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Local Actions and Campaigns: Good Anti-War Calendars: Next BAUAW Meeting: |
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Friday, September 10, 2004
YES ON PROP. N-BAUAW NEWSLETTER
Dear readers,
At our meeting last evening we resolved to throw our efforts
in the coming weeks before the elections, into the Proposition N
antiwar campaign in San Francisco.
Proposition N reads:
"It is the Policy of the people of the City and County of San
Francisco that: The Federal government should take immediate
steps to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and bring our troops
safely home now."
To this end we have already entered a ballot argument in support
of Prop. N at a cost of over $600.00 and have contributed an
additional $50.00 to the Prop. N campaign committee last evening.
However our funds are getting very low. We wish to publish material
so that we can cover the city with Yes on Prop N material.
Very few people even know about the initiative yet. We need to
change this and make it a central focus for the movement here.
There should be window signs in every window on every block
urging a YES on N vote.
We are a voluntary organization and have no outside funding
other than contributions from folks like you. We have no paid
staff or office so all the money we get is spent on antiwar
organizing efforts-posters, brochures, flyers, forums, teach-ins,
street meetings and mailings-and now we want to focus on
YES on N material and community organizing up until the
elections.
This means we need money for printed material and
for sound permits (at $60.00 each) for community street meetings,
etc., to get out the YES on N vote.
We are appealing to our readers to make a financial contribution to
help us in this work.
Please send a contribution to:
Bay Area United Against War
P.O. Box 318021
San Francisco, CA 94131-8021
If you can send an amount over $50.00 and wish to take a
tax deduction then make your check payable to:
Bay Area United Against War/NVM
P.O. Box 318021
San Francisco, CA 94131-8021
We want to ensure nothing less than a landslide victory for
Proposition N in San Francisco this year and we need your support!
Peace and solidarity,
BAUAW
P.S. We will be launching our redesigned web site soon with links
to all major antiwar groups. The site will include all the latest news
and information of actions and activity in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Keep a lookout for the opening launch soon!
The next BAUAW meeting will be:
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 7 p.m.
1380 VALENCIA STREET
(BETWEEN 24TH & 25TH STREETS, S.F.)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) U.S. Hid Dozens of Iraqi
Prisoners, Investigators Say
By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 05:41 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6197512&src=eDialog/GetContent§ion=news
2) New Documents Reveal that USAID Provided $2.3 Million
to Venezuela's Opposition in 2003
By: Eva Golinger - Venezuelafoia.info
New York, September 8, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?newsno=1360
3) Ashcroft Strikes Out, Third Federal Court Rules
Federal Abortion Ban is Unconstitutional
and Cannot Be Enforced
Decision Echoes Rulings in San Francisco and New York
NEW YORK CITY
September 8, 2004
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/pr/040908_Ashcroft.html
4) Gaza Emergency
"Barbara Lubin"
Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:12:16 -0700 (PDT)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) U.S. Hid Dozens of Iraqi
Prisoners, Investigators Say
By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 05:41 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6197512&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United
may have kept up to 100 "ghost
detainees" in Iraq off the books and
concealed from Red Cross observers, a far
higher number than previously reported,
an Army general told Congress on
Thursday.
Estimates were rough because the CIA has
withheld documents on concealed
detainees, Army generals who investigated
U.S. abuses of Iraqi prisoners told
lawmakers. Republican and Democratic
senators blasted the CIA, and called for it to
turn over the material.
At a Senate committee hearing, Gen. Paul
Kern, commander of the U.S. Army Materiel
Command, said he believed the number of
ghost detainees held in violation of
Geneva Convention protections was "in the
dozens to perhaps up to 100," far
surpassing the eight people identified
in an Army report.
Maj. Gen. George Fay, deputy commander
at the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security
Command, said he expected it may be
two dozen or more. "We were not able to get
documentation from the Central Intelligence
Agency to answer those types of
questions. So we really don't know the
volume," he said.
The Geneva Conventions require countries
to disclose information on prisoners to
the International Committee of the Red
Cross, which monitors their treatment.
The Senate and House of Representatives
Armed Services Committees held hearings
on an Army probe of the role of military
intelligence in abuses at Abu Ghraib prison
near Baghdad, as well as broader findings
on U.S. mistreatment of prisoners by an
independent panel headed by former Defense
Secretary James Schlesinger.
The reports depicted more widespread
abuses than the acts of a handful of soldiers
accused when the images of horrific
sexual and physical humiliation and torture at
the Abu Ghraib prison first came to light last spring.
CIA CRITICIZED
While the panel led by Schlesinger blamed
top Pentagon civilian and military leaders
for contributing to a climate that led to
the sadistic treatment of detainees,
Schlesinger said U.S. forces in Iraq had
behaved far better overall than in previous
wars, including World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
He said the 66 cases of confirmed
abuse, although higher than the Bush
administration first disclosed, "is a s
mall number -- comparing quite well ... with
previous wars."
Senators called the CIA's failure so far
to turn over information sought by Army
investigators unacceptable.
"The situation with the CIA and ghost
soldiers is beginning to look like a bad movie,"
said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican.
"I think that this is something that needs
to be asked ... of the incoming director of
the CIA," McCain said, referring to Rep.
Porter Goss, a Florida Republican tapped by
President Bush to run the CIA.
The Senate Intelligence Committee
scheduled a confirmation hearing for Goss on
Sept. 14.
Warner said the Intelligence Committee
also was pressing the CIA for information,
and said the Armed Services Committee
would more closely examine the ghost
detainees issue.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the
agency's inspector general was conducting
"a comprehensive review of the agency's
involvement in detention and interrogation
activities," and the agency was "determined
to examine thoroughly any allegations of
abuse."
The findings of the Army investigation,
headed by Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones
and released in August, listed 44 instances
of prisoner abuse, 13 directly involving
interrogations.
It said 27 military intelligence personnel --
23 soldiers and four contractors --
directly took part in abuse or induced
others to do so, while another eight -- six
soldiers and two contractors -- failed to
report abuse they had witnessed. All have
been recommended for possible criminal charges.
Lawmakers said those higher up the chain
of command also must be held
accountable for failing in key duties.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina
Republican, worried that the "only people that
are court-martialed here are privates and
sergeants ... Dereliction of duty will be
redefined one way or the other after this
investigation." (Additional reporting by Will
Dunham, Jim Wolf and Tabassum Zakaria)
(c) Copyright Reuters 2004.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) New Documents Reveal that USAID Provided $2.3 Million
to Venezuela's Opposition in 2003
By: Eva Golinger - Venezuelafoia.info
New York, September 8, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?newsno=1360
New York, September 8, 2004-
Documents recently obtained from the U.S.
Department of State under the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by
www.venezuelafoia.info
than $5 million annually during the
past two years was given by the United
States Agency for International Development
(USAID) to various organizations in Venezuela,
many of which are aligned with the
opposition. One of the
key groups collaborating with
USAID is Súmate, the organization that promoted the
recall referendum campaign against
President Hugo Chávez and is now rejecting the
results that have been certified by the
most credible international observers and even
by the U.S. government. Súmate,
despite its numerous undemocratic positions and
actions, has also been a recipient of
U.S. government funds from the National
Endowment for Democracy in 2003.
However, these new documents
obtained by Venezuelafoia.info have all been
censored by the U.S. Government
despite the use of the FOIA, which intends to
ensure transparency in U.S. Government
operations. The Department of State has
withheld the names of the organizations
receiving financing from USAID by
misapplying a FOIA exemption that is
intended to protect "personnel and medical
files" of individuals. Such clear censorship
indicates that USAID and the U.S.
Government clearly have something to hide
regarding their collaborations with the
Venezuelan opposition. Despite USAID's
ongoing crusade to encourage transparency
in foreign governments, the withholding
of information that does not fall under any
available exemptions clearly demonstrates
a double standard applied by the U.S.
Government in this case.
USAID is financed by the U.S. Congress and
is controlled by the Department of State.
Founded by President John F. Kennedy in
1961, USAID was established as a fund
dedicated to humanitarian intervention around
the world. Despite Kennedy's humane
intentions, USAID has more recently been
used, in many instances, as a mechanism to
promote the interests of the U.S. in strategically
important countries around the
world. In the case of Venezuela, USAID
maintains a private contractor in Caracas
monitoring and facilitating its projects
and funds and also has a local operating
center, the Office of Transition Initiatives
(OTI) that was established in 2002, after the
failed coup d'etat against President Chávez.
The private contractor, Development
Alternatives, inc. (DAI), manages and
supervises grants approved by USAID to
Venezuelan organizations.
Under a program entitled Venezuela: Initiative
to Build Confidence, DAI has awarded
67 grants to Venezuelan organizations in
various sectors and areas of interest. These
grants equal $2.3 million, just during 2003.
In total, DAI 's program in Venezuela
counts on $10,000,000 in funding for the
period August 2002 through August 2004
-$5 million annually to "focus on common
goals for the future of Venezuela".
According to the documents obtained
under FOIA and DAI's project description
(available on www.dai.com/about_dai/about_fs.htm
none of the project grants or programs
have been in collaboration with the
Venezuelan government.
In fact, many of the same recipients of U.S.
government funds through the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) have
also received USAID funding through DAI.
Despite the illegal withholding of names
on the USAID-DAI grants, one document
apparently was skipped, at least in part.
The name, Súmate appears on a grant
intended to encourage "electoral participation"
in the recall referendum, citing
$84,840 as the total grant amount.
Combined with the NED grant of $53,400 given to
Súmate in 2003-2004, the organization
that is now crying fraud about the recall
referendum against President Chávez, the
results of which have been recognized as
absolutely credible by the Carter Center
and the U.S. Department of State, has
received, at minimum, more than $200,000
in just one year for promoting its
attempts to remove Venezuela's President
from office.
Other recipients of USAID funds through
DAI which are apparent in the censored
documents include the organization
Liderazgo y Visión for its project, "Un Sueño para
Venezuela", ("A Dream for Venezuela") a
project created in 2002-2003 with the intent
of offering an alternative vision and agenda
for those opposing President Chávez's
administration. Liderazgo y Visión has also
been a recipient of NED funds over the
past few years. More than 6 organizations
have been given funding for political and
social formation and development in Petare,
a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of
Caracas, in the Miranda State. The work in
Petare and the more than $200,000 that
have been funneled into that neighborhood
in the past year, appear to have been
aimed at converting a community that was
traditionally pro-Chávez, into one that
supports the opposition. The recall referendum
results from August 15, 2004 show
the opposition gaining substantial numbers
in Petare, and Miranda state was one of
only two states in the entire nation that
gave victory to the opposition in the
referendum.
One grant from USAID/DAI focuses on
the creation of radio and television
commercials during the December 2002-
February 2003 strike imposed by the
opposition, during which the private media
dedicated its airwaves 24-7 to opposition
propaganda. One of the most striking aspects
of the media's dedication to the strike
was the use of anti-Chávez commercials to
indoctrinate viewers' opinions on
Venezuela's political situation. The USAID/DAI
grant shows funding originating from
the U.S. government for some of these
anti-Chávez commercials, collaborating with
former Fedecámaras President Carlos
Fernandez, who was one of the leaders of the
strike, in the project.
These new documents from USAID provide
evidence for a clear focus on two major
projects in Venezuela: The Recall Referendum
and the Formation of a National
Agenda that would serve as a transitional
government post-Chávez (assuming the
referendum was won by the opposition).
The documents are available for public
viewing on www.venezuelafoia.info
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) Ashcroft Strikes Out, Third Federal Court Rules
Federal Abortion Ban is Unconstitutional
and Cannot Be Enforced
Decision Echoes Rulings in San Francisco and New York
NEW YORK CITY
September 8, 2004
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/pr/040908_Ashcroft.html
NEW YORK CITY - In the third of three
federal court rulings, a Nebraska judge has
struck down the federal abortion ban passed
by Congress last October and signed by
President Bush. Planned Parenthood
Federation of America (PPFA) applauded the
ruling issued today in Carhart v. Ashcroft .
"Today's ruling should be a cease and desist
order for Attorney General Ashcroft and
his taxpayer-funded anti-choice pursuits,"
PPFA President Gloria Feldt said. "Like the
San Francisco and New York courts, the
Nebraska court recognized that women's
health, medical privacy and the U.S.
Constitution trump anti-choice ideology. Women
and doctors should make private, personal
health care decisions - not John Ashcroft
or any other politician."
On June 1, 2004, in Planned Parenthood
Federation of America v. Ashcroft, a federal
court in northern California struck down
the federal abortion ban. In doing so, the
federal court ruled that Attorney General
Ashcroft cannot enforce the federal abortion
ban against any Planned Parenthood affiliate,
or its "officers, agents, servants,
employees, [or] contractors," whether the
abortion is performed in a facility owned or
operated by Planned Parenthood or elsewhere.
On August 26, the federal court in New
York City struck down the ban again in
National Abortion Federation (NAF) v. Ashcroft .
All three cases included the overwhelming
testimony of highly respected ob/gyns
from around the country who testified that
this law would ban abortions as early as
12 to 15 weeks in pregnancy, abortions
they say are safe and among the best for
women's health. The ban would further fail
to safeguard women because it does not
contain an exception to protect their health.
The American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists (ACOG) and many other
major medical organizations join PPFA in
opposing the ban.
In an attempted sweeping invasion of
medical privacy earlier this year, Attorney
General John Ashcroft tried unsuccessfully
to obtain thousands of confidential
medical records of women who obtained
abortions. Among the records subpoenaed
were those from Planned Parenthood health
centers nationwide, but PPFA successfully
blocked the effort. Ashcroft's calculated
fishing expedition was in response to the
effort to block the federal abortion ban.
On March 29, 2003, three federal courts
began hearing legal challenges to the
"Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003," a
new law passed by Congress in October
2003 and signed by President Bush in
November 2003. The lawsuits were brought by
PPFA on behalf of Planned Parenthood
Golden Gate, the affiliate in San Francisco, and
the physicians, staff and patients of
Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide; the
American Civil Liberties Union and Wilmer
Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP on
behalf of the National Abortion Federation
and other doctors; and the Center for
Reproductive Rights (CRR) on behalf of
Dr. LeRoy Carhart and other doctors.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
is the nation's largest and most trusted
voluntary reproductive health organization.
We believe that everyone has the right to
choose when or whether to have a child -
and that every child should be wanted and
loved. Planned Parenthood affiliates operate
nearly 850 health centers nationwide,
providing medical services and sexuality
education for millions of women, men, and
teenagers each year.
Contact:
Colleen McCabe (212) 261-4729
Joel Lawson (202) 973-4880
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Gaza Emergency
"Barbara Lubin"
Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:12:16 -0700 (PDT)
All of us at the Middle East Children's Alliance are concerned, as I'm
sure you are, about the worsening situation in Palestine and
particularly the latest news coming out of northern Gaza. I, MECA's executi=
ve
director, spoke with a friend and doctor in Gaza City this morning and was =
told that 19 Palestinians had been admitted into the Al-Awda hospital
last night with serious injuries. The Israeli army has stated that this
an open ended invasion. We fear that this will become another operation
like those in Rafah and Beit Hanoun, leaving many more Palestinians
killed, injured, and homeless.
We felt we had to send out a message to our friends and supporters to
update you on the tragedies being paid for by our US tax dollars.
Please find below a number of excerpts with the links to full articles. We =
hope you will pass on this information to your friends and families.
Thank you,
Middle East Children's Alliance
901 Parker Street
Berkeley, California 94710
United States
No US Aid to Israel. End the Occupation.
Support Divestment and Sanctions.
From the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR):
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
files/PressR/English/2004/110-2004.htm "At the time of
writing, 4 Palestinians,
including a 10 year old child,
have been killed and 53 others, mostly children, have been injured by
the Israeli gunfire and shelling. PCHR's investigations strongly
indicate that Israeli troops used excessive lethal force against unarmed
Palestinian civilians, without adhering to the principles of proportionalit=
y
and distinction."
"...At approximately 12:00, Israeli troops indiscriminately shelled
[Jabalya] camp. As a result, 3 Palestinian civilians, including a child,
were killed."
"PCHR reminds the international community of Israeli violations of the
Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in
Time of War of 1949 (Fourth Geneva Convention), particularly article 33
which prohibits collective punishment, and article 147 which considers
"extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by
military necessity, and carried out unlawfully and wantonly" a grave
breach that may amount, in some circumstances, to be a war crime under
article 85-3 of Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Conventions."
10-Year Old Girl Hit in UNRWA Classroom by Israeli Gunfire
UNRWA Press Release- September 7 http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/
6b9f5e29011585b585256f08004f231b?OpenDocument At 07:45 10-year old Raghda
Adnan Al-Assar was struck in the head by
Israeli fire while sitting at her desk in UNRWA's Elementary C Girl's
School in Khan Younis camp. She is now in the European
Gaza Hospital where
she has undergone major surgery.
UNRWA's Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said: "The kind of live
firing into refugee camps that is so indiscriminate that it makes classroom=
s
dangerous for 10-year old children is totally unacceptable. UNRWA will
protest this violation of the sanctity of its school in the strongest
possible terms to the Israeli authorities."
Story about the extrajudicial assassination of a Palestinian at an
internet café in Jericho. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/09/
content_1962652.htm "A special Israeli undercover unit stormed
the West Bank city of Jericho Wednesday night and assassinated a
Palestinian member of Al Aqsa
martyrs brigades, Palestinian security sources said on Thursday.
"...Witnesses confirmed that the soldiers opened intensive gunfire
directly on Abedeia who tried to pull out from the café.
"Three of the café visitors were wounded by Israeli soldiers
who opened fire haphazardly in the café, added the witnesses."
What you can do:
-Invite MECA to speak to your community group, school, church,
synagogue, mosque, union, etc.
-Send a contribution to MECA for emergency medical aid
Donate online: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=1171
Checks can
be mailed to:
901 Parker Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
-Email this message to as many people as possible
-Tell your US senators and congress representatives to stop aid to
Israel www.congress.org
At our meeting last evening we resolved to throw our efforts
in the coming weeks before the elections, into the Proposition N
antiwar campaign in San Francisco.
Proposition N reads:
"It is the Policy of the people of the City and County of San
Francisco that: The Federal government should take immediate
steps to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and bring our troops
safely home now."
To this end we have already entered a ballot argument in support
of Prop. N at a cost of over $600.00 and have contributed an
additional $50.00 to the Prop. N campaign committee last evening.
However our funds are getting very low. We wish to publish material
so that we can cover the city with Yes on Prop N material.
Very few people even know about the initiative yet. We need to
change this and make it a central focus for the movement here.
There should be window signs in every window on every block
urging a YES on N vote.
We are a voluntary organization and have no outside funding
other than contributions from folks like you. We have no paid
staff or office so all the money we get is spent on antiwar
organizing efforts-posters, brochures, flyers, forums, teach-ins,
street meetings and mailings-and now we want to focus on
YES on N material and community organizing up until the
elections.
This means we need money for printed material and
for sound permits (at $60.00 each) for community street meetings,
etc., to get out the YES on N vote.
We are appealing to our readers to make a financial contribution to
help us in this work.
Please send a contribution to:
Bay Area United Against War
P.O. Box 318021
San Francisco, CA 94131-8021
If you can send an amount over $50.00 and wish to take a
tax deduction then make your check payable to:
Bay Area United Against War/NVM
P.O. Box 318021
San Francisco, CA 94131-8021
We want to ensure nothing less than a landslide victory for
Proposition N in San Francisco this year and we need your support!
Peace and solidarity,
BAUAW
P.S. We will be launching our redesigned web site soon with links
to all major antiwar groups. The site will include all the latest news
and information of actions and activity in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Keep a lookout for the opening launch soon!
The next BAUAW meeting will be:
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 7 p.m.
1380 VALENCIA STREET
(BETWEEN 24TH & 25TH STREETS, S.F.)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) U.S. Hid Dozens of Iraqi
Prisoners, Investigators Say
By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 05:41 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6197512&src=eDialog/GetContent§ion=news
2) New Documents Reveal that USAID Provided $2.3 Million
to Venezuela's Opposition in 2003
By: Eva Golinger - Venezuelafoia.info
New York, September 8, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?newsno=1360
3) Ashcroft Strikes Out, Third Federal Court Rules
Federal Abortion Ban is Unconstitutional
and Cannot Be Enforced
Decision Echoes Rulings in San Francisco and New York
NEW YORK CITY
September 8, 2004
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/pr/040908_Ashcroft.html
4) Gaza Emergency
"Barbara Lubin"
Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:12:16 -0700 (PDT)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) U.S. Hid Dozens of Iraqi
Prisoners, Investigators Say
By Vicki Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 05:41 PM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6197512&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United
may have kept up to 100 "ghost
detainees" in Iraq off the books and
concealed from Red Cross observers, a far
higher number than previously reported,
an Army general told Congress on
Thursday.
Estimates were rough because the CIA has
withheld documents on concealed
detainees, Army generals who investigated
U.S. abuses of Iraqi prisoners told
lawmakers. Republican and Democratic
senators blasted the CIA, and called for it to
turn over the material.
At a Senate committee hearing, Gen. Paul
Kern, commander of the U.S. Army Materiel
Command, said he believed the number of
ghost detainees held in violation of
Geneva Convention protections was "in the
dozens to perhaps up to 100," far
surpassing the eight people identified
in an Army report.
Maj. Gen. George Fay, deputy commander
at the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security
Command, said he expected it may be
two dozen or more. "We were not able to get
documentation from the Central Intelligence
Agency to answer those types of
questions. So we really don't know the
volume," he said.
The Geneva Conventions require countries
to disclose information on prisoners to
the International Committee of the Red
Cross, which monitors their treatment.
The Senate and House of Representatives
Armed Services Committees held hearings
on an Army probe of the role of military
intelligence in abuses at Abu Ghraib prison
near Baghdad, as well as broader findings
on U.S. mistreatment of prisoners by an
independent panel headed by former Defense
Secretary James Schlesinger.
The reports depicted more widespread
abuses than the acts of a handful of soldiers
accused when the images of horrific
sexual and physical humiliation and torture at
the Abu Ghraib prison first came to light last spring.
CIA CRITICIZED
While the panel led by Schlesinger blamed
top Pentagon civilian and military leaders
for contributing to a climate that led to
the sadistic treatment of detainees,
Schlesinger said U.S. forces in Iraq had
behaved far better overall than in previous
wars, including World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
He said the 66 cases of confirmed
abuse, although higher than the Bush
administration first disclosed, "is a s
mall number -- comparing quite well ... with
previous wars."
Senators called the CIA's failure so far
to turn over information sought by Army
investigators unacceptable.
"The situation with the CIA and ghost
soldiers is beginning to look like a bad movie,"
said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican.
"I think that this is something that needs
to be asked ... of the incoming director of
the CIA," McCain said, referring to Rep.
Porter Goss, a Florida Republican tapped by
President Bush to run the CIA.
The Senate Intelligence Committee
scheduled a confirmation hearing for Goss on
Sept. 14.
Warner said the Intelligence Committee
also was pressing the CIA for information,
and said the Armed Services Committee
would more closely examine the ghost
detainees issue.
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said the
agency's inspector general was conducting
"a comprehensive review of the agency's
involvement in detention and interrogation
activities," and the agency was "determined
to examine thoroughly any allegations of
abuse."
The findings of the Army investigation,
headed by Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones
and released in August, listed 44 instances
of prisoner abuse, 13 directly involving
interrogations.
It said 27 military intelligence personnel --
23 soldiers and four contractors --
directly took part in abuse or induced
others to do so, while another eight -- six
soldiers and two contractors -- failed to
report abuse they had witnessed. All have
been recommended for possible criminal charges.
Lawmakers said those higher up the chain
of command also must be held
accountable for failing in key duties.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina
Republican, worried that the "only people that
are court-martialed here are privates and
sergeants ... Dereliction of duty will be
redefined one way or the other after this
investigation." (Additional reporting by Will
Dunham, Jim Wolf and Tabassum Zakaria)
(c) Copyright Reuters 2004.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) New Documents Reveal that USAID Provided $2.3 Million
to Venezuela's Opposition in 2003
By: Eva Golinger - Venezuelafoia.info
New York, September 8, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print.php?newsno=1360
New York, September 8, 2004-
Documents recently obtained from the U.S.
Department of State under the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by
www.venezuelafoia.info
than $5 million annually during the
past two years was given by the United
States Agency for International Development
(USAID) to various organizations in Venezuela,
many of which are aligned with the
opposition. One of the
key groups collaborating with
USAID is Súmate, the organization that promoted the
recall referendum campaign against
President Hugo Chávez and is now rejecting the
results that have been certified by the
most credible international observers and even
by the U.S. government. Súmate,
despite its numerous undemocratic positions and
actions, has also been a recipient of
U.S. government funds from the National
Endowment for Democracy in 2003.
However, these new documents
obtained by Venezuelafoia.info have all been
censored by the U.S. Government
despite the use of the FOIA, which intends to
ensure transparency in U.S. Government
operations. The Department of State has
withheld the names of the organizations
receiving financing from USAID by
misapplying a FOIA exemption that is
intended to protect "personnel and medical
files" of individuals. Such clear censorship
indicates that USAID and the U.S.
Government clearly have something to hide
regarding their collaborations with the
Venezuelan opposition. Despite USAID's
ongoing crusade to encourage transparency
in foreign governments, the withholding
of information that does not fall under any
available exemptions clearly demonstrates
a double standard applied by the U.S.
Government in this case.
USAID is financed by the U.S. Congress and
is controlled by the Department of State.
Founded by President John F. Kennedy in
1961, USAID was established as a fund
dedicated to humanitarian intervention around
the world. Despite Kennedy's humane
intentions, USAID has more recently been
used, in many instances, as a mechanism to
promote the interests of the U.S. in strategically
important countries around the
world. In the case of Venezuela, USAID
maintains a private contractor in Caracas
monitoring and facilitating its projects
and funds and also has a local operating
center, the Office of Transition Initiatives
(OTI) that was established in 2002, after the
failed coup d'etat against President Chávez.
The private contractor, Development
Alternatives, inc. (DAI), manages and
supervises grants approved by USAID to
Venezuelan organizations.
Under a program entitled Venezuela: Initiative
to Build Confidence, DAI has awarded
67 grants to Venezuelan organizations in
various sectors and areas of interest. These
grants equal $2.3 million, just during 2003.
In total, DAI 's program in Venezuela
counts on $10,000,000 in funding for the
period August 2002 through August 2004
-$5 million annually to "focus on common
goals for the future of Venezuela".
According to the documents obtained
under FOIA and DAI's project description
(available on www.dai.com/about_dai/about_fs.htm
none of the project grants or programs
have been in collaboration with the
Venezuelan government.
In fact, many of the same recipients of U.S.
government funds through the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) have
also received USAID funding through DAI.
Despite the illegal withholding of names
on the USAID-DAI grants, one document
apparently was skipped, at least in part.
The name, Súmate appears on a grant
intended to encourage "electoral participation"
in the recall referendum, citing
$84,840 as the total grant amount.
Combined with the NED grant of $53,400 given to
Súmate in 2003-2004, the organization
that is now crying fraud about the recall
referendum against President Chávez, the
results of which have been recognized as
absolutely credible by the Carter Center
and the U.S. Department of State, has
received, at minimum, more than $200,000
in just one year for promoting its
attempts to remove Venezuela's President
from office.
Other recipients of USAID funds through
DAI which are apparent in the censored
documents include the organization
Liderazgo y Visión for its project, "Un Sueño para
Venezuela", ("A Dream for Venezuela") a
project created in 2002-2003 with the intent
of offering an alternative vision and agenda
for those opposing President Chávez's
administration. Liderazgo y Visión has also
been a recipient of NED funds over the
past few years. More than 6 organizations
have been given funding for political and
social formation and development in Petare,
a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of
Caracas, in the Miranda State. The work in
Petare and the more than $200,000 that
have been funneled into that neighborhood
in the past year, appear to have been
aimed at converting a community that was
traditionally pro-Chávez, into one that
supports the opposition. The recall referendum
results from August 15, 2004 show
the opposition gaining substantial numbers
in Petare, and Miranda state was one of
only two states in the entire nation that
gave victory to the opposition in the
referendum.
One grant from USAID/DAI focuses on
the creation of radio and television
commercials during the December 2002-
February 2003 strike imposed by the
opposition, during which the private media
dedicated its airwaves 24-7 to opposition
propaganda. One of the most striking aspects
of the media's dedication to the strike
was the use of anti-Chávez commercials to
indoctrinate viewers' opinions on
Venezuela's political situation. The USAID/DAI
grant shows funding originating from
the U.S. government for some of these
anti-Chávez commercials, collaborating with
former Fedecámaras President Carlos
Fernandez, who was one of the leaders of the
strike, in the project.
These new documents from USAID provide
evidence for a clear focus on two major
projects in Venezuela: The Recall Referendum
and the Formation of a National
Agenda that would serve as a transitional
government post-Chávez (assuming the
referendum was won by the opposition).
The documents are available for public
viewing on www.venezuelafoia.info
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) Ashcroft Strikes Out, Third Federal Court Rules
Federal Abortion Ban is Unconstitutional
and Cannot Be Enforced
Decision Echoes Rulings in San Francisco and New York
NEW YORK CITY
September 8, 2004
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about/pr/040908_Ashcroft.html
NEW YORK CITY - In the third of three
federal court rulings, a Nebraska judge has
struck down the federal abortion ban passed
by Congress last October and signed by
President Bush. Planned Parenthood
Federation of America (PPFA) applauded the
ruling issued today in Carhart v. Ashcroft .
"Today's ruling should be a cease and desist
order for Attorney General Ashcroft and
his taxpayer-funded anti-choice pursuits,"
PPFA President Gloria Feldt said. "Like the
San Francisco and New York courts, the
Nebraska court recognized that women's
health, medical privacy and the U.S.
Constitution trump anti-choice ideology. Women
and doctors should make private, personal
health care decisions - not John Ashcroft
or any other politician."
On June 1, 2004, in Planned Parenthood
Federation of America v. Ashcroft, a federal
court in northern California struck down
the federal abortion ban. In doing so, the
federal court ruled that Attorney General
Ashcroft cannot enforce the federal abortion
ban against any Planned Parenthood affiliate,
or its "officers, agents, servants,
employees, [or] contractors," whether the
abortion is performed in a facility owned or
operated by Planned Parenthood or elsewhere.
On August 26, the federal court in New
York City struck down the ban again in
National Abortion Federation (NAF) v. Ashcroft .
All three cases included the overwhelming
testimony of highly respected ob/gyns
from around the country who testified that
this law would ban abortions as early as
12 to 15 weeks in pregnancy, abortions
they say are safe and among the best for
women's health. The ban would further fail
to safeguard women because it does not
contain an exception to protect their health.
The American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists (ACOG) and many other
major medical organizations join PPFA in
opposing the ban.
In an attempted sweeping invasion of
medical privacy earlier this year, Attorney
General John Ashcroft tried unsuccessfully
to obtain thousands of confidential
medical records of women who obtained
abortions. Among the records subpoenaed
were those from Planned Parenthood health
centers nationwide, but PPFA successfully
blocked the effort. Ashcroft's calculated
fishing expedition was in response to the
effort to block the federal abortion ban.
On March 29, 2003, three federal courts
began hearing legal challenges to the
"Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003," a
new law passed by Congress in October
2003 and signed by President Bush in
November 2003. The lawsuits were brought by
PPFA on behalf of Planned Parenthood
Golden Gate, the affiliate in San Francisco, and
the physicians, staff and patients of
Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide; the
American Civil Liberties Union and Wilmer
Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP on
behalf of the National Abortion Federation
and other doctors; and the Center for
Reproductive Rights (CRR) on behalf of
Dr. LeRoy Carhart and other doctors.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
is the nation's largest and most trusted
voluntary reproductive health organization.
We believe that everyone has the right to
choose when or whether to have a child -
and that every child should be wanted and
loved. Planned Parenthood affiliates operate
nearly 850 health centers nationwide,
providing medical services and sexuality
education for millions of women, men, and
teenagers each year.
Contact:
Colleen McCabe (212) 261-4729
Joel Lawson (202) 973-4880
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Gaza Emergency
"Barbara Lubin"
Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:12:16 -0700 (PDT)
All of us at the Middle East Children's Alliance are concerned, as I'm
sure you are, about the worsening situation in Palestine and
particularly the latest news coming out of northern Gaza. I, MECA's executi=
ve
director, spoke with a friend and doctor in Gaza City this morning and was =
told that 19 Palestinians had been admitted into the Al-Awda hospital
last night with serious injuries. The Israeli army has stated that this
an open ended invasion. We fear that this will become another operation
like those in Rafah and Beit Hanoun, leaving many more Palestinians
killed, injured, and homeless.
We felt we had to send out a message to our friends and supporters to
update you on the tragedies being paid for by our US tax dollars.
Please find below a number of excerpts with the links to full articles. We =
hope you will pass on this information to your friends and families.
Thank you,
Middle East Children's Alliance
901 Parker Street
Berkeley, California 94710
United States
No US Aid to Israel. End the Occupation.
Support Divestment and Sanctions.
From the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR):
http://www.pchrgaza.org/
files/PressR/English/2004/110-2004.htm "At the time of
writing, 4 Palestinians,
including a 10 year old child,
have been killed and 53 others, mostly children, have been injured by
the Israeli gunfire and shelling. PCHR's investigations strongly
indicate that Israeli troops used excessive lethal force against unarmed
Palestinian civilians, without adhering to the principles of proportionalit=
y
and distinction."
"...At approximately 12:00, Israeli troops indiscriminately shelled
[Jabalya] camp. As a result, 3 Palestinian civilians, including a child,
were killed."
"PCHR reminds the international community of Israeli violations of the
Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in
Time of War of 1949 (Fourth Geneva Convention), particularly article 33
which prohibits collective punishment, and article 147 which considers
"extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by
military necessity, and carried out unlawfully and wantonly" a grave
breach that may amount, in some circumstances, to be a war crime under
article 85-3 of Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Conventions."
10-Year Old Girl Hit in UNRWA Classroom by Israeli Gunfire
UNRWA Press Release- September 7 http://domino.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/
6b9f5e29011585b585256f08004f231b?OpenDocument At 07:45 10-year old Raghda
Adnan Al-Assar was struck in the head by
Israeli fire while sitting at her desk in UNRWA's Elementary C Girl's
School in Khan Younis camp. She is now in the European
Gaza Hospital where
she has undergone major surgery.
UNRWA's Commissioner-General Peter Hansen said: "The kind of live
firing into refugee camps that is so indiscriminate that it makes classroom=
s
dangerous for 10-year old children is totally unacceptable. UNRWA will
protest this violation of the sanctity of its school in the strongest
possible terms to the Israeli authorities."
Story about the extrajudicial assassination of a Palestinian at an
internet café in Jericho. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-09/09/
content_1962652.htm "A special Israeli undercover unit stormed
the West Bank city of Jericho Wednesday night and assassinated a
Palestinian member of Al Aqsa
martyrs brigades, Palestinian security sources said on Thursday.
"...Witnesses confirmed that the soldiers opened intensive gunfire
directly on Abedeia who tried to pull out from the café.
"Three of the café visitors were wounded by Israeli soldiers
who opened fire haphazardly in the café, added the witnesses."
What you can do:
-Invite MECA to speak to your community group, school, church,
synagogue, mosque, union, etc.
-Send a contribution to MECA for emergency medical aid
Donate online: https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=1171
Checks can
be mailed to:
901 Parker Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
-Email this message to as many people as possible
-Tell your US senators and congress representatives to stop aid to
Israel www.congress.org
Thursday, September 09, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2004
BAUAW MEETING TONIGHT
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 7 PM
1380 VALENCIA STREET
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) FW: Press conference and vigil
From: Howard Wallace
Wed, 8 Sep 2004
2) For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home
By MONICA DAVEY
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/national/09deaths.html?hp
3) U.S. Forces on Offensive in Iraq Rebel Strongholds
By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:28 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193417&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
4) Israel Kills 4, Including 9-Year-Old, in Gaza
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:43 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193616&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
5) Family 'Thanks' Bush for Death of Son
WKYC-TV
Wednesday 08 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091004Z.shtml
6) USA: Chevron donates to Schwarzenegger, gets removal of
restrictions on oil refineries in California
by Tom Chorneau , Associated Press
Friday, September 03, 2004 - SACRAMENTO
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11519
7) The Beslan hostage tragedy:
the lies of the Putin government and its media
By Vladimir Volkov
8 September 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/puti-s08.shtml
8) Protests Powered by Cellphone
By PATRICK DI JUSTO
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/technology/circuits/09mobb.html
9) Ex-Banking Star Given 18 Months for Obstruction
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/business/09star.html
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) FW: Press conference and vigil
From: Howard Wallace
Wed, 8 Sep 2004
Dear Friends,
Please help us spread the word about the vigil below to
commemorate the over 1,000 US soldiers who died in Iraq. If any of you
or someone from your organizations would like to speak, please do so.
Thanks so much,
Medea Benjamin
Code Pink and Global Exchange
URGENT CALL TO ACTION:
JOIN US AT A VIGIL FOR THE 1,000 U.S. SOLDIERS AND TENS OF
THOUSANDS IRAQIS KILLED IN IRAQ
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 5-7PM at UN PLAZA (Market St
between 7th and Hyde), San Francisco
For more information: Nancy Mancias, Code Pink,
415-342-6409 or foonan@jps.net
Over 1,000 young Americans have now died in Iraq, over
7,000 are maimed, and many thousands of Iraqis have died.
The President won't mourn our dead, but we will. Please
join Code Pink, Bring Our Troops Home Now Committee,
Mother Speak, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For
Peace, Not in Our Name, and Global Exchange to say: Enough
to Endless War and Suffering, Bring Them Home NOW.
There will be dozens such vigils happening all over the
country, where we will remember the 1,000 US servicemen
and women who have died in Iraq. We will remember the tens
of thousands of Iraqis--civilians and combatants, men and
women, children, the elderly--who have been killed. We
will remember that these deaths did not have to happen.
We know that the current administration has plunged us
into this unjust and unjustifiable war, driven by greed
for oil and lust for power and fueled by lie after lie.
We cannot remain silent. We want an end to the occupation
so the Iraqi people can determine their own destiny free
from foreign interference and control.
We want our troops brought home now. Don't ask these men
and women to continue to die for politicians' mistakes and
lies. And we want them treated right when they return.
Give them the benefits there were promised and give them
the help they will need to heal their bodies, their minds
and their spirits.
We are here to remember, to honor and to mourn. We will
not forget!
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home
By MONICA DAVEY
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/national/09deaths.html?hp
Dixie Codner had a question for the marines who came down her gravel
road, past the rows of corn and alfalfa, to tell her that her 19-year-old
son, Kyle, had been killed in Iraq. Should she bring them the dress blues, =
still pressed and hanging neatly in his closet, for his funeral?
No need, she recalled them answering. They had dress uniforms from
all the services, all sizes, waiting back at Dover Air Force Base in Delawa=
re,
where the bodies of American service members come home.
"What does that say?" Ms. Codner asked, as she sat at her kitchen table
in Shelton, Neb., on a recent morning, fingering a thick stack of photograp=
hs
that her son had sent from the desert. "How many more are they expecting?
All I know is that there are 1,000 families that feel just like we do. We g=
o
to bed at night, and we don't have our children."
Like Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Codner, each of the more than 1,000 marines and
soldiers, sailors and airmen killed since the United States sent troops
to invade Iraq leaves behind a grieving family, a story, a unique memory
of duty and sacrifice in what has become the deadliest war for Americans
since Vietnam.
But along with so much personal loss, the roster of the dead tells a
larger story, a portrait of a society and a military in transition, with
ever-widening roles and costs for the country's part-time soldiers,
women and Hispanics.
As has often been true in the United States' wars, small towns like
Shelton and other rural areas suffered a disproportionate share of
deaths compared with the nation's big cities. More than 100 service
members who died were from California, the most for any state, but
the smaller, less-populated states, many in the nation's middle - the
Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska - recorded some of the biggest per
capita losses.
In these mostly Republican-leaning states, people have begun to
take painful note of the toll in Iraq. Many of the families of the dead
there said they remained supportive of the war, the troops and the
president. Still, with the death toll reaching 1,000 just two months
before the presidential election, the somber milestone captured a
central spot in the national political debate this week.
More than 70 percent of the dead were soldiers in the Army, and
more than 20 percent were marines. More than half were in the
lowest-paid enlisted ranks. About 12 percent were officers. Three-
quarters of the troops died in hostile incidents: most often,
homemade-bomb explosions, small-arms fire, rocket attacks.
A quarter died in illnesses or accidents: truck and helicopter
crashes and gun discharges.
On average, the service members who died were about 26. The
youngest was 18; the oldest, 59. About half were married, according
to the death roll, which does not include a handful yet to be identified
by the Defense Department and three civilians who worked for the
military.
Part-time soldiers, the guardsmen and reservists who once expected
to tend to floods and hurricanes, were called to Iraq on a scale not
seen through five decades of war. Increasingly, Iraq is becoming their
conflict, and in growing numbers this spring and early summer, these
part-time soldiers died there. Ten times as many of them died from
April to July of this year as had in the war's first two months.
American women, too, have quietly drawn closer to combat than they
had in half a century. At least 24 female service members died in Iraq,
more than in any American conflict since World War II, a stark sign of
a barrier broken.
Many Hispanics, once underrepresented in the armed forces, have
fought and died in striking numbers. At least 122 Hispanics have
died in Iraq, meaning that they died at a rate disproportionately high
for their representation in the active forces and among the deployed
troops. Among the dead were 39 service members who were not
American citizens, significantly more than had died in Vietnam or
Afghanistan, according to Defense Department records.
Most of the troops - 85 percent - died after President Bush declared
major combat operations over on May 1, 2003. Nearly 15 percent
died after the United States turned over sovereignty to Iraq's new
leaders this June. The deadliest month was this April, as insurgents
stepped up their attacks. Nearly as many American troops died that
month as had in the initial invasion.
The Pentagon says it does not track or release estimates of the
number of Iraqis killed since the war began, although some independent
groups have offered widely varying estimates. (A group called Iraq
Body Count said Iraqi civilian deaths exceeded 11,000.)
Among Americans, especially the relatives of service members who
have died, the meaning of the toll is already a matter of feverish,
sometimes bitter, debate.
Some say they view the number of deaths - and the injuries to more
than 7,000 other Americans - as a tragic but unavoidable price of war,
and one that seems modest beside the death toll from Vietnam, which
was 58,000. About 380 troops died in the Persian Gulf war of 1991,
and some 97 in Afghanistan. Any questions about the mounting
numbers in Iraq, these relatives said, served as a rejection of the
troops' mission, an insult to their lost soldier's work.
"The loss is there, of course, but we also know the honor and the
pride," said Kelby McCrae, himself a captain in the National Guard
and the son of a veteran soldier. His younger brother, Erik, was
killed in June. "We're just so honored at the sacrifice he gave."
But others said they worried that their soldier's sacrifice in Iraq
might be forgotten as more months pass and people grow inured
to news of so many deaths, one after the next in this war.
The Guard and the Reserves: 'Weekend Warriors' Go Full Time
Eric S. McKinley was a baker and a part-time soldier. He dyed his
hair strange colors and pierced his body in places his mother
sometimes wished he had not. His six-year stint in the Oregon
National Guard was supposed to end in April, but it was extended,
and Specialist McKinley died June 13 when a bomb blew up near
his Humvee near Baghdad. Specialist McKinley's father, Tom, said
he was left with a haunting conviction: that guardsmen and
reservists are now being asked in record numbers to fight the
same lethal wars as full-time soldiers, but without the same
level of training, equipment or respect. Dozens of parents and
spouses of guardsmen - some who died and others still serving
in Iraq - said they shared Mr. McKinley's worries as they wrestled
with what the role of the nation's 1.2 million part-time service
members once was and what it was becoming.
"They are not prepared for this, not emotionally and not with
their gear and equipment," said Mr. McKinley, of Salem, Ore.
"There's this opinion that these guys are just 'weekend warriors,'
and we'll have them do all the things the regular army doesn't
have time to do. But these guys are being asked to put their lives
on the line just as much as everyone else. These guys are yanked
from their lives, and yet they aren't treated the same."
During special training at a base in Texas before he left for Iraq,
Specialist McKinley told his father that his Guard unit was getting
only two meals a day, while regular units ate three. And in Iraq,
on the day of his death, Specialist McKinley's fellow guardsmen
said he was in a Humvee reinforced with plywood and sandbags,
not real armor.
Cecil Green, a spokesman at Fort Hood where Specialist McKinley's
unit trained before it left for Iraq, said all soldiers - regular and
part time - were fed equally. But Col. Mike Caldwell, deputy director
of the Oregon National Guard, said his troops had complained about
unequal conditions during training there in months past. "There
were a lot of problems in their treatment," Colonel Caldwell said.
"It was deplorable. They were treated like slaves in some respects."
Thomas F. Hall, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs,
acknowledged in a telephone interview last week that since the
terrorist attacks of 2001, the nation's reserve components had been
called in numbers unknown since perhaps World War II. But those
part-timers sent to Iraq are trained and equipped to the same level
as any active-duty troops, Mr. Hall said.
"It's no longer your father or your grandfather's Guard and Reserves,"
Mr. Hall said. "A lot of this is a leftover vestige from a time in which
we didn't perhaps equip and train our Guard and Reserve as we need to."
Any shortages of equipment - of armored Humvees or protective gear -
have been faced by all types of troops, not just guardsmen, he said.
And Mr. Hall insisted that no one, not even him, could distinguish
between part--s and others when it came to Iraq. "They look the
same. Their standards are the same. Their training is the same,"
he said.
Recently home from Iraq with an injury, Specialist Andrew Cross,
a member of the North Carolina National Guard, said the only
difference he discerned was a little taunting. "Sure, they say stuff
about you not being full time,'' Specialist Cross said, "but who
cares what they say."
Specialist Cross's best friend, Specialist Daniel A. Desens, who
listened to Bob Marley and Dave Matthews with him as they rolled
along in their Bradleys in Iraq, was one of at least 179 guardsmen
and reservists killed there, the records of those identified as of
yesterday show.
Their deaths make up less than a fifth of those killed, but the timing
of their deaths underscores the changing makeup of American forces
in Iraq. In the first weeks of war, only a small group of reserve forces
was sent to Iraq, and only a few died. The numbers grew swiftly this
year, and reserves and guards now amount to about 40 percent of
the forces deployed to Iraq, and maybe still more soon.
Back in Oregon, Colonel Caldwell said leaders were busy arranging
more deployments for some of the state's 8,400 Army and Air
National Guard troops in the coming weeks, even as gloom lingered
over the headquarters. Four Oregon guardsmen, including Specialist
McKinley, died in a 10-day stretch.
Nationally, Mr. Hall said, recruiters may fall 1 percent short of their
goals for new Guard members when the annual count is taken at the
end of September. In Oregon, Colonel Caldwell predicted direr
shortfalls: 10 percent to 15 percent.
"I think it's pretty obvious what's happening," he said. "People
have realized: you join the Guard in Oregon, you're going to be
mobilized."
The Women: Dying, in a Role Quietly Redefined
Before she left her home in Richmond, Va., Leslie D. Jackson's
Junior R.O.T.C. instructor warned her that although women might
not officially be on the very front line of a ground war, they were
edging ever closer - and the line itself, if ever there was one in Iraq,
had grown dangerously blurry.
"I told her that even combat support roles could still take you places
that maybe you should not be," said Master Sgt. Earl G. Winston Jr.,
who taught Private Jackson at George Wythe High School. "But she said
she was ready to accept the challenge. She said she did not want her
fellow soldiers, most of them men, to think that she wasn't every bit
as good as them."
Private Jackson, who had talked her reluctant mother into letting her
sign up for the Army when she was 17, died on May 20 in Baghdad.
The truck she was transporting supplies in hit a roadside bomb. She
had finished basic training eight months before, and had turned 18,
making her the youngest of 24 women who have died in Iraq.
Not long before, she had sent an e-mail message to her former
principal, Earl Pappy, to say that she was spending long hours
driving trucks and had been unnerved at seeing a soldier killed for
the first time right before her: " 'I left home as Mommy's little girl,' ''=
Mr. Pappy said she wrote, " 'and I'm coming back as a strong woman.'
"She told me she wouldn't be in combat, and I don't think women
should be," said Viola Jackson, Private Jackson's mother. "But then
again, they joined the Army, and I guess you've got to do whatever
the other people are doing. I don't know. What I know is she was a
sweet child."
Women make up some 10 percent of American forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but they account for less than 3 percent of the 1,000
deaths in Iraq. Still, more women have died there than in any conflict
since hundreds died in World War II - a certain if somber sign of how
women's roles in the military have grown in the last decade.
More surprising, though, to advocates on both sides of a long-
simmering debate over what women should and should not do
in times of war has been the public's reaction to the loss of 24
women. Mostly, there has been silence.
"What it means is that our view of women has changed," said Lory
Manning, director of the Women in the Military Project at the
Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington and a
retired 25-year veteran of the Navy.
"Within our minds, women are doing a lot of athletic things. They're
SWAT team members and firefighters now. This is worldwide. So
people see this as less horrible. The horror of death is equal now."
But others, like Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military
Readiness, an independent public policy group in Livonia, Mich.,
said Americans were largely oblivious to the role women were playing
in Iraq and would be disturbed if they knew. Female soldiers who die
receive little attention, she said, except in small hometown newspapers;
the same is true of the 207 women who have been injured in Iraq.
Shortly after the war began, there were hints of the nation's discomfort
when three female soldiers, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Specialist
Shoshana Johnson, were taken hostage, and one of them, Pfc. Lori Ann
Piestewa, was killed, Ms. Donnelly said. In images broadcast around
the world, Specialist Johnson looked terrified, her eyes darting.
"The risk of capture is why we oppose women in combat," said Ms.
Donnelly, who wants the Pentagon to reconsider the jobs close to
combat that women now hold. "We're a civilized nation. Violence
against women is wrong. I hope that we don't become that kind of
a nation that doesn't care about this sort of thing."
Eight women died in Vietnam. Sixteen died in the first Persian Gulf
war. Three died in Afghanistan. And through most of that time,
people have argued over what place women should take in war.
Women have served in the American military since 1901, and others
quietly did unofficial military work as early as the Revolutionary War.
But in 1948, Congress adopted the Armed Forces Integration Act,
which capped women at 2 percent of the services and barred them
from serving on combat planes and combat ships.
After Vietnam, and the end of the draft, the restrictions on women
began to fade, one by one. By 1994, women were allowed to fly
combat aircraft, to serve on fighter ships but not submarines, and
to fill ground jobs except those most directly on the front lines:
special forces, infantry, armor, artillery. But in Iraq, the jobs that
women could fill - as drivers in convoys bringing supplies to troops
and as members of military police units - came under attack from
homemade bombs and mortar fire, too, and the notion of a front
line seemed no longer to fit the conflict.
Nearly all of the women killed were full-time soldiers in the Army.
And two-thirds of them died in hostile situations, not in accidents
or because of illness.
Even Ms. Manning, who supports bigger roles for women in the
military, said she was surprised at the degree to which women
had been included in critical operations, including patrolling
checkpoints. In part, their role may have been a necessary
outgrowth of cultural differences in Iraq. Female soldiers were
needed when Iraqi women were searched or questioned.
Still, Ms. Donnelly and other critics say, the scars from so much
change are being ignored: What will come of the children, they
asked, who lose their mothers to war?
Sgt. Tatjana Reed, a single mother, was killed on July 22 when a
bomb exploded near her convoy vehicle. She had signed papers
leaving her 10-year-old daughter, Genevieve, in the care of relatives
near her base in Germany, expecting the arrangement to be
temporary.
Sergeant Reed "always said, 'What a man can do, I can do,' ''
recalled her mother, Brigitte Dykty, who lives in Clarksville, Tenn.
"Sometimes I wish she hadn't thought that."
The Hispanics: Underrepresented, Except on Death Rolls
Five years ago, the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group
for Hispanics, released a scathing study of Hispanics in the United
States military. The central finding was that the military was not
employing as many Hispanics as it should.
In 1996, the study said, Hispanics 18 to 44 made up more than
11 percent of the civilian work force but accounted for less than 7
percent of the military's active forces.
The military took notice, and the Marines, in particular, began a
serious recruiting effort aimed at Spanish-speaking markets, said
Lisa Navarrete, vice president of the advocacy group.
"They took it very, very seriously," Ms. Navarrete said.
By 2004, Latinos accounted for 9.2 percent of all active-duty
forces and about 10 percent of those forces deployed to Iraq
nd Afghanistan.
That news came with a distinctly bittersweet edge. Of the 1,000
killed in Iraq, at least 122, or more than 12 percent, were Hispanic,
according to the Defense Department, which says ethnicity was not
tracked by the same measures in previous wars.
"It seems that in a time of peace, we're underrepresented,"
Ms. Navarrete said quietly. "In a time of war, the situation is
completely changed."
One reason for the high rate of Hispanic deaths in Iraq is that Hispanics =
account for a particularly large segment - more than 13 percent - of
the Marines, the ground troops who suffered significant losses early
in the war, as well as in the uprisings of recent weeks.
Some of those who died fighting for the United States were not even
citizens. At least 39 noncitizens - many, though not all, of Hispanic
heritage - were among the dead. Legal residents of this country have
long served in the armed forces, but records of their deaths in war
are hard to find. The official Defense Department records show that
one noncitizen died in military duty in Vietnam and three in
Afghanistan.
In 2002, Mr. Bush issued an order shortening the waiting periods
for service members and their families seeking citizenship, and
Congress made those changes permanent with a law that takes
effect in October. Some anti-immigration advocates said that
military service alone was not a qualification for citizenship, while
others worried that the changes might induce some immigrants
to enlist in hopes of speedy citizenship.
"But the bottom line, whatever the casualties, is that people are
going to continue to join because they have to," said Rodolfo Acuna,
a professor of Chicano studies at California State University,
Northridge. "They want to live better. They want to get money.
They want to better themselves."
Rey David Cuervo was born in Tampico, Mexico, but his mother,
Rosalba Kuhn, took him to Texas when he was 6. She was a maid
in Port Isabel. He was an only boy among three sisters, the quiet
one with just a handful of friends.
At age 8, she said, he went to her carrying a picture of the
American flag and explained that he planned to join the American
Army. "He said that this is all he wanted," she recalled not long ago.
"He said if they wouldn't take him in the Army here, then he'd go back
to Mexico and sign up there."
In 1999, he left for basic training.
"I was so proud," Ms. Kuhn said. "When I came here, my dreams
were that I would see my kids here, see them learn the language,
see them get a better life for themselves. Part of that was wanting
to see my son in an American uniform."
Ms. Kuhn said she thinks of her son every day when she wakes up.
She lights candles for him. She holds a hat of his under her nose
and breathes it in. In the sadness, though, Ms. Kuhn said she had
no anger. Her son wanted to go into the Army. He wanted to go to
Iraq. He chose his future.
Private Cuervo, who once told his mother that he planned to retire
from the military after 20 years and then buy a big house, died on
Dec. 28, 2003, when a bomb exploded. He was 24, one of 32,000
noncitizens in the armed forces. The government granted him
citizenship after he died.
The Small Towns: When the Population Is Reduced by One
There are no sidewalks along the quiet streets of Shelton, Neb.,
but there is red-white-and-blue bunting, a little faded now, and
tattered black ribbon tied to the street posts. Not that anyone
here needs to be reminded about Kyle Codner.
The nation's small towns experienced more than their share of
death in Iraq, a clear reflection of their representation in the
nation's military services. Not only did death arrive in
disproportionate numbers in these towns, but each death
seemed to echo louder and longer than it might have in a big city.
One resident here compared Corporal Codner's death on May 26
to a tornado whipping up in the Midwest and zeroing in on this
town of 1,100 people.
"The word 'shock' is overused, generally," said Lynn McBride, the
chairman of Shelton's village trustees and a schoolteacher. "But it
understates the feelings about this. We're all in it together here,
and there was a feeling that this couldn't be true."
To Shelton, Corporal Codner was the son of Dixie and Wain Codner.
He was one of 19 graduates of Shelton High in 2003, and one of two
to go off to the military. He was the basketball player with the blond
girlfriend, each of them usually on the king and queen court. He was
the clerk at J. R.'s Mini Mart. He was the kid who got his photograph
taken in front of the old military tank that sits at the town's entrance,
and the student named in the yearbook as "Most Likely to Kick Some
Terrorist Butt."
Nebraska and a long list of states in the country's middle and South
had some of the highest death rates per capita. Many of these states
are considered Republican strongholds. Vermont, a Democratic-leaning
state in the presidential race, had the most deaths per capita. Among
swing states in the presidential race, Oregon, Maine and Iowa had
heavy losses.
No one can be sure what role the deaths in Iraq will play in this election =
season. Nebraska has been more reliably Republican through five
decades of presidential races than any other state. Still, Democrats
in Nebraska say the war and the death toll of 14 is stirring political
discussion.
"The Republican voting bloc is persuadable here, especially when
you're talking about sending your sons and daughters to war," said
Barry R. Rubin, executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party.
"One thing about Nebraska is we are very independent-minded people,
and people are seriously questioning the merits of this war."
But along the streets of Shelton last weekend, most people said they
backed the war, and would probably vote for Mr. Bush. Among them
was Corporal Codner's best friend from childhood, Matthew S. Walter,
19 and preparing to vote in his first presidential election. "I don't think=
I like what John Kerry has to say,'' Mr. Walter said.
Most people interviewed said they did not see Corporal Codner's
death through the prism of politics.
"I sense no bitterness or contrition whatsoever about Kyle,''
Mr. McBride said. "I've never heard any of that. I think the overall
feeling is that we're grateful he died the way he did - serving his
country."
About eight miles away, back at Ms. Codner's kitchen table, the
Codners said they would vote against President Bush, one of the
many people Ms. Codner describes as "someone without skin in
the game."
She and her husband go to sleep thinking of the boy in the circle
of class pictures on their living room wall, she said, and then they
wake up thinking of him. In the moments when other thoughts
crowd out those memories, Ms. Codner said, something always
brings him back. On Friday, it was the mail. Four packages that
had been sent to her son in Iraq were returned to her, unopened.
A yellow form on the front of the boxes gave a curt explanation
in the form of a checked box: "Deceased."
The Codners tried to discourage their son from joining the Marines
during his senior year in high school, but when he complained that
they were not being supportive, they tried to go along.
Wain Codner said the town's embrace helped his family the first
weeks after his son's death. "The support was incredible," he said.
"But then, people go on with their lives."
A few days before Corporal Codner died, he sent home a roll of
film. His family developed it, then waited, hoping he would call,
so he could tell them exactly what they were seeing.
The mysterious stack of pictures still sits on the kitchen table. One
shows Corporal Codner, with a wide smile, beside an Iraqi child.
In another, a thick automatic weapon dangles around his neck,
seeming to dwarf his slim frame. Another shows just a sleeping
bag and pad, arranged carefully on a concrete block. This is
probably where he slept, his parents surmise, but they will
never be sure.
Tom Torok and the research staff of The New York Times
contributed to this report.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) U.S. Forces on Offensive in Iraq Rebel Strongholds
By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:28 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193417&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces launched operations in
three Iraqi rebel strongholds on Thursday, killing nearly two
dozen insurgents in a town near the Syrian border and bombing
targets in Falluja for the third straight day.
Fierce fighting around the town of Tal Afar, a suspected
haven for foreign fighters about 100 km (60 miles) east of the
Syrian border in northern Iraq, left 22 insurgents dead and
more than 70 wounded, a local government health official said.
"The situation is critical," Rabee Yassin, general manager
for health in Nineveh province, told Reuters. "Ambulances and
medical supplies cannot get to Tal Afar because of the ongoing
military operations."
There were no immediate reports of any U.S. or Iraqi
government casualties in the fighting which local government
sources said had killed 57 since Saturday.
U.S. forces said the assault was in response to provocation
after they and Iraqi security forces "were repeatedly attacked
by a large terrorist element that has displaced local Iraqi
security forces throughout recent weeks."
"These attacks by terrorist groups included
rocket-propelled grenades, small arms fire, mortars and
roadside bombs, and resulted in civilian casualties," the
military said.
Further south, U.S. warplanes bombed rebel-held Falluja for
a third successive night. The U.S. military said the assault
was part of a "precision strike" on an operating base for Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant Washington says is
allied to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
"The target was a building frequently used by terrorists at
the time of the strike. Three Zarqawi associates were reported
to be in the area, no other individuals were present at the
time of the strike," the statement said.
DOCTORS SAY CHILDREN KILLED
But doctors in Falluja said at least eight people were
killed. Doctor Rafi Hayad said four of them were children and
two women. Iraq's Health Ministry said at least 16 people had
been killed in fighting in Falluja in the past 24 hours.
Reuters Television pictures showed several bloodied and
heavily bandaged children being treated in a Falluja hospital.
The United States blames Zarqawi for masterminding a series
of suicide bomb attacks and the killing of several hostages. It
has offered a $25 million reward for his capture.
A statement posted on an Islamic Web Site and claiming to
come from Zarqawi's group said four of his militants had been
killed in the U.S. bombardment of Falluja earlier this week.
The past few days have seen a surge in attacks and clashes
in Iraq that pushed the official Pentagon U.S. death toll for
the war to above 1,000. The Pentagon has admitted that U.S. and
Iraqi forces are not in control of strongholds of the
insurgency like Falluja, Ramadi and Samarra.
U.S. forces entered Samarra on Thursday for the first time
in weeks to try to reestablish Iraqi government control there.
A military statement said the troops went in to install a
temporary mayor and police chief, set up a local council and
assess police stations. There were no reports of clashes.
NO WORD ON HOSTAGES
Besides trying to contain the insurgency, Iraq's government
is also grappling with a hostage crisis.
In one of the most brazen abductions so far, two Italian
women aid workers and two Iraqi colleagues were snatched from
their office in central Baghdad in broad daylight on Tuesday.
No word has yet emerged from their captors.
Since April, people from more than two dozen countries have
been kidnapped as guerrillas have tried to force foreign troops
and firms to leave. More than 20 foreign hostages have been
killed, including two Italians.
The latest kidnappings has piled more pressure on Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Most Italian voters strongly
oppose Italy's role in Iraq, where it has sent 2,700 soldiers.
Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Margherita Boniver flew to
the Middle East on Thursday to seek help in securing the
women's release.
The abductions are likely to fuel uncertainty over the fate
of two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges
Malbrunot, who have been held since Aug. 20 despite intense
diplomatic efforts to free them.
The seizure of the aid workers is also likely to trigger an
exodus of the 50 or so remaining foreign humanitarian workers
in Iraq.
(c) Copyright Reuters 2004.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) Israel Kills 4, Including 9-Year-Old, in Gaza
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:43 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193616&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Israeli forces thrust into
Gaza's largest refugee camp on Thursday, killing four
Palestinians including a 9-year-old boy, as the army tightened
its grip on the northern part of the coastal strip.
Scores of gunmen fought a column of tanks and armored
vehicles as Israeli troops took up positions in and around the
teeming Jabalya camp, a militant stronghold, in an operation
the army said was aimed at stopping rocket fire into Israel.
Helicopter gunships fired missiles into the camp of 100,000
inhabitants as Israeli forces sealed it off in Israel's biggest
incursion in the northern Gaza Strip in months.
Munir el-Deqqes was shot in the chest while playing with
friends outside his grandfather's house, witnesses said. "How
can anyone blame children playing in the street?" said the
boy's uncle. "Munir was a victim of blind Israeli retaliation."
At least 35 people, including militants and civilians, were
wounded by Israeli fire, medics said.
A military source said soldiers had shot only at armed men.
It was the latest chapter in Israel's military response after
suicide bombers killed 16 people in southern Israel last week.
The raid marked a widening of Israel's incursion that began
on Wednesday when forces swept in and seized control following
a barrage of makeshift rocket strikes in southern Israel.
The latest spiral of violence could further complicate
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw troops
and settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip by the end of 2005.
Palestinian militants are determined to claim any Israeli
pullout as a victory, but Israel has vowed to smash them first.
PALESTINIAN CONDEMNATION
"We urge the ... civilized world to stop these crimes by
Israeli occupation forces and call on the United States to
shoulder its responsibilities toward the peace process,"
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said in a statement.
Israel's army killed 14 Hamas fighters at a Gaza training
camp on Tuesday in the deadliest strike ever against the
militant Islamic group, which is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Hamas, responsible for a double suicide bombing in the
Israeli city of Beersheba on August 31, vowed revenge for the
Israeli attacks.
In the second day of Israel's incursion in northern Gaza,
the army said its forces had penetrated to the first row of
houses in eastern Jabalya.
Israeli commanders have usually been reluctant to send
forces deep into Jabalya's cramped alleys, where they would be
vulnerable to booby traps and bombs planted by militants.
"We won't stay there forever," a senior Israeli official said.
"But we have to conduct forays just to keep them (the
rocket crews) off balance."
Medics said troops shot dead four people in Jabalya,
including at least one Hamas militant. It was not known if two
other dead, both men in their 20s, were militants or civilians.
Israeli forces surrounded Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya on
Wednesday -- towns that have been frequently raided -- and
bulldozers tore up stretches of road to cut off the area. By
Thursday, shops were getting low on supplies.
Despite the two-day-old raid, militants managed to fire
several primitive Qassam rockets from fenced-in Gaza toward the
Israeli town of Sderot. There were no reports of casualties.
In a game of cat-and-mouse, militants in some cases use
timers so they can escape minutes before the rockets are
launched, Palestinian sources said.
The army said soldiers in northern Gaza destroyed three
welding machines on Thursday used to make the rockets.
(c) Copyright Reuters 2004.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) Family 'Thanks' Bush for Death of Son
WKYC-TV
Wednesday 08 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091004Z.shtml
THOMPSON - In Geauga County, anger and frustration over the
death of a young soldier inside Iraq has prompted one family to
send a personal message to President Bush.
Ken and Betty Landrus have put up a large sign outside their
home near Thompson, Ohio that is sharply critical of the Bush
administration.
The sign reads "Thanks Mr. Bush for the death of our son."
Their son, Staff Sgt. Sean Landrus was killed near Fallujah in
January.
They believe the president misled the country about the
reasons for invading Iraq and that their son died for nothing.
"Yes I do feel lied to because they kept saying there's mass
destruction and nobody's found anything yet," father Ken
Landrus said.
Sean Landrus also left behind a wife and three young
children.
His youngest daughter, Kennedy, was born just before
Sean left to serve inside Iraq.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6) USA: Chevron donates to Schwarzenegger, gets removal of
restrictions on oil refineries in California
by Tom Chorneau , Associated Press
Friday, September 03, 2004 - SACRAMENTO
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11519
Friday, September 03, 2004 - SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger's ambitious plan to reorganize almost every
aspect of state government was influenced significantly by oil
and gas giant ChevronTexaco Corp., which managed to shape
such key recommendations as the removal of restrictions on oil
refineries.
Many corporations and interest groups participated in the
governor's reform plan - known as the California Performance
Review - but state records and interviews with the participants
show Chevron enjoyed immense success in influencing the report
through its array of lobbyists, attorneys and trade organizations.
And few corporations have spent so much political cash on the
governor, either. Since Schwarzenegger's election last October,
the San Ramon company has contributed more than $200,000
to his committees and $500,000 to the California Republican
Party.
Chevron, whose officials acknowledge they lobbied hard to get
their ideas in the report, is one of about 20 companies that paid
to send the governor and his staff to this week's Republican
National Convention in New York. On Wednesday, Schwarzenegger
attended a closed-door meeting in New York with representatives
of those companies, including Chevron. And just three weeks
after the governor's office released the 2,700-page reorganization
report, the company gave $100,000 to a Schwarzenegger-
controlled political fund.
Environmental watchdogs and local agencies that regulate some
of Chevron's operations complain that they had no such access,
and that their counterproposals appear nowhere in the massive
report.
Top reform project
Disclosure of Chevron's determined role in what many believe is
the administration's most important political reform effort contrasts
sharply with statements he made during last year's election campaign
and afterward in which he promised to sweep out a corrupt system
where "contributions go in, the favors go out."
Schwarzenegger launched the reorganization effort in January,
calling the state bureaucracy a "mastodon frozen in time" that needed
to be reviewed from top to bottom to eliminate waste and duplication.
The administration said the recommendations in the report would save
$32 billion over five years, a claim analysts said is exaggerated.
Although the governor's senior aides helped organize and oversee the
reorganization effort, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger said the
review staff, not the governor's office, was responsible for the report.
Schwarzenegger announced the review in January and then appointed
its two top members, who then assembled the rest of the staff.
Ashley Snee, the governor's deputy press secretary, said it was
premature to assume any of the recommendations will be adopted
and that those who are unhappy with parts of the report can
comment at a series of statewide hearings on the proposal.
Beneficial proposals
Proposals that would benefit Chevron are peppered throughout the
four-volume report. They include:
- Streamlining the permit process for the construction of new oil
refineries and the expansion of existing ones. Chevron, which owns
two of the state's largest refineries in Richmond and El Segundo,
wanted the state's help in revising existing laws so local government
officials would be required to make decisions more quickly on
construction permits at refineries.
- Streamlining the activities of the San Francisco Bay Conservation
and Development Commission. That agency, which issues permits
for dredging and sand mining in the Bay Area, oversees activities
related to Chevron's interests in the Bay Area.
- Reorganizing the regulatory process for picking the locations
for refineries, tank farms, liquefied natural gas and other energy
facilities. Chevron has two proposals to build liquefied natural
gas (LNG) facilities in Southern California and the Mexican state
of Baja California.
But Mark Petracca, a University of California, Irvine political
scientist, said Chevron's considerable influence on the CPR
report may taint the whole review because the study was
presented to the public as an objective and authoritative
analysis of how to fix state government.
"This is good old fashioned interest-group politics," Petracca
said. "Powerful people who have money can hire powerful
people and use occasions like this report to set the agenda
for policy beneficial to those interests."
Under scrutiny
In response, Snee repeated that the report was independent
of the governor's office.
Chevron's operations have drawn steady and critical scrutiny
from state and federal regulators, including a settlement last
October of a lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department that
required the company to install $275 million in air pollution
equipment and pay $3.5 million in civil penalties.
Company officials said they were just doing their jobs through
their vigorous participation in the CPR process, which included
meeting with senior aides to the governor.
"This is what we are here for," said Jack Coffey, Chevron's
general manager over state government relations, from New
York where he was attending the Republican convention.
Chevron learned about the CPR early and "obviously
understood their agenda," Coffey said, adding that while
there was direct contact by company lobbyists, most contact
came through trade groups of which Chevron is a member.
"We made an effort to feed those trade associations who
were more active."
But, Coffey said, Chevron's donations to Schwarzenegger are
because of his "pro-business agenda" and have nothing to
do with the CPR report.
Chevron's concerns
In an interview, Chevron lobbyist K.C. Bishop said he met with
Richard Costigan, Schwarzenegger's legislative affairs secretary,
in April or May, about trouble the company was having with
routine refinery permits and proposed legislation on the issue.
At the end of the discussion, Bishop was directed to the CPR
staff, which he visited a week or so later.
Neither the meeting with Costigan nor with CPR staff were
reported in Chevron's quarterly lobbying filings.
Also acknowledged in the CPR report were Bishop; Mike Barr,
a lawyer with the San Francisco-based firm Pillsbury Winthrop
and who represents Chevron; and affiliated lobbyists of the
Western States Petroleum - Kahl/Pownall Advocates - of which
Chevron is also a member.
Meanwhile, the Bay Planning Coalition - a business-oriented
group of which Chevron is a board member - contacted the
governor's cabinet secretary over problems its members were
having with the San Francisco Bay Conservation and
Development Commission.
Schwarzenegger's staff sent the coalition's issue to the CPR
staff, which met with the coalition sometime in April,
according Ellen Johnck, the coalition's executive director.
Complaints lodged
A letter from the coalition outlining the complaints -
including some lodged by Chevron - was used a primary
source for the CPR report that concluded BCDC had
overstepped its authority. Although BCDC officials offered
significant documentation to rebut the allegations, none
of the commission's defense was included in the CPR report.
In its section about making it easier to locate refineries
or LNG plants, the CPR report cites attorney Mike Carroll
of the law firm Latham & Watkins as a source. Based in
the firm's Orange County office, Carroll represents
Chevron on a variety of regulatory issues, according
to the firm's Web site.
Carroll did not return telephone calls for comment
from the Associated Press.
Chevron has two LNG proposals - a $650 million facility
that would be built offshore on an island near Tijuana in
Baja California; and a second plan that would place a
facility at Camp Pendleton in Orange County.
Schwarzenegger is expected to meet with Mexican officials
in Mexicali later this month. One expected topic of
discussion is Chevron's LNG proposal.
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---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) The Beslan hostage tragedy:
the lies of the Putin government and its media
By Vladimir Volkov
8 September 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/puti-s08.shtml
The hostage-taking tragedy in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia
has demonstrated the lengths to which the ruling elite in Russia is
prepared to go in deceiving its own people. Four days after the hostage
drama began with terrorists seizing over 1,000 children, parents
and teachers, elementary facts still remain unclear. The Russian
government has denied the people the most important and
elementary right-that of reliable, rapid and extensive information
on what has taken place.
From the beginning of the crisis on the morning of September 1
to its tragic end two days later, leading politicians, representatives
of the secret police and the major media outlets in Russia conducted
a deliberate campaign of disinformation regarding the extent
of the catastrophe and its dreadful consequences.
Lie number one: the number of hostages
From the outset, the number of hostages was deliberately
underestimated. The official figure of 354 hostages was repeated
by television channels and in the public appearances of
government representatives up to the point of the storming
of the school building.
Early on in the crisis, much higher figures for the hostages
were provided by newspapers and Internet sources, yet the
television networks held firm to their original claim. After
talks September 2 between the hostage takers and the former
president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Auschev-resulting in the
release of 26 women and children-the media repeated its
estimate, even though the real extent of the hostage taking
could at that stage hardly be concealed.
Auschev had seen how many people had been incarcerated
in the gymnasium hall. One of the women released
September 2 told the press: "There are many hostages,
very many. I think a thousand." Another woman whose
two children remained in the school said: "According to
the list 860 children attend the school. Maybe half of them
did not come to the school's opening ceremony. Then
there are the parents. Look around at how many people
are standing here. Here in the House of Culture there are
1,000 people and all of them have at least one relative or
child in the school."
Similar reports appeared in newspapers and Internet
magazines. Nevertheless the television channels remained
stubbornly attached to their original figure.
Lie number two: the terrorists had posed no demands
At the outset of the drama, a decision was made at the
highest political level that under no circumstances would
information be released concerning the terrorists' demands.
This was a lesson that the Putin government had drawn
from the hostage drama at the Moscow Musical Theatre
"Nordost" in 2002. Relatives of the hostages then held
captive inside the theatre had demonstrated for an end
to the Russian war in Chechnya. The demand met with
widespread popular support, and the Kremlin has had
great difficulty suppressing this political sentiment.
This time it was claimed that the terrorists had made no
demands. A statement calling for an end to the Chechen
war and the withdrawal of Russian troops made at the
start of the hostage crisis by an Islamist group was kept
secret. In addition, the government maintained that all of
its efforts to make contact with the terrorists had been
ignored.
On September 6, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported
that as early as the afternoon of September 1 and not far
from the school, "Parents of children being held in the
school had addressed the Russian president in a video.
They called upon him to fulfill all the demands of the
terrorists in order to save the lives of the children."
All the major television and other media outlets kept this
information secret for a considerable period.
According to numerous witnesses, the hostage takers made
no secret about their demands. For example, on September 3,
Izvestia interviewed a teacher who had been released along
with her three-year-old daughter. Question: "Did the terrorists
tell you their demands?" Answer: "They said they had just one
demand: the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya."
Lie number three: there were no plans for storming the building
Immediately after news of the hostage taking broke, leading
to widespread popular anguish, representatives of the Russian
government declared that everything would be done to avoid an
armed assault on the school by security forces. In fact, nothing
was done to prevent such a storming of the school.
According to a commentary in the newspaper Izvestia, the
drama "took the worst possible turn." The government sought
to hide its own failure by claiming that the storming of the
building had not been prepared, and even that there were no
plans for such an action. This claim is contradicted by a series
of facts and reports by witnesses.
On September 3, the paper Nezavicimaya Gazeta reported that
"intelligence forces were preparing to storm the school." The
paper referred to the fact that on the night of September 1 specially
equipped military transport planes had landed in North Ossetia.
The paper also said it was presumed that the anti-terror unit "Alfa"
had been flown in.
It is now known that "Alfa" and another anti-terror unit, "Vimpel,"
played the decisive role in the storming of the building. The very
fact that, following the unexpected exchange of fire on September 3,
the terrorists immediately began shooting and set off previously
installed explosives indicates that they were sure a storming of the
building would take place.
Bearing these facts in mind-the demands of the terrorists that were
never disclosed, the refusal of the government to undertake any
discussions with the hostage-takers, the scale of the censorship
of information regarding what was taking place inside the school
and the positioning of the special forces units in the front line-the
newspaper Gazeta.ru concluded on September 4: "The storming had
in fact been prepared and was to have been carried out within the
next two days. Without water, the children could only have survived
for three or four days, and then it would have no longer been
possible to rescue most of the hostages. However, on Friday they
were forced to take action."
Lie number four: the number of victims
Even after the catastrophe had taken place-bombs had gone off
in the gym, part of which had collapsed-the government and the
media continued to lie by minimizing the number of casualties.
The official death toll rose only as the bodies began to be
counted. According to government sources on Monday morning,
September 6, 335 dead had been counted. At the same time it
became clear there existed a list of missing persons totaling 260.
According to the radio station "Echo Moscow," these victims feature
neither on the lists of those who have died nor on the list of those
who have been hospitalized.
On Saturday, inhabitants of Beslan, who observed coffins with
victims inside being transported from the burnt out ruins of the
school, reported t
hat they had counted a total of between 500 and 600.
Against this background it is hardly necessary to examine the other
lies broadcast by the Russian media about the number of terrorists
involved-which was also minimized-or the course of events that
was officially reported in wildly varying versions.
The overall conduct of the Russian media, in particular the major
television networks, was shameful. While in the West many television
stations devoted special coverage to the events in North Ossetia,
often working with Russian cameramen, Russian television refused
to interrupt its regular programming.
At one point in the crisis, a correspondent for the Russian
television channel NTW addressed the camera and bluntly
declared, "We cannot say what is happening; we cannot
comment on the actions of those involved in the fighting!"
It is no wonder that television journalists have been physically
assaulted by Beslan inhabitants. As the first information emerged
on the real extent of the casualties, outraged bystanders turned
on television journalists, lashing out at their cameras and the
reporters themselves.
The role played by Russian television, however, only expressed
the iron-fisted control exerted over the major media outlets by
Putin's Kremlin, which has brought every television channel under
either direct or indirect state control. The Russian regime has
enforced media subservience with intimidation and state gangsterism,
which is backed by much of Russia's ruling strata of corrupt
businessmen and ex-Stalinist bureaucrats.
Putin used the hostage-taking crisis at the Moscow theatre two
years ago to consolidate this grip over the media, claiming that
it had abused freedom of the press in its coverage. He demanded
that the news outlets report nothing that could conceivably aid
the terrorists, including their statements or demands, analysis
of the events or coverage of Russian military and police operations.
This noose is tightening. The editor in chief of Izvestia, Raf Shakirov,
announced his forced resignation Monday after coming under fire
from the Kremlin and the newspaper's corporate publishers over
its coverage of the Beslan events. The paper filled its entire front
page last Saturday with a photograph of a man carrying a wounded
child from the besieged school. The newspaper also raised pointed
questions about the official claim that only 350 people were held
hostage and published a stinging column denouncing the self-
censorship by the television channels.
Meanwhile, a prominent Russian journalist who has reported
critically on the war in Chechnya was prevented from reaching
the scene of the latest hostage-taking tragedy under
circumstances that can only be described as ominous.
Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya fell sick
after drinking tea during the first leg of her flight to Beslan.
Rushed to the hospital after landing in Rostov, she was diagnosed
with acute food poisoning. According to one report, authorities
had blocked her from boarding her original flight, but the captain
of another airliner recognized her and invited her aboard.
The suppression of the media, together with the impotence of
the Russian parliament-the Duma chose not to meet during the
crisis, with its leaders affirming that all they could do was issue
another statement-are hallmarks of the authoritarian state that
Putin is consolidating in Russia.
The president's resort to the methods of state censorship, however,
is a manifestation of the general impotence and political isolation
of the regime as a whole. Under conditions of historically
unprecedented social inequality between a thin layer of "new
Russian" entrepreneurs and masses of impoverished working
people, democratic forms of rule are not possible.
While capable of buying off or intimidating his political opponents
and much of the media, Putin has proven unable to resolve any of
the deepening crises wracking Russia, from the war in Chechnya
and other outbreaks of regional separatism, to the generalized
corruption and breakdown that characterizes the entire state
apparatus and the economy. All of these crises came together
to produce the tragedy in Beslan.
While these failures are behind the drive to control the media,
the ham-fisted censorship carried out in the latest crisis has
provoked widespread anger and opposition within the former
Soviet Union. The "democratic reforms" that were touted as a
byproduct of the collapse of the USSR and the introduction of
capitalism have produced instead a media that is in many ways
reminiscent of the worst of the Stalinist period, based on lies and
deception and dedicated to the suppression of any news that
casts the head of state in a bad light.
Putin has seized upon the atrocity in Beslan to claim even more
authoritarian power and to reject any suggestion of negotiating an
end to the brutal war in Chechnya. His transparent aim is to
emulate Bush in claiming unlimited power to carry out repression
in the name of a "war on terror."
While hundreds of thousands turned out at rallies against
terrorism that were organized with state support on Tuesday,
the mood of outrage was directed not only at the terrorists, but
at the government itself.
The harshest anger was expressed at a rally in the North Ossetian
capital of Vladikavkaz, about 18 miles north of Beslan. The crowd
that turned out in the city's central square protested not only
against terrorism, but the state authorities as well.
"Today, we will bury our children and tomorrow we will come
here and throw these devils out of their seats, from the lowest
director up to ministers and the president," a speaker at the
rally declared.
A protest sign raised above the crowd read, "Corrupt authority
is a source of terrorism."
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
8) Protests Powered by Cellphone
By PATRICK DI JUSTO
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/technology/circuits/09mobb.html
AS thousands of protesters marched through Manhattan
during the Republican National Convention last week, some
were equipped with a wireless tactical communications device
connected to a distributed information service that provided
detailed and nearly instantaneous updates about route changes,
street closures and police actions.
The communications device was a common cellphone. The
information service, a collection of open-source, Web-based
programming scripts running on a Linux server in someone's
closet, is called TXTMob.
TXTMob works like an Internet mailing list for cellphones and is
the brainchild of a young man who goes by the pseudonym John
Henry. He is a member of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a
group of artists, programmers and others who say their mission
is to develop technologies that serve the social and human need
for self-determination. (The group was behind iSee, a Web site that
has maps of surveillance cameras in Lower Manhattan and calculates
routes for those seeking to avoid them.)
He conceals his identity as part of an agreement with other members
of the group and out of concern that he might become the target
of an effort to force disclosure of TXTMob members' phone numbers,
which are kept in a database he maintains.
TXTMob allows people to quickly and easily send text messages
from one cellphone to a group of other cellphones. This in itself
is nothing new: other mobile networking systems like
dodgeball.com and bedno.com already exist.
To sign up for TXTMob, users enter their cellphone numbers
into the TXTMob Web site, www.txtmob .com. To thwart spammers,
the system uses opt-in registration: a machine-generated
authorization code is sent to each registered number and must
be re-entered into the Web site to activate the registration.
TXTMob is designed to carefully maintain members' privacy,
not surprising given why most are using TXTMob.
The software was not intended for everyday mobile socializing.
It was created as a tool political activists could use to organize
their work, from staff meetings to street protests. Most of the
people using it are on the left: of the 142 public groups listed on
the TXTMob site, the largest are dedicated to protesting the Bush
administration, the Republican Party or the state of the world in
general.
When a preliminary version of TXTMob was tested at the Democratic
National Convention in Boston in July, about 200 people used it to
organize protesters into spontaneous rallies, to warn them about
the location of police crackdowns and to direct volunteer medics
where they were needed, all in real time.
Based on user feedback afterward, some changes were made -
primarily beefing up the system to handle a heavier volume of
messages - to increase its usefulness for what were expected
to be much larger protests during the Republican National
Convention.
TXTMob had its first major New York workout on the evening
of Aug. 27, during the Critical Mass, a loosely organized bicycle
ride through Manhattan by anti-Republican protesters. From the
start of the ride, participants in a TXTMob group called
comms_dispatch sent a slew of messages alerting one
another to route changes and warning of traffic snarls.
As the ride neared its end, comms_dispatch buzzed with
reports of arrests from Second Avenue to 10th Avenue,
and around St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.
On Aug. 29, two days after she took part in the Critical Mass
ride, a woman from San Francisco who identified herself only
as Josie sat outside St. Mark's and read text messages on her
cellphone. Describing herself as a "voracious" TXTMob reader,
she credited the service with helping keep her safe during the ride.
"It told me where the cops were and where I could rest," she
said as she thumbed through the TXTMob messages from that
day's United for Peace and Justice march that were arriving on
her cellphone at the rate of about one per minute. "It brought
me here."
As reports of clashes between the police and protesters appeared
on her cellphone screen, it became possible to build a mental
picture of the march: a burning papier mâché dragon outside
Madison Square Garden, barricades on 34th Street, police officers
zipping around on scooters, a rally so large that the first marchers
had finished before the last marchers had started.
That, to Josie, was TXTMob's most important function. "When I can't
be at a protest, like now," she said, waving her phone, "it's like I can
be there, because I can know what's going on directly from the people
who are there in the streets."
What might have been TXTMob's greatest moment, the planned flash
mob at Union Square on Aug. 31, did not work out as planned. That
afternoon, TXTMob subscribers with cellular service from Sprint or
T-Mobile stopped receiving messages for nearly four hours, leaving
them unaware of the first meeting location. When those who did meet
started marching, the police quickly set up a barricade across 16th
Street and began arresting the marchers. All told, it took about an
hour for the event, loosely organized by the A31 Action Coalition,
to go from promise to debacle:
18:15:50 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party mtg at SE corner of Union Sq.
18:37:56 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party look for festive signs.
19:02:51 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party on B-way at 15th headed north.
Doing fine.
19:07:02 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party penned in b/w Irving and 16th.
More in next message.
19:15:23 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party disperse immediately.
What happens to TXTMob after Election Day? The events of last week
left the Institute for Applied Autonomy convinced that it has a future,
not just as an activist organizing tool but also as a general mobile
networking system.
The Internet Business Chronicle, an online publication, is using
TXTMob to deliver news updates to readers, and the number of
party groups is quickly catching up to the number of protest
groups. The pseudonymous John Henry said he was looking at
keeping the system going and might even expand it to work with
cellphones in Europe and Asia. After that, it's anyone's guess.
"People keep finding their own uses for this thing, and they're
developing it on the fly," he said. "That's what's really exciting."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
9) Ex-Banking Star Given 18 Months for Obstruction
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/business/09star.html
Frank P. Quattrone, the Wall Street banker whose pay and deals
made him a vivid symbol of the 1990's technology boom, was
sentenced to 18 months in prison yesterday for obstructing a
government investigation into the allocation of hot stock offerings.
Mr. Quattrone, 48, who led the initial offerings of companies like
Amazon.com and Cisco Systems as a banker at Credit Suisse First
Boston, is the most prominent Wall Street figure to face prison since
Michael R. Milken pleaded guilty to six securities charges in 1990.
Judge Richard Owen of Federal District Court in Manhattan handed
down a harsher prison sentence than the 10 to 16 months stipulated
by basic federal guidelines, finding that Mr. Quattrone perjured himself
when he took the witness stand during his trial and said under oath that
he had not intended to impede the government's investigation when he
sent a one-line e-mail message at the heart of the case.
"It is crystal clear that he was untruthful," Judge Owen said yesterday.
Mr. Quattrone, who made $120 million in 2000, was perhaps the most
prominent banker in Silicon Valley during the 1990's, assembling a team
that brought public many of the biggest names in technology. After that
success and the bursting of the technology bubble, Mr. Quattrone and
First Boston came under the microscope of regulators and prosecutors,
who began investigating whether the bank was soliciting kickbacks from
preferred investors, later dubbed Friends of Frank, in exchange for access =
to hot stock offerings.
While that inquiry did not lead to criminal charges, Mr. Quattrone was
charged with hampering the investigations when he endorsed a
colleague's e-mail message in December 2000 urging his staff to
"clean up those files." Mr. Quattrone's first trial ended in a hung jury,
but he was convicted at a retrial.
Judge Owen refused Mr. Quattrone's request to remain free while he
appealed the case. Mr. Quattrone must surrender to federal prison
authorities within 50 days. The judge also fined him $90,300 and
initially asked him to make the payment immediately. "There's $50
million in the bank," Judge Owen said. "He can't write a check today?"
He then acquiesced to requests by Mr. Quattrone's lawyers to pay the
fine within 20 days.
Mr. Quattrone's sentence, which includes two years of probation, stands
in stark contrast to the one recently given to Martha Stewart, who was
also convicted of obstruction of justice. In that case, Judge Miriam
Goldman Cedarbaum sentenced Ms. Stewart to five months in prison,
plus five months of home confinement. Ms. Stewart was also allowed
to remain free pending appeal.
The Bureau of Prisons had recommended in its presentencing report
that Mr. Quattrone receive the same sentence as Ms. Stewart.
Robert G. Morvillo, who is Ms. Stewart's lawyer, said yesterday that
Mr. Quattrone's sentence was too severe. "Is it a reasonable sentence?"
Mr. Morvillo asked. "You won't find a defense attorney in town who
thinks this is reasonable. The idea that Judge Owen jumped the
sentence just continues the defense bar view that he is overly harsh."
Judge Owen, an appointee of President Richard M. Nixon, has long
had a reputation among defense lawyers of favoring prosecutors, and
the sentencing of Mr. Quattrone capped nearly a year of dueling
between his lawyers and the judge that often included heated
exchanges in court.
At one point yesterday, Mr. Quattrone's trial lawyer, John W. Keker,
a former prosecutor of Oliver L. North during the Iran-contra trial,
told the judge he thought he was being strung along while making
his argument for leniency.
"If you've made up your mind on this, just tell me," Mr. Keker said. At
another point, in which Mr. Keker cited the hung jury in the first trial
and asserted there were grounds for appeal because the case was so
close, Judge Owen blurted out: "I don't agree with you that this was a
close case."
Mr. Quattrone's appeal will be based in large part on several rulings
Judge Owen made that barred him from introducing evidence that
may have been helpful to his case.
The clash continued in court yesterday and spilled into the street after
the hearing, with Mr. Quattrone's lawyers standing in pelting rain
accusing Judge Owen of an unfair trial.
"Cases like this are why we have courts of appeals," said Mark F.
Pomerantz, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in
Manhattan who will lead Mr. Quattrone's appeal. "The defense was
forced to try its case from the inside of a straitjacket."
"The trial judge kept out critical evidence offered by the defense,"
said Mr. Pomerantz, who represented Dr. Samuel D. Waksal, the founder
of ImClone Systems Inc. , who pleaded guilty to insider trading. "And
although the judge tied the hands of the defense, he gave the
government free rein to put in irrelevant but prejudicial evidence."
Before he was sentenced, Mr. Quattrone addressed the judge, saying:
"I humbly ask that you show mercy and compassion for me and my
family, for whom any separation from me would be extremely
detrimental."
But the judge denied his request, and Mr. Quattrone's legal team
and friends sitting in court were enraged when Judge Owen then
appeared to gratuitously make public the medical problems of
Mr. Quattrone's 15-year-old daughter, Cristina, questioning the
severity of claims from doctors who submitted records that she
has a medical disorder. Mr. Quattrone's lawyers had asked that
the medical records of the family remain sealed.
Judge Owen also dismissed arguments from Mr. Quattrone's lawyers
that he should receive a lenient sentence because his wife has a
chronic illness that makes him the "only functioning adult" in the
household.
"There's $50 million of assets out there to take care of
Mrs. Quattrone and $26 million to take care of Cristina in some
trust fund," Judge Owen said. Reading from Mrs. Quattrone's
medical records, Judge Owen added, "It says here she can drive
under limited conditions."
Judge Owen's decision to depart from the basic federal guidelines
and give Mr. Quattrone a tougher sentence raises questions about
whether it will be upheld. In a case from Washington State in June,
the Supreme Court ruled that the state's judicial system, which
allowed judges to increase a convicted defendant's sentence
beyond the ordinary range for the crime, violated the constitutional
right to trial by jury. While the ruling only applies to Washington
State, the decision - Blakely v. Washington - is being watched by
federal judges nationwide, and many have stuck to the guidelines,
worried that their sentences will be overturned. The Supreme Court
has agreed to rule on the constitutionality of the guidelines for
federal criminal sentences this fall.
"Given that the Blakely case is still out there, to do an upward
departure, this is a judge who is thumbing his nose at Blakely,"
said John J. Fahy, a former federal prosecutor who practices law
in New Jersey.
Some defense lawyers contended the sentence might help
Mr. Quattrone's appeal. "It plays into the defense claim of unfair
treatment on the part of Judge Owen," said Robert A. Mintz, a
former federal prosecutor and a partner at McCarter & English.
Judge Owen agreed to a request from Mr. Quattrone's lawyers
that he be assigned to Lompoc Federal Prison Camp in California,
which is a minimum-security prison northwest of Los Angeles
where Ivan F. Boesky was once an inmate.
As he left the courthouse, Mr. Quattrone said: "To my family in
California, Dad is coming home soon, and I love you. And I can
hold my head high because I know I'm innocent and I never
intended to obstruct justice."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9. 7 PM
1380 VALENCIA STREET
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) FW: Press conference and vigil
From: Howard Wallace
Wed, 8 Sep 2004
2) For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home
By MONICA DAVEY
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/national/09deaths.html?hp
3) U.S. Forces on Offensive in Iraq Rebel Strongholds
By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:28 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193417&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
4) Israel Kills 4, Including 9-Year-Old, in Gaza
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:43 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193616&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
5) Family 'Thanks' Bush for Death of Son
WKYC-TV
Wednesday 08 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091004Z.shtml
6) USA: Chevron donates to Schwarzenegger, gets removal of
restrictions on oil refineries in California
by Tom Chorneau , Associated Press
Friday, September 03, 2004 - SACRAMENTO
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11519
7) The Beslan hostage tragedy:
the lies of the Putin government and its media
By Vladimir Volkov
8 September 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/puti-s08.shtml
8) Protests Powered by Cellphone
By PATRICK DI JUSTO
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/technology/circuits/09mobb.html
9) Ex-Banking Star Given 18 Months for Obstruction
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/business/09star.html
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) FW: Press conference and vigil
From: Howard Wallace
Wed, 8 Sep 2004
Dear Friends,
Please help us spread the word about the vigil below to
commemorate the over 1,000 US soldiers who died in Iraq. If any of you
or someone from your organizations would like to speak, please do so.
Thanks so much,
Medea Benjamin
Code Pink and Global Exchange
URGENT CALL TO ACTION:
JOIN US AT A VIGIL FOR THE 1,000 U.S. SOLDIERS AND TENS OF
THOUSANDS IRAQIS KILLED IN IRAQ
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 5-7PM at UN PLAZA (Market St
between 7th and Hyde), San Francisco
For more information: Nancy Mancias, Code Pink,
415-342-6409 or foonan@jps.net
Over 1,000 young Americans have now died in Iraq, over
7,000 are maimed, and many thousands of Iraqis have died.
The President won't mourn our dead, but we will. Please
join Code Pink, Bring Our Troops Home Now Committee,
Mother Speak, United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For
Peace, Not in Our Name, and Global Exchange to say: Enough
to Endless War and Suffering, Bring Them Home NOW.
There will be dozens such vigils happening all over the
country, where we will remember the 1,000 US servicemen
and women who have died in Iraq. We will remember the tens
of thousands of Iraqis--civilians and combatants, men and
women, children, the elderly--who have been killed. We
will remember that these deaths did not have to happen.
We know that the current administration has plunged us
into this unjust and unjustifiable war, driven by greed
for oil and lust for power and fueled by lie after lie.
We cannot remain silent. We want an end to the occupation
so the Iraqi people can determine their own destiny free
from foreign interference and control.
We want our troops brought home now. Don't ask these men
and women to continue to die for politicians' mistakes and
lies. And we want them treated right when they return.
Give them the benefits there were promised and give them
the help they will need to heal their bodies, their minds
and their spirits.
We are here to remember, to honor and to mourn. We will
not forget!
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home
By MONICA DAVEY
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/national/09deaths.html?hp
Dixie Codner had a question for the marines who came down her gravel
road, past the rows of corn and alfalfa, to tell her that her 19-year-old
son, Kyle, had been killed in Iraq. Should she bring them the dress blues, =
still pressed and hanging neatly in his closet, for his funeral?
No need, she recalled them answering. They had dress uniforms from
all the services, all sizes, waiting back at Dover Air Force Base in Delawa=
re,
where the bodies of American service members come home.
"What does that say?" Ms. Codner asked, as she sat at her kitchen table
in Shelton, Neb., on a recent morning, fingering a thick stack of photograp=
hs
that her son had sent from the desert. "How many more are they expecting?
All I know is that there are 1,000 families that feel just like we do. We g=
o
to bed at night, and we don't have our children."
Like Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Codner, each of the more than 1,000 marines and
soldiers, sailors and airmen killed since the United States sent troops
to invade Iraq leaves behind a grieving family, a story, a unique memory
of duty and sacrifice in what has become the deadliest war for Americans
since Vietnam.
But along with so much personal loss, the roster of the dead tells a
larger story, a portrait of a society and a military in transition, with
ever-widening roles and costs for the country's part-time soldiers,
women and Hispanics.
As has often been true in the United States' wars, small towns like
Shelton and other rural areas suffered a disproportionate share of
deaths compared with the nation's big cities. More than 100 service
members who died were from California, the most for any state, but
the smaller, less-populated states, many in the nation's middle - the
Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska - recorded some of the biggest per
capita losses.
In these mostly Republican-leaning states, people have begun to
take painful note of the toll in Iraq. Many of the families of the dead
there said they remained supportive of the war, the troops and the
president. Still, with the death toll reaching 1,000 just two months
before the presidential election, the somber milestone captured a
central spot in the national political debate this week.
More than 70 percent of the dead were soldiers in the Army, and
more than 20 percent were marines. More than half were in the
lowest-paid enlisted ranks. About 12 percent were officers. Three-
quarters of the troops died in hostile incidents: most often,
homemade-bomb explosions, small-arms fire, rocket attacks.
A quarter died in illnesses or accidents: truck and helicopter
crashes and gun discharges.
On average, the service members who died were about 26. The
youngest was 18; the oldest, 59. About half were married, according
to the death roll, which does not include a handful yet to be identified
by the Defense Department and three civilians who worked for the
military.
Part-time soldiers, the guardsmen and reservists who once expected
to tend to floods and hurricanes, were called to Iraq on a scale not
seen through five decades of war. Increasingly, Iraq is becoming their
conflict, and in growing numbers this spring and early summer, these
part-time soldiers died there. Ten times as many of them died from
April to July of this year as had in the war's first two months.
American women, too, have quietly drawn closer to combat than they
had in half a century. At least 24 female service members died in Iraq,
more than in any American conflict since World War II, a stark sign of
a barrier broken.
Many Hispanics, once underrepresented in the armed forces, have
fought and died in striking numbers. At least 122 Hispanics have
died in Iraq, meaning that they died at a rate disproportionately high
for their representation in the active forces and among the deployed
troops. Among the dead were 39 service members who were not
American citizens, significantly more than had died in Vietnam or
Afghanistan, according to Defense Department records.
Most of the troops - 85 percent - died after President Bush declared
major combat operations over on May 1, 2003. Nearly 15 percent
died after the United States turned over sovereignty to Iraq's new
leaders this June. The deadliest month was this April, as insurgents
stepped up their attacks. Nearly as many American troops died that
month as had in the initial invasion.
The Pentagon says it does not track or release estimates of the
number of Iraqis killed since the war began, although some independent
groups have offered widely varying estimates. (A group called Iraq
Body Count said Iraqi civilian deaths exceeded 11,000.)
Among Americans, especially the relatives of service members who
have died, the meaning of the toll is already a matter of feverish,
sometimes bitter, debate.
Some say they view the number of deaths - and the injuries to more
than 7,000 other Americans - as a tragic but unavoidable price of war,
and one that seems modest beside the death toll from Vietnam, which
was 58,000. About 380 troops died in the Persian Gulf war of 1991,
and some 97 in Afghanistan. Any questions about the mounting
numbers in Iraq, these relatives said, served as a rejection of the
troops' mission, an insult to their lost soldier's work.
"The loss is there, of course, but we also know the honor and the
pride," said Kelby McCrae, himself a captain in the National Guard
and the son of a veteran soldier. His younger brother, Erik, was
killed in June. "We're just so honored at the sacrifice he gave."
But others said they worried that their soldier's sacrifice in Iraq
might be forgotten as more months pass and people grow inured
to news of so many deaths, one after the next in this war.
The Guard and the Reserves: 'Weekend Warriors' Go Full Time
Eric S. McKinley was a baker and a part-time soldier. He dyed his
hair strange colors and pierced his body in places his mother
sometimes wished he had not. His six-year stint in the Oregon
National Guard was supposed to end in April, but it was extended,
and Specialist McKinley died June 13 when a bomb blew up near
his Humvee near Baghdad. Specialist McKinley's father, Tom, said
he was left with a haunting conviction: that guardsmen and
reservists are now being asked in record numbers to fight the
same lethal wars as full-time soldiers, but without the same
level of training, equipment or respect. Dozens of parents and
spouses of guardsmen - some who died and others still serving
in Iraq - said they shared Mr. McKinley's worries as they wrestled
with what the role of the nation's 1.2 million part-time service
members once was and what it was becoming.
"They are not prepared for this, not emotionally and not with
their gear and equipment," said Mr. McKinley, of Salem, Ore.
"There's this opinion that these guys are just 'weekend warriors,'
and we'll have them do all the things the regular army doesn't
have time to do. But these guys are being asked to put their lives
on the line just as much as everyone else. These guys are yanked
from their lives, and yet they aren't treated the same."
During special training at a base in Texas before he left for Iraq,
Specialist McKinley told his father that his Guard unit was getting
only two meals a day, while regular units ate three. And in Iraq,
on the day of his death, Specialist McKinley's fellow guardsmen
said he was in a Humvee reinforced with plywood and sandbags,
not real armor.
Cecil Green, a spokesman at Fort Hood where Specialist McKinley's
unit trained before it left for Iraq, said all soldiers - regular and
part time - were fed equally. But Col. Mike Caldwell, deputy director
of the Oregon National Guard, said his troops had complained about
unequal conditions during training there in months past. "There
were a lot of problems in their treatment," Colonel Caldwell said.
"It was deplorable. They were treated like slaves in some respects."
Thomas F. Hall, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs,
acknowledged in a telephone interview last week that since the
terrorist attacks of 2001, the nation's reserve components had been
called in numbers unknown since perhaps World War II. But those
part-timers sent to Iraq are trained and equipped to the same level
as any active-duty troops, Mr. Hall said.
"It's no longer your father or your grandfather's Guard and Reserves,"
Mr. Hall said. "A lot of this is a leftover vestige from a time in which
we didn't perhaps equip and train our Guard and Reserve as we need to."
Any shortages of equipment - of armored Humvees or protective gear -
have been faced by all types of troops, not just guardsmen, he said.
And Mr. Hall insisted that no one, not even him, could distinguish
between part--s and others when it came to Iraq. "They look the
same. Their standards are the same. Their training is the same,"
he said.
Recently home from Iraq with an injury, Specialist Andrew Cross,
a member of the North Carolina National Guard, said the only
difference he discerned was a little taunting. "Sure, they say stuff
about you not being full time,'' Specialist Cross said, "but who
cares what they say."
Specialist Cross's best friend, Specialist Daniel A. Desens, who
listened to Bob Marley and Dave Matthews with him as they rolled
along in their Bradleys in Iraq, was one of at least 179 guardsmen
and reservists killed there, the records of those identified as of
yesterday show.
Their deaths make up less than a fifth of those killed, but the timing
of their deaths underscores the changing makeup of American forces
in Iraq. In the first weeks of war, only a small group of reserve forces
was sent to Iraq, and only a few died. The numbers grew swiftly this
year, and reserves and guards now amount to about 40 percent of
the forces deployed to Iraq, and maybe still more soon.
Back in Oregon, Colonel Caldwell said leaders were busy arranging
more deployments for some of the state's 8,400 Army and Air
National Guard troops in the coming weeks, even as gloom lingered
over the headquarters. Four Oregon guardsmen, including Specialist
McKinley, died in a 10-day stretch.
Nationally, Mr. Hall said, recruiters may fall 1 percent short of their
goals for new Guard members when the annual count is taken at the
end of September. In Oregon, Colonel Caldwell predicted direr
shortfalls: 10 percent to 15 percent.
"I think it's pretty obvious what's happening," he said. "People
have realized: you join the Guard in Oregon, you're going to be
mobilized."
The Women: Dying, in a Role Quietly Redefined
Before she left her home in Richmond, Va., Leslie D. Jackson's
Junior R.O.T.C. instructor warned her that although women might
not officially be on the very front line of a ground war, they were
edging ever closer - and the line itself, if ever there was one in Iraq,
had grown dangerously blurry.
"I told her that even combat support roles could still take you places
that maybe you should not be," said Master Sgt. Earl G. Winston Jr.,
who taught Private Jackson at George Wythe High School. "But she said
she was ready to accept the challenge. She said she did not want her
fellow soldiers, most of them men, to think that she wasn't every bit
as good as them."
Private Jackson, who had talked her reluctant mother into letting her
sign up for the Army when she was 17, died on May 20 in Baghdad.
The truck she was transporting supplies in hit a roadside bomb. She
had finished basic training eight months before, and had turned 18,
making her the youngest of 24 women who have died in Iraq.
Not long before, she had sent an e-mail message to her former
principal, Earl Pappy, to say that she was spending long hours
driving trucks and had been unnerved at seeing a soldier killed for
the first time right before her: " 'I left home as Mommy's little girl,' ''=
Mr. Pappy said she wrote, " 'and I'm coming back as a strong woman.'
"She told me she wouldn't be in combat, and I don't think women
should be," said Viola Jackson, Private Jackson's mother. "But then
again, they joined the Army, and I guess you've got to do whatever
the other people are doing. I don't know. What I know is she was a
sweet child."
Women make up some 10 percent of American forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but they account for less than 3 percent of the 1,000
deaths in Iraq. Still, more women have died there than in any conflict
since hundreds died in World War II - a certain if somber sign of how
women's roles in the military have grown in the last decade.
More surprising, though, to advocates on both sides of a long-
simmering debate over what women should and should not do
in times of war has been the public's reaction to the loss of 24
women. Mostly, there has been silence.
"What it means is that our view of women has changed," said Lory
Manning, director of the Women in the Military Project at the
Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington and a
retired 25-year veteran of the Navy.
"Within our minds, women are doing a lot of athletic things. They're
SWAT team members and firefighters now. This is worldwide. So
people see this as less horrible. The horror of death is equal now."
But others, like Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military
Readiness, an independent public policy group in Livonia, Mich.,
said Americans were largely oblivious to the role women were playing
in Iraq and would be disturbed if they knew. Female soldiers who die
receive little attention, she said, except in small hometown newspapers;
the same is true of the 207 women who have been injured in Iraq.
Shortly after the war began, there were hints of the nation's discomfort
when three female soldiers, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Specialist
Shoshana Johnson, were taken hostage, and one of them, Pfc. Lori Ann
Piestewa, was killed, Ms. Donnelly said. In images broadcast around
the world, Specialist Johnson looked terrified, her eyes darting.
"The risk of capture is why we oppose women in combat," said Ms.
Donnelly, who wants the Pentagon to reconsider the jobs close to
combat that women now hold. "We're a civilized nation. Violence
against women is wrong. I hope that we don't become that kind of
a nation that doesn't care about this sort of thing."
Eight women died in Vietnam. Sixteen died in the first Persian Gulf
war. Three died in Afghanistan. And through most of that time,
people have argued over what place women should take in war.
Women have served in the American military since 1901, and others
quietly did unofficial military work as early as the Revolutionary War.
But in 1948, Congress adopted the Armed Forces Integration Act,
which capped women at 2 percent of the services and barred them
from serving on combat planes and combat ships.
After Vietnam, and the end of the draft, the restrictions on women
began to fade, one by one. By 1994, women were allowed to fly
combat aircraft, to serve on fighter ships but not submarines, and
to fill ground jobs except those most directly on the front lines:
special forces, infantry, armor, artillery. But in Iraq, the jobs that
women could fill - as drivers in convoys bringing supplies to troops
and as members of military police units - came under attack from
homemade bombs and mortar fire, too, and the notion of a front
line seemed no longer to fit the conflict.
Nearly all of the women killed were full-time soldiers in the Army.
And two-thirds of them died in hostile situations, not in accidents
or because of illness.
Even Ms. Manning, who supports bigger roles for women in the
military, said she was surprised at the degree to which women
had been included in critical operations, including patrolling
checkpoints. In part, their role may have been a necessary
outgrowth of cultural differences in Iraq. Female soldiers were
needed when Iraqi women were searched or questioned.
Still, Ms. Donnelly and other critics say, the scars from so much
change are being ignored: What will come of the children, they
asked, who lose their mothers to war?
Sgt. Tatjana Reed, a single mother, was killed on July 22 when a
bomb exploded near her convoy vehicle. She had signed papers
leaving her 10-year-old daughter, Genevieve, in the care of relatives
near her base in Germany, expecting the arrangement to be
temporary.
Sergeant Reed "always said, 'What a man can do, I can do,' ''
recalled her mother, Brigitte Dykty, who lives in Clarksville, Tenn.
"Sometimes I wish she hadn't thought that."
The Hispanics: Underrepresented, Except on Death Rolls
Five years ago, the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group
for Hispanics, released a scathing study of Hispanics in the United
States military. The central finding was that the military was not
employing as many Hispanics as it should.
In 1996, the study said, Hispanics 18 to 44 made up more than
11 percent of the civilian work force but accounted for less than 7
percent of the military's active forces.
The military took notice, and the Marines, in particular, began a
serious recruiting effort aimed at Spanish-speaking markets, said
Lisa Navarrete, vice president of the advocacy group.
"They took it very, very seriously," Ms. Navarrete said.
By 2004, Latinos accounted for 9.2 percent of all active-duty
forces and about 10 percent of those forces deployed to Iraq
nd Afghanistan.
That news came with a distinctly bittersweet edge. Of the 1,000
killed in Iraq, at least 122, or more than 12 percent, were Hispanic,
according to the Defense Department, which says ethnicity was not
tracked by the same measures in previous wars.
"It seems that in a time of peace, we're underrepresented,"
Ms. Navarrete said quietly. "In a time of war, the situation is
completely changed."
One reason for the high rate of Hispanic deaths in Iraq is that Hispanics =
account for a particularly large segment - more than 13 percent - of
the Marines, the ground troops who suffered significant losses early
in the war, as well as in the uprisings of recent weeks.
Some of those who died fighting for the United States were not even
citizens. At least 39 noncitizens - many, though not all, of Hispanic
heritage - were among the dead. Legal residents of this country have
long served in the armed forces, but records of their deaths in war
are hard to find. The official Defense Department records show that
one noncitizen died in military duty in Vietnam and three in
Afghanistan.
In 2002, Mr. Bush issued an order shortening the waiting periods
for service members and their families seeking citizenship, and
Congress made those changes permanent with a law that takes
effect in October. Some anti-immigration advocates said that
military service alone was not a qualification for citizenship, while
others worried that the changes might induce some immigrants
to enlist in hopes of speedy citizenship.
"But the bottom line, whatever the casualties, is that people are
going to continue to join because they have to," said Rodolfo Acuna,
a professor of Chicano studies at California State University,
Northridge. "They want to live better. They want to get money.
They want to better themselves."
Rey David Cuervo was born in Tampico, Mexico, but his mother,
Rosalba Kuhn, took him to Texas when he was 6. She was a maid
in Port Isabel. He was an only boy among three sisters, the quiet
one with just a handful of friends.
At age 8, she said, he went to her carrying a picture of the
American flag and explained that he planned to join the American
Army. "He said that this is all he wanted," she recalled not long ago.
"He said if they wouldn't take him in the Army here, then he'd go back
to Mexico and sign up there."
In 1999, he left for basic training.
"I was so proud," Ms. Kuhn said. "When I came here, my dreams
were that I would see my kids here, see them learn the language,
see them get a better life for themselves. Part of that was wanting
to see my son in an American uniform."
Ms. Kuhn said she thinks of her son every day when she wakes up.
She lights candles for him. She holds a hat of his under her nose
and breathes it in. In the sadness, though, Ms. Kuhn said she had
no anger. Her son wanted to go into the Army. He wanted to go to
Iraq. He chose his future.
Private Cuervo, who once told his mother that he planned to retire
from the military after 20 years and then buy a big house, died on
Dec. 28, 2003, when a bomb exploded. He was 24, one of 32,000
noncitizens in the armed forces. The government granted him
citizenship after he died.
The Small Towns: When the Population Is Reduced by One
There are no sidewalks along the quiet streets of Shelton, Neb.,
but there is red-white-and-blue bunting, a little faded now, and
tattered black ribbon tied to the street posts. Not that anyone
here needs to be reminded about Kyle Codner.
The nation's small towns experienced more than their share of
death in Iraq, a clear reflection of their representation in the
nation's military services. Not only did death arrive in
disproportionate numbers in these towns, but each death
seemed to echo louder and longer than it might have in a big city.
One resident here compared Corporal Codner's death on May 26
to a tornado whipping up in the Midwest and zeroing in on this
town of 1,100 people.
"The word 'shock' is overused, generally," said Lynn McBride, the
chairman of Shelton's village trustees and a schoolteacher. "But it
understates the feelings about this. We're all in it together here,
and there was a feeling that this couldn't be true."
To Shelton, Corporal Codner was the son of Dixie and Wain Codner.
He was one of 19 graduates of Shelton High in 2003, and one of two
to go off to the military. He was the basketball player with the blond
girlfriend, each of them usually on the king and queen court. He was
the clerk at J. R.'s Mini Mart. He was the kid who got his photograph
taken in front of the old military tank that sits at the town's entrance,
and the student named in the yearbook as "Most Likely to Kick Some
Terrorist Butt."
Nebraska and a long list of states in the country's middle and South
had some of the highest death rates per capita. Many of these states
are considered Republican strongholds. Vermont, a Democratic-leaning
state in the presidential race, had the most deaths per capita. Among
swing states in the presidential race, Oregon, Maine and Iowa had
heavy losses.
No one can be sure what role the deaths in Iraq will play in this election =
season. Nebraska has been more reliably Republican through five
decades of presidential races than any other state. Still, Democrats
in Nebraska say the war and the death toll of 14 is stirring political
discussion.
"The Republican voting bloc is persuadable here, especially when
you're talking about sending your sons and daughters to war," said
Barry R. Rubin, executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party.
"One thing about Nebraska is we are very independent-minded people,
and people are seriously questioning the merits of this war."
But along the streets of Shelton last weekend, most people said they
backed the war, and would probably vote for Mr. Bush. Among them
was Corporal Codner's best friend from childhood, Matthew S. Walter,
19 and preparing to vote in his first presidential election. "I don't think=
I like what John Kerry has to say,'' Mr. Walter said.
Most people interviewed said they did not see Corporal Codner's
death through the prism of politics.
"I sense no bitterness or contrition whatsoever about Kyle,''
Mr. McBride said. "I've never heard any of that. I think the overall
feeling is that we're grateful he died the way he did - serving his
country."
About eight miles away, back at Ms. Codner's kitchen table, the
Codners said they would vote against President Bush, one of the
many people Ms. Codner describes as "someone without skin in
the game."
She and her husband go to sleep thinking of the boy in the circle
of class pictures on their living room wall, she said, and then they
wake up thinking of him. In the moments when other thoughts
crowd out those memories, Ms. Codner said, something always
brings him back. On Friday, it was the mail. Four packages that
had been sent to her son in Iraq were returned to her, unopened.
A yellow form on the front of the boxes gave a curt explanation
in the form of a checked box: "Deceased."
The Codners tried to discourage their son from joining the Marines
during his senior year in high school, but when he complained that
they were not being supportive, they tried to go along.
Wain Codner said the town's embrace helped his family the first
weeks after his son's death. "The support was incredible," he said.
"But then, people go on with their lives."
A few days before Corporal Codner died, he sent home a roll of
film. His family developed it, then waited, hoping he would call,
so he could tell them exactly what they were seeing.
The mysterious stack of pictures still sits on the kitchen table. One
shows Corporal Codner, with a wide smile, beside an Iraqi child.
In another, a thick automatic weapon dangles around his neck,
seeming to dwarf his slim frame. Another shows just a sleeping
bag and pad, arranged carefully on a concrete block. This is
probably where he slept, his parents surmise, but they will
never be sure.
Tom Torok and the research staff of The New York Times
contributed to this report.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) U.S. Forces on Offensive in Iraq Rebel Strongholds
By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:28 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193417&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S.-led forces launched operations in
three Iraqi rebel strongholds on Thursday, killing nearly two
dozen insurgents in a town near the Syrian border and bombing
targets in Falluja for the third straight day.
Fierce fighting around the town of Tal Afar, a suspected
haven for foreign fighters about 100 km (60 miles) east of the
Syrian border in northern Iraq, left 22 insurgents dead and
more than 70 wounded, a local government health official said.
"The situation is critical," Rabee Yassin, general manager
for health in Nineveh province, told Reuters. "Ambulances and
medical supplies cannot get to Tal Afar because of the ongoing
military operations."
There were no immediate reports of any U.S. or Iraqi
government casualties in the fighting which local government
sources said had killed 57 since Saturday.
U.S. forces said the assault was in response to provocation
after they and Iraqi security forces "were repeatedly attacked
by a large terrorist element that has displaced local Iraqi
security forces throughout recent weeks."
"These attacks by terrorist groups included
rocket-propelled grenades, small arms fire, mortars and
roadside bombs, and resulted in civilian casualties," the
military said.
Further south, U.S. warplanes bombed rebel-held Falluja for
a third successive night. The U.S. military said the assault
was part of a "precision strike" on an operating base for Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant Washington says is
allied to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
"The target was a building frequently used by terrorists at
the time of the strike. Three Zarqawi associates were reported
to be in the area, no other individuals were present at the
time of the strike," the statement said.
DOCTORS SAY CHILDREN KILLED
But doctors in Falluja said at least eight people were
killed. Doctor Rafi Hayad said four of them were children and
two women. Iraq's Health Ministry said at least 16 people had
been killed in fighting in Falluja in the past 24 hours.
Reuters Television pictures showed several bloodied and
heavily bandaged children being treated in a Falluja hospital.
The United States blames Zarqawi for masterminding a series
of suicide bomb attacks and the killing of several hostages. It
has offered a $25 million reward for his capture.
A statement posted on an Islamic Web Site and claiming to
come from Zarqawi's group said four of his militants had been
killed in the U.S. bombardment of Falluja earlier this week.
The past few days have seen a surge in attacks and clashes
in Iraq that pushed the official Pentagon U.S. death toll for
the war to above 1,000. The Pentagon has admitted that U.S. and
Iraqi forces are not in control of strongholds of the
insurgency like Falluja, Ramadi and Samarra.
U.S. forces entered Samarra on Thursday for the first time
in weeks to try to reestablish Iraqi government control there.
A military statement said the troops went in to install a
temporary mayor and police chief, set up a local council and
assess police stations. There were no reports of clashes.
NO WORD ON HOSTAGES
Besides trying to contain the insurgency, Iraq's government
is also grappling with a hostage crisis.
In one of the most brazen abductions so far, two Italian
women aid workers and two Iraqi colleagues were snatched from
their office in central Baghdad in broad daylight on Tuesday.
No word has yet emerged from their captors.
Since April, people from more than two dozen countries have
been kidnapped as guerrillas have tried to force foreign troops
and firms to leave. More than 20 foreign hostages have been
killed, including two Italians.
The latest kidnappings has piled more pressure on Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Most Italian voters strongly
oppose Italy's role in Iraq, where it has sent 2,700 soldiers.
Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Margherita Boniver flew to
the Middle East on Thursday to seek help in securing the
women's release.
The abductions are likely to fuel uncertainty over the fate
of two French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges
Malbrunot, who have been held since Aug. 20 despite intense
diplomatic efforts to free them.
The seizure of the aid workers is also likely to trigger an
exodus of the 50 or so remaining foreign humanitarian workers
in Iraq.
(c) Copyright Reuters 2004.
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4) Israel Kills 4, Including 9-Year-Old, in Gaza
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters)
Thu Sep 9, 2004 09:43 AM ET
http://www.reuters.com/
newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6193616&src=eDialog/
GetContent§ion=news
JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Israeli forces thrust into
Gaza's largest refugee camp on Thursday, killing four
Palestinians including a 9-year-old boy, as the army tightened
its grip on the northern part of the coastal strip.
Scores of gunmen fought a column of tanks and armored
vehicles as Israeli troops took up positions in and around the
teeming Jabalya camp, a militant stronghold, in an operation
the army said was aimed at stopping rocket fire into Israel.
Helicopter gunships fired missiles into the camp of 100,000
inhabitants as Israeli forces sealed it off in Israel's biggest
incursion in the northern Gaza Strip in months.
Munir el-Deqqes was shot in the chest while playing with
friends outside his grandfather's house, witnesses said. "How
can anyone blame children playing in the street?" said the
boy's uncle. "Munir was a victim of blind Israeli retaliation."
At least 35 people, including militants and civilians, were
wounded by Israeli fire, medics said.
A military source said soldiers had shot only at armed men.
It was the latest chapter in Israel's military response after
suicide bombers killed 16 people in southern Israel last week.
The raid marked a widening of Israel's incursion that began
on Wednesday when forces swept in and seized control following
a barrage of makeshift rocket strikes in southern Israel.
The latest spiral of violence could further complicate
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw troops
and settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip by the end of 2005.
Palestinian militants are determined to claim any Israeli
pullout as a victory, but Israel has vowed to smash them first.
PALESTINIAN CONDEMNATION
"We urge the ... civilized world to stop these crimes by
Israeli occupation forces and call on the United States to
shoulder its responsibilities toward the peace process,"
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said in a statement.
Israel's army killed 14 Hamas fighters at a Gaza training
camp on Tuesday in the deadliest strike ever against the
militant Islamic group, which is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Hamas, responsible for a double suicide bombing in the
Israeli city of Beersheba on August 31, vowed revenge for the
Israeli attacks.
In the second day of Israel's incursion in northern Gaza,
the army said its forces had penetrated to the first row of
houses in eastern Jabalya.
Israeli commanders have usually been reluctant to send
forces deep into Jabalya's cramped alleys, where they would be
vulnerable to booby traps and bombs planted by militants.
"We won't stay there forever," a senior Israeli official said.
"But we have to conduct forays just to keep them (the
rocket crews) off balance."
Medics said troops shot dead four people in Jabalya,
including at least one Hamas militant. It was not known if two
other dead, both men in their 20s, were militants or civilians.
Israeli forces surrounded Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya on
Wednesday -- towns that have been frequently raided -- and
bulldozers tore up stretches of road to cut off the area. By
Thursday, shops were getting low on supplies.
Despite the two-day-old raid, militants managed to fire
several primitive Qassam rockets from fenced-in Gaza toward the
Israeli town of Sderot. There were no reports of casualties.
In a game of cat-and-mouse, militants in some cases use
timers so they can escape minutes before the rockets are
launched, Palestinian sources said.
The army said soldiers in northern Gaza destroyed three
welding machines on Thursday used to make the rockets.
(c) Copyright Reuters 2004.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) Family 'Thanks' Bush for Death of Son
WKYC-TV
Wednesday 08 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091004Z.shtml
THOMPSON - In Geauga County, anger and frustration over the
death of a young soldier inside Iraq has prompted one family to
send a personal message to President Bush.
Ken and Betty Landrus have put up a large sign outside their
home near Thompson, Ohio that is sharply critical of the Bush
administration.
The sign reads "Thanks Mr. Bush for the death of our son."
Their son, Staff Sgt. Sean Landrus was killed near Fallujah in
January.
They believe the president misled the country about the
reasons for invading Iraq and that their son died for nothing.
"Yes I do feel lied to because they kept saying there's mass
destruction and nobody's found anything yet," father Ken
Landrus said.
Sean Landrus also left behind a wife and three young
children.
His youngest daughter, Kennedy, was born just before
Sean left to serve inside Iraq.
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6) USA: Chevron donates to Schwarzenegger, gets removal of
restrictions on oil refineries in California
by Tom Chorneau , Associated Press
Friday, September 03, 2004 - SACRAMENTO
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11519
Friday, September 03, 2004 - SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger's ambitious plan to reorganize almost every
aspect of state government was influenced significantly by oil
and gas giant ChevronTexaco Corp., which managed to shape
such key recommendations as the removal of restrictions on oil
refineries.
Many corporations and interest groups participated in the
governor's reform plan - known as the California Performance
Review - but state records and interviews with the participants
show Chevron enjoyed immense success in influencing the report
through its array of lobbyists, attorneys and trade organizations.
And few corporations have spent so much political cash on the
governor, either. Since Schwarzenegger's election last October,
the San Ramon company has contributed more than $200,000
to his committees and $500,000 to the California Republican
Party.
Chevron, whose officials acknowledge they lobbied hard to get
their ideas in the report, is one of about 20 companies that paid
to send the governor and his staff to this week's Republican
National Convention in New York. On Wednesday, Schwarzenegger
attended a closed-door meeting in New York with representatives
of those companies, including Chevron. And just three weeks
after the governor's office released the 2,700-page reorganization
report, the company gave $100,000 to a Schwarzenegger-
controlled political fund.
Environmental watchdogs and local agencies that regulate some
of Chevron's operations complain that they had no such access,
and that their counterproposals appear nowhere in the massive
report.
Top reform project
Disclosure of Chevron's determined role in what many believe is
the administration's most important political reform effort contrasts
sharply with statements he made during last year's election campaign
and afterward in which he promised to sweep out a corrupt system
where "contributions go in, the favors go out."
Schwarzenegger launched the reorganization effort in January,
calling the state bureaucracy a "mastodon frozen in time" that needed
to be reviewed from top to bottom to eliminate waste and duplication.
The administration said the recommendations in the report would save
$32 billion over five years, a claim analysts said is exaggerated.
Although the governor's senior aides helped organize and oversee the
reorganization effort, a spokeswoman for Schwarzenegger said the
review staff, not the governor's office, was responsible for the report.
Schwarzenegger announced the review in January and then appointed
its two top members, who then assembled the rest of the staff.
Ashley Snee, the governor's deputy press secretary, said it was
premature to assume any of the recommendations will be adopted
and that those who are unhappy with parts of the report can
comment at a series of statewide hearings on the proposal.
Beneficial proposals
Proposals that would benefit Chevron are peppered throughout the
four-volume report. They include:
- Streamlining the permit process for the construction of new oil
refineries and the expansion of existing ones. Chevron, which owns
two of the state's largest refineries in Richmond and El Segundo,
wanted the state's help in revising existing laws so local government
officials would be required to make decisions more quickly on
construction permits at refineries.
- Streamlining the activities of the San Francisco Bay Conservation
and Development Commission. That agency, which issues permits
for dredging and sand mining in the Bay Area, oversees activities
related to Chevron's interests in the Bay Area.
- Reorganizing the regulatory process for picking the locations
for refineries, tank farms, liquefied natural gas and other energy
facilities. Chevron has two proposals to build liquefied natural
gas (LNG) facilities in Southern California and the Mexican state
of Baja California.
But Mark Petracca, a University of California, Irvine political
scientist, said Chevron's considerable influence on the CPR
report may taint the whole review because the study was
presented to the public as an objective and authoritative
analysis of how to fix state government.
"This is good old fashioned interest-group politics," Petracca
said. "Powerful people who have money can hire powerful
people and use occasions like this report to set the agenda
for policy beneficial to those interests."
Under scrutiny
In response, Snee repeated that the report was independent
of the governor's office.
Chevron's operations have drawn steady and critical scrutiny
from state and federal regulators, including a settlement last
October of a lawsuit with the U.S. Justice Department that
required the company to install $275 million in air pollution
equipment and pay $3.5 million in civil penalties.
Company officials said they were just doing their jobs through
their vigorous participation in the CPR process, which included
meeting with senior aides to the governor.
"This is what we are here for," said Jack Coffey, Chevron's
general manager over state government relations, from New
York where he was attending the Republican convention.
Chevron learned about the CPR early and "obviously
understood their agenda," Coffey said, adding that while
there was direct contact by company lobbyists, most contact
came through trade groups of which Chevron is a member.
"We made an effort to feed those trade associations who
were more active."
But, Coffey said, Chevron's donations to Schwarzenegger are
because of his "pro-business agenda" and have nothing to
do with the CPR report.
Chevron's concerns
In an interview, Chevron lobbyist K.C. Bishop said he met with
Richard Costigan, Schwarzenegger's legislative affairs secretary,
in April or May, about trouble the company was having with
routine refinery permits and proposed legislation on the issue.
At the end of the discussion, Bishop was directed to the CPR
staff, which he visited a week or so later.
Neither the meeting with Costigan nor with CPR staff were
reported in Chevron's quarterly lobbying filings.
Also acknowledged in the CPR report were Bishop; Mike Barr,
a lawyer with the San Francisco-based firm Pillsbury Winthrop
and who represents Chevron; and affiliated lobbyists of the
Western States Petroleum - Kahl/Pownall Advocates - of which
Chevron is also a member.
Meanwhile, the Bay Planning Coalition - a business-oriented
group of which Chevron is a board member - contacted the
governor's cabinet secretary over problems its members were
having with the San Francisco Bay Conservation and
Development Commission.
Schwarzenegger's staff sent the coalition's issue to the CPR
staff, which met with the coalition sometime in April,
according Ellen Johnck, the coalition's executive director.
Complaints lodged
A letter from the coalition outlining the complaints -
including some lodged by Chevron - was used a primary
source for the CPR report that concluded BCDC had
overstepped its authority. Although BCDC officials offered
significant documentation to rebut the allegations, none
of the commission's defense was included in the CPR report.
In its section about making it easier to locate refineries
or LNG plants, the CPR report cites attorney Mike Carroll
of the law firm Latham & Watkins as a source. Based in
the firm's Orange County office, Carroll represents
Chevron on a variety of regulatory issues, according
to the firm's Web site.
Carroll did not return telephone calls for comment
from the Associated Press.
Chevron has two LNG proposals - a $650 million facility
that would be built offshore on an island near Tijuana in
Baja California; and a second plan that would place a
facility at Camp Pendleton in Orange County.
Schwarzenegger is expected to meet with Mexican officials
in Mexicali later this month. One expected topic of
discussion is Chevron's LNG proposal.
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---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) The Beslan hostage tragedy:
the lies of the Putin government and its media
By Vladimir Volkov
8 September 2004
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/sep2004/puti-s08.shtml
The hostage-taking tragedy in the town of Beslan in North Ossetia
has demonstrated the lengths to which the ruling elite in Russia is
prepared to go in deceiving its own people. Four days after the hostage
drama began with terrorists seizing over 1,000 children, parents
and teachers, elementary facts still remain unclear. The Russian
government has denied the people the most important and
elementary right-that of reliable, rapid and extensive information
on what has taken place.
From the beginning of the crisis on the morning of September 1
to its tragic end two days later, leading politicians, representatives
of the secret police and the major media outlets in Russia conducted
a deliberate campaign of disinformation regarding the extent
of the catastrophe and its dreadful consequences.
Lie number one: the number of hostages
From the outset, the number of hostages was deliberately
underestimated. The official figure of 354 hostages was repeated
by television channels and in the public appearances of
government representatives up to the point of the storming
of the school building.
Early on in the crisis, much higher figures for the hostages
were provided by newspapers and Internet sources, yet the
television networks held firm to their original claim. After
talks September 2 between the hostage takers and the former
president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Auschev-resulting in the
release of 26 women and children-the media repeated its
estimate, even though the real extent of the hostage taking
could at that stage hardly be concealed.
Auschev had seen how many people had been incarcerated
in the gymnasium hall. One of the women released
September 2 told the press: "There are many hostages,
very many. I think a thousand." Another woman whose
two children remained in the school said: "According to
the list 860 children attend the school. Maybe half of them
did not come to the school's opening ceremony. Then
there are the parents. Look around at how many people
are standing here. Here in the House of Culture there are
1,000 people and all of them have at least one relative or
child in the school."
Similar reports appeared in newspapers and Internet
magazines. Nevertheless the television channels remained
stubbornly attached to their original figure.
Lie number two: the terrorists had posed no demands
At the outset of the drama, a decision was made at the
highest political level that under no circumstances would
information be released concerning the terrorists' demands.
This was a lesson that the Putin government had drawn
from the hostage drama at the Moscow Musical Theatre
"Nordost" in 2002. Relatives of the hostages then held
captive inside the theatre had demonstrated for an end
to the Russian war in Chechnya. The demand met with
widespread popular support, and the Kremlin has had
great difficulty suppressing this political sentiment.
This time it was claimed that the terrorists had made no
demands. A statement calling for an end to the Chechen
war and the withdrawal of Russian troops made at the
start of the hostage crisis by an Islamist group was kept
secret. In addition, the government maintained that all of
its efforts to make contact with the terrorists had been
ignored.
On September 6, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported
that as early as the afternoon of September 1 and not far
from the school, "Parents of children being held in the
school had addressed the Russian president in a video.
They called upon him to fulfill all the demands of the
terrorists in order to save the lives of the children."
All the major television and other media outlets kept this
information secret for a considerable period.
According to numerous witnesses, the hostage takers made
no secret about their demands. For example, on September 3,
Izvestia interviewed a teacher who had been released along
with her three-year-old daughter. Question: "Did the terrorists
tell you their demands?" Answer: "They said they had just one
demand: the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya."
Lie number three: there were no plans for storming the building
Immediately after news of the hostage taking broke, leading
to widespread popular anguish, representatives of the Russian
government declared that everything would be done to avoid an
armed assault on the school by security forces. In fact, nothing
was done to prevent such a storming of the school.
According to a commentary in the newspaper Izvestia, the
drama "took the worst possible turn." The government sought
to hide its own failure by claiming that the storming of the
building had not been prepared, and even that there were no
plans for such an action. This claim is contradicted by a series
of facts and reports by witnesses.
On September 3, the paper Nezavicimaya Gazeta reported that
"intelligence forces were preparing to storm the school." The
paper referred to the fact that on the night of September 1 specially
equipped military transport planes had landed in North Ossetia.
The paper also said it was presumed that the anti-terror unit "Alfa"
had been flown in.
It is now known that "Alfa" and another anti-terror unit, "Vimpel,"
played the decisive role in the storming of the building. The very
fact that, following the unexpected exchange of fire on September 3,
the terrorists immediately began shooting and set off previously
installed explosives indicates that they were sure a storming of the
building would take place.
Bearing these facts in mind-the demands of the terrorists that were
never disclosed, the refusal of the government to undertake any
discussions with the hostage-takers, the scale of the censorship
of information regarding what was taking place inside the school
and the positioning of the special forces units in the front line-the
newspaper Gazeta.ru concluded on September 4: "The storming had
in fact been prepared and was to have been carried out within the
next two days. Without water, the children could only have survived
for three or four days, and then it would have no longer been
possible to rescue most of the hostages. However, on Friday they
were forced to take action."
Lie number four: the number of victims
Even after the catastrophe had taken place-bombs had gone off
in the gym, part of which had collapsed-the government and the
media continued to lie by minimizing the number of casualties.
The official death toll rose only as the bodies began to be
counted. According to government sources on Monday morning,
September 6, 335 dead had been counted. At the same time it
became clear there existed a list of missing persons totaling 260.
According to the radio station "Echo Moscow," these victims feature
neither on the lists of those who have died nor on the list of those
who have been hospitalized.
On Saturday, inhabitants of Beslan, who observed coffins with
victims inside being transported from the burnt out ruins of the
school, reported t
hat they had counted a total of between 500 and 600.
Against this background it is hardly necessary to examine the other
lies broadcast by the Russian media about the number of terrorists
involved-which was also minimized-or the course of events that
was officially reported in wildly varying versions.
The overall conduct of the Russian media, in particular the major
television networks, was shameful. While in the West many television
stations devoted special coverage to the events in North Ossetia,
often working with Russian cameramen, Russian television refused
to interrupt its regular programming.
At one point in the crisis, a correspondent for the Russian
television channel NTW addressed the camera and bluntly
declared, "We cannot say what is happening; we cannot
comment on the actions of those involved in the fighting!"
It is no wonder that television journalists have been physically
assaulted by Beslan inhabitants. As the first information emerged
on the real extent of the casualties, outraged bystanders turned
on television journalists, lashing out at their cameras and the
reporters themselves.
The role played by Russian television, however, only expressed
the iron-fisted control exerted over the major media outlets by
Putin's Kremlin, which has brought every television channel under
either direct or indirect state control. The Russian regime has
enforced media subservience with intimidation and state gangsterism,
which is backed by much of Russia's ruling strata of corrupt
businessmen and ex-Stalinist bureaucrats.
Putin used the hostage-taking crisis at the Moscow theatre two
years ago to consolidate this grip over the media, claiming that
it had abused freedom of the press in its coverage. He demanded
that the news outlets report nothing that could conceivably aid
the terrorists, including their statements or demands, analysis
of the events or coverage of Russian military and police operations.
This noose is tightening. The editor in chief of Izvestia, Raf Shakirov,
announced his forced resignation Monday after coming under fire
from the Kremlin and the newspaper's corporate publishers over
its coverage of the Beslan events. The paper filled its entire front
page last Saturday with a photograph of a man carrying a wounded
child from the besieged school. The newspaper also raised pointed
questions about the official claim that only 350 people were held
hostage and published a stinging column denouncing the self-
censorship by the television channels.
Meanwhile, a prominent Russian journalist who has reported
critically on the war in Chechnya was prevented from reaching
the scene of the latest hostage-taking tragedy under
circumstances that can only be described as ominous.
Novaya Gazeta correspondent Anna Politkovskaya fell sick
after drinking tea during the first leg of her flight to Beslan.
Rushed to the hospital after landing in Rostov, she was diagnosed
with acute food poisoning. According to one report, authorities
had blocked her from boarding her original flight, but the captain
of another airliner recognized her and invited her aboard.
The suppression of the media, together with the impotence of
the Russian parliament-the Duma chose not to meet during the
crisis, with its leaders affirming that all they could do was issue
another statement-are hallmarks of the authoritarian state that
Putin is consolidating in Russia.
The president's resort to the methods of state censorship, however,
is a manifestation of the general impotence and political isolation
of the regime as a whole. Under conditions of historically
unprecedented social inequality between a thin layer of "new
Russian" entrepreneurs and masses of impoverished working
people, democratic forms of rule are not possible.
While capable of buying off or intimidating his political opponents
and much of the media, Putin has proven unable to resolve any of
the deepening crises wracking Russia, from the war in Chechnya
and other outbreaks of regional separatism, to the generalized
corruption and breakdown that characterizes the entire state
apparatus and the economy. All of these crises came together
to produce the tragedy in Beslan.
While these failures are behind the drive to control the media,
the ham-fisted censorship carried out in the latest crisis has
provoked widespread anger and opposition within the former
Soviet Union. The "democratic reforms" that were touted as a
byproduct of the collapse of the USSR and the introduction of
capitalism have produced instead a media that is in many ways
reminiscent of the worst of the Stalinist period, based on lies and
deception and dedicated to the suppression of any news that
casts the head of state in a bad light.
Putin has seized upon the atrocity in Beslan to claim even more
authoritarian power and to reject any suggestion of negotiating an
end to the brutal war in Chechnya. His transparent aim is to
emulate Bush in claiming unlimited power to carry out repression
in the name of a "war on terror."
While hundreds of thousands turned out at rallies against
terrorism that were organized with state support on Tuesday,
the mood of outrage was directed not only at the terrorists, but
at the government itself.
The harshest anger was expressed at a rally in the North Ossetian
capital of Vladikavkaz, about 18 miles north of Beslan. The crowd
that turned out in the city's central square protested not only
against terrorism, but the state authorities as well.
"Today, we will bury our children and tomorrow we will come
here and throw these devils out of their seats, from the lowest
director up to ministers and the president," a speaker at the
rally declared.
A protest sign raised above the crowd read, "Corrupt authority
is a source of terrorism."
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8) Protests Powered by Cellphone
By PATRICK DI JUSTO
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/technology/circuits/09mobb.html
AS thousands of protesters marched through Manhattan
during the Republican National Convention last week, some
were equipped with a wireless tactical communications device
connected to a distributed information service that provided
detailed and nearly instantaneous updates about route changes,
street closures and police actions.
The communications device was a common cellphone. The
information service, a collection of open-source, Web-based
programming scripts running on a Linux server in someone's
closet, is called TXTMob.
TXTMob works like an Internet mailing list for cellphones and is
the brainchild of a young man who goes by the pseudonym John
Henry. He is a member of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a
group of artists, programmers and others who say their mission
is to develop technologies that serve the social and human need
for self-determination. (The group was behind iSee, a Web site that
has maps of surveillance cameras in Lower Manhattan and calculates
routes for those seeking to avoid them.)
He conceals his identity as part of an agreement with other members
of the group and out of concern that he might become the target
of an effort to force disclosure of TXTMob members' phone numbers,
which are kept in a database he maintains.
TXTMob allows people to quickly and easily send text messages
from one cellphone to a group of other cellphones. This in itself
is nothing new: other mobile networking systems like
dodgeball.com and bedno.com already exist.
To sign up for TXTMob, users enter their cellphone numbers
into the TXTMob Web site, www.txtmob .com. To thwart spammers,
the system uses opt-in registration: a machine-generated
authorization code is sent to each registered number and must
be re-entered into the Web site to activate the registration.
TXTMob is designed to carefully maintain members' privacy,
not surprising given why most are using TXTMob.
The software was not intended for everyday mobile socializing.
It was created as a tool political activists could use to organize
their work, from staff meetings to street protests. Most of the
people using it are on the left: of the 142 public groups listed on
the TXTMob site, the largest are dedicated to protesting the Bush
administration, the Republican Party or the state of the world in
general.
When a preliminary version of TXTMob was tested at the Democratic
National Convention in Boston in July, about 200 people used it to
organize protesters into spontaneous rallies, to warn them about
the location of police crackdowns and to direct volunteer medics
where they were needed, all in real time.
Based on user feedback afterward, some changes were made -
primarily beefing up the system to handle a heavier volume of
messages - to increase its usefulness for what were expected
to be much larger protests during the Republican National
Convention.
TXTMob had its first major New York workout on the evening
of Aug. 27, during the Critical Mass, a loosely organized bicycle
ride through Manhattan by anti-Republican protesters. From the
start of the ride, participants in a TXTMob group called
comms_dispatch sent a slew of messages alerting one
another to route changes and warning of traffic snarls.
As the ride neared its end, comms_dispatch buzzed with
reports of arrests from Second Avenue to 10th Avenue,
and around St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery.
On Aug. 29, two days after she took part in the Critical Mass
ride, a woman from San Francisco who identified herself only
as Josie sat outside St. Mark's and read text messages on her
cellphone. Describing herself as a "voracious" TXTMob reader,
she credited the service with helping keep her safe during the ride.
"It told me where the cops were and where I could rest," she
said as she thumbed through the TXTMob messages from that
day's United for Peace and Justice march that were arriving on
her cellphone at the rate of about one per minute. "It brought
me here."
As reports of clashes between the police and protesters appeared
on her cellphone screen, it became possible to build a mental
picture of the march: a burning papier mâché dragon outside
Madison Square Garden, barricades on 34th Street, police officers
zipping around on scooters, a rally so large that the first marchers
had finished before the last marchers had started.
That, to Josie, was TXTMob's most important function. "When I can't
be at a protest, like now," she said, waving her phone, "it's like I can
be there, because I can know what's going on directly from the people
who are there in the streets."
What might have been TXTMob's greatest moment, the planned flash
mob at Union Square on Aug. 31, did not work out as planned. That
afternoon, TXTMob subscribers with cellular service from Sprint or
T-Mobile stopped receiving messages for nearly four hours, leaving
them unaware of the first meeting location. When those who did meet
started marching, the police quickly set up a barricade across 16th
Street and began arresting the marchers. All told, it took about an
hour for the event, loosely organized by the A31 Action Coalition,
to go from promise to debacle:
18:15:50 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party mtg at SE corner of Union Sq.
18:37:56 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party look for festive signs.
19:02:51 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party on B-way at 15th headed north.
Doing fine.
19:07:02 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party penned in b/w Irving and 16th.
More in next message.
19:15:23 Tue., Aug 31: A31 party disperse immediately.
What happens to TXTMob after Election Day? The events of last week
left the Institute for Applied Autonomy convinced that it has a future,
not just as an activist organizing tool but also as a general mobile
networking system.
The Internet Business Chronicle, an online publication, is using
TXTMob to deliver news updates to readers, and the number of
party groups is quickly catching up to the number of protest
groups. The pseudonymous John Henry said he was looking at
keeping the system going and might even expand it to work with
cellphones in Europe and Asia. After that, it's anyone's guess.
"People keep finding their own uses for this thing, and they're
developing it on the fly," he said. "That's what's really exciting."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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9) Ex-Banking Star Given 18 Months for Obstruction
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
September 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/business/09star.html
Frank P. Quattrone, the Wall Street banker whose pay and deals
made him a vivid symbol of the 1990's technology boom, was
sentenced to 18 months in prison yesterday for obstructing a
government investigation into the allocation of hot stock offerings.
Mr. Quattrone, 48, who led the initial offerings of companies like
Amazon.com and Cisco Systems as a banker at Credit Suisse First
Boston, is the most prominent Wall Street figure to face prison since
Michael R. Milken pleaded guilty to six securities charges in 1990.
Judge Richard Owen of Federal District Court in Manhattan handed
down a harsher prison sentence than the 10 to 16 months stipulated
by basic federal guidelines, finding that Mr. Quattrone perjured himself
when he took the witness stand during his trial and said under oath that
he had not intended to impede the government's investigation when he
sent a one-line e-mail message at the heart of the case.
"It is crystal clear that he was untruthful," Judge Owen said yesterday.
Mr. Quattrone, who made $120 million in 2000, was perhaps the most
prominent banker in Silicon Valley during the 1990's, assembling a team
that brought public many of the biggest names in technology. After that
success and the bursting of the technology bubble, Mr. Quattrone and
First Boston came under the microscope of regulators and prosecutors,
who began investigating whether the bank was soliciting kickbacks from
preferred investors, later dubbed Friends of Frank, in exchange for access =
to hot stock offerings.
While that inquiry did not lead to criminal charges, Mr. Quattrone was
charged with hampering the investigations when he endorsed a
colleague's e-mail message in December 2000 urging his staff to
"clean up those files." Mr. Quattrone's first trial ended in a hung jury,
but he was convicted at a retrial.
Judge Owen refused Mr. Quattrone's request to remain free while he
appealed the case. Mr. Quattrone must surrender to federal prison
authorities within 50 days. The judge also fined him $90,300 and
initially asked him to make the payment immediately. "There's $50
million in the bank," Judge Owen said. "He can't write a check today?"
He then acquiesced to requests by Mr. Quattrone's lawyers to pay the
fine within 20 days.
Mr. Quattrone's sentence, which includes two years of probation, stands
in stark contrast to the one recently given to Martha Stewart, who was
also convicted of obstruction of justice. In that case, Judge Miriam
Goldman Cedarbaum sentenced Ms. Stewart to five months in prison,
plus five months of home confinement. Ms. Stewart was also allowed
to remain free pending appeal.
The Bureau of Prisons had recommended in its presentencing report
that Mr. Quattrone receive the same sentence as Ms. Stewart.
Robert G. Morvillo, who is Ms. Stewart's lawyer, said yesterday that
Mr. Quattrone's sentence was too severe. "Is it a reasonable sentence?"
Mr. Morvillo asked. "You won't find a defense attorney in town who
thinks this is reasonable. The idea that Judge Owen jumped the
sentence just continues the defense bar view that he is overly harsh."
Judge Owen, an appointee of President Richard M. Nixon, has long
had a reputation among defense lawyers of favoring prosecutors, and
the sentencing of Mr. Quattrone capped nearly a year of dueling
between his lawyers and the judge that often included heated
exchanges in court.
At one point yesterday, Mr. Quattrone's trial lawyer, John W. Keker,
a former prosecutor of Oliver L. North during the Iran-contra trial,
told the judge he thought he was being strung along while making
his argument for leniency.
"If you've made up your mind on this, just tell me," Mr. Keker said. At
another point, in which Mr. Keker cited the hung jury in the first trial
and asserted there were grounds for appeal because the case was so
close, Judge Owen blurted out: "I don't agree with you that this was a
close case."
Mr. Quattrone's appeal will be based in large part on several rulings
Judge Owen made that barred him from introducing evidence that
may have been helpful to his case.
The clash continued in court yesterday and spilled into the street after
the hearing, with Mr. Quattrone's lawyers standing in pelting rain
accusing Judge Owen of an unfair trial.
"Cases like this are why we have courts of appeals," said Mark F.
Pomerantz, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in
Manhattan who will lead Mr. Quattrone's appeal. "The defense was
forced to try its case from the inside of a straitjacket."
"The trial judge kept out critical evidence offered by the defense,"
said Mr. Pomerantz, who represented Dr. Samuel D. Waksal, the founder
of ImClone Systems Inc. , who pleaded guilty to insider trading. "And
although the judge tied the hands of the defense, he gave the
government free rein to put in irrelevant but prejudicial evidence."
Before he was sentenced, Mr. Quattrone addressed the judge, saying:
"I humbly ask that you show mercy and compassion for me and my
family, for whom any separation from me would be extremely
detrimental."
But the judge denied his request, and Mr. Quattrone's legal team
and friends sitting in court were enraged when Judge Owen then
appeared to gratuitously make public the medical problems of
Mr. Quattrone's 15-year-old daughter, Cristina, questioning the
severity of claims from doctors who submitted records that she
has a medical disorder. Mr. Quattrone's lawyers had asked that
the medical records of the family remain sealed.
Judge Owen also dismissed arguments from Mr. Quattrone's lawyers
that he should receive a lenient sentence because his wife has a
chronic illness that makes him the "only functioning adult" in the
household.
"There's $50 million of assets out there to take care of
Mrs. Quattrone and $26 million to take care of Cristina in some
trust fund," Judge Owen said. Reading from Mrs. Quattrone's
medical records, Judge Owen added, "It says here she can drive
under limited conditions."
Judge Owen's decision to depart from the basic federal guidelines
and give Mr. Quattrone a tougher sentence raises questions about
whether it will be upheld. In a case from Washington State in June,
the Supreme Court ruled that the state's judicial system, which
allowed judges to increase a convicted defendant's sentence
beyond the ordinary range for the crime, violated the constitutional
right to trial by jury. While the ruling only applies to Washington
State, the decision - Blakely v. Washington - is being watched by
federal judges nationwide, and many have stuck to the guidelines,
worried that their sentences will be overturned. The Supreme Court
has agreed to rule on the constitutionality of the guidelines for
federal criminal sentences this fall.
"Given that the Blakely case is still out there, to do an upward
departure, this is a judge who is thumbing his nose at Blakely,"
said John J. Fahy, a former federal prosecutor who practices law
in New Jersey.
Some defense lawyers contended the sentence might help
Mr. Quattrone's appeal. "It plays into the defense claim of unfair
treatment on the part of Judge Owen," said Robert A. Mintz, a
former federal prosecutor and a partner at McCarter & English.
Judge Owen agreed to a request from Mr. Quattrone's lawyers
that he be assigned to Lompoc Federal Prison Camp in California,
which is a minimum-security prison northwest of Los Angeles
where Ivan F. Boesky was once an inmate.
As he left the courthouse, Mr. Quattrone said: "To my family in
California, Dad is coming home soon, and I love you. And I can
hold my head high because I know I'm innocent and I never
intended to obstruct justice."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2004
NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING:
TOMORROW, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 7 p.m.
1380 VALENCIA STREET
(Between 24th & 25th Streets, S.F.)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Tomgram: Nick Turse on the new Homeland Security State
Posted September 5, 2004 at 11:09 am
2) One Thousand and One
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 08 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/090804A.shtml
3) CONFRONTING INSURGENTS
U.S. Conceding Rebels
Control Regions of Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08policy.html?hp
4) Fight Oppression One Olive at a Time
Help with the Palestinian Olive Harvest this Fall
This simple act will help Palestinians resist the occupation
by insisting on life.
5) Peace activist held as 'danger to Israel'
Lawyers question state motives behind detention
without trial of former woman soldier who befriended
leading Palestinian militant
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Tuesday September 7, 2004
The Guardian
6) URGENT CALL TO ACTION: ORGANIZE A
VIGIL ON THURSDAY NIGHT
FOR THE MORE THAN 1,000 U.S. SOLDIERS AND TENS OF
THOUSANDS OF IRAQIS KILLED
7) CENSORED 2005:
THE TOP 25 CENSORED MEDIA STORIES OF 2003-2004
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/index.html
8) 150 Arrests during Demonstration by
San Francisco Hotel Workers
By Frontlines correspondent
9) Bush & Putin self-fulfilled prophesies:
Slaughter and Terrorism
Frontlines Editorial Board
http://www.sf-frontlines.com
TOMORROW, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 7 p.m.
1380 VALENCIA STREET
(Between 24th & 25th Streets, S.F.)
---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Tomgram: Nick Turse on the new Homeland Security State
Posted September 5, 2004 at 11:09 am
2) One Thousand and One
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 08 September 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/090804A.shtml
3) CONFRONTING INSURGENTS
U.S. Conceding Rebels
Control Regions of Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/politics/08policy.html?hp
4) Fight Oppression One Olive at a Time
Help with the Palestinian Olive Harvest this Fall
This simple act will help Palestinians resist the occupation
by insisting on life.
5) Peace activist held as 'danger to Israel'
Lawyers question state motives behind detention
without trial of former woman soldier who befriended
leading Palestinian militant
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Tuesday September 7, 2004
The Guardian
6) URGENT CALL TO ACTION: ORGANIZE A
VIGIL ON THURSDAY NIGHT
FOR THE MORE THAN 1,000 U.S. SOLDIERS AND TENS OF
THOUSANDS OF IRAQIS KILLED
7) CENSORED 2005:
THE TOP 25 CENSORED MEDIA STORIES OF 2003-2004
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/index.html
8) 150 Arrests during Demonstration by
San Francisco Hotel Workers
By Frontlines correspondent
9) Bush & Putin self-fulfilled prophesies:
Slaughter and Terrorism
Frontlines Editorial Board
http://www.sf-frontlines.com