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TONIGHT!

Hands Off Venezuela:
Jorge Martin Speaking Tour Date in San Francisco
When: Wednesday, May 9, 2007, 7:00 PM
Where: Center for Political Education,
3rd Floor Auditorium
522 Valencia, near 16th St.
(ring bell; not wheelchair accessible)
Cost: $5/$3 students, seniors, unemployed
Transit: BART station, 16th St.
Parking nearby: Mission & Bartlett Garage;
16th & Hoff Garage
Visit our websites at:
www.ushov.org
www.handsoffvenezuela.org

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Hold the date and Spread the word:

EMERGENCY RALLY

STAND WITH MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!

Thursday, May 17th, 4 - 6 p.m.

U.S. Court of Appeal Building at
7th and Mission Streets
San Francisco

Mumia is Innocent--Free Mumia!

For Labor Action to Free Mumia!

End the Racist Death Penalty!

On May 17th, 2007, oral arguments
will be heard in federal court in
Philadelphia on what could be the
last appeal of death-row journalist
Mumia Abu-Jamal, known as the "Voice
of the Voiceless."

The evidence shows--Mumia Abu-Jamal
is an innocent man. He has been on
death row in Pennsylvania for 25 years,
victim of a police and prosecutorial
frame-up and a racist judge. He continues
to serve the movement for human rights
as a journalist writing and broadcasting
from prison.

Come out on May 17th in SF to support
Mumia at this critical time!

Demonstrate with the Labor Action Committee
To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610. 510 763-2347,

Sponsored by: The Mobilization to Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal (Northern California);
International Concerned Family and Friends
of Mumia Abu-Jamal; Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
Coalition (NYC); Chicago Committee to Free
Mumia Abu-Jamal; Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Bay Area United Against War, and many others!

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LABOR’S RESPONSE TO KATRINA

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE?
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

MALCOLM SUBER
PEOPLES HURRICANE RELIEF FUND

REGISTERED NURSE RESPONSE NETWORK
CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION

MEMBERS OF OTHER UNIONS

A Member of the
NEW ORLEANS COMMUNITY Residing in the Bay Area

MIKE BISHOP
UC-BERKELEY VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR

TUESDAY MAY 22nd - 7pm

$5-10 sliding scale donation –
no one turned away for lack of funds

CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION
2200 FRANKLIN STREET, OAKLAND
(near 19th Street BART Station)

Sponsored By The Bay Area Labor
Committee For Peace & Justice/USLAW
For more info: 510-540-0845

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Students to Pelosi: immediate withdrawal from Iraq
http://www.traprockpeace.org/traprock_blog/index.php/2007/05/09/students-to-pelosi-immediate-withdrawal-from-iraq/

*** Please forward widely ***

Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi:

We are students from Bay Area colleges and universities
and part of the Campus Antiwar Network. We are concerned
about the state of the war and occupation in Iraq as well
as the effect that this is having on our schools and our
communities. We are furthermore concerned that the debate
about the war has been hamstrung by political maneuvering
rather than principled commitments to peace and justice.
In that vein, we believe that any meaningful solution
in the Middle East requires the following:

1) Immediate withdrawal of all US forces, personnel,
and contractors from Iraq

2) Iraqi control over Iraq: no permanent military
bases, no control over Iraqi oil, no US intervention
in their political process

3) Full funding of veterans’ benefits and health care,
including mental health care

4) Reparations to the Iraqi people

5) Ban on the use of depleted uranium munitions in Iraq

6) Redistribution of the war budget towards jobs
and education

The current standoff between you and the President brings
us no closer to withdrawal. Your House Spending Bill
is not a good solution. It would have allowed tens
of thousands of troops to remain in Iraq, kept military
bases open nearby, and would have authorized the President
to intervene again on the pretext of combating al-Qaeda.
It appears to us that the Democratic controlled Congress
is putting its election hopes above the needs of US
citizens and Iraqis. It’s time that you implement
legislation calling for a full and unconditional
withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. Furthermore,
any lasting solution involves that all of our above
demands be met.

Speaker Pelosi, you are the representative of a city
that overwhelmingly has proven that it not only wants
the military out of Iraq, but wants a reduction in US
militarism overall. In 2004, over two-thirds of San
Francisco voters made it policy to demand that the
troops in Iraq be brought “safely home now” by voting
for Proposition N. In 2006 San Francisco proved that
it wants military recruiters out of our public schools
and funds diverted away from war and into education
by voting for Proposition i. Not only are your San
Francisco voters demanding that you meet the above
demands, the nation has turned against the war.
Whether you purport to represent your home district
or the nation as a whole in your role as Majority
Speaker, you can take meaningful action today.
We demand that you do so.

Finally, we would like a forum where you address the
concerns of students with respect to the war in Iraq
at the early part of the fall semester. We would like
to work with your office to make sure that such an
event can take place and help not only to voice the
concerns of students but also to make clear your
positions on the war in Iraq. We look forward to your
immediate and full response.

Sincerely,

Campus Antiwar Network chapters at UC Berkeley,
San Francisco State University,
and City College San Francisco
http://www.campusantiwar.net

Charles Jenks
Chair of Advisory Board
Traprock Peace Center
103 Keets Road
Deerfield, MA 01342
http://www.traprockpeace.org

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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s

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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/

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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King

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ARTICLES IN FULL:

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1) Where’s the ‘reform’ in massive prison building proposal?
Staff
"Lawmakers and governor deny Californians right to vote
on $7.3 billion in bonds for more prisons."
Saturday, 05 May 2007
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=14

2) COINTELPRO, then and now
by Minister of Information JR
"A POCC Block Report Radio interview wit’ political
prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal"
Wednesday, 02 May 2007
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=14

3) Mumia’s son faces intense restrictions
by Monique Code
Wednesday, 02 May 2007
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94&Itemid=21

4) Stress on Troops Adds to U.S. Hurdles in Iraq
By BENEDICT CAREY
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/washington/06military.html?hp

5) Colombia Unearths Victims of Violence
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06colombia.html

6) Torn From Parents, a Top Speller Vents His Anger
By KIRK JOHNSON
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/us/06speller.html

7) When Carbon Is Currency
By HANNAH FAIRFIELD
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/business/yourmoney/06emit2.html

8) Chávez Rattles Takeover Saber at Steel Company and Banks
By SIMON ROMERO
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/americas/07venez.html

9) Critic Says Levee Repairs Show Signs of Flaws
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/us/07levees.html?ref=us

10) Park Service to Increase Entrance Fees
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/washington/07parks.html

11) Chief in Los Angeles Cites Police Failures
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/us/07immig.html

12) Cho Didn't Get Court - Ordered Treatment
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Cho.html

13) ‘The Mad Man Chronicles‘
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
April 21, 2007
Prison Radio
Via Email from: Howard Keylor
howardkeylor@comcast.net

14) Hundreds Are Arrested in Post-Election Riots Across France
By CRAIG S. SMITH
May 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/world/europe/08protests.html

15) Los Angeles Punishes Police Official Over Clash at Demonstration
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
May 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/08california.html?ref=us

16) Sale of Carbon Credits Helping Land-Rich, but Cash-Poor, Tribes
By JIM ROBBINS
May 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/science/earth/08carb.html?ref=business

17) Bring them home
Iraqis need political reconciliation, not occupation;
and U.S. troops shouldn't referee a civil war.
May 6, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq6may06,0,6475755.story

18) REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE TRAGEDY THREATENING OUR SPECIES
Fidel Castro Ruz May 7, 2007, 5:42 p.m.
www.marxmail.org

19) Immigration officials allegedly drugged deportees
"An ACLU lawyer condemns the incidents in L.A. as 'horrifying.' Both
men remain in the U.S. while appealing their cases."
By Anna Gorman and Greg Krikorian, Times Staff Writers
LA Times, May 9, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-deport9may09,0,1969594.story?coll=la-home-center

20) Hospital Markups on Care Toughest on Poor: Study
Tuesday, May 8, 2007; 12:00 AM
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/08/AR2007050800576.html

21) Urgent: Posada's charges dropped, protests continue
"The Bush administration must be held responsible."
From El Paso TX to Washington to New York,
multiple demonstrations May 11, 2007
http://www.freethefive.org

22) In Forgotten New Orleans, Life and Hope Stir at the Bottom
By Lawrence Downes
New York Times - May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/opinion/07mon4.html

23) Police Raids against G8 Mobilisation in Germany
((i)) | 09.05.2007 09:59
This morning police raided about 40 places, including social centres
and several private home in Berlin and Hamburg as well as the
alternative web provider so36.net . Police forces searched the "Rote
Flora" in Hamburg as well as parts of the "Bethanien" in Berlin, both
places planned to be decentral convergence spaces for the G8 protest.
see de.indymedia.org for detailed info.
Source:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/05/370112.html
More from UK indymedia
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/05/370122.html
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/05/370114.html
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/05/370110.html

24) The Democrats’ Pledge
Editorial
May 9, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/opinion/09wed1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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1) Where’s the ‘reform’ in massive prison building proposal?
Staff
"Lawmakers and governor deny Californians right to vote
on $7.3 billion in bonds for more prisons."
Saturday, 05 May 2007
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=14

Sacramento – In a disastrous deal for California’s future,
legislative leaders and the governor announced Wednesday
an agreement to build 53,000 new prison, jail and juvenile
detention beds at an astounding cost of $7.3 billion for
construction alone via lease revenue bonds which bypass
voter approval, plus $350 million in general fund money.
The agreement does not include any of the numerous reforms
to parole or sentencing policies that have been put forward.

“California is again putting prison construction in front
of reform. Real reform would mean no need for more prison,
jail and juvenile detention beds,” said Rose Braz of Critical
Resistance, members of Californians United for a Responsible
Budget (CURB), a statewide coalition of 40 organizations
committed to reducing prison spending by reducing the number
of people in prison and closing prisons.

“Last year the legislative leadership rejected proposals to
build more cells because the governor offered no reforms of
sentencing or parole policies,” said John Lum of Californians
United for a Responsible Budget. “This deal doesn’t even
pay lip service to reform. We’re back to the policy of taking
more money from education and health care to lock up more
and more people. “

“California voters have consistently rejected more prison
construction, and we think they would have again – if only
they had been allowed to vote on the $7.3 billion package,”
said Vanessa Huang of Justice Now. “The only reason to build
prisons using lease revenue bonds is because everyone knows
voters oppose more prison construction. The polls say only
3 percent of Californians prioritize prison construction.
Using a lease-revenue bond is more expensive, and, as Nunez
denounced in floor session last week, allows politicians
to make an end run around voters.”

Four recent statewide polls of likely voters all found
that Californians favor cuts to prison spending over
any other area of the state budget. A May 2006 poll
found that 61 percent believed that “we have built
enough jails in California and now need to consider
alternative ways to rehabilitate non-violent criminals,
including treatment programs that help them get back
into society.”

“The governor and the Legislature have missed a unique
opportunity to move toward the only solution to the problem
that there are too many people in prison in California: That
is to reduce the number of people in prison,” said Craig
Gilmore of the California Prison Moratorium Project. “We
could have enacted a moratorium on sending people to prison
for technical violations which would have freed up thousands
of beds. We could have followed the lead of other states
in not placing so many people on parole, paroling geriatric
prisoners or adjusting credits. Instead, we choose to
invest even more in a costly system that has failed to
provide effective public safety.”

At a Senate Budget Subcommittee hearing just this past Monday,
the staff wrote that “parole reforms constitute the largest
part of the Governor’s strategy to immediately reduce the
inmate population …. Building capacity will realistically
take three years to implement and transfers of inmates to
facilities out of state have been halted by the courts.”
Parole reforms would have been “the only option put forth
in the Governor’s plan to immediately reduce the prison
population.”

Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) is
a broad based statewide coalition of over 40 organizations
committed to curbing prison spending by reducing the number
of people in prison and closing prisons. Contact CURB at
Californians United for a Responsible Budget, 1904 Franklin St.,
Suite 504, Oakland CA 94612, (510) 444-0484, curb@riseup.net
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you
need JavaScript enabled to view it , www.curbprisonspending.org

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2) COINTELPRO, then and now
by Minister of Information JR
"A POCC Block Report Radio interview wit’ political
prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal"
Wednesday, 02 May 2007
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=14

Oral arguments in the case of Political Prisoner Mumia
Abu Jamal will be heard in a Philadelphia courtroom on
May 17 that many believe will determine his fate; either
he will be released after 25 years in prison on the
trumped up charge of killing a Philly police officer or
given a re-trial or murdered by the state. We as the
people have to stand up and demand that the state free
Mumia now or, at the least, give him a new trial, since
his original trial was plagued with police coercion and
prosecutorial misconduct.

Here, Mumia is interviewed on the POCC Block Report Radio
show about his case, the San Francisco 8 and the Counter-
Intelligence Program – Cointelpro – in general. Check it
out as we talk to one of the “People’s main advocates,”
who spoke wit’ us from a death-row cell in Pennyslavania ...

MOI JR: What is the status of your case?

Mumia: Nothing has changed. We’re still waiting for
a briefing date from the same court of appeals.

MOI JR: What is the purpose of the corporate media being
flooded wit’ negative reporting in regards to the San
Francisco 8 case?

Mumia: I think there are two very key intentions. One is
to demonize the Black Panther Party to a generation that
only knows about it, if at all, through the movie “Panther”
or an occasional book or some scattered references in
popular culture movies like “Forrest Gump” or something
like that. Two, (it’s) to intimidate young radicals who
are inspired by the example of the Black Panther Party –
to teach them that, once a revolutionary, always
a revolutionary.

I mean literally those charges are perhaps two generations
old. They were dismissed, I think, in 1973 – because
of proven torture – by a judge in San Francisco. Most
people, when they talk about the Party, they talk about
it like “the old days,” “back in the ‘60s,” or some in
a fit of nostalgia even would say “the good old days,”
as if these days are different. Ain’t nothing changed.
The Movement continues, and the repression continues,
you see?

MOI JR: What is the connection between the case of the
San Francisco 8 and other political prisoners and exiles
like yourself, Assata Shakur, the Move 9, Hugo Pinell,
Ruchell Magee, Veronza Bowers, Russell Maroon Shoatz,
Chip Fitzgerald, Mutulu Shakur and Leonard Peltier,
just to name a few?

As a member of the Black Panther Party in his teens,
Mumia was already such an extraordinary journalist that
he was named Minister of Information.

Mumia: That the state never forgets – and never forgives
those who dare to rebel. Think of it this way: One of
the most controversial and, to us in our generation
almost incomprehensible, laws that were ever passed
in the United States was the Fugitive Slave Law. That
law proved that there is no such thing as a Constitution
when the state wants to get people who escape from slavery.

They actually began chasing people all across the United
States – in Boston, in Pittsburg, everywhere in the United
States at the behest of Southern slave owners. They passed
a law, right, and Black people all across the North had
to flee to Canada to find a place of rest and freedom
and respite from state terrorism.

How things have not changed – even though we are not
talking about space, because those good eight brothas
were in the United States – we’re talking about the
space of time. At least one of the brothas is 70 years
old; almost all of them are 60, or almost 60. Some of
them have worked with the DA’s office in California,
you dig? All of them had established good lives of
service to their community and community organizing
and activity and education of younger generations.

These were men who had established families, established
lifestyles of service, and they’re targeted really because
of their radical ideas, because many of the people –
although they are no longer members of the Party, because
the Party doesn’t formally exist – still believe in some
of the ideals of the Party, you see? And that is their
real offense. That is their real crime. That is why they
were targeted.

MOI JR: What is the connection between the media and the
government’s war of terror against the Black and Brown
hoods across Amerikkka?

Mumia: Back in the old days again, the FBI had something
called “media friendlies.” These were literally television,
newspaper and radio and wire reporters who had special
access to the FBI, and the FBI had special access to them.
They would use the media to go after targets in the Black
Freedom Movement. They would also use the media to target
and harass supporters of the Movement.

There was a woman named Jane Sebert, a white woman,
a columnist in a national and some California papers,
who covered an article saying that this woman had a baby
by Masai Hewitt. Now it was a lie. They knew it was a lie,
but the woman was so traumatized because her husband felt
like she had cheated on him with a Black guy. They drove
this woman to loosing her baby, mental instability,
insanity and suicide. This was an actress, you see?
Someone of means, money, and position in society. They
did this because she supported the Black Panther Party,
but no one calls this terrorism. You could read the files.
They applauded. They were happy. They celebrated. So the
media plays a diabolical role then and now.

MOI JR: In regards to the Counter-Intelligence Program
and the Church Committee findings, where the government
publicly admitted its illegal activity, what do you think
should have happened?

Mumia: Whatever happens when something is illegal – I mean
the government did something that was very clever. They
had congressional hearings, they brought out some of the
stuff that the state had done, but guess what? After all
of the hearings, after all of the volumes were published
and all of the news footage and the newspaper accounts,
nobody that was involved in this illegal and unconstitutional
and unlawful activity was prosecuted.

So what does it mean to say that you found it was illegal
or you called it illegal or even unconstitutional? It meant
absolutely nothing at all, not to the people who did it.
It certainly meant something to the people who were the
targets. Yeah, they got to talk about it. Some got to write
about it. What did it really mean?

These people permitted crimes against American citizens
because they didn’t like their ideas. The real tragedy
is that 30 years later, everything that was illegal,
unconstitutional, unlawful through Cointelpro has become
legalized through what? The Patriot Act. Everything. And
they’re doing today what they did yesterday, with the
impunity of the law.

MOI JR: Tupac Shakur, Kamau Sadiki, Imam Jamil Al-Amin
and Aaron Patterson have all been victims of the state’s
war against the Black community within the last decade
and a half because of stances that they have taken. What
does today’s Counter-Intelligence Program or Patriot
Act look like?

Mumia: It’s the same thing as Cointelpro except, again,
its legalized. And here is the real kicker: It never
stopped, you dig? It never stopped. It was a former FBI
agent whose name is Powers, who wrote a book about his
life in the FBI. And he would go to the FBI library and
read about it, and he went to his instructor and said,
“Wow, I read about that Cointel Program. That’s over,
right? They don’t do that any more?” And the guy looked
at him, smiled and said, “Look, if a thing worked, would
you stop doing it?”

Powers was blown away, because he had read the Church
Report hearings and he believed that that was illegal
and unconstitutional, but this was an insider speaking
to another alleged insider, albeit a Black one. He just
told him, “If it worked, why would we stop it?” All they
did was change the name of the program and continue doing
the same thing. There’s never been a time when people
who were dissenters, activists, resisters were not
harassed, were not targeted, you dig? It ain’t stopped.

MOI JR: Barack Obama as well as Hillary Clinton have
officially announced their campaigns to run for the
presidency of the United States, amongst a host of
other candidates. What is your opinion on what the
POCC calls “the (s)elections of ‘08”?

Mumia: I certainly have some preliminary opinions,
but I think it is important for people in the Movement –
of various social movements and social justice freedom
movements – to get with anybody who is running for any
of those offices, congressional offices, local offices,
and get with them about what their position is. Once
they respond to the position, then you can take an
educated guess, a really informed response.

As a rule, generally, it doesn’t matter if there
is a Black face in a high place. If anything, the
performances of the secretaries of state – the last
two in the Bush administration – should show us through
those examples that it doesn’t matter what your complexion
is, it doesn’t matter what your color is; what matters
is your consciousness. Unless we remember that important
lesson, many of us can be fooled by people who look like
us but who serve the interests of the ruling class
and the empire.

Email POCC Minister of Information JR at blockreportradio@gmail.com
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need
JavaScript enabled to view it , and listen to the Block Report
at hiphopwarreport.com or myspace.com/blockreportfilm

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3) Mumia’s son faces intense restrictions
by Monique Code
Wednesday, 02 May 2007
http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94&Itemid=21

Jamal Hart, son of Mumia Abu-Jamal, is facing intense
restrictions. Jamal’s Chicago-based attorney recently
found out that Jamal has an assault charge dated back
to 1995 that does not exist! He was given federal time
as a result of this “error.”

Jamal called on April 20 to say that he was charged with
fighting via an agent provocateur and got 30 days in the
hole because of it. A letter I received from him yesterday
states that he has also lost his visits and personal phone
calls for six months!

I’m asking everyone to BOMBARD the prison with phone calls,
emails and faxes to express your outrage. This punishment
must be the result of Jamal coming so close to exposing
his unjust incarceration through his own research.

Address all correspondence and phone calls to Warden Ronnie
L. Holt ONLY. Contact him by phone at (570) 544-7100, fax
at (570) 544-7350 or email at sch/ execassistant@bop.gov
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots,
you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Monique Code, who writes from New York City, can be reached at moniquecode@hotmail.com

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4) Stress on Troops Adds to U.S. Hurdles in Iraq
By BENEDICT CAREY
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/washington/06military.html?hp

The detailed mental health survey of troops in Iraq released
by the Pentagon on Friday highlights a growing worry for the
United States as it struggles to bring order to Baghdad:
the high level of combat stress suffered during lengthy
and repeated tours.

The fourth in a continuing series, the report suggested that
extended tours and multiple deployments, among other policy
decisions, could escalate anger and increase the likelihood
that soldiers or marines lash out at civilians, or defy
military ethics.

That is no small concern since the United States’
counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the importance
of winning the trust and support of the local population.

The report was provided in November to Gen. George W.
Casey Jr., then the senior American commander in Iraq.

Pentagon officials have not explained why the public
release of the report was delayed, a move that kept the
data out of the public debate as the Bush administration
developed its plan to build up troops in Iraq and extend
combat tours. Rear Adm. Richard R. Jeffries, a medical
officer, told reporters on Friday that the timing was
decided by civilian Pentagon officials.

The survey of 1,320 soldiers and 447 marines was conducted
in August and September of 2006. The military’s report,
which drew on that survey as well as interviews with commanders
and focus groups, found that longer deployments increased the
risk of psychological problems; that the levels of mental
problems was highest — some 30 percent — among troops involved
in close combat; that more than a third of troops endorsed
torture in certain situations; and that most would not turn
in fellow service members for mistreating a civilian.

“These are thoughts people are going to have when under this
kind of stress, and soldiers will tell you that: you don’t
know what’s it’s like until you’ve been there,” said Dr. Andy
Morgan, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale
University who has worked extensively with regular and Special
Operations troops. “The question is whether you act on them.”

The Pentagon’s analysis also identified sources of anger besides
lengthy and repeated deployments that could lead to ethics
violations, which would not be apparent from the outside:
eight-day rest breaks that involved four days of transit;
long lines to get into recreation facilities, especially for
those who perform missions outside the relative safety of
base camps; and inconsistent dress-code rules.

Most of all, there were uncertainties about deployment:
40 percent of soldiers rated uncertain redeployment
dates as a top concern.

The military has evaluated the emotional state of soldiers
in the past, from the cases of shaking and partial paralysis
known as shell shock after World War I, to the numb exhaustion
identified as combat fatigue in World War II. The flashbacks
and irritability reported in the years after the Vietnam War
came to define another diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

But since the Persian Gulf war in 1991 the Pentagon’s efforts
to track mental health have become far more sophisticated,
and now provide a deeper X-ray into the day-to-day realities
of life on the ground, in real time — a glimpse of how the
stresses of both combat, and policy decisions, can affect
the behavior of troops.

When the administration decided in January to send more
troops to Baghdad to try to reverse the spiraling sectarian
violence in Iraq, it sought to ease the strain on the armed
forces by announcing its intention to expand the active
duty Army and Marine forces by 92,000 troops.

But it takes years to recruit, train and equipment an
expanded ground force, and the decision to increase the
size of the military was made too late to relieve the
stress on the forces now in Iraq.

To sustain the current elevated troop levels, Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates announced in April that the
Army was increasing combat tours to 15 months, rather
than the traditional one-year tour.

“The Army is spread very thin, and we need it to be a larger
force for the number of missions that we were being asked to
address for our nation,” said Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the
Army’s acting surgeon general and head of the Army’s Medical
Command, on Friday, as the report was released.

To better cope with the current strains, the report
recommended that suicide prevention program be revised,
that soldiers and marines who have combat positions outside
large bases have better opportunities for occasional rest
and recreation, and that a more determined effort be made
to teach battlefield ethics on dealing with civilians.

The military team that conducted the survey recommended that
soldiers spend 18 to 36 months at home between deployments
abroad, in contrast to the current Army policy of 12 months.

Col. Carl Castro of the Army, who led the team that carried
out the survey, asserted that the military began to carry
out the report’s recommendations immediately after it was
completed.

The report noted a direct relationship between involvement
in intense combat and soldiers who exhibited signs of anxiety,
depression and acute stress. Almost 30 percent of soldiers
who were engaged in “high combat” were discovered to be
suffering from “acute stress,” according to the report.

But the length of tours in Iraq was another important factor.
Soldiers who were deployed for more than six months were one
and a half times more likely to exhibit depression or anxiety
than those with shorter tours of duty.

Those who had repeatedly served in Iraq were also more likely
to suffer from psychological ailments than those who were
serving their first tour. The survey showed that 24 percent
of those who had done multiple tours suffered from “acute
stress,” compared with 15 percent who were on their first tour.

According to the survey, suicide rates for soldiers in Iraq
from 2003 to 2006 were 16.1 per 100,000, compared with the
average Army rate of 11.1.

In general, soldiers experience higher rates of mental health
problems than do marines. The morale of the soldiers also
tended to be lower than that of marines, who unlike those
in the Army typically serve seven-month combat tours in Iraq.

The report said psychological ailments and built-up anger
resulting from combat stress increased the likelihood that
the troops would lash out at civilians. The survey noted
that only 47 percent of the soldiers and 38 percent of
marines agreed that noncombatants should be treated with
dignity and respect. Troops who had high levels of anger
were twice as likely to violate ethical standards, the report
found. The survey found that 40 percent of troops who scored
high on measures of personal anger reported insulting or
cursing at a civilian, and 7 percent reported having hit
or kicked a civilian. Among those low on measures of anger,
only 1 percent said they had hit a civilian, and 16 percent
reported insulting noncombatants.

The Iraq war, experts say, is a new kind of war — a 360-degree
battle space, with no front or rear, no safe zone outside the
large fortified bases, and the compounded physical uncertainty
of roadside bombs and mortar attacks. The lack of any control
over these factors, and the generally limited sense of progress,
only intensifies the stress for troops.

“You can endure a lot of physical and mental exhaustion as
long as you feel you’re having an impact, you’re accomplishing
something and that you have some control over your situation,”
Dr. Morgan said. “If you don’t feel you have any of that, you
quickly get to a point where the only thing that’s important
is keeping yourself and your buddies alive. Nothing else
much matters.”

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.

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5) Colombia Unearths Victims of Violence
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06colombia.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 5 (AP) — Investigators on Friday exhumed
105 bodies of people they believe were killed between 1999
and 2001 in Putumayo Province in southern Colombian, the chief
prosecutor there said Saturday at a news conference.

Most of the victims had been dismembered before burial.
Historically a major region for growing the coca plant that
is used to make cocaine, the Putumayo jungles near the border
with Ecuador are the scene of almost daily fighting between
leftist rebels, far-right paramilitaries and state security
forces.

Forensic teams have found hundreds of shallow graves in recent
months, as demobilized paramilitaries confess their crimes
as part of a peace deal with the government.

The office of the prosecutor, Mario Iguarán, estimates that
10,000 murdered Colombians lie in unmarked graves across the
country, now in its fifth decade of civil conflict.

Earlier this week, Mr. Iguarán visited Washington — Colombia’s
largest financial backer — to ask for more money to help
such investigations.

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6) Torn From Parents, a Top Speller Vents His Anger
By KIRK JOHNSON
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/us/06speller.html

GREEN RIVER, Utah — Great spellers come in all types, from
egotistical showoffs to loners who find sanctuary in the
forest of words.

Kunal Sah, a 13-year-old eighth-grader, is an angry speller.
He lives with his uncle and aunt at the Ramada Limited Motel
in this tough former railroad town in eastern Utah. Kunal
is making himself into a great speller by way of unhappiness
and the immense pressure he feels to reunite his family,
which was blown across two continents when his parents were
sent back to India last year after being denied political
asylum.

He said he cried every day after his parents left, then
as the spelling bee season started and he began winning —
ultimately reaching the regional competition and becoming
one of three students from Utah who will be going to
Washington at the end of this month for the Scripps National
Spelling Bee — he began to put his frustration into words.
Capturing the spotlight at the bee, he said, could draw
attention to his parents’ case.

The Indian news media have already taken notice. An article
in March in The Indian Express, an English-language daily
newspaper, tried to capture the family’s mix of pride and
pain under the headline: “Spelling bee whiz in U.S. motel
room, parents in Bihar Village.”

“What I want to do is win the nationals, and, if I do, then
there is a chance that my mom and dad will have a better
chance of coming back,” Kunal said, sitting on his bed
in a room stuffed to the ceiling with sprachgefühl,
a word he was stumped by in a spelling bee last year.
It means things that are linguistically appropriate or
intuitive. Everything in Kunal’s room, from his dictionaries
to his spelling trophies, is linguistically appropriate.
“The anger is pushing me,” he said. “The anger is just
telling me that yes, this year I have to win.”

An immigration lawyer working on the Sahs’ behalf, Steven
R. Lawrence Jr., said he believed the Sahs might yet be
able to return, perhaps on a visa for people who own
businesses in the United States. But their case is exceedingly
complicated and even Mr. Lawrence acknowledges that a reunion
in America is not likely anytime soon.

Mr. Sah, who was born in India, came to the United States
in 1990 and shortly before his entry visa expired the next
year he applied for political asylum, saying that if he
was forced to return to his home province in southeastern
India he would be targeted by Muslims because of his involvement
in a group called Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which he described
as committed to Hindu nationalism.

Mr. Sah acknowledged in his application that he had been
active in organizing a campaign against Babri Mosque,
in northern India, because it was “built on our sacred
land” and that he “actively participated” in riots intended
to demolish it.

In 1992, after Mr. Sah had immigrated to the United States,
Hindu extremists destroyed the mosque.

In denying him haven, immigration officials noted that
Mr. Sah “had participated in the persecution of non-Hindus
and thus was ineligible for asylum.”

The town of Green River played a role in the making of
Kunal the speller. He grew up here, three hours southeast
of Salt Lake City, after his family came in 1997 from
California, where he was born, an American citizen. For
the only boy of Indian heritage in a town of about 900
people, that might be lonely enough. But Kanhai and Sarita
Sah were strivers, bent on upward mobility, willing
to work harder than the competition, trading up to
a larger motel, the Ramada, after five years in town.

Some people admitted that they did not like Kanhai,
or Ken, as he was known, although they say they admire
the son’s accomplishments.

“I really believe it was just the personality people
didn’t like,” Amy Wilmarth, the manager of the Green
River Coffee Company, said of Mr. Sah. “He probably
has quite a bit of arrogance, along with rudeness.”

On a busy summer night, there may be 2,000 travelers
in Green River’s 600-odd rooms. Most are only stopping
long enough to catch up on sleep, food and fuel.
The town sits midway between Denver and Las Vegas,
with few lodging choices for 100 miles in any direction.

And every now and then, people here say, some of those
visitors do not like seeing a dark-skinned face at the
Ramada. So Kunal’s family members rarely sit at the
front desk, only coming out when the front bell is
pushed. By the time someone has come that far, they
say, and perhaps smelled the Indian cooking, they are
more likely to stay.

Other motel operators are well aware that some travelers
are racist or anti-immigrant. “A lot of them will come
down to me because they won’t stay there,” said Cynthia
Powell, manager of the Rodeway Inn.

Kunal’s uncle, Dharm Chandra Prasad, who came to Utah
three years ago after receiving a degree in business
in England, said that jealousy over the family’s success,
combined with the ethnic and cultural differences —
much of the town is Mormon — created resentment.

“When you will go up, everybody will try to pull your
leg down,” Mr. Prasad said at the motel on a recent
morning. He said his brother was pressed to become
a Mormon. “He said, Why we should change our religion?”
Mr. Prasad said. “The god is one, same god yours, you
call Jesus, we call a different word.”

What makes everything go behind the Ramada’s walls,
and inside Kunal, is a work ethic.

Sitting on the couch in the living room of the apartment
he shares with his uncle and his aunt, Jyothie, Kunal
pointed across the room to the sneakers he was given
as a reward from his parents. The kind of sneakers that
lots of American children get just for asking. If he
could work through 5,000 words in one day, his father
promised, he would get the shoes. Kunal delivered in
16 hours.

Wherever the burning desire came from, it has manifested
itself in the embrace of language. There are friendly
words, Kunal said, and stranded, orphan sorts of words,
which are the hardest because they lack linguistic
relatives that can provide clues to their spelling
patterns.

Last year, Kunal made a friend at his first national
spelling bee, where he was eliminated early on. The
friend is Yeeva Cheng, 14, a champion speller from
Cherryville, N.C. The two study over the Internet,
lobbing pronunciations back and forth.

One recent night they kept at it until 4 a.m., and
Kunal smiled when he told the story. No anger now,
just a 13-year-old like any other.

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7) When Carbon Is Currency
By HANNAH FAIRFIELD
May 6, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/business/yourmoney/06emit2.html

AMID steadily increasing carbon emissions, and a federal
government hesitant to take the lead on climate legislation,
10 states have joined to create the first mandatory carbon
cap-and-trade program in the United States. They aim to
reduce emissions from power plants by 10 percent in 10 years.

Leaders of state environmental and energy regulatory agencies
hammered out the detailed model for the program, the Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative, over the course of three years.
The program sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that
the 10 states — as a whole — can emit. Starting in 2009,
each state will receive a set amount of carbon credits for
its power plants, and each plant must have enough allowances
to cover its total emissions at the end of three-year
compliance periods.

In 2003, George E. Pataki, then New York’s governor, invited
governors of 10 other states from Maine to Maryland to discuss
a program to cut power plant emissions. All but one of the
states joined the program; Pennsylvania has observer status.

Officials have closely watched the European Union, which
started its carbon trading market in 2005; analysts say the
Europeans have stumbled on some fronts. “We’ve learned a lot
from the Europeans,” said Judith Enck, adviser on environment
issues to Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York. “The way we distribute
the allowances will be vastly different than the European
experience.”

To build a carbon market, its originators must create a currency
of carbon credits that participants can trade. In Europe, power
companies received these credits directly and could buy or sell
from one another as needed. But most companies passed the cost
of the credits on to consumers even though they received them
free — giving the companies windfall profits. Power companies
in Britain alone made about $1 billion from free credits
in 2005, according to a study by the British government.

Participants in the United States want to avoid that
problem by selling some or all of the credits at auction,
with the proceeds going to state energy efficiency programs.

In Europe, power companies were not the only businesses
to profit from the new carbon market. Because power plants
there can use credits earned from offset projects that take
greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere (or put less of them
into it), businesses wanting to earn offset credits inundated
the Europeans with proposals — many of which would have
a negligible effect on emissions or were for reductions
that would have taken place anyway.

To sidestep that problem, the program here limits offsets
to five categories: capture of landfill gas, curbs on sulfur
hexafluoride leaks, planting of trees, reductions in methane
from manure, and increased energy efficiency in buildings.
Power companies can offset 3.3 percent of a plant’s total
emissions from any combination of the five categories.

“We saw what happened in Europe, so we limited the categories
and set our criteria upfront,” said Christopher Sherry,
chairman of the regional program’s staff working group and
a research scientist at the New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection. “We did that so we would have assurance that the
reductions actually take place.”

Although Northeastern states have taken the lead in
inaugurating a mandatory carbon market, California and
some of its neighbors are not far behind. Those states
are watching closely; Mr. Sherry and others involved in
the 10-state effort are already helping California figure
out how best to accomplish its climate plan.

“The idea is to see what everyone else has done, and learn
from it,” said Dale Bryk, a lawyer at the Natural Resources
Defense Council who has been involved with the Northeastern
regional program and California’s advisory committee. “Let’s
not start from scratch.”

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8) Chávez Rattles Takeover Saber at Steel Company and Banks
By SIMON ROMERO
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/world/americas/07venez.html

CARACAS, Venezuela, May 6 — President Hugo Chávez
is deepening efforts to assert greater control over
the economy by dictating changes to the operations
of a large Argentine-controlled steel maker and
threatening to nationalize banks controlled by
financial institutions from the United States
and Spain.

Markets here are reacting with distress to his
latest moves. The main index of the Caracas stock
exchange fell 2.7 percent on Friday, while Venezuela’s
currency, the bolívar, also weakened about 3 percent,
to 3,950 to the dollar in unregulated trading as rich
Venezuelans rushed to take money out of the country.

The announcements by Mr. Chávez are part of a broader
project to reconfigure Venezuela’s economy to strengthen
worker-led cooperatives and state enterprises. Mr. Chávez
is also trying to build regional financing alternatives
to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,
to be financed largely by his government.

Mr. Chávez dressed down the foreign owners of the steel
maker Siderúrgica del Orinoco over the weekend, asking
them to halt exports and focus on meeting domestic demand.
The company, also known as Sidor, is controlled by Techint
Group of Argentina. Mr. Chávez said he had summoned Paolo
Rocca, the company’s chairman, to Caracas for talks.

“I’ll grab your company,” Mr. Chávez said in a taunt
to Mr. Rocca on Saturday at an event celebrating the
creation of a single Socialist party among his followers.

“Give it to me, and I’ll pay you what it’s worth,” the
president said. “I won’t rob you.”

Mr. Chávez had threatened on Thursday to nationalize
Sidor, and to take over the banking system unless banks
agreed to offer low-cost financing to domestic industry.

Mr. Chávez made similar threats before nationalizing
telephone and electricity companies.

Erratic policy shifts have led foreign direct investment
to plunge in Venezuela, the only country in Latin America
besides tiny Suriname to register an outflow of those
investments last year, of $543 million.

Comparable economies in the region enjoyed high levels
of direct foreign investment, with Argentina receiving
$4.8 billion and Colombia $6.3 billion, according
to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean.

Cushioned by high oil prices and $25 billion in reserves,
Venezuela is still distant from a painful crash of the
type that plagued it in the wake of past oil booms,
according to economists. But problems like a widening
budget deficit are growing more acute as growth slows
from last year’s torrid 10.3 percent.

“There is fear that all of Chávez’s different spending
projects will lead to a depletion of funds,” said
Francisco Rodríguez, a former chief economist at
Venezuela’s national assembly who teaches at Wesleyan
University. “Chávez’s threat to the banks may reflect
increasing resistance in the sector to rolling over
internal debt.”

Indeed, both Mr. Chávez and Venezuela’s banks face
a dilemma as a surge in public spending widens the budget
deficit this year to an estimated 4.9 percent of gross
domestic product from 1.8 percent in 2006. The government
can cover that shortfall by getting banks to buy its
debt or by printing more money, a choice that could
cause inflation to jump.

The government is already trying to reduce inflation,
the highest in Latin America at 19.4 percent a year.
And officials are grappling with continuing scarcity
of foods subject to price controls, like beef, eggs,
sugar and milk. Producers say the controls have made
it hard to meet demand while labor costs are soaring.

Showing exasperation with these claims, senior officials
are growing increasingly adversarial in their treatment
of private industry. Elías Jaua, the agriculture minister,
said last week that a “destabilization campaign” was
to blame for the short supply of some food products.

Beyond such talk is a redistribution of income under
Mr. Chávez, making imports like cellphones and refrigerators
and services like modest plastic surgery procedures more
widely available. Monthly stipends to the poor or indirect
subsidies to buy food and consumer goods, channeled through
an array of social welfare programs, have also lifted
corporate income.

Profits for the banking sector climbed 33 percent in 2006,
led by a more than 100 percent jump in credit card loans
and a 143 percent increase in automobile credit, according
to Softline Consulting, a financial analysis firm here.

Blessed with such profits, few bankers are explicitly
critical of Mr. Chávez. In fact some express admiration.

“President Chávez is saying it’s the job of all of us for
Venezuela to press ahead,” Francisco Aristeguieta, president
of Citibank Venezuela and director of the Venezuelan Banking
Association, told the government’s official news agency.

Still, economists fear a bill is coming due for the spending
spree and the nationalizations. They point to the costs
of reimbursing foreign owners for seized assets and meeting
their debt obligations, which could be more than $10 billion
for oil projects the government is taking over from American
and European companies.

Unregulated trading in the bolívar has become the most
visible indicator of eroding confidence.

Meanwhile, despite Mr. Chávez’s excellent record of meeting
foreign debt obligations, investors have begun selling
Venezuelan bonds amid confusion over his announcement that
the country would exit the International Monetary Fund.
Investors could demand quick payment of billions of dollars
of the bonds if Mr. Chávez goes through with leaving the fund,
setting off a possible default.

Jens Erik Gould contributed reporting.

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9) Critic Says Levee Repairs Show Signs of Flaws
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/us/07levees.html?ref=us

Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps
of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing
signs of serious flaws, a leading critic of the corps says.

The critic, Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the
University of California, Berkeley, said he encountered several
areas of concern on a tour in March.

The most troubling, Dr. Bea said, was erosion on a levee by the
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation canal that helped
channel water into New Orleans during the storm.

Breaches in that 13-mile levee devastated communities in St.
Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, and the rapid
reconstruction of the barrier was hailed as one of the corps’
most significant rebuilding achievements in the months
after the storm.

But Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the
levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation,
said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are
still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-
dotted-line levees.”

Dr. Bea examined the hurricane protection system at the
request of National Geographic magazine, which is publishing
photographs of the levee and an article on his concerns about
the levee and other spots on its Web site at ngm.com/levees.

Corps officials argue that Dr. Bea is overstating the risk
and say that they will reinspect elements of the levee system
he has identified and fix problems they find. The disagreement
underscores the difficulty of evaluating risk in hurricane
protection here, where even dirt is a contentious issue.
And discussing safety in a region still struggling with
a 2005 disaster requires delicacy.

Hurricane season begins again next month.

The most revealing of the photographs, taken from
a helicopter, looks out from the levee across the
navigation canal and a skinny strip of land to the
expanses of Lake Borgne. From the grassy crown of the
levee, small, wormy patterns of rills carved by rain
make their way down the landward side, widening at
the base into broad fissures that extend beyond
the border of the grass.

Dr. Bea, who was recently appointed to an expert
committee for plaintiffs’ lawyers in federal suits against
the government and private contractors over Hurricane
Katrina losses, said that he could not be certain the
situation was dangerous without further inspection and
that he wanted to avoid what he called “cry wolf syndrome.”
But, he added, he does not want to ignore “potentially
important early warning signs.”

He praised the corps for much of the work it had done
since the storm, but he added that the levee should be
armored with rock or concrete against overtopping,
a move the corps has rejected in the short term.

Another expert who has viewed the photographs, J. David
Rogers, called the images “troubling.” Dr. Rogers, who
holds the Karl F. Hasselmann chair in geological
engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, said
it would take more work, including an analysis of the
levee soils, to determine whether there was a possibility
of catastrophic failure.

But he said his first thought upon viewing the images
was, “That won’t survive another Katrina.” Dr. Rogers
worked on the 2006 report on levee failures with Dr. Bea.

John M. Barry, a member of the Southeast Louisiana Flood
Protection Authority-East who has also seen the photographs,
also expressed worry. “If Bea and Rogers are concerned,
then I’m concerned,” he said.

Mr. Barry, the author of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi
Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America,” said it was
important to seek balance when discussing the levees
in the passionately charged environment of New Orleans
since the storm.

“I don’t want anybody to have any false confidence” in
the system, he said. “On the other hand, if things are
improving, people need to know that, too. And things have
been improving.”

After being informed of the safety questions, Senator
Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, prepared
a letter to send today to the corps commander, Lt. Gen.
Carl A. Strock, asking whether the work by the corps
was sufficient to protect the levee system.

At the corps, Richard J. Varuso, the assistant chief
of the geotechnical branch of the district’s engineering
division, said that some erosion could be expected after
a levee was constructed. “If it rains, we get some rutting,”
Mr. Varuso said, adding that as vegetation grows in, the
levee “heals itself.”

Walter O. Baumy Jr., the chief of the engineering division
for the New Orleans district of the corps, said the new
levees were made with dense, clay-rich soil that would
resist erosion. Although the stretches of the St. Bernard
levee that were still standing after the storm are composed
of more porous soils dredged from the nearby canal, Mr. Baumy
said a reinforcing clay layer on top some 10 feet thick would
keep the fissures from reaching the weaker soils.

Still, he said that “we will take a look at this” and that
the corps would make repairs where necessary.

Dr. Bea, who wrangled with the corps last year about construction
standards on the same levee, countered that recent work
in the Netherlands suggested that clay-capped levees with
a porous core, which are common, were prone to failure
in high water.

Another official who viewed the photographs, Robert A.
Turner Jr., the executive director of the Lake Borgne basin
levee district, east of New Orleans, said he was concerned,
but not necessarily alarmed, about the rills toward the crown
of the St. Bernard levee, calling them a common sight on new
levees in the area.

Mr. Turner said he was more concerned by the images of larger
ruts toward the base of the levee, and said of the corps,
“We’re just going to keep on them.”

Mr. Turner said the corps had been responsive to issues raised
by local officials. “They’re out there trying to prove
to everybody under the sun that they built everything
correctly,” he said.

“That is a big departure from the way the corps used to operate
pre-Katrina,” he said, but added: “They got so much negative
publicity before, they can’t afford to do it wrong. They’ve
got to do it right.”

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10) Park Service to Increase Entrance Fees
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/washington/07parks.html

WASHINGTON, May 6 (AP) — Entrance fees are scheduled to rise
at national parks over the next three summers, though
a public outcry over some of the increases could cause
the government to reconsider.

A few increases have already taken effect.

The National Park Service plans to phase in higher rates
for park passes and vehicle fees at 131 of the 390 parks,
monuments and other areas it manages. The government does
not collect fees at the other sites in the park system.

The Park Service, which has planned the increases for
some time, did not publicize the higher fees through its
headquarters in Washington, instead leaving that job
to managers of the specific sites, said David Barna,
an agency spokesman.

The intention was to let affected communities absorb
the news and see if they would go along with the increases.
Park superintendents can recommend that the agency’s
director, Mary A. Bomar, rescind the increases if enough
people protest.

This summer, higher entrance fees are set for 11 parks:
Muir Woods in California; Black Canyon of the Gunnison
and Mesa Verde, in Colorado; Fort McHenry in Maryland;
Martin Van Buren in New York; Big Bend and Guadalupe
Mountains, in Texas; Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks and
Zion, in Utah; and Colonial in Virginia.For 2008, fee
increases are planned for 84 other parks. In 2009,
fees would rise at 36 additional parks.

Mr. Barna said the higher fees were not linked to the
$230 million increase in the $2.1 billion parks budget
that President Bush proposed in February to help prepare
for the park system’s centennial in nine years.

Under the new fee structure, annual park passes will
generally range from $10 to $40. Fees per person would
range from about $5 to $12; per vehicle, they would
be about $10 to $25.

A $50 fee for an annual pass has already taken effect
at Grand Canyon and Zion and for a combined pass into
Grand Teton and Yellowstone.

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11) Chief in Los Angeles Cites Police Failures
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/us/07immig.html

LOS ANGELES, May 6 (AP) — Police Chief William Bratton
said Sunday that up to 60 members of an elite squad that
swept into MacArthur Park and fired rubber bullets during
a May Day immigration rally are no longer on the street.

Mr. Bratton said he had spent the weekend watching video
of the incident. He said failures were widespread and
that officers at all levels were responsible. “I’m not
going to defend the indefensible,” Mr. Bratton told
reporters. “Things were done that shouldn’t have been
done.”

Reporters were among those roughed up when a platoon
from the Metropolitan Division went through the park,
firing 148 rubber bullets to break up what had been
a peaceful and lawful rally. The police said they moved
in after rocks and bottles were thrown at them by 30
to 40 agitators, he said.

The Metropolitan Division is the city’s premier police
squad, made up of experienced officers who have extensive
training in crowd control.

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12) Cho Didn't Get Court - Ordered Treatment
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Cho.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia
Tech failed to get the mental health treatment ordered by
a judge who declared him an imminent threat to himself
and others, a newspaper reported Monday.

Seung-Hui Cho was found ''mentally ill and in need of
hospitalization'' in December 2005, according to court
papers. A judge ordered him into involuntary outpatient
treatment.

However, neither the court nor community mental health
officials followed up on the judge's order, and Cho didn't
get the treatment, The Washington Post reported, citing
unidentified authorities who have seen Cho's medical files.

''The system doesn't work well,'' said Tom Diggs, executive
director of the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform,
which has been studying the state mental health system
and will report to the General Assembly next year.

Federal, state and local officials contacted Monday by
The Associated Press said they had no idea whether Cho
received the treatment because they are not privy to that
information. School officials did not return calls seeking
comment.

The panel appointed to look into the massacre hasn't
received any information yet, said its chairman, retired
Virginia State Police Superintendent W. Gerald Massengill.
The eight-member panel meets for the first time this week,
when it expects to get a confidential briefing from the
state police.

On Dec. 13, 2005, Cho e-mailed a roommate at Virginia Tech
in Blacksburg saying that he might as well commit suicide.
The roommate called police, who took Cho to the New River
Valley Community Services Board, the area's mental health
agency.

Cho was detained temporarily at Carilion St. Albans
Behavioral Health Clinic in Christiansburg, a few miles
from campus, until a special justice could review his
case in a commitment hearing.

On Dec. 14, special judge Paul M. Barnett found that Cho
was an imminent danger to himself and ordered him into
involuntary outpatient treatment. Special justices are
lawyers with some expertise and training who are appointed
by the jurisdiction's chief judge.

Terry W. Teel, Cho's court-appointed lawyer at the time,
said he does not remember Cho or the details of his case.
But he said Cho most likely would have been ordered
to seek treatment at Virginia Tech's Cook Counseling
Center.

The court doesn't follow up because ''we have no
authority,'' Teel said.

Virginia Tech mental health officials would not discuss
Cho's case because of privacy laws.

Virginia law says community services boards ''shall
recommend a specific course of treatment and programs''
for people such as Cho who are ordered to receive outpatient
treatment. It also says these boards ''shall monitor
the person's compliance.''

''That's news to us,'' said Mike Wade of the New River
Valley Community Services Board.

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13) ‘The Mad Man Chronicles‘
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
April 21, 2007
Prison Radio
Via Email from: Howard Keylor
howardkeylor@comcast.net

How does the nation continually find itself in a pit
of its own making, time and time again? We’ve seen
the blunders of the 20th century that can be encapsulated
by a word, or a brief phrase: the Bay of Pigs, Pearl
Harbor, Watergate, Vietnam (just to name a few).

In each of these instances, extremely smart and educated
people decided to invade, or failed to plan, or ordered
illegal acts—all because they often didn’t hear,
or considered, an alternative viewpoint.

This is a feature of elite decision making, when small,
insular groups, usually imbued with great political
power, fail to look out the window, or open the door,
or expand their perspectives.

Vietnam was begun on little more than a whim; an attempt
to aid a white colonial power (France) that suffered
a crippling defeat at Dienbienphu.

It was almost an imperial afterthought, a fly on the
buttocks of an elephant, in the minds of politicians
in the White House, and generals in the Pentagon.

It was (obviously) more, because of the resistance
of the Vietnamese people.

Psychologist Irving L. Janis wrote a book, and several
articles about this phenomenon, which he called
groupthink, an idea he took from George Orwell‚s 1984,
and when examining the fiasco that was the Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba, came to the six following defects
in government thinking:

First, the group‚s discussions were limited to a few
alternatives (often only two) without a survey of the
full range of alternatives.

Second, the members failed to re-examine their initial
decision-making from the standpoint of non-obvious
drawbacks that had not been originally considered.

Third, they neglected courses of action initially
evaluated as unsatisfactory; they almost never
discussed whether they had overlooked any non-obvious
gains.

Fourth, members make little or no attempt to obtain
information from experts who could supply sound
estimates of losses and gains to be expected from
alternative courses.

Fifth, selective bias was shown in the way the
members reacted to information and judgment from
experts, the media and outside critics; they were
only interested in the facts and opinions that
supported their preferred policy.

Finally, they spent little time deliberating how
the policy might be hindered by bureaucratic inertia,
sabotaged by political opponents or derailed by the
accidents that happen to the best of well-laid plans.
Consequently, they failed to work out contingency
plans to cope with foreseeable setbacks to softheaded
thinking.

(Fr.: Janis, I. L., “Groupthink;” Kressel,
Neil J., ed. Political Psychology: Classic and
Contemporary Readings (NY.: Paragon House, 1993, p. 362.)

Three decades later, and neocon dreamers called Iraq
a “cakewalk.” Hardly that. And like Vietnam, many
people knew it was over years before U.S. diplomats
affixed their signatures to dotted lines. Several
days ago, an American Senator said, in an unguarded
moment, that the “Iraq war is lost.”

Amid right-wing protests the Senator has begun to
wobble-to, in Senate-speak, amend his remarks.
During the height of the Vietnam War, when the U.S.
was dropping unprecedented bombs on Southeast Asia,
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told a Senate
committee that such bombings were ineffective.
President L.B. Johnson was livid, and told members
of his White House staff that McNamara was playing
into the hands of the enemy.

Sound familiar?

We’ve been here before-isn’t it time to change the
channel of Mad TV?

-MAJ

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14) Hundreds Are Arrested in Post-Election Riots Across France
By CRAIG S. SMITH
May 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/world/europe/08protests.html

PARIS, May 7 — Violent protests against the election
of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France ended early
Monday after hundreds of people were arrested, hundreds
of cars gutted, and hundreds of windows smashed in several
cities across France.

Many people fear that the violence is just a taste
of what is to come if Mr. Sarkozy makes good on his
campaign promises to push through divisive legislation
during his first 100 days in office.

Agence France-Presse, citing figures from national
police headquarters, said that 730 cars had been set
afire overnight, 35 in Paris, and that 592 people
had been arrested, 79 in the capital. It said 78 police
officers had been injured.

Some of the most concentrated violence took place
in Paris at the Place de la Bastille, where police
officers fired volley after volley of tear gas cluster
grenades that looked like fireworks before descending
on the crowds. At one point, the square was thick with
white tear gas, reflecting the orange glow of a car
fire while silhouetted youths heaved paving stones
at tight formations of armored riot police officers.

But there was also violence elsewhere in the capital,
leaving bus stop shelters shattered and slogans like
“Sarkozy Fascist” scrawled on walls around the city.

While Mr. Sarkozy is most hated by minority youths
in the country’s poor housing projects on the
outskirts of major cities over his law-and-order
crackdowns and demeaning comments, most of the
violence took place in city centers. Reuters
quoted an internal police memo that said there
had not been “any large demonstrations of urban
violence in sensitive neighborhoods.”

In Paris, at least, most protesters seemed to be
of European background and below age 30, similar
to crowds that took to the streets last year to
protest a labor law that would have made it easier
for companies to fire young workers.

Those protests eventually led to repeal of the law
and ended Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s
chances of running for president.

Mr. Sarkozy risks facing even greater unrest with
his proposed legislation. One measure would require
public service workers’ unions to ensure a certain
level of operation during strikes — for transportation,
in particular.

The provision would take the sharpest teeth out of
France’s unions, which rely on their ability to block
transportation to put pressure on the government.
Though less than 10 percent of the French work force
is unionized, the unions’ call to action is often met
with support from groups in many sectors of society
— including youths.

Already, France’s largest union syndicates — the
C.F.D.T. and the C.G.T., which have their thumbs
on public transportation and utilities — are warning
Mr. Sarkozy to expect people in the streets if he tries
push through some of the measures he has said he will
pursue in his first 100 days, including limiting
unions’ ability to strike.

“If the government wants to pass reforms by force
during the summer, it risks a big reaction by workers,”
said Michel Grignard, national secretary of the C.F.D.T.,
in an interview before Sunday’s vote.

Given Mr. Sarkozy’s lack of popularity among the
country’s youth, any mass demonstration against his
policies would be likely to draw young people into
the streets, creating the conditions for even more
violent clashes.

In addition to the post-election violence in Paris,
incidents were reported in Lyon, in the southeast,
and Toulouse, in the south. In addition, bus shelters
were smashed in Lille, in the north, and a school was
set on fire in Évry, a Paris suburb, Reuters reported.
In the northern region around Lille, it reported that
about 100 cars were set on fire.

Reuters also quoted the director of public security
for the Loire-Atlantique region as saying that 26 people
were held for questioning and six police officers were
slightly injured during an anti-Sarkozy rally in Nantes.
In the northern city of Caen, four police officers were
hurt, and some people tried to set a local Sarkozy
campaign office on fire.

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15) Los Angeles Punishes Police Official
Over Clash at Demonstration
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
May 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/08california.html?ref=us

LOS ANGELES, May 7 — The city’s mayor and its police chief
said Monday that one of the highest-ranking officials
in the Police Department would be demoted and transferred
in the wake of a violent confrontation between officers
and demonstrators at an immigration rally last week.

The police official, Deputy Chief Cayler Carter Jr.,
a 30-year veteran of the department, will be reduced
one rank, to commander, and moved out of the Central
Bureau, which he currently heads.

Mr. Carter has been ordered to work from home while
investigations into the episode proceed. He was the
highest-ranking police official present last Tuesday
when officers, in response to a group of agitators
who were trying to provoke them with taunts and
thrown objects, fired 148 rubber bullets and used
other forceful tactics to break up the immigration
rally, in MacArthur Park. Several spectators and
journalists were injured, as were a number
of officers.

The second in command at the scene, Cmdr. Louis Gray,
will also be transferred out of the Central Bureau,
a 1,700-member unit that, according to the department’s
Web site, serves more than a million residents in an
area roughly the size of the District of Columbia.

“I have to be comfortable with the leadership around
me,” William J. Bratton, the police chief, said at
a City Hall news conference with Mayor Antonio R.
Villaraigosa.

The demotion of the two officials came a day after
60 members of an elite squad, the Metropolitan Division,
were removed from street duty as a result of the clash.
Mr. Bratton said they were unlikely to return to the
division, made up of highly skilled, specialized
officers who are trained in relative isolation from
neighborhood streets and are on guard for riot
conditions.

The episode at MacArthur Park underscored problems
that have continued to dog the department deep into
the term of Mr. Bratton, who rode into town five
years ago with a plan to reduce crime, improve the
department’s relationship with the city’s myriad
ethnic groups and change its essential culture.

Still, the swiftness of Monday’s response by him
and Mr. Villaraigosa, and their profuse apologies
in the last few days, signaled their determination
to break with the department’s long history of
disproportionate response to events on the street
and defensiveness to criticism.

That the move against the department officials
was announced at City Hall, by the mayor and the
police chief together, was a sign that Mr. Bratton,
whose appointment is up for renewal this summer,
enjoys the unqualified support of Mr. Villaraigosa.

The civilians who oversee the department also made
their support clear. “I personally still have
confidence in Chief Bratton,” John W. Mack,
president of the Board of Police Commissioners,
said at the news conference.

Mr. Mack will play a major role in whether Mr. Bratton
gets a second term. And although he said he viewed
the events in MacArthur Park as “a major setback
for the department,” he praised the chief for not
being defensive about the resulting criticism.

Mr. Villaraigosa, who was out of the country on
the day of the rally, appeared eager Monday to
demonstrate that he was firmly in control of his
city and the way the department polices it.

“Accountability begins at the top,” Mr. Villaraigosa
said, adding: “Let me be clear about this. When I say
accountability starts at the top, it starts with me.
Today we’re taking decisive action.”

Though the outcome of several investigations is pending,
it appears that a group of roughly 50 agitators,
throwing bottles at the police, were pushed by them
into the park among nonviolent protesters, rather than
being isolated and confined. What followed, videos of
the demonstration suggest, were widespread and fairly
random acts of aggressive police tactics against a broad
swath of people in the park, including reporters.

“You see in the highly specialized, aggressive units
the lack of judgment about appropriate and proportionate
use of force,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer
who, appointed by Mr. Bratton and the civilian commissioners,
led a committee that studied the widely publicized
corruption in the department’s Rampart Division.

Ms. Rice said she was glad the department’s leadership
had taken a firm stand. Referring to a former Los Angeles
police chief known for tough methods, she said, “It is
important to send a strong signal that this lack of judgment
and this mindless kind of tactic may have been O.K. under
Daryl Gates, but it’s not O.K. in 21st-century L.A.”

“The question for me, though,” she added, “is not the
individuals who get disciplined, but do they understand
the mentality that led them to do what they did?”

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16) Sale of Carbon Credits Helping Land-Rich, but Cash-Poor, Tribes
By JIM ROBBINS
May 8, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/science/earth/08carb.html?ref=business

LAPWAI, Idaho — On the Nez Perce reservation here, land that
was cleared in the 19th century for farming is being converted
back to forest, in part to sell the trees’ ability to
sequester carbon.

“These forests are a carbon crop,” Brian Kummett, a forester
for the Nez Perce tribal forestry division, said as he surveyed
a vast field studded with recently planted ponderosa pine,
Douglas fir and larch saplings. “We can sell the rights from
the time the forest is planted to the time it’s harvested,
80 or 120 years down the road.”

The market for carbon credits promises to be a boon for
some land-rich but cash-poor tribes. Selling carbon
sequestration credits early in the growth of a forest
lets the tribe realize some money more quickly, rather
than waiting for decades for the harvest.

Carbon is a constituent of heat-trapping gases like carbon
dioxide. Trees can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and store the carbon in their tissue. Companies may be
able to offset the carbon dioxide they send into the
atmosphere by paying for projects that pull carbon out
of the atmosphere.

The Nez Perce are participating in an Indian tribe “carbon
portfolio” being created by the National Carbon Offset
Coalition in Butte, Mont., an organization supported
largely by the Energy Department.

“They have a long-term management, large acreage and
trained staff,” said Ted Dodge, executive director
of the coalition.

Bob Gruenig, senior policy analyst for the National Tribal
Environmental Council in Albuquerque, said the tribes
“see climate change as a really big issue.”

“They are seeing changes in the land, changes in plants
and changes in the migration of wildlife,” he said.

New forests are just part of the carbon credits that
are being sold on reservations and at other places.
In the last few weeks, the Chicago Carbon Exchange
has approved selling carbon sequestration credits
on rangeland and no-till agricultural fields.

An acre of pine forest captures and holds one to
two metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which
it uses for photosynthesis. Untilled cropland holds
a third of a ton of carbon per acre, and rangeland
holds up to a fifth of a ton. The sequestered carbon
dioxide is measured by soil tests before and after
the planting.

The market for carbon sequestration in the United
States is voluntary. As a result, the demand has been
low compared with Europe, where emissions are now
restricted by law. The market also lacks uniform
standards, prompting some environmental campaigners
to question its credibility. Tribal carbon sales have
had mixed results since the first such sale in the
1990s, when the Confederated Tribes of the Colville
Reservation in Washington sold rights to its land
for 25 cents a metric ton.

The Nez Perce had a major deal fall through a few
years ago. It would have paid the tribe $1.50 a ton
for 200,000 tons over 50 years and would have been
worth nearly $500,000. Experts estimate that a project
of that size would offset carbon equivalent to a year’s
emission from 500,000 cars.

Other tribes have found reason to grow carbon crops.
In Washington and Oregon, new coal-fired power plants
are required to offset their emissions. So the Lummi
in northwestern Washington bought 1,700 acres that
had been logged, reforested the land and sold
sequestration rights to a power company.

Officials say studies showing that recent warming
is almost certainly caused by accumulating greenhouse
gases are increasing support for “cap and trade” rules
that limit the carbon dioxide a site can emit. If
a factory produces less than the cap, it can sell
the surplus rights to emit carbon to other companies.
If a plant exceeds the limit, it has to buy the right
to emit more gases from another company or find other
methods to sequester carbon equal to what it is releasing.

Carbon dioxide credits now sell for about $4 a metric
ton. Mandatory restrictions, experts say, could increase
the price to $12 or higher. In Europe, the cost of
a credit sold for sequestering carbon dioxide has
reached $20, and even $30, a ton.

“We need $12 to $15 carbon to really make this work,”
Mr. Dodge said. “We’re doing it on small margins. But
to bring in a lot more landowners, you need better prices.”

Even so, “Things are changing,” said Sean Clark, director
of offset programs for the Climate Trust, a group
in Portland, Ore., that buys and sells carbon credits.
“The last 12 months have been growing exponentially.”

The Nez Perce tribe has 4,000 acres that it has planted
with trees in 29 projects across the 75,000-acre reservation.
The tribe had hoped to sell its carbon-fixing rights
to European companies. But because the United States
has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, it cannot, even
though it is considered a sovereign nation.

The sale of carbon sequestration rights has enhanced land
conservation. Plants on rangeland where carbon rights have
been sold, for example, have to be kept healthy to assure
that they hold carbon. That means that they have to be
grazed by a specific number of cows in a certain way.
Forests have to be managed sustainably.

In most cases, third parties inspect and verify terms
of the sale.

Carbon purchasers do not rely on one type of carbon
sequestration, but a portfolio of different types sold
by aggregators like the Offset Coalition or the Climate
Trust. A company does not buy just one forested area,
for example, but several, along with, perhaps, rangeland
and cropland. In addition to biological sequestration,
they might pay to capture methane at landfills, switch
from diesel to other less polluting emissions or pay
for energy efficient light bulbs.

“It’s like a mutual fund,” Mr. Kummett said. “You spread
out your risk.”

Because the market for carbon fixing is being sorted out,
“uncertainty is the name of the game,” Mr. Clark said.

Many rules depend on how well the contracts are written
and what the plans are for problems. “If a beetle
infestation hits your forest stand and all the tree
are killed, all of the carbon gets re-emitted,”
Mr. Clark said. “Then what?”

Something like that happened to the Confederate Salish
and Kootenai Tribes in Montana. In 2001, they sold the
sequestration rights to 250 acres to a company in London.
The trees died from drought and had to be replanted.

Part of what gives tribal sequestration rights their
value is low “permanence risk.” Commonly held by
a tribal government, the land will not be sold, and
long-term leases are more secure.

One day geological sequestration — pumping captured and
liquefied carbon dioxide into the ground — will probably
replace biological sequestration. But at this point,
biology is the only affordable alternative.

“Biological sequestration credits are a bridge,” Mr. Dodge
said. “We can bring them to the table now, but technology
may pass us by.”

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17) Bring them home
Iraqis need political reconciliation, not occupation;
and U.S. troops shouldn't referee a civil war.
May 6, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-iraq6may06,0,6475755.story

WHATEVER THE future holds, the United States has not "lost" and
cannot "lose" Iraq. It was never ours in the first place. And however
history will judge the war, some key U.S. goals have been
accomplished: Saddam Hussein has been ousted, tried and executed;
Iraqis have held three elections, adopted a constitution and
established a rudimentary democracy.

But what now? After four years of war, more than $350 billion spent
and 3,363 U.S. soldiers killed and 24,310 wounded, it seems
increasingly obvious that an Iraqi political settlement cannot be
achieved in the shadow of an indefinite foreign occupation. The U.S.
military presence - opposed by more than three-quarters of Iraqis -
inflames terrorism and delays what should be the primary and most
pressing goal: meaningful reconciliation among the Sunnis, Shiites
and Kurds.

This newspaper reluctantly endorsed the U.S. troop surge as the last,
best hope for stabilizing conditions so that the elected Iraqi
government could assume full responsibility for its affairs. But we
also warned that the troops should not be used to referee a civil
war. That, regrettably, is what has happened.

The mire deepens against a backdrop of domestic U.S. politics in
which support for the ill-defined mission wanes by the week. Better
to begin planning a careful, strategic withdrawal from Iraq now,
based on the strategies laid out by the Iraq Study Group, than allow
for the 2008 campaign season to create a precipitous pullout.

With four out of five additional battalions now in place, there is no
reason to believe that the surge will help bring about an end to what
is, in fact, a multifaceted civil war. The only bright spot is in Al
Anbar province, where Sunni tribal leaders have joined U.S. forces in
the fight against foreign Al Qaeda fighters. They deserve our
continuing support. But as long as civil war rages in Iraq, even the
post-surge force of 160,000 troops cannot achieve more than marginal
progress.

As Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. war commander, has
acknowledged, the solution to Iraq's problems cannot be military.
Yet political progress has been backsliding. It was only frantic White
House intervention last week that prevented the resignation of the
last Sunni leaders in the Shiite-dominated Cabinet of Prime Minister
Nouri Maliki. The Sunnis say the Maliki government is sectarian,
corrupt and incompetent; and they're right. The Bush administration
should convene national peace and reconciliation talks as early as
possible - say June 1. All of Iraq's parties, tribes, ethnic and
sectarian factions, except for Al Qaeda, should be invited to the
table.

But an important element needs to be taken off the table: American
blood. The U.S. should immediately declare its intention to begin a
gradual troop drawdown, starting no later than the fall. The pace of
the withdrawal must be flexible, to reflect progress or requests by
the Iraqis and the military's commanders. The precise date for
completing the withdrawal need not be announced, but the assumption
should be that combat troops would depart by the end of 2009. Iraqi
political compromise is more likely to come when Washington is no
longer backing the stronger (Shiite) party. U.S. troops could then be
repositioned to better wage the long-term struggle against Islamic
extremism.

We are not naive. U.S. withdrawal, whether concluded next year or
five years from now, entails grave risks. But so does U.S.
occupation. The question is how best to manage the risks.

First, there is the grim prospect of a bloodbath in Iraq. But the
best way to forestall slaughter is political reconciliation, not
military occupation. Second is the worry that Al Qaeda will establish
a beachhead in Al Anbar. Yet Iraqis have already turned against the
foreign fighters. Third, the neighbors may meddle. Alarmists fear an
Iranian proxy state in Baghdad; southern Iraq is already allied with
Tehran. But Iraq's neighbors are more likely to be helpful once
withdrawal is assured, and instability is not in their interests,
especially without a U.S. occupier to bleed.

Having invested so much in Iraq, Americans are likely to find
disengagement almost as painful as war. But the longer we delay
planning for the inevitable, the worse the outcome is likely to be.
The time has come to leave.

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18) REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF
THE TRAGEDY THREATENING OUR SPECIES
Fidel Castro Ruz May 7, 2007, 5:42 p.m.
www.marxmail.org

I cannot speak as an economist or a scientist. I simply speak
as a politician who wishes to unravel the economists' and
scientists' arguments one way or another. I also try to
sense the motivations of each one of those who make
statements on these matters. Just twenty-two years ago,
here in Havana, we had a great number of meetings with
political, union, peasant and student leaders invited
to our country as representatives of these sectors.
They all agreed that the most important problem at that
time was the enormous foreign debt accumulated by the
nations of Latin America in 1985. That debt amounted
to 350 billion dollars. The dollar then had a higher
purchasing power than it does today.

A copy of the outcome of those meetings was sent to
all the world governments, of course with some
exceptions, because it might have seemed insulting.
At that time, the petrodollars had flooded the market
and the large transnational banks were virtually
demanding that the countries accept high loans.
Needless to say, the people responsible for the
economy had taken on those commitments without
consulting anybody. That period coincided with the
presence of the most repressive and bloody governments
this continent has ever suffered, installed by imperialism.
Large sums were spent on weapons, luxuries and consumer
goods. The subsequent debt grew to 800 billion dollars
while today's catastrophic dangers were being hatched,
the dangers that weigh upon a population that doubled
in just two decades and along with it, the number of
those condemned to a life of extreme poverty. Today,
in the Latin American region, the difference between
the most favored population and the one with the lowest
income is the greatest in the world.

Many years before the subjects of today's debates were
center stage, the struggles of the Third World focused
on equally agonizing problems like the unequal exchange.
Year after year it was discovered that the price
of the industrialized nations' exports, usually
manufactured with our raw materials, would unilaterally
grow while our basic exports remained unchanged. The price
of coffee and cacao, just to mention two examples, was
approximately 2,000 dollars a ton. A cup of coffee or
a chocolate milkshake could be bought in cities like
New York for a few cents; today, these cost several
dollars, perhaps 30 or 40 times what they cost back then.
Today, the purchase of a tractor, a truck or medical
equipment require several times the volume of products
that was needed to import them back then; jute,
henequen and other Third World produced fibers that
were substituted by synthetic ones succumbed to the
same fate. In the meantime, tanned hides, rubber and
natural fibers used in many textiles were being replaced
by synthetic materials derived from the sophisticated
petrochemical industry while sugar prices hit rock bottom,
crushed by the large subsidies granted by the industrialized
countries to their agricultural sector.

The former colonies or neocolonies that had been promised
a glowing future after World War II had not yet awakened
from the Bretton Woods dream. From top to bottom, the
system had been designed for exploitation and plundering.

When consciousness was beginning to be roused, the other
extremely adverse factors had not yet surfaced, such as
the undreamed-of squandering of energy that industrialized
countries had fallen prey to. They were paying less than
two dollars a barrel of oil. The source of fuel, with the
exception of the United States where it was very abundant,
was basically in Third World countries, chiefly in the
Middle East but also in Mexico, Venezuela, and later in
Africa. But not all of the countries that by virtue of
yet another white lie classified as "developing countries"
were oil producers, since 82 of them are among the poorest
and as a rule they must import oil. A terrible situation
awaits them if food stuffs are to be transformed into
biofuels or agrifuels, as the peasant and native movements
in our region prefer to call them.

Thirty years ago, the idea of global warming hanging over
our species' life like a sword of Damocles was not even
known by the immense majority of the inhabitants of our
planet; even today there is great ignorance and confusion
about these issues. If we listen to the spokesmen of the
transnationals and their media, we are living in the best
of all possible worlds: an economy ruled by the market,
plus transnational capital, plus sophisticated technology
equals a constant growth of productivity, higher GDP,
higher living standards and every dream of the human
species come true; the state should not interfere with
anything, it should not even exist, other than as an
instrument of the large financial capital.

But reality is hard-headed. Germany, one of the most
highly industrialized countries in the world, loses
sleep over its 10 percent unemployment. The toughest
and least attractive jobs are taken by immigrants who,
desperate in their growing poverty, break into
industrialized Europe through any possible chink.
Apparently, nobody is taking note of the number of
inhabitants on our planet, growing precisely in the
undeveloped countries.

More than 700 representatives of social organizations
have just been meeting in Havana to discuss various
issues raised in this reflection. Many of them set
out their points of view and left indelible impressions
on us. There is plenty of material to reflect upon
as well as new events happening every day.

Even now, as a consequence of liberating a terrorist
monster, two young men, who were fulfilling their legal
duty in the Active Military Service, anx