19-year-old woman. Another soldier shot himself in the head this year. Another was arrested on suspicion of breaking a civilian’s jaw in March. Another is awaiting trial in the shooting of a pregnant woman.
Graham, who handed over command of the post last week, said Fort Carson is doing everything it can to help its soldiers. “I wish I could predict how all this is going to go,” he said. “I can’t say it is not going to happen again.”

“All I know how to do is kill people”
For Bastien, the Army medic, the crescendo started to peak just after midnight on Aug. 4, 2007, when he was driving his silver Audi to get cigarettes after a night of drinking at Bressler’s apartment.
The rest of their battalion was still fighting in Iraq.
Bastien was in Colorado Springs because he had been arrested and accused of beating his wife while on leave in May 2007.
Bressler was in town because the Army had sent him back from Iraq early, in July, with PTSD, according to his wife. He was awaiting a medical discharge because, Eastridge said, he attacked an officer in Iraq.
Bastien and Bressler declined requests for interviews.
According to court documents, that night the pair spotted a drunk 23-year-old Fort Carson private they didn’t know named Robert James, who was walking home from a bar, and pulled the Audi over to give him a ride.
Bastien later told police that he and Bressler decided to rob James. They drove to a dark parking lot.
Bressler pointed a .38 revolver at James and demanded his money. James pulled a few rumpled bills from his pockets — about $25. Bressler shot him twice and gathered the scattered bills.
The random crime left cops with no leads.
A little over a month later, in late September, Eastridge landed under Army escort at the Colorado Springs Airport.
The once-decorated soldier had been court-martialed in August 2007 on suspicion of possession of drugs, disobeying orders and threatening an officer. Medical records show that, after two bloody deployments, the Army diagnosed him with paranoia, depression, insomnia, antisocial personality disorder, PTSD, homicidal thoughts and hearing loss caused by constant shooting and explosions.
His Army escorts were taking him to Fort Carson — not for treatment, he said, but to get kicked out of the Army.
From there, he was going to jail. In Colorado Springs, there was a warrant waiting from a year before, when he skipped a court date on charges of putting a gun to his girlfriend’s head.
At the baggage claim, Eastridge said, while his escorts waded into the crowd to grab their bags, he ran. He said he hopped in a cab, took it to a cheap hotel and called the only people in town he knew: Bastien and Bressler.
“When I met up with those guys, they were weird,” he said. They were paranoid and aggressive, he said.
“They kept saying, ‘Do you want to go rob someone? Do you want to go kill someone? I just thought they were kidding, but they had gone a little crazy.”
Eastridge did have plans to rob someone. Compared with Iraq, it would be easy.
He wanted to do it alone, but he had no car and no gun. Bressler and Bastien had both, Eastridge said, and they insisted on coming along.
On Oct. 29, 2007, wearing all black, they attempted to rob a nightclub manager as she emerged from a club. When they botched that, they drove off and spotted a young woman named Erica Ham walking down the street. Bressler hit her with the car and she crashed onto the hood. Then Bastien jumped out to grab her bag and started stabbing her. When she tried to fight back, Eastridge pulled out a pistol and yelled for her to get on the ground.
Ham was unable to identify her attackers, and police had no leads.
The stabbing sobered Eastridge up, he said. He turned himself in for his year-old domestic violence charge and spent most of November in the El Paso County jail. He bonded out on Nov. 27. A few days later, he returned to Fort Carson, where he received an “other than honorable” discharge for possession of drugs in Iraq.
After two tours in Iraq, Eastridge was depressed, paranoid, violent, abusing drugs and haunted by nightmares. But because he was other-than-honorably discharged, he said, he was ineligible for benefits or health care. He was no longer Uncle Sam’s problem. He was on his own.
“I had no job training,” he said. “All I know how to do is kill people.”
A few days later, on Nov. 30, 2007, Eastridge went drinking with Bastien and Bressler. According to court documents the three ran into a fellow soldier, Kevin Shields, who was celebrating his 24th birthday.
They downed shots at the downtown bars until closing, then drove around, smoking a joint, until they were lost on the west side.
In the first, dark hours of Dec. 1, 2007, Bressler and Shields got in a fight when Shields teased the tough gunner for throwing up in the car. Bressler told Bastien to pull over because he needed to puke again. Bressler leaned against a pole like he was sick, then turned around and shot Shields in the head. The soldier fell to the ground, and Bressler shot him four more times.
Bressler fished a few things out of Shields’ pockets to make the shooting look like a robbery, and they sped away.
Soldiers who saw the trio drinking with Shields at Rum Bay helped police tie them to the crime, court documents said.
Bressler was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to 60 years.
Bastien pleaded guilty to the same charge and also got 60 years.
Eastridge pleaded guilty to accessory to murder and got 10 years.
None used their experiences in Iraq as a defense.
“When I was sentenced, the judge told me ‘Look at how many people go to Iraq, and how few come back and commit crimes,” Eastridge said, “But that’s not fair. A lot of the soldiers who go to Iraq just drive trucks or check IDs or sit in the Green Zone. Look at combat troops. And look at what kind of combat they did. My unit was in the worst neighborhood in the bloodiest part of the war. Even in my platoon, there were guys that stayed in the truck and guys that did most of the fighting. Look at that tiny number. It’s not the hundreds of thousands that go, it’s the few hundred that see heavy, heavy combat. It changes lives.”

“Give me the gun”
The rest of the Lethal Warriors returned home from Iraq in December 2007.
Some went wild in the bars, overflowing with the same pent-up jubilation troops experienced after the first tour. Then the crescendo started.
Jose Barco, who was burned so badly in the first tour that, soldiers said, he had to beg commanders to allow him back for the second tour, was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence. Then drunken driving. Then burglary with a deadly weapon. Then he got divorced. Finally, he was arrested and accused of taking a pistol to a house party.
On April 25, 2008, he was with a crowd in the basement of a friend of a friend’s house, police say, when he got in an argument, pulled out the gun and shot a round through the ceiling. There was a fight. He was thrown out. A few minutes later, when the party crowd was still standing on the front lawn, he drove by, spraying bullets. Police say one hit 19-year-old Ginny Stefanic, who was six months pregnant, in the thigh. Stefanic suffered minor injuries.
Barco, who declined to be interviewed, was arrested Jan. 7. He posted $25,000 bail and is awaiting trial for attempted murder.
It was a classic case of the pattern that Graham said most soldiers follow when they spiral out of control. Before the big stuff, there is little stuff. Catching it in time can save lives.
Fort Carson has trained key leaders to spot the warning signs.
When a soldier is drinking too much or acting out, instead of punishment, they are supposed to get help.
“But it’s a very tough problem,” said Graham, who ordered the new programs. “If a soldier is showing all the risk factors, what can you do? You can’t lock them up. They haven’t done anything. But what we can do is provide them every opportunity to get the care they need and try to break down the stigma against seeking help.”
Like Barco, Jomar Falu-Vives started hitting his wife.
Soldiers say the lifelong Army brat seemed to handle Baghdad OK. Back home, Falu-Vives would go out to sing karaoke with other soldiers and go shooting at the firing range off Rampart Range Road, according to fellow soldiers.
But his ex-wife, Jolhea Vives, said he had turned mean.
He always liked to party and had a short temper, she said. But when he got back from Iraq, it was worse. Soon after, they filed for divorce.
Falu-Vives’ lawyer did not respond to a request for an interview.
His ex-wife said he had episodes where he “went into combat mode.” At one point, she said, he stuck a loaded .45 in her mouth.
She said she called his sergeant, saying that he was violent and was going to kill somebody, but the Army did nothing.
An Army spokesman said, “There is no specific Army policy that provides guidance on these types of situations. It is up to the soldier’s chain of command.”
The soldier’s commanders declined to be interviewed.
On May 26, 2007, Falu-Vives was riding in the back seat of his friend and fellow soldier Rodolfo Torres-Gandarilla’ Chrysler sedan on the way back from a bar, according to his arrest affidavit. Near South Circle Drive, he allegedly saw two men standing in front of a house on the corner of Flintshire Street and Monterey Road, lifted an AK-47 and started shooting. One of the men in front of the house, Army Capt. Zachary Szody, collapsed with a bullet in his knee and another in his hip.
Ten days later, Falu-Vives was cruising in his black Chevy Tahoe with Torres-Gandarilla and two other Army buddies, according to the affidavit.
Near midnight, he pulled up to an intersection five blocks from the first shooting. Amairany Cervantes, 18, and her boyfriend, Cesar Ramirez-Ibanez, 21, were setting up signs for a yard sale the next morning, the affidavit said.
“Give me the gun,” police said he told a friend sitting in the back seat. He shot the woman in the back five times, police said, her boyfriend, four times. Both died almost instantly. Falu-Vives sped back to his apartment, where he stood on the balcony watching the red and blue lights converge on the spot.
He listened to sirens wailing in the night and, according to what witnesses told police, held up his hands and said, “I love that sound.”
Falu-Vives’ mother, Lt. Col. Marta Vives, is an Army nurse in a Combat Stress Team. She helps soldiers in war zones who are starting to lose it. It is one of a number of programs the Army has created since the war began.
When her son was patrolling Baghdad, she was stationed just a few miles away.
Reached at Fort Hood, Texas, she said the Army has many programs to help troops, but soldiers often avoid the counseling and medication offered, and leaders sometimes don’t give GIs time or permission to visit.
“There is still a stigma behind getting help,” she said. “That is the hardest part. It is still seen as a sign of weakness.”
She said she has talked to the battalion commander of the Lethal Warriors and the commander of Fort Carson to tell them that many efforts to treat troops’ mental problems are not trickling down to privates like her son.
Falu-Vives was arrested July 30, 2008.
Torres-Gandarilla pleaded guilty to accessory to murder in April and is expected to testify against Falu-Vives in August.
Falu-Vives’ mother said she never saw evidence of her son having problems.
“He isn’t a criminal,” she said. “He never killed a fly — except when it was his job.”
Before Falu-Vives could be charged with first-degree murder, another Lethal Warrior was arrested for the same thing.

“Pushed them until they broke”
John Needham struggled to find normalcy after trying to kill himself in Iraq in September 2007.
The tall California surfer had been hit by six roadside bombs before getting drunk one night in Baghdad and putting a gun to his head, his father, Michael Needham, said.
The soldier was diagnosed with PTSD, flown to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. and put on antipsychotics, an antidepressant, an antiseizure drug used to calm PTSD soldiers and a potent blood-pressure drug used to silence nightmares. Side effects of the cocktail can include hangover-like symptoms, short-term memory loss, irritability, aggression, hallucinations, sleepwalking, paranoia and panic attacks. So many of the side effects were like the symptoms of his PTSD that his father said it was hard to know if they were making him better or worse.
For a month, Needham stayed at the hospital. On Nov. 9, 2007, according to orders provided by his father, Needham’s battalion commander had him transferred to Fort Carson so he could be sent back to Iraq.
“It’s just bizarre, we couldn’t figure out why they were doing this to him,” his father said.
Needham’s father and Andrew Pogany , a veterans’ advocate and former Fort Carson sergeant, persuaded commanders to keep Needham from going back to Iraq so he could continue psychiatric treatment.
But, his father said, his son didn’t get it.
Laws prevent the Army from discussing medical treatment of soldiers. Needham’s father said his son was kept on the drugs but never received counseling.
Instead, he said, his son was berated by sergeants.
“They would write things on the chalkboard in his barracks like ‘John Needham is a shit bag cry baby PTSD boohoo,’” his father said.
It was so bad that when Needham went home for Thanksgiving in 2007, his father refused to let him return to the Army.
“We basically kidnapped him,” his father said. He took his son to Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, and argued with Fort Carson until the soldier was reassigned to Balboa.
Needham was honorably discharged from the Army on July 18, 2008, with chronic PTSD and moved back to his father’s house in San Clemente, Calif. But, his father said, he was not better.
“He was severely different,” his father said.
John Needham was groggy and vacant from the pills. He had lost much of his hearing from bomb blasts. He often drank himself to oblivion. He was paranoid and afraid of crowds.
He begged his father to buy him an assault rifle like the one he carried in Iraq. Eventually, they compromised on a toy pistol that shot rubber BBs. Needham carried it almost everywhere, his father said.
The former soldier was going to regular counseling at a local Veterans Affairs hospital, but, his father said, it wasn’t enough.
His son had frightening flashbacks. Late one night, he rummaged through the bathroom naked, smearing his face and body with cosmetics as if they were camouflage paint. He sharpened one end of a broom handle to make a weapon. His father said he found him crouching silently behind the couch. His father said his son always took off his clothes when he had a flashback.
“He needed to be committed,” his father said. “He needed serious psychiatric help. I tried to put him in the hospital, but the VA said they could only treat him as an outpatient . . . I could see the train wreck coming.”
On the night of Sept. 1, 2008, Needham was at home hanging out with a girlfriend in his bedroom on the ground floor. His father was two floors above, taking a shower.
A 19-year-old woman named Jacqwelyn Villagomez, whom the soldier had recently broken up with, came in. The women fought,his father said. Needham’s girlfriend called the police. They arrived a few minutes later, and Needham answered the door naked and bleeding, his father said.
Villagomez’s body lay in his bedroom, he said.
His father said he heard a ruckus, went downstairs and watched the police tackle his son. The soldier fought back as they put him in cuffs. Michael Needham said he stared, weeping, as his naked son lay bleeding and struggling, incoherent on the driveway as the police tasered him again and again.
John Needham is awaiting trial on suspicion of murder. In May, family members mortgaged their houses to bail him out. He is now getting inpatient treatment at a VA hospital, Michael Needham said.
“I know the Army would like to say it is not responsible for this, that it didn’t train them to do this. But that is bullshit,” Michael Needham said. “They trained them to kill, then when they didn’t have enough men for the surge, they pushed these guys until they broke, then threw them away.”

Resiliency
This spring, Lethal Warriors sprawled on the floor of a Fort Carson conference room, learning to take deep breaths.
They lazed on their backs in full camouflage. In. Out. And relax.
“The media says war will (expletive) you up, but that stress can also make you stronger. You just have to learn to mentally metabolize the experience,” Dan Taslitz, a former Marine, told a group of sprawling soldiers.
Taslitz was there as part of a new “resiliency training” called “Warrior Optimization Systems,” or WAROPS, that the 4th Brigade was testing to try to counter mental illness, violence and suicide in the ranks.
If the Army likes the results, it may take the program Army-wide, commanders said.
In the four-hour class, soldiers learn how the brain and body react to combat stress, and talk about healthy ways to respond, such as relaxation breathing, exercise and visualizing a positive outcome to a mission.
Sometimes, instructors said, controlling emotions is as simple as stepping back, identifying the feeling and saying it out loud. They call the process “name it and tame it.”
The brigade plans to hold refresher courses in Afghanistan and again when soldiers return home.
Fort Carson also created a task force late in 2008 to hunt for “common threads” in the killings committed by Fort Carson soldiers.
The investigation, conducted by a team of 27 behavioral health and Army professionals, concluded with a report released July 15. The findings echo what guys in the ranks said: Their tour was bloodier than most; violence in Iraq messed them up; they started abusing drugs and alcohol; treatment for substance abuse and mental health at Fort Carson was inadequate; stigma kept soldiers from getting help; and when those so-called “risk factors” came together, guys got in serious trouble.
The report did not address other issues, such as soldiers carrying guns once they return from deployments, alleged war crimes by the unit, or the Army’s deployment of soldiers with pending civilian felonies.
The study recommended better mental health care and training, programs to “ensure there is no humiliation or belittling” of soldiers seeking mental health care, and more studies to “assess a possible link between deployment, combat intensity, and aggressive behavior.”
But Graham said the report does not offer a simple cure.
“We didn’t see any one thing that we could identify and say, yes, this is the reason these soldiers do this,” he said.
Instead, he said, Fort Carson and the Army have instituted a wide array of changes.
Evans Army Community Hospital has increased the number of behavioral health care workers from 37 to 71. Many are assigned to mobile teams within brigades, so soldiers don’t have to go to the hospital to seek help.
Fort Carson also has added 16 “military family life consultants,” whom soldiers and their families can visit anonymously for help with everything from relationship problems to financial concerns.
Fort Carson started referring soldiers to private counselors in Colorado Springs in 2006. The number seeking private counseling surged from 11 in 2006 to 2,171 in 2008, according to Evans Army Community Hospital.
“We see that as a sign of strength, not weakness,” said Roger Meyer, Evans spokesman. “It shows we are having success in our efforts to educate soldiers on the signs of stress.”
In Colorado Springs, lawyers and law enforcement agencies have created an experimental veteran’s court to catch returning soldiers who get in trouble with the law and steer them toward help instead of jail. Soldiers charged with felonies will be sentenced to counseling and substance abuse treatment. The court is expected to take its first cases in August.
The Army has created Warrior Transition Units to manage the care of soldiers, like Needham, who are too mentally or physically disabled to stay with their units.
Colorado’s senators urged the Army last week to include Fort Carson in a pilot alcohol abuse program.
Graham said the Army is also trying to change the culture.
All low-level leaders, he said, are now taught to treat mental illness like any battlefield injury.
“If a soldier is shot or injured, other soldiers know how to give him care,” Graham said. “We need to get soldiers to understand the signs of combat stress so they can do the same thing — get their buddy the care he needs.”
Staff Sgt. James Combs, with the Lethal Warriors, said in June that the combat stress education is more comprehensive than when he was a private in the late 1990s.
Now, he said, sergeants teach soldiers that “You may be able to pull the trigger on our M4 or M16, but you have to understand what it is doing to you mentally, and you need to be prepared for that.”
“We don’t just throw them to the wolves like we used to,” he said.
It is not clear how effective the changes will be.
The current commanders of the Lethal Warriors, who would implement many of the changes, declined repeated requests for interviews.
And Fort Carson’s new programs have not prevented more occurrences of destructive behavior.
On May 10, Thomas Woolly, the soldier Needham replaced in a blown-out Humvee turret in Baghdad in 2007, was drinking with friends after midnight at an apartment just a few blocks from Fort Carson.
Woolly had done two tours with the Lethal Warriors and was in the new Warrior Transition Unit, about to be medically discharged because, his grandmother, Gladys Woolly said, “He was blowed up so many times until it damaged his brain.”
Woolly, 24, had a drink in one hand and a loaded .45 Long Colt revolver in the other, according to his arrest affidavit, when a friend’s husband, who had been arguing with the group, banged on the door.
Police say Woolly cocked the gun’s hammer. After the husband left and Woolly went to uncock the gun, the hammer slipped. The bullet killed 19-year-old Lisa Baumann, who was standing on the other side of the room.
Woolly was charged with manslaughter. He is out on bail and is scheduled for arraignment in August. He did not respond to interview requests.
Two weeks later, Roy Mason, 28, another Lethal Warrior who had served two tours and landed in the Warrior Transition Unit, went AWOL, drove to California, parked at the beach, called 911 from his car, asked them to clean up the mess quickly “before kids see,” then shot himself in the head, media reports said.
Civilian mental health professionals caution that the Army programs treat the symptoms but do not address the underlying cause.
“There are some good things going on,” said Davida Hoffman, the director of First Choice Counseling, a private clinic that treats about 250 Carson soldiers.
But counseling can do only so much, she said. The quality of treatment is not the cause of the problem. Combat is.
The more combat soldiers see, she said, the more problems they will have. The more problems soldiers have, the more problems Colorado Springs has.
“Soldiers simply cannot handle repeated deployments,” she said. “If these guys keep seeing deployments like the stuff they saw in Iraq, we could have a very dangerous situation.”
Graham agreed that repeated deployments are tough on soldiers. But the Army has a job to do, he said, and the rate of deployment is not expected to slow for at least 12 to 18 months.
On the same day Mason put a gun to his head at the beach, his old brigade was deploying to Afghanistan.
Most of the guys from the first deployment had left the Army, transferred to a different unit, been kicked out, wounded or killed. But for every one gone there is a new recruit. And while some attitudes in the Army are changing, the day-to-day reality of the foot soldier is not. Since June, insurgent attacks have killed three in the brigade.
No one may have a better view of the Army’s challenges than Sgt. Michael Cardenaz. In many ways, he is the battle-worn face of today’s soldier.
The solid, bald-headed Lethal Warriors staff sergeant and father of two was the platoon commander for Eastridge, Barco and Bastien in Baghdad. He often played Texas Hold ’em with Bressler at the base. He went bowling with Falu-Vives just days before Falu-Vives was arrested in the yard sale sign shootings. He has done three tours in Iraq and two in Kosovo. He said he has had close scrapes with 35 IEDs, scores of rocket-propelled grenades and one 500-pound bomb. He has taken shrapnel twice. He describes himself as an “old-school career soldier.” He is 29.
With every arrest of a fellow soldier, he was shocked, he said, but he does not think it is just coincidence that so many guys in the unit are now in jail.
“These are all younger guys. They are just kids, straight out of high school, from mom’s house to basic training to Iraq. You throw them in a tour like this, and there is going to be an aftermath,” he said. “Time was, before I really understood it, my reaction would have been ‘fry ’em.’ But now I can empathize. . . If they did what they did, fine, they have to answer to the justice system, but these guys like Eastridge who tried so hard and loved the Army . . . they are a casualty of war. Their psyches are casualties of war.”
He agreed that the deployment to Afghanistan will be different from the ones that he said screwed up his friends.
“There is much more attention to the mental side,” he said. “I’ve been trained to do stress debriefings and suicide prevention. I remember a time in the Army when mental health was taboo. It was career over. That’s not the case anymore.”
But, he said, the stigma is alive and well, especially among infantrymen.
“There’s still a feeling that if you got to go see the doc, you’re a punk. There are a lot of people who still feel that way. I’m not going to lie to you, I do,” he said.
Real soldiers, he said, “just suck it up.”
“That’s what I do. I think I was given a God-given talent to suck it up. Horrible things happen, I suck it up. I don’t let it bother me.”
In March Cardenaz was arrested in a felony assault.
He was walking with his wife past The Thirsty Parrot on Tejon Street, in full dress uniform after the Lethal Warriors’ annual ball, when some civilians hanging out in front of the bar said something. Or maybe Cardenaz said something to them. Witnesses say the sergeant dropped one with a single punch. When another guy came after him to ask why he did it, police say, Cardenaz broke his jaw.
The soldier posted bail and did not show up for his court hearing July 15.
His lawyer told the judge that Cardenaz had deployed to Afghanistan.
—
Call the writer at 636-0223.

Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:08:15 -0600

I often give corporate media a hard time because most of what they produce is such shite, but occasionally they do produce something really good. This is one of those stories about Colorado Springs soldiers having returned from Iraq.

Unfortunately, this spike in crime from soldiers with PTSD returning from Iraq was utterly predictable. To hear a very chilling jailhouse interview about the murder and mayhem that US soldiers inflicted in Iraq, click on the “Hear Prison Interviews with Kenneth Eastridge” below.

DAVE PHILIPPS
2009-07-24 11:48:02
Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her son was poised to kill.
It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had not been the same since being wounded and coming home from Iraq eight months before. He had violent outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a gun.
(A word of caution about the language and content of this story: Please see Editor's Note)
“It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a walking time bomb,” said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.
His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do. Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying things like, “Your mommy called. She says you are going crazy.”
Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart.
Marquez was the first infantry soldier in his brigade to murder someone after returning from Iraq. But he wasn’t the last.
Hear the prison interviews with Kenneth Eastridge.
Marquez's 3,500-soldier unit — now called the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team — fought in some of the bloodiest places in Iraq, taking the most casualties of any Fort Carson unit by far.
Back home, 10 of its infantrymen have been arrested and accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter since 2006. Others have committed suicide, or tried to.
Almost all those soldiers were kids, too young to buy a beer, when they volunteered for one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Almost none had serious criminal backgrounds. Many were awarded medals for good conduct.
But in the vicious confusion of battle in Iraq and with no clear enemy, many said training went out the window. Slaughter became a part of life. Soldiers in body armor went back for round after round of battle that would have killed warriors a generation ago. Discipline deteriorated. Soldiers say the torture and killing of Iraqi civilians lurked in the ranks. And when these soldiers came home to Colorado Springs suffering the emotional wounds of combat, soldiers say, some were ignored, some were neglected, some were thrown away and some were punished.
Some kept killing — this time in Colorado Springs.
Many of those soldiers are now behind bars, but their troubles still reach well beyond the walls of their cells — and even beyond the Army. Their unit deployed again in May, this time to one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous regions, near Khyber Pass.
This month, Fort Carson released a 126-page report by a task force of behavioral-health and Army professionals who looked for common threads in the soldiers’ crimes. They concluded that the intensity of battle, the long-standing stigma against seeking help, and shortcomings in substance-abuse and mental-health treatment may have converged with “negative outcomes,” but more study was needed.
Marquez, who was arrested before the latest programs were created, said he would never have pulled the trigger if he had not gone to Iraq.
“If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot,” Marquez said this spring as he sat in the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is serving 30 years. “But after Iraq, it was just natural.”
More killing by more soldiers followed.
In August 2007, Louis Bressler, 24, robbed and shot a soldier he picked up on a street in Colorado Springs.
In December 2007, Bressler and fellow soldiers Bruce Bastien Jr., 21, and Kenneth Eastridge, 24, left the bullet-riddled body of a soldier from their unit on a west-side street.
In May and June 2008, police say Rudolfo Torres-Gandarilla, 20, and Jomar Falu-Vives, 23, drove around with an assault rifle, randomly shooting people.
In September 2008, police say John Needham, 25, beat a former girlfriend to death.
Most of the killers were from a single 500-soldier unit within the brigade called the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, which nicknamed itself the “Lethal Warriors.”
Soldiers from other units at Fort Carson have committed crimes after deployments — military bookings at the El Paso County jail have tripled since the start of the Iraq war — but no other unit has a record as deadly as the soldiers of the 4th Brigade. The vast majority of the brigade’s soldiers have not committed crimes, but the number who have is far above the population at large. In a one-year period from the fall of 2007 to the fall of 2008, the murder rate for the 500 Lethal Warriors was 114 times the rate for Colorado Springs.
The battalion is overwhelmingly made up of young men, who, demographically, have the highest murder rate in the United States, but the brigade still has a murder rate 20 times that of young males as a whole.
The killings are only the headline-grabbing tip of a much broader pyramid of crime. Since 2005, the brigade’s returning soldiers have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.
Like Marquez, most of the jailed soldiers struggled to adjust to life back home after combat. Like Marquez, many showed signs of growing trouble before they ended up behind bars. Like Marquez, all raise difficult questions about the cause of the violence.
Did the infantry turn some men into killers, or did killers seek out the infantry? Did the Army let in criminals, or did combat-tattered soldiers fall into criminal habits? Did Fort Carson fail to take care of soldiers, or did soldiers fail to take advantage of care they were offered?
And, most importantly, since the brigade is now in Afghanistan, is there a way to keep the violence from happening again?
Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, who took command of Fort Carson in the thick of the murders and ordered marked changes in how returning soldiers are treated, said he hopes so.
“When we see a problem, we try to identify it and really learn what we can do about it. That is what we are trying to do here,” Graham said in a June interview. “There is a culture and a stigma that need to change.”
Under his command, nearly everyone — from colonels to platoon sergeants — is now trained to help troops showing the signs of emotional stress. Fort Carson has doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors and tightened hospital regulations to the point where a soldier visiting an Army doctor for any reason, even a sprained ankle, can’t leave without a mental health evaluation. Graham has also volunteered Fort Carson as a testing ground for new Army programs to ease soldiers’ transition from war to home.
Eastridge, an infantry specialist now serving 10 years for accessory to murder, said it will take a lot to wipe away the stain of Iraq.
“The Army trains you to be this way. In bayonet training, the sergeant would yell, ‘What makes the grass grow?’ and we would yell, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ as we stabbed the dummy. The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody. And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off. ... If they don’t figure out how to take care of the soldiers they trained to kill, this is just going to keep happening.”

Satan’s throne
The violence started to take root in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, where the brigade landed in September 2004.
“It was actually beautiful. There were lots of palm trees,” said Eastridge, who is a working-class kid from Kentucky who had never really been anywhere before he joined the Army.
But, he said, “the situation was ugly.”
It was a little more than a year after President George W. Bush had landed on an aircraft carrier in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner to announce the end of major combat operations. But the situation was growing worse. Rival militias of Sunnis and Shiites were gaining strength. Looting had crippled cities. And in a war with no clear front or enemy, the average monthly body count for U.S. soldiers was up 25 percent from a year earlier.
The brigade was in the worst of it.
None of it bothered Marquez.
In high school, he had been a co-captain on the football team and had run track. After graduation, he joined the infantry because the Army commercials full of guns and helicopters looked like the coolest job in the world.
Eastridge felt the same way. He was the closest thing to a criminal in the group of soldiers later arrested for murder. He was trying to get his life together after growing up with a mother addicted to cocaine. He had been arrested for reckless homicide when he was 12, after he accidentally shot his best friend in the chest while playing with his father’s antique shotgun. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to counseling. After that, his record had been clean.
Felons cannot join the Army unless they get a waiver from a recruiter. Eastridge said he called a dozen until one told him, “Son, it looks like you just need someone to give you a chance.”
Like Marquez, Eastridge wanted to join the infantry because, he said, “that’s where you get to do all the awesome stuff.”
After basic training, the Army sent both men to South Korea.
They were in different battalions of what became the 4th Brigade Combat Team. Marquez was in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment; Eastridge, the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment. Both were foot soldiers. Both were surrounded by other young, gung-ho GIs with no battle experience. And both learned in the spring of 2004 that they were going to Iraq.
“We thought it would be cool. It was what we signed up for,” Marquez said.
It turned out not to be cool at all.
Ramadi, where Marquez landed, had a population the size of Colorado Springs but had no dependable electricity, let alone law and order. Sewage ran in rubble-choked streets. The temperature sometimes rose to 120 degrees.
And when roadside bombs blew civilians to bits, soldiers said, packs of feral dogs fought over the scraps.
Pat Dollard, a documentary filmmaker embedded in the area at the time, wrote that it looked like “Satan had punched a hole in the Earth’s surface, plopped down his throne, and set up shop.”
Marquez was assigned to hunt terrorists in the city. Eastridge patrolled the highway between Ramadi and Fallujah. With him was Bressler, a quiet, friendly gunner later arrested with Eastridge for murder.
Going on a mission usually meant tramping house to house in dust-colored camouflage, loaded down with rifles, pistols, body armor, ammo, grenades and water to fight the incessant heat.
Soldiers went out day and night, knocking on doors — sometimes kicking them in. They set up checkpoints. They seized weapons. They clapped hoods over suspected insurgents. They rarely found terrorists, but the terrorists found them.
A few days into the deployment, a sniper’s bullet killed Marquez’s lieutenant. Then another friend died in a car bombing. Then another.
Combat brigades always take higher casualties than the rest of the Army because they fight on the front lines, but, even by those standards, the 3,500-soldier brigade got pummeled. Sixty-four were killed and more than 400 were injured in the yearlong tour, according to Fort Carson — double the average for all Army brigades that have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the insurgents learned their craft, attacks became more gruesome.
A truck loaded with explosives careened into Eastridge’s platoon, killing his squad leader, blowing fist-size holes in his platoon sergeant and pinning the burning engine against the baby of the unit, Jose Barco.
Bombs meant to kill soldiers shredded anyone in the area. Women had their arms ripped off. Old men along the road were reduced to meat.
“It just got sickening,” said David Nash, a then-19-year-old private and Eastridge’s best friend. “There was a massive amount of hate for us in the city.”
One of the jobs of the infantry was to bag Iraqi bodies tossed in the streets at night by sectarian murder squads.
“First thing in the morning, all we would do is bag bodies,” Eastridge said. “Guys with drill bits in their eyes. Guys with nails in their heads.”
Eastridge said he was targeted by snipers twice. Both bullets smashed against walls so close to his face that they peppered his eyes with grit. He laughed at his luck. He loved being a soldier.
In February 2005, Eastridge was in the gun turret of his Humvee when it drove over an anti-tank mine. A deafening flash tore off the front end. Eastridge woke up a few minutes later, several feet from the smoking crater.
He sucked it up. He was bandaged up and sent back on patrol. He said cerebral fluid was leaking out of his ear.
That was the job of the infantry. Eastridge’s battalion was created in World War II and became known as the “Band of Brothers.” It parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. In Vietnam, it helped turn back the Tet Offensive and take Hamburger Hill.
Men who heard the stories of past glory almost never got a chance for their own in Iraq. The enemy was invisible. The leading cause of death was hidden roadside bombs.
Sometimes, Marquez felt his only purpose was to drive up and down roads in an armored personnel carrier called a Bradley to clear away hidden bombs.
To unwind, soldiers spent hours playing shoot-’em-up video games. They even played one based on their own unit in Vietnam. They said it offered a release. They could confront a clearly defined enemy. They could shoot, knowing they had the right guy. They could win.
In Ramadi, Marquez and other soldiers said, it felt like they were losing.
“It just seemed like the longer we were there, the worse it got,” said Marquez’s friend in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, Daniel Freeman.
Freeman was knocked unconscious by a roadside bomb, but the most rattling thing, he said, was driving through the eerie calm, knowing an improvised explosive device, or IED, could kill every soldier in a Humvee without warning, or maybe just smoke one guy in the truck, leaving the others to wonder how, and why, they survived.
Hatred and mistrust simmered between soldiers and locals. Locals who waved to them one day would watch silently as they drove toward an IED the next.
“I’m all about spreading freedom and democracy and everything,” said Josh Butler, another soldier in the 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment. “But it seems like the Iraqis didn’t even want it.”
Soldiers said discipline started to break down.
“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” Freeman said. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley.”
If soldiers were hit by an IED, they would aim machine guns and grenade launchers in every direction, Marquez said, and “just light the whole area up. If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ’em.”
Other soldiers said they shot random cars, killing civilians.
“It was just a free-for-all,” said Marcus Mifflin, 21, a friend of Eastridge who was medically discharged with PTSD after the tour. “You didn’t get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong. And that was hard. So things happened. Taxi drivers got shot for no reason. Guys got kidnapped and taken to the bridge and interrogated and dropped off.”
Soldiers later told El Paso County sheriff’s deputies investigating Marquez for murder that, in Iraq, he got his hands on a stun gun similar to the one he later used on the Widefield drug dealer. They said he used it to “rough up” Iraqis.
Stun guns are banned by the Geneva Conventions. Using one is a war crime, but four soldiers interviewed by The Gazette said a number of soldiers ordered the stun guns over the Internet and carried them on raids. The brigade refused to make other soldiers who served during the tour available for interviews. The Army said it destroys disciplinary records after two years, so it has no knowledge of whether soldiers in the unit were punished.
After 10 months, Marquez said, all he wanted to do was go home.
In June 2005, with a month to go, his platoon was walking across a field when a sniper’s bullet smashed through his best friend’s skull under the helmet.
The platoon circled its guns and grenade launchers, Marquez said, and “tore that neighborhood up.”
That night, Marquez got hit. His squad had just finished hosing his friend’s blood out of their Bradley when they were called out on another mission. They loaded into two Bradleys and rolled toward downtown Ramadi.
Marquez was riding in the dark, cramped rear of the lead Bradley. In a flash, a blast tore through the floor. The engine exploded. Diesel fuel spewed everywhere in a plume of fire. Marquez said he watched the driver scramble out screaming, flames leaping from his clothes.
Marquez and the others clambered into the dark street, rifles ready. Another bomb slammed them to the ground.
Then came a flurry of bullets spitting across the dirt. Marquez was hit four times in the leg.
As blood spurted from his femoral artery, Marquez said, he raised his grenade launcher to return fire and realized the storm of bullets had come from the heavy machine gun on the other Bradley, which had just come around the corner.
“They must have seen our Bradley on fire, figured it was an attack and thought we were all dead,” he said this spring, shaking his head, “then just started shooting.”
According to the Army, two soldiers died. Marquez said three others were wounded. Brigade commanders didn’t make anyone familiar with the incident available.
Marquez was flown to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
He was still bleary on morphine on the Fourth of July weekend that he was told Bush was coming to award him a Purple Heart.
Marquez’s sister, who was visiting, didn’t want to see the president because she was so angry about the war and her brother’s wounds, but Marquez was honored.
“I had gotten hurt, but it is part of the job. I wasn’t mad at nobody,” Marquez said.
He was in the hospital for three months and had 17 surgeries so he could keep his leg. Marquez was being medically discharged from the Army and could have stayed at the hospital, but he transferred to Fort Carson on Sept. 13, 2005, to spend his remaining months with his war buddies, who had just returned from Iraq.
He eventually learned to walk without a cane, but other wounds proved harder to heal. He started having nightmares about the war. He felt worthless and crippled, depressed and angry. On a visit home to California, he made his mom put away all his high school sports trophies.
The only things that made him feel better were the pain pills the doctors prescribed for him — and only if he took too many.

‘Kumbaya period’
Post-traumatic stress disorder is like a roadside bomb.
The symptoms can remain hidden for months, then explode. They can cripple some soldiers and leave others untouched. And just like bombs disguised as trash or ruts in the road, PTSD can look like something else.
In many cases, it looks like a bad soldier. In addition to flashbacks and nightmares, Army studies say, symptoms can include heavy drinking, drug use, domestic violence, slacking off at work or disobeying orders.
You can often see it coming, said the most recent commanding general of Fort Carson, if you know what to look for.
Soldiers usually go through a jubilant high for a few months after they come home, Graham said. He calls this time “the Kumbaya period.”
“Soldiers have served their country, they’ve made it back, they’re home. It’s all great. It’s later that problems start to surface,” Graham said.
Usually, problems don’t show up for three to six months, he said.
When the brigade landed in Colorado Springs, most soldiers had spent a year in Iraq and a year in South Korea. Most had saved several thousand dollars. Many were old enough to legally drink in the United States for the first time. They had survived the worst of Iraq, and they were jonesing to blow off steam.
All they had to do was go through a few post-deployment debriefings that Fort Carson still uses.
Soldiers sit through classes that warn them that troops often have unrealistically rosy notions of home. They are told to be understanding with spouses and loved ones. They are cautioned to be careful with drinking and driving, and they are warned that the time for carrying a gun everywhere ended in Iraq.
All personal guns must be stored in the post’s armory — not in soldiers’ barracks, not in their cars and not tucked in their belts.
Then Fort Carson screens every soldier for PTSD and other combat-related problems.
If there are no red flags, the soldier can go on leave. If there are, they are referred for further diagnosis, officials at Fort Carson’s Evans Army Community Hospital said.
The screening asks soldiers a long list of questions about the deployment: Do you have trouble sleeping? Are you depressed? Did you clear houses or bunkers? Were you shot at? Did you witness brutality toward detainees? Did you have friends who were killed?
“Did you shoot people? Did you kill people? Did you see dead civilians? Did you see dead Americans? Did you see dead babies? No. No. No. No.” Eastridge said, mimicking how he answered the questionnaire.
“I had seen and done all that stuff, but you just lie to get it over with.”
Several soldiers said the same: They lied because they didn’t want the hassle of more screening.
When the young infantrymen were set free in Colorado Springs, many packed Tejon Street bars such as Rendezvous Lounge and Rum Bay. When the bars closed, soldiers said, they often picked fights in the street.
By 2006, the police were being called to break up bar brawls almost every night. Extra police were assigned to the area.
The Colorado Springs Police Department doesn’t track the crime statistics of individual units, but according to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, jail bookings of military personnel as a whole increased 66 percent in the 12 months after the brigade returned.
The “Kumbaya period” lasted about six months, soldiers said.
Eastridge said he blew through almost $27,000, mostly drinking at bars, but the first thing he did was buy guns: pistols, shotguns and an assault rifle similar to the one he carried in Iraq.
“After being in Iraq, it feels like everyone is the enemy,” he said. “You feel like you need a gun so they don’t come to get you.”
His friends all felt the same way.
Nash slept with a loaded .45 under his pillow.
Butler kept a Glock .40-caliber with him all the time, even when he rocked his newborn baby.
Marquez bought three pistols, a riot-style shotgun and an assault rifle like the one he carried in Iraq. He carried a pistol constantly, he said, even when he went to church.
His buddy, Freeman, said he bought himself a “big, scary” snub-nose .357 revolver.
“I couldn’t go anywhere without it,” he said. “I took it to the mall. I took it to the bank. I even had it right next to me when I took a shower. It makes you feel powerful, less scared. You have to have it with you every second of every day.”
Some returning soldiers, especially those with family members to notice their behavior, went into counseling.
More than 200 Fort Carson soldiers have been referred to First Choice Counseling Center, a private counseling service in Colorado Springs. Davida Hoffman, the director, said her counselors were unprepared for what they heard.
“We’re used to seeing people who are depressed and want to hurt themselves. We’re trained to deal with that,” she said. “But these soldiers were depressed and saying, ‘I’ve got this anger, I want to hurt somebody.’ We weren’t accustomed to that.”
In units that have seen the toughest combat in Iraq, one in four soldiers can screen positive for PTSD, the director of psychiatry at Walter Reed, Dr. Charles Hoge, said in an e-mail interview.
“Many soldiers continue to be able to perform their duties very well despite having significant symptoms,” Hoge wrote. But others show what he called “serious impairment,” and the worse the combat and the longer units are exposed, the worse the effects.
The affliction is as old as war itself.
Eric Dean, an author in Connecticut who specializes in war’s psychological toll, reviewed records from the Civil War for his 1997 book, “Shook Over Hell,” and found the same surge of crime and suicide that Fort Carson has seen.
“They have been in every war,” he said. “They never readjusted. They ended up living alone, drinking too much.”
They were “the lost generation” of World War I. They are the veterans of Vietnam who disproportionately populate homeless shelters and prisons today.
The psychological casualties may be particularly heavy in Iraq, he said.
“In the Civil War, if you experienced really traumatic fighting, chances are you didn’t make it,” he said. “Today, you can be blown up multiple times and go right back into the fight.”
In Vietnam, most draftees did one yearlong tour. Since the start of the Iraq war, some soldiers have been deployed three times for 12 to 15 months each.
When a soldier faces constant threat of attack, studies suggest, the brain is flooded with adrenaline, dopamine and other performance-enhancing chemicals that the body naturally produces in a fight-or-flight response. Over time, the brain can crave these stimulants, like a junkie for his fix.
When the stimulant of combat is taken away, soldiers often have trouble sleeping, said Sister Kateri Koverman, a social worker who has counseled people in war zones for almost 40 years. They can feel irritable, numb and paranoid, she said. They can sink into depression.
And they can search for another substance to replace the rush of war.
“Often they’ll use booze or drugs to mask their symptoms until they become explosive,” said Koverman, who moved to Colorado Springs from her convent in Ohio this year to help with the wave of PTSD. “We have a public disaster here, and no one really knows how to deal with it.”
Men from the unit mostly dealt with it on their own.
Mifflin got deep into smoking pot to ease his nerves.
Nash was mixing pills and booze.
Eastridge got blotto on whatever.
Butler said he and a lot of guys started doing Ecstasy and cocaine.
Marquez started destroying himself with the pills that were supposed to help him.
For his injuries, he said, doctors at Evans prescribed him 90 morphine pills, 90 Percocets, and five fentanyl patches every three weeks.
“They were for pain,” he said. “And I still had pain. But, mostly, I was using them to get high.”
He could not get Iraq out of his head. Doctors prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills, but he said they didn’t help. He was saving up Percocet, then downing a handful on an empty stomach.
He said he started trading his morphine with other soldiers for an antipsychotic called quetiapine and an anti-anxiety drug called clonazepam. Improper use of either can cause psychotic reactions, anxiety, panic attacks, aggressiveness and suicidal behavior, but, Marquez said, injured soldiers traded them like children in a lunchroom swapping desserts.
“It was real common among the guys who were hurt,” Marquez said.
At one point, Marquez said, he ate his three-week supply of meds in half the time, then went back to Evans claiming he had lost his pills.
He said a doctor told him security measures prevented him from giving Marquez more narcotics, but he could write the soldier a paper prescription he could fill in Colorado Springs.
Marquez agreed.
Fort Carson said privacy laws prohibit commenting on medical treatment.
Marquez’s mother is a police officer in Southern California. She said when her son came home to visit at Christmas 2005, six months after being shot, she knew something was seriously wrong. He would stay in his room all day in a daze and try to down old pain pills in the medicine cabinet. He would have dreams so violent that she was afraid to wake him.
In February 2006, she said, she called his sergeants and told them he was a danger to himself and others and needed help.
She said the sergeants told her that her son would have to seek treatment on his own.
An Army spokesman said there is no Army policy on how to handle such calls. It is up to individual commanders.
The response didn’t make sense, she said. As a law enforcement officer, if she shot someone, she was required to go through counseling, she said. Her son had weathered a long, gruesome combat tour, yet he had no such requirement.
Few of the young infantry soldiers felt like they needed counseling.
“We were just partying,” Butler said. “Some guys went in for PTSD, but we thought that was just a bullshit excuse to get out of the Army.”
Those who did seek treatment faced obstacles.
Six months after getting back from Ramadi, Marquez’s friend, Freeman, who had been injured by a roadside bomb, said he started to feel “shell-shocked” and depressed and decided to go to Evans.
“I did it on the down-low because I didn’t want my unit to know,” he said.
The psychiatric ward was overwhelmed by soldiers, he said. Cases of PTSD at Fort Carson had climbed from 26 in 2002 to more than 600 in 2006, according to the hospital. Getting an appointment could take weeks, soldiers said. Counseling in the ward, in most cases, was in group settings only.
Freeman said the hospital staff prescribed him antidepressants and told him they were so busy that he wouldn’t receive counseling for a month.
A few weeks later, on Feb. 22, 2006, Freeman got in a fight with a man he had never met, Kenneth Tatum, in the China Express restaurant on B Street. Freeman pulled out his .357 and, before he knew it, he said, Tatum was bleeding on the ground. He had shot him through the thigh.
Freeman was arrested for attempted murder and pleaded guilty to felony menacing. He served two years and got out in January. He is unemployed, living at his mother’s house in Alabama. He said he still has headaches and memory problems and is getting therapy for PTSD at a nearby Veterans Affairs hospital.
Because of his crime, he is not eligible for most Army benefits.
“I was a good soldier before this,” he said. “Now I’m a screwed-up Iraq vet with a felony conviction. I don’t have many prospects. I was good at what I did in the infantry. . . . Too bad it followed me home.”
The Army spends millions of dollars to help soldiers such as Marquez and Freeman. It has programs to mentally prepare soldiers for deployment, treat them overseas and rehabilitate them when they return. Top brass, including the highest-ranking officer in the Army, Gen. George Casey, have said taking care of returning soldiers’ mental health is a top priority.
But sentiments and programs at the top sometimes don’t reach the trenches, soldiers and experts said.
In infantry units such as the Lethal Warriors, soldiers said, toughness and bravery are prized above all else. Anyone who says he has PTSD is immediately thought of as not worthy of wearing the uniform, soldiers said. In Army slang, they said, he is deemed a “shit bag.”
When the brigade returned home from the Sunni Triangle, sergeants sometimes refused to let soldiers seek help for PTSD and taunted them for being weak or faking it, said Andrew Pogany, a former Fort Carson special forces sergeant who now investigates complaints for the advocacy group Veterans for America
“They just don’t want to deal with it,” Pogany said.
Some commanders punished soldiers for displaying PTSD symptoms, soldiers said.
Mifflin, who is now unemployed and lives in his mother’s house in Florida, went to a Fort Carson psychiatrist for counseling because he said he sometimes wanted to kill civilians in Colorado Springs. The psychiatrist checked him into Cedar Springs, an inpatient mental hospital in Colorado Springs. He stayed for about a week, he said.
“As soon as I got out, I had a scheduled bitching session with the sergeant so he could yell at me about what a liar I was,” he said. “After they found out a guy was getting evaluated for PTSD, they would try to find any little thing to kick him out.”
Dozens of soldiers who screened positive for PTSD received an “other than honorable” discharge from the Army — the equivalent of being kicked out — for infractions such as missing duty and drug use, Pogany said. If soldiers are kicked out, they often aren’t eligible for free health care, counseling or other benefits that soldiers who are medically discharged with PTSD receive. Often, Pogany said, that means veterans who need help the most don’t get it.
Some soldiers coming back to Colorado Springs seemed fine. Bressler, who later murdered two soldiers, seemed as nice and mellow as ever, soldiers said. He got married, always showed up for training and seemed to be doing well.
Others fell apart.
Eastridge, who had been awarded medals for achievement and good conduct, started having nightmares and mouthing off to his commanders. In March 2006, he got in a drunken fight with his girlfriend and was arrested for putting a gun to her face. After that, he said, he stopped showing up for work. He said he was AWOL on and off for six months.
“I started slapping my wife around, too,” Butler said. “She just never called the police.”
Butler said he was emotionally numb some days and ready to explode others. He couldn’t understand why he was so angry, but he still thought PTSD was just a lame excuse.
One night, he called Eastridge and told him to come over to his house. He wanted his buddies to shoot him in the leg so he wouldn’t have to go back to Iraq.
“We were all excited we were going to get to shoot him,” Eastridge said.
When he got to the apartment, Barco, the platoon baby who had been burned by the exploding Humvee in Iraq, was there.
They found a dark parking lot, Eastridge said, and Barco shot Butler through the calf with a .32. Butler screamed. Blood went everywhere.
“It was hilarious,” said Mifflin, who saw him shortly afterward. “He only ended up getting out of duty for a few days, but that’s only part of why he did it. He also wanted the Percocets they prescribed him at the hospital.”
After a number of 4th Brigade soldiers got in trouble for DUIs and drugs, the brigade increased the number of random drug tests soldiers have to take, troops said. The rate of Fort Carson soldiers testing positive in 2006 was 16 times what it had been in 2004, according to the post. Twenty percent of them were enrolled in substance-abuse programs. Most, soldiers said, were just given the boot. Nash and Butler were kicked out of the Army for snorting cocaine in the summer of 2006.
Eastridge was supposed to be kicked out too, soldiers said, but he wasn’t around to be discharged.
More than 400 soldiers have been kicked out of the brigade for misconduct since the start of the war, according to Fort Carson. Only 57 were discharged for mental health reasons.
Butler went to prison for beating his wife, who was pregnant at the time. He said their child was born with severe birth defects and died. He blames it, in part, on their fights.
There is no easy way to track how many Butlers are out there — soldiers who didn’t commit violent crimes until after they were kicked out of the Army and left Colorado Springs.
“That’s the shadiest thing about the Army. They just throw these guys away,” said Nash, now a pipeline welder in Louisiana. He said he still struggles with the effects of combat. He can’t go to bars because he gets into fights, and his car is loaded with what he called “enough guns for World War III.”
“The Army neglected their responsibility to take care of soldiers they trained to be this way,” he said. “Most of these guys were ordinary people put in really shitty situations — the side effect is you turn good people into ravenous beasts.”
So many soldiers were leaving or getting kicked out of Eastridge’s company in 2006, Eastridge said, that commanders created a new platoon for them.
Marquez’s battalion created a similar company, called Echo Company, soldiers said. Soldiers called it the “Shit-Bag Brigade.”
An Army spokesman said it “is unknown” whether these units existed.
Marquez was assigned to the Shit-Bag Brigade even though his only offense was being too physically disabled to train with the rest of his unit. He said he had to do the menial tasks designed to punish the others, such as pull weeds along the road.
He started not showing up for duty. He took more pills. He bought more guns and kept them his in his car, he and other soldiers said.
It was no secret. Sergeants later told police that Marquez had showed off his stash of weapons. His mother said they did nothing.
Sergeants also told sheriff’s deputies they thought he was abusing pills.
“Maybe if they had punished him like they were supposed to, he would not be in for murder,” his mother said.
On Oct. 22, 2006, three days before Marquez was scheduled to be honorably discharged, he limped down to the Widefield drug dealer’s basement, carrying a .45-caliber pistol in one hand and a 500,000-volt stun gun in the other. He shocked the dealer — 19-year-old Smith — with the stun gun and grabbed his stash of marijuana, according to witness statements to El Paso County sheriff’s investigators. When the dealer tried to fight back, investigators say, Marquez shot him through the heart, picked up the shell casings, grabbed the weed and walked out.
Prosecutors said he was planning a robbery. Marquez said he was just there to buy some weed and, when a fight started over the price, his infantry reflexes took over.
“When someone grabs you or something, you’re going to light ’em up,” he said. “It probably won’t even be that hard because it’s not like it’s your first time.”
Marquez didn’t respond to letters asking him why he used a stun gun and whether he used it in Iraq.
A week after the murder, sheriff’s deputies questioned his commanders at Fort Carson in search of a motive.
Capt. David Larimer, the soldier’s company commander, told detectives that Marquez had been diagnosed with PTSD, but Larimer didn’t believe it. According to the detectives’ written summary, Larimer said he thought Marquez was just a “whiny bitch.”

‘Heart of Darkness’
The day Marquez was arrested, his brigade was on its way back to Iraq.
They were sent to tame the one spot in the country that was more dangerous than their first assignment: downtown Baghdad.
“Violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular,” Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East said just weeks before the soldiers arrived. “If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move towards civil war.”
In the warren of city streets, terrorist bombs killed scores of civilians. Sunni and Shiite murder squads massacred one another by the thousands. The United Nations estimated that 3,000 Iraqis were being murdered a month.
The Lethal Warriors were assigned to one of the deadliest corners of the city, a bullet-riddled neighborhood called Al-Doura. The Warriors’ battalion commander, Lt. Col. Stephen Michael, called it the “Heart of Darkness.”
Eastridge showed up for duty shortly before the brigade shipped out. He was happy to be there. He never felt more alive than when he was in a war zone.
“It’s almost like a religious experience to see a battlefield,” he said. “To hear the explosions — to see a person bleeding out and die — see everything on fire and smell the smoke and burning flesh. It makes you truly realize what it is to be alive. Combat is the biggest rush you can have.”
Since the start of his first deployment, he had covered himself in tattoos.
On his arm was a memorial to his sergeant killed by a car bomb. On his wrists were red dotted “kill lines” marking where, if needed, he could slit them. On his arm were the twin lightning bolts of the Nazi SS. Wrapping his neck like a collar were the words “BORN TO KILL, READY TO DIE.”
If the Army had followed its own rules, he would not have returned to Iraq for another tour.
Army regulations bar anyone with a pending felony from deploying.
Eastridge was awaiting trial for putting a gun to his girlfriend’s head. He said his commanders knew it.
But when the young soldier showed up and begged his sergeant to let him go back to Iraq, they did. The Army was evasive about if, and why, commanders knowingly deployed Eastridge with a felony hanging over his head.
Eastridge said there was a reason the unit wanted him back. He was one of the best gunners in the battalion.
Soldiers said he was “surgical” with a machine gun and utterly fearless.
“He was really good. If I had 10 Eastridges, my job would be a lot easier,” said his platoon sergeant, Michael Cardenaz.
Eastridge had the most kills of anyone in his company, Cardenaz said.
He was exactly the type of soldier to have in the Heart of Darkness.
Only a few of Eastridge’s buddies from the last tour were still with him. Louis Bressler, a cool, unflappable gunner, was there. So was Jose Barco, who, soldiers said, had persuaded commanders to let him return to Iraq even though he was so burned from the explosion in his previous tour that he had trouble sweating.
Many of the unit’s other soldiers had been kicked out for drugs, or discharged with PTSD or other disabilities, soldiers said. The Army would not provide numbers. But for every missing soldier, there was a new kid.
Jomar Falu-Vives had signed up because his mother was a nurse stationed in Baghdad, and he wasn’t going to let her go without him.
John Needham was a surfing champion from California who signed up because, with the insurgency raging, it looked as if his country needed him.
Bruce Bastien was a skinny, red-cheeked guy from Connecticut who was assigned as the new medic for Eastridge’s platoon.
Not even the veterans were prepared for how bad Baghdad would be, Eastridge said.
At one point, the unit was losing a soldier a day to the hospital or the morgue.
At first, Eastridge said, he enjoyed the intensity of it. He had a competition going with Bressler to see who could kill more bad guys. His final count, he said — and his sergeant confirmed — was about 80.
But after a few months, the raids, gore and constant threat of roadside bombs started to get to him. He couldn’t sleep. He was on edge all the time. Doctors at the base diagnosed him with PTSD, depression, anxiety and a sleep disorder. They gave him antidepressants and sleeping pills and put him back on duty.
When he went back to the doctors a few weeks later saying the pills were not working, his medical records show, they doubled his dose.
In the spring of 2007, as part of the surge to take back Baghdad, the 500 Lethal Warriors were moved out of their central base into 100-soldier Combat Outposts, known as COPs, scattered in the neighborhoods.
“Once we got to the COPS, it was way worse,” Eastridge said. “We would have mortars and rocket fire and drive-bys every single day.”
With the wounded list mounting, noncombat soldiers were pulled in to fill combat positions when guys got hit, soldiers said, and even they couldn’t fill the holes. By summer 2007, the company was so depleted that Humvees designed to be manned by five soldiers were going on patrol with three, said Eastridge and his sergeant.
There was no time for mental health care in the COPs, Eastridge said. Often, his squad would come in from an all-night mission, pull off their body armor, get attacked and have to slap their armor right back on and go out. Sometimes, he said, they wouldn’t sleep for days.
Eastridge’s Iraqi translator introduced him to Valium as a way to relax. At first, he would just take a couple before missions. Then he was taking a couple all the time. Then he was taking a lot more.

Winning and losing it
The surge worked.
Lethal Warrior commanders designed a victory strategy based on intensive foot patrols and strong community ties, where soldiers were assigned to patrol small neighborhoods and ordered to get to know every neighbor. They built a Baghdad version of Neighborhood Watch, where locals could be the eyes and ears of the Army. Cardenaz, who started the tour carrying a cell phone so he could call his wife to say goodbye if he got shot, began handing out his number to locals as a hot line on where to find the bad guys.
During the first six months of the 15-month deployment, soldiers were attacked multiple times every day, according to an ARMY magazine article by a Lethal Warrior captain.
By the end, he wrote, they were not getting attacked at all.
In the first six months, soldiers had to collect mutilated Iraqi bodies left by murder squads every morning.
By the end, there were no bodies to retrieve.
Bomb attacks dropped to near zero.
But the victory came at a price.
Under the strain of daily violence, Eastridge, Bastien and Bressler started to lose it.
Needham did, too. A few weeks after arriving in Baghdad, he was on foot patrol when a sniper’s bullet shattered his friend’s head, splattering Needham with brains. In the months that followed, he was hit by six IEDs, Needham wrote in letter to his father. One blast made him hit the roof of his truck so hard that he cracked his spine.
On every occasion, his father, Michael Needham, said, his sergeant’s response was to “suck it up.”
For the most part, Needham did. When a rocket-propelled grenade blew a fellow soldier, Thomas Woolly, out of the gun turret of a Humvee in their convoy, Needham jumped behind the gun and started firing, Needham’s father said.
“He wasn’t giddy about being there,” his father said. “But he was secure in what he was doing, fighting as an infantryman in an honorable way.”
Then something began gnawing at him, his father said.
In the quest to win, John Needham said, some in his platoon turned ugly.
The soldier said some loaded their rifles with hollow-point bullets designed to expand on impact, making them more lethal. These bullets are banned by international treaties.
It wasn’t just one platoon, either. Eastridge said soldiers in his platoon, including himself, used hollow-point bullets, too. It was easy to get them sent from home, Eastridge said. Both soldiers said some guys in their units carried illegal stun guns, as soldiers had in the first deployment.
The Army said it investigated Needham’s claims and found no evidence.
But there was more to the platoon’s tactics.
In a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General’s Office of Fort Carson, which investigates crimes within the Army, Needham told of the atrocities he saw. His father provided a copy to The Gazette.
One sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason, John Needham said. When Needham and another soldier rushed to deliver first aid, the sergeant said, “No, let him bleed out.”
Another sergeant shot a man in the head without cause while questioning him, Needham said, then mutilated the body, lashed it to the hood of his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood blaring warnings to insurgents in Arabic that “they would be next.”
Other Iraqis were shot for invented reasons, then mutilated, Needham said.
The sergeants particularly liked removing victims’ brains, Needham said.
Needham offered a photograph of a soldier removing brains from an Iraqi on the hood of a Humvee and other photos as evidence. His father supplied copies to The Gazette.
The Army’s criminal investigation division interviewed several soldiers from the unit and said it was “unable to substantiate any of his allegations.”
“Those guys were seriously whacked,” Needham’s father said. “And it began to grate on him.”
In March 2007, Needham went to the battalion’s doctor, saying he was “losing it” and needed a break, according to a summary of his service that he wrote. He was prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft and sent back to work. In May, Needham said, he went back to the doctor and was again sent back to work. In June, according to medical records, he went again. And in September. Commanders always sent him back out on patrol, he said.
Around that time, he posted a note on his MySpace page: “I’m falling apart by the seams it seems the days here bleed into each other I have to find the will to live man I miss my brothers. These walls are caving in my despair wraps me in its web, I feel I’m sinking in, throw me a lifesaver throw me a life worth living. I’m a part of death I am death this is hard to admit but this shits getting old.”
A few nights later, on Sept. 18, Needham and a fellow soldier bought a contraband can of whiskey and tried to drink away their sorrows. Then Needham took out a gun and fired a shot at his head, his father said. The bullet missed. Needham was detained by his commanders for illegally discharging a firearm. After a few weeks of arguing by phone and e-mail, Needham’s father convinced the unit to let his son see a doctor. The soldier was diagnosed with severe PTSD and flown to Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“What led him to the point of such deep despair that he would attempt suicide?” his father, a retired Army officer, asked. “I understand it. He was trained as a soldier. He was a good soldier, and his group was doing things he knew was wrong. And he was in this prolonged combat situation where they have all this armor and lifesaving technology to keep them alive, but mentally, they are in pieces.”

The breaking point
Eastridge started to crumble around the same time.
He had been a decorated soldier during his first tour. But in the second, his judgment melted away.
He started searching medicine cabinets for Valium while raiding houses.
Then he started stealing cash and weapons from civilians, which he said he would sell back to the Shiite militia.
He was disciplined by his battalion for stealing once, he said, after he ransacked a house, but only because it belonged to a well-connected man. Most of the time, he got away with it.
He was disciplined again when he flipped out on patrol. Someone shot at his squad from a nearby farmhouse. Eastridge fired about 20 grenades into the house, then stormed in and said he found a farmer and his two dogs in the back and spotted a shell casing from an AK-47 on the ground.
Eastridge demanded to know where the shooter was.
The man said he didn’t know.
Eastridge shot one of the man’s dogs, then asked where the shooter was.
The man said he didn’t know.
Eastridge shot the man’s other dog.
His lieutenant told him he needed to cool off and go sit in the truck.
On the way out, Eastridge passed the man’s herd of a dozen goats. He leveled them with a machine gun. Then he ordered a private to shoot the man’s two cows. Then he shot his horse.
“I was really (expletive deleted) losing it,” Eastridge said, shaking his head.
The Army hasn’t supplied disciplinary records for Eastridge or several other soldiers requested under the Freedom of Information Act, but Eastridge’s account was confirmed by his platoon sergeant.
Bressler and Bastien started losing it, too.
In May 2007, Bastien went home on leave. While there, the medic was thrown in jail for beating his wife, according to police records. Bastien, who is in prison, declined to be interviewed for this story. After his arrest, the Army kept him in Colorado Springs.
In June 2007, Bressler saw his best friend killed in a firefight, according to soldiers. After that, Bressler, who had always been a mellow, stable guy whom soldiers could find at the poker table in the COP, started to withdraw, soldiers say.
In July 2007, Eastridge said, Bressler went crazy and attacked his commanding officer, threatening to kill him.
Bressler, who is in prison, declined to be interviewed. He was diagnosed with PTSD, according to his wife. The Army decided he was too unstable and dangerous to be in Iraq, so they sent him back to Colorado Springs.
Eastridge went on one more mission.
He was the gunner manning the M240 machine gun on a Humvee — a big gun that shoots 600 rounds per minute. He said he was ordered to guard the street while the rest of his platoon searched a house.
Eastridge said he told his lieutenant he was going to kill people as soon as the officer was out of sight. Then he asked the driver to put some heavy-metal “killin’ music on.”
His lieutenant laughed and walked off, Eastridge said.
Families were out playing soccer and barbecuing. Eastridge said he just started shooting. He pumped a long burst of rounds into a big palm tree where a few old men had gathered in the shade.
People started running. They piled into their cars and sped away. There was a no-driving rule in effect in the neighborhood, so, Eastridge said, he put his cross hairs on every car that moved.
“All I could think of was car bombs, car bombs, car bombs, and I just kept shooting,” he said.
Orders came over the radio to cease fire, he said, but he kept yelling, “Negative! Negative!”
Eastridge said he shot more than 1,700 rounds. When asked how many people he killed, he said, “Not that many. Maybe a dozen.”
He was court-martialed a short time later on nine counts, including drug possession and disobeying orders. Killing civilians wasn’t one of them.
For that, he said, he was put on guard duty.
Then, in August 2007, sergeants found him with 463 Valium pills in his laundry and a naked female soldier in his bed, according to court testimony. His staff sergeant confronted him about the woman, and Eastridge lashed out, according to his mother, Leanne Eastridge, screaming that he would kill the sergeant, suck out his blood and spit it at his children. Eastridge was court-martialed for disobeying orders and drug possession and sent to a prison camp in Kuwait for a month.
This spring, Eastridge said it was funny that sex and drugs were what got him court-martialed, considering the things he did in Iraq, “Things that can never be told, but that everybody knew about and approved of — basically war crimes.”
He got a health screening as part of the court-martial. Doctors diagnosed him with chronic PTSD, antisocial personality disorder, depression, anxiety and hearing loss. In late September 2007, his commanders decided he was too unstable and dangerous to stay in Iraq, so the Army sent him back to Colorado Springs.

Is It Really Possible that Dick Cheney is Guilty of Treason?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:16:17 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

The story goes that when Leon Panetta, the current head of the CIA, told members of Congress about a secret program that Dick and Bush had authorized, there was a collective gasp from both Democrats and Republicans. Leon then supposedly de-authorized the program the very next day.

But what program caused Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike to gasp in disbelief? Remember, we already know about waterboarding and torture, forced disappearances and kidnappings, systemic violation of the Constitution of the United States through wide-scale warrantless wiretapping, denial of habeus corpus, and the creation of our very own gulag of secret prisons. So what was this program really about?

Nobody who knows is willing to say, but there are a few clues. The Wall Street Journal went out of its way to claim without substantiation that the program specifically did not involve “domestic spying,” and other corporate news sources are claiming (again without substantiation) that the program just involved a little bit of “training” that was never used.

Personally, my bullshit meter is going off the scale. First, why would Congressional Democrats and Republicans let out a collective “gasp” if all they heard about was a little bit of training that was never used? Second, the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch who has been a reliable spokesman for oligarchs and corporate criminals for the last decade or so) made a specific point of claiming that no domestic spying was involved.

Besides the fact that there’s no substantiation for this claim, this sounds a lot like projection to me. One of the most incisive ways to gain insight into the reactionary/conservative pathology is to understand that in order to maintain an illusion of yourself as an example of perfection and goodness (which a lot of Republicans do) while doing undeniably bad things is to project the fault of your own sins onto somebody else.

Republicans have done this a lot. There are tons of examples, but one recent one is from the 2004 election, when conservatives started howling about voter irregularities supposedly sponsored by ACORN. Isn’t it ironic that they were screaming loudest just when the election was being cooked in Ohio and other states in a redux of 2000’s right-wing coup d’etat?

Mark my words, if this investigation doesn’t get buried in bullshit, it will turn out that this program involves exactly what Rupe and friends are saying it doesn’t: MORE UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND TREASONOUS DOMESTIC SPYING.

Cheney 'set up illegal secret spy project'

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

Hidden Republican policies on terrorism threaten major distraction for Obama
Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney was at the centre of a bitter new row last night, after charges he had directly ordered the CIA to keep Congress in the dark about a secret intelligence programme set up after the 9/11 attacks – an action that may have been in violation of the law.
A top Democratic senator, Leon Panetta, who took over as CIA director a month into the Obama administration, told Congress on June 24 about the eight year old project, of which Mr Panetta himself had only just been informed. He told the House And Senate intelligence committees that he had immediately scrapped the programme and that information about it had been withheld at Mr Cheney's behest.
In doing so, the Bush administration may have acted illegally, Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee said. "This is a big problem," she said, although she acknowledged the urgency of the circumstances after the attacks on New York and Washington: "I understand the need of the day... but you weaken your case when you go outside the law."
Another top Democrat, Deputy Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, went further, demanding a full-scale Congressional probe into the affair. He said the executive branch should not create these types of programmes and conceal them from legislators. This was "not only inappropriate, it could be illegal," he said.
The sharp words of the two Democratic Senators came yesterday after the New York Times first reported on the programme, whose exact details still remain a mystery. According to the paper, it did not involve domestic surveillance and wiretapping, subject of a separate ongoing row between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the previous Republican White House, nor the harsh interrogation techniques, including water-boarding, used at secret CIA detention centres abroad.
The secretive and taciturn Mr Cheney was not available for comment. But according to unnamed officials quoted by the paper, the project never become operational, although planning and "some training" had intermittently taken place since 2001. It appears to have emerged amid a search for "radical countermeasures" in the traumatic immediate aftermath of 9/11. But there seems to have been no opposition within the CIA when Mr Panetta recently ordered its end.
The row threatens to be a major distraction and a new rift between the parties at the worst possible moment – just as President Obama's efforts to push through contentious legislation on energy policy, financial market reform, and above all, health care, reach a critical juncture. Yesterday Republicans leapt to the defence of their embattled former vice-president, insisting Mr Cheney and Mr Bush had the constitutional right to protect the country as they saw fit. They accused the Democrats of cooking up the affair to divert attention from their own problems on Capitol Hill, especially on health care.
Nor is the renewed spotlight on Mr Cheney the only instance of how controversies of the Bush era are dogging his successor, despite Mr Obama's insistence that the government must look forward rather than refight battles of the past.
In a potentially explosive move, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, is understood to be considering naming a prosecutor soon to investigate torture allegations against CIA operatives who carried out waterboarding and other "enhanced" methods of interrogation against detainees suspected of terrorism, techniques that may have violated international conventions against torture.
The White House has publicly come out against any legal sanctions, arguing that this would further damage morale at the CIA, and has successfully fended off action against the Bush administration officials who devised the tough interrogation policies – among whose strongest backers was Mr Cheney.
Mr Holder could thus drive an embarrassing wedge between his Justice Department and Mr Obama, a problem the former acknowledged this weekend. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the President's agenda," Mr Holder told Newsweek magazine. "But that can't be a part of my decision."
John McCain, Mr Obama's defeated opponent in 2008, also backed the president. A congressional probe into the Cheney revelations, and possible criminal action against some CIA employees were "not a good idea," the Arizona senator said on the NBC's Meet the Press yesterday.
Further washing of such dirty linen in public would merely inflict new damage on the image of the US around the world. "I agree with the President, it's time to move forwards," Mr McCain said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cheney-set-up-illegal-secret-spy-project-1743364.html

It’s the End of the World As We Know It

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:03:23 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

Part 2 in the “What’s to be done?” series. (See “Falalalalalalala...Apocalypse” and Comments below for Part 1.)

Remember the scene in “Rebel Without a Cause” when James Dean is playing chicken as he and another guy race toward a cliff, but the guy that James Dean is racing gets his shoelace tangled up in the pedals, and can’t jump out in time, and so plummets to his death as he launches off the side of a cliff? When I read about what we collectively are doing as a nation and globally as a civilization, then I really start to feel like that guy who can see that we’re headed toward a cliff but can’t get out in time.

So the question then becomes, what would a reasonable person do in this situation? Or perhaps more to the point, what are you doing as we collectively race toward the cliff-edge?

The Planet's Future: Climate Change 'Will Cause Civilisation to Collapse'

Authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of shortages and violence – but amid all the gloom, there is some hope too
by Jonathan Owen

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, "billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse".

The report praises the web, which it singles out as 'the most powerful force for globalisation, democratisation, economic growth, and education in history'

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet - obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing "invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society".

The impact of the global recession is a key theme, with researchers warning that global clean energy, food availability, poverty and the growth of democracy around the world are at "risk of getting worse due to the recession". The report adds: "Too many greedy and deceitful decisions led to a world recession and demonstrated the international interdependence of economics and ethics."

Although the future has been looking better for most of the world over the past 20 years, the global recession has lowered the State of the Future Index for the next 10 years. Half the world could face violence and unrest due to severe unemployment combined with scarce water, food and energy supplies and the cumulative effects of climate change.

And the authors of the report, produced by the Millennium Project - a think-tank formerly part of the World Federation of the United Nations Associations - set out a number of emerging environmental security issues. "The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change - ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states - has unprecedented implications for political and social stability."

But the authors suggest the threats could also provide the potential for a positive future for all. "The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centred adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood... Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies, to rethink economic and development assumptions, and to put the world on course for a better future."

Scientific and technological progress continues to accelerate. IBM promises a computer at 20,000 trillion calculations per second by 2011, which is estimated to be the speed of the human brain. And nanomedicine may one day rebuild damaged cells atom by atom, using nanobots the size of blood cells. But technological progress carries its own risks. "Globalisation and advanced technology allow fewer people to do more damage and in less time, so that possibly one day a single individual may be able to make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction."

The report also praises the web, which it singles out as "the most powerful force for globalisation, democratisation, economic growth, and education in history". Technological advances are cited as "giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity".

The immediate problems are rising food and energy prices, shortages of water and increasing migrations "due to political, environmental and economic conditions", which could plunge half the world into social instability and violence. And organised crime is flourishing, with a global income estimated at $3 trillion - twice the military budgets of all countries in the world combined.

The effects of climate change are worsening - by 2025 there could be three billion people without adequate water as the population rises still further. And massive urbanisation, increased encroachment on animal territory, and concentrated livestock production could trigger new pandemics.

Although government and business leaders are responding more seriously to the global environmental situation, it continues to get worse, according to the report. It calls on governments to work to 10-year plans to tackle growing threats to human survival, targeting particularly the US and China, which need to apply the sort of effort and resources that put men on the Moon.

"This is not only important for the environment; it is also a strategy to increase the likelihood of international peace. Without some agreement, it will be difficult to get the kind of global coherence needed to address climate change seriously."

While the world has the resources to address its challenges, coherence and direction have been lacking. Recent meetings of the US and China, as well as of Nato and Russia, and the birth of the G20 plus the continued work of the G8 promise to improve global strategic collaboration, but "it remains to be seen if this spirit of co-operation can continue and if decisions will be made on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges discussed in this report".

Although the scale of the effects of climate change are unprecedented, the causes are generally known, and the consequences can largely be forecast. The report says, "coordination for effective and adequate action is yet incipient, and environmental problems worsen faster than response or preventive policies are being adopted".

Jerome Glenn, director of the Millennium Project and one of the report's authors, said: "There are answers to our global challenges, but decisions are still not being made on the scale necessary to address them. Three great transitions would help both the world economy and its natural environment - to shift as much as possible from freshwater agriculture to saltwater agriculture; produce healthier meat without the need to grow animals; and replace gasoline cars with electric cars."
©independent.co.uk

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/13-0

“Beat It! Beat It!” Is That a Cultural Metaphor?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:50:17 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

Chris Hedges is one of my favorite contemporary writers. The former divinity student almost always has something insightful to say, though he’s often uncompromising in his content and tone. I thought this article captures some of the bizarre fetishism of Michael Jackson’s recent deification.

The Man in the Mirror
by Chris Hedges

In celebrity culture we destroy what we worship. The commercial exploitation of Michael Jackson’s death was orchestrated by the corporate forces that rendered Jackson insane. Jackson, robbed of his childhood and surrounded by vultures that preyed on his fears and weaknesses, was so consumed by self-loathing he carved his African-American face into an ever changing Caucasian death mask and hid his apparent pedophilia behind a Peter Pan illusion of eternal childhood. He could not disentangle his public and his private self. He became a commodity, a product, one to be sold, used and manipulated. He was infected by the moral nihilism and personal disintegration that are at the core of our corporate culture. And his fantasies of eternal youth, delusions of majesty, and desperate, disfiguring quests for physical transformation were expressions of our own yearning. He was a reflection of us in the extreme.

His memorial service—a variety show with a coffin—had an estimated 31.1 million television viewers. The ceremony, which featured performances or tributes from Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields and other celebrities, was carried live on 19 networks, including the major broadcast and cable news outlets. It was the final episode of the long-running Michael Jackson series. And it concluded with Jackson’s daughter, Paris, being prodded to stand in front of a microphone to speak about her father. Janet Jackson, before the girl could get a few words out, told Paris to “speak up.” As the child broke down, the adults around her adjusted the microphone so we could hear the sobs. The crowd clapped. It was a haunting echo of what destroyed her father.

The stories we like best are “real life” stories—early fame, wild success and then a long, bizarre and macabre emotional train wreck. O.J Simpson offered a tamer version of the same plot. So does Britney Spears. Jackson, by the end, was heavily in debt and had weathered a $22 million out-of-court settlement payment to Jordy Chandler, as well as seven counts of child sexual abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to commit a felony. We fed on his physical and psychological disintegration, especially since many Americans are struggling with their own descent into overwhelming debt, loss of status and personal disintegration.

The lurid drama of Jackson’s personal life meshed perfectly with the ongoing dramas on television, in movies and in the news. News thrives on “real life” stories, especially those involving celebrities. News reports on television are mini-dramas complete with a star, a villain, a supporting cast, a good-looking host and a dramatic, if often unexpected, ending. The public greedily consumed “news” about Jackson, especially in his exile and decline, which often outdid most works of fiction. In “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged, scripted, given a narrative and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment. And Jackson was a great show. He deserved a great finale.

Those who created Jackson’s public persona and turned him into a piece of property, first as a child and finally as a corpse encased in a $15,000 gold-plated casket, are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit. They are the puppet masters. No one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is swallowed as reality, without these armies of cultural enablers and intermediaries. The producers at the Staples Center in Los Angeles made sure the 18,000 attendees and the television audience (even the BBC devoted three hours to the tribute) watched a funeral that was turned into another maudlin form of uplifting popular entertainment.

The memorial service for Jackson was a celebration of celebrity. There was the queasy sight of groups of children, including his own, singing over the coffin. Magic Johnson put in a plug for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Shields, fighting back tears, recalled how she and a 33-year-old Jackson—who always maintained that he was straight—broke into Elizabeth Taylor’s room the night before her last wedding to “get the first peek of the [wedding] dress.” Shields and Jackson, at Taylor’s wedding, then joked that they were “the mother and father of the bride.” “Yes, it may have seemed very odd to the outside,” Shields said, “but we made it fun and we made it real.” There were photo montages in which a shot of Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela was immediately followed by one of him with Kermit the Frog. Fame reduces all of the famous to the same level. Fame is its own denominator. And every anecdote seemed to confirm that when you spend your life as a celebrity you have no idea who you are.

We measure our lives by these celebrities. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the messiness of real life through the fantasy of their stardom. We, too, long to attract admiring audiences for our grand, ongoing life movie. We try to see ourselves moving through our lives as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads with us as stars. We wonder how an audience would react. Celebrity culture has taught us, almost unconsciously, to generate interior personal screenplays. We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that grossly disfigure the way we relate to the world and those around us. Neal Gabler, who has written wisely about this, argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of consumer culture and religion so much as a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture.

Jackson desperately feared growing old. He believed he could control race and gender. He transformed himself through surgery and perhaps female hormones from a brown-skinned African-American male to a chalk-faced androgynous ghoul with no clear sexual identity. And while he pushed these boundaries to the extreme, he did only what many Americans do. There were 12 million cosmetic plastic surgery procedures performed last year in the United States. They were performed because, in America, most human beings, rich and poor, famous and obscure, have been conditioned to view themselves as marketable commodities. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. They must remain young. They must achieve notoriety and money, or the illusion of it, to be a success. And it does not matter how they get there.

The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, ridiculed and voted off any reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show “America’s Next Top Model,” a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities who can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and constant quest for notoriety and attention. And life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are ugly or poor, are belittled and mocked. Human beings are used, betrayed and discarded in a commodity culture, which is pretty much the story of Jackson’s life, although he experienced the equivalent of celebrity resurrection. This has been very good for his music sales and perhaps for his father’s new recording company, which Joe Jackson made sure to plug at public events after his son’s death. Compassion, competence, intelligence and solidarity are useless assets when human beings are commodities. Those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve their fate.

The cult of self, which Jackson embodied, dominates our culture. This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Jackson, from his phony marriages to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. This is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the celebration of image over substance.

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street banks and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stocks to finance their retirement or the college expenses of their children. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and bonuses. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity.

The saturation coverage of Jackson’s death is an example of our collective flight into illusion. The obsession with the trivia of his life conceals the despair, meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status, wealth and fame has destroyed our souls, as it destroyed Jackson, and it has destroyed our economy.

The fame of celebrities masks the identities of those who possess true power—corporations and the oligarchic elite. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, as we barrel toward a crisis that will create more misery than the Great Depression, we are controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness and keep us from fighting back. And in the end, that is all the Jackson coverage was really about, another tawdry and tasteless spectacle to divert a dying culture from the howling wolf at the gate.

Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/13-1

Video: Michael Pollan Interview

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:51:52 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

This is an interview I helped shoot a few weeks ago with author and activist Michael Pollan of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and An Eater’s Manifesto fame. It’s kind of a loosely structured interview, but Pollan makes some interesting points about our current food-supply system. Take a look and enjoy...

Honduran Coup Resistance Growing

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:49:23 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

An interview with Sandra Cuffe, independent journalist reporting from the streets of Tegucigalpa, Honduras on the day the military opened fire on protesters. Tension peaked as unprecedented thousands marched to the airport to welcome the return of ousted President Manuel Zelaya, a return that was thwarted by the military.

Honduran Clashes Turn Deadly

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:47:23 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

The Honduran military has thwarted an attempt by Manuel Zelaya, the ousted president, to fly back to the country, as clashes between his supporters and security forces turned deadly. A young boy has become the first to die in the wake of the coup after security forces opened fire on tens of thousands of Zelaya supporters who had gathered in anticipation of his return. Al Jazeera's Mariana Sanchez reports from Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.

Honduras Under Seige

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:44:56 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

The military coup government of Roberto Micheletti is coming under increasing economic pressure to concede power, whether from holds on US humanitarian aid and World Bank loan money or the sealing of the borders by all three neighbors. On the political front, it has yet to be recognized by a single foreign government. And domestically, it has resorted to the tactics of Central America's dark past to crush the people's angry response to the coup. Beatings, curfews, spot-checks, censorship and death threats. Honduran human rights advocate Bertha Oliva believes that the actions of the 'golpistas' (coup leaders) can only be explained as a reaction to the growing demand for citizen participation in Honduran politics. Though the Golpistas have sought to make their actions appear necessary to defend the republic from a power-hungry President, Manuel Zelaya, Oliva tells The Real News that the real story is the opposite. That it is they, as the polical-economic ruling class, that are afraid of losing their power to an increasingly engaged citizenry.

Military Coup in Honduras

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 12:36:46 -0600

Submitted by Jeff

On Sunday, Hondurans were expecting to vote in a first ever nation-wide survey. Instead they woke to find the military in control of the streets and their elected President Manuel Zelaya kidnapped and flown to Costa Rica. Soon after, an emergency convening of the National Congress appointed Zelaya's political rival, Roberto Micheletti, as the new president. However, Hondurans were quick to take to the streets and world leaders just as fast to denounce the move, demanding the return to power of Manuel Zelaya and refusing to deal with the coup leaders.