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Thursday, January 06, 2005
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-THURSDAY, JAN. 6, 2005 - PART 2
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19) The Pentagon says that more than 10,000 US military personnel have been wounded in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. Story from BBC NEWS: Published: 2005/01/05 10:33:34 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4147705.stm 20) Ramsey Clark: Why I'm Taking Saddam's Case By Lizzy Ratner http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage1.asp# 21) Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 GISpecial 3A5 ThomasFBarton@earthlink.net 22) The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter George Monbiot Guardian Tuesday January 4, 2005 23) National Task Force for Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Update - December 11, 2004 meeting in New York City (Reviewed by Attorney Robert R. Bryan) 24) U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN http://nytimes.com/2005/01/02/international/worldspecial4/ 02quake.html?ei=5094 &en=92dbe740aaf891ca&hp=&ex=1104642000&partner=homepage&pagewanted= print&posit ion= 25) IRAQ: Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say 04 Jan 2005 14:56:16 GMT Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/ 121b671d950efc3ac031b54b55118d85.htm 26) The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. 27) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ 28) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ 29) Iraq War is Bad for Business By Jim Lobe Peace and Justice News from FPIF http://www.fpif.org/ January 4, 2005 Introducing a new commentary from Foreign Policy In Focus 30) The Numbers Beyond the Bling In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail By Ward Harkavy January 4th, 2005 3:26 PM Village Voice.com 31) Powell declares tsunami aid part of global war on terror Imperialism in Samaritan's clothing By Bill Van Auken World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org 6 January 2005 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/powl-j061.shtml 32) Israel's "Days of Penitence" Drown Gaza In a Sea Of Blood By Mohammed Omer Washington Report , December 2004, pages 10-12 http://www.washington-report.org/archives/December_2004/0412010.html ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 19) US Wounded in Iraq Reaches 10,000 The Pentagon says that more than 10,000 US military personnel have been wounded in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. Story from BBC NEWS: Published: 2005/01/05 10:33:34 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4147705.stm Newly published figures show that more than 5,000 of the wounded have been unable to return to duty. Many have been left with serious injuries such as lost limbs and sight, mostly as a result of the blast effects of roadside bombs. More than 1,300 US troops have been killed. The latest figures underline that an equally telling price is being paid in the number of US soldiers being wounded there, says the BBC's Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs. Advances in military medicine and body armour mean that many have survived wounds that they would not have done in previous conflicts. In Iraq on Wednesday, a car bomb killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded 10 others in Baghdad. Police say the bomb exploded near a petrol station in the western district of Amiriyah. The explosion came a day after gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad province, and in a separate attack killed at least 10 people outside the headquarters of the Iraqi National Guard. (c) BBC MMV ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 21) Ramsey Clark: Why I'm Taking Saddam's Case By Lizzy Ratner http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage1.asp# "You can't be sure of how the trial will go," said longtime Manhattan civil-rights attorney Ramsey Clark, wagging a long, slender forefinger. "But you could say that if it's properly done, it will be the biggest trial of this century." Mr. Clark was talking about the trial of Saddam Hussein, whom he recently signed on to represent before a special tribunal in Baghdad. For the man who has represented Leonard Peltier, the Harrisburg Seven and the Attica Brothers, but also prosecuted war resisters in the Johnson administration-indeed, for the man who, as a young Marine Corps courier, witnessed the Nuremberg trials after World War II-calling it the "trial of the century" was no small thing. Ramsey Clark was in his office, in a loft on East 12th Street in the East Village, speaking like a law professor across a large slab of a wooden table. He'd just returned a few days before from a visit to Jordan, where he met with other members of Mr. Hussein's legal team as well as the families of both Mr. Hussein and former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. In the room hung an Salvadoran solidarity poster and a painting by Mr. Peltier. The painting is of an old Native American woman with a single tear running down her cheek; it's called Big Lady Mountain . By Mr. Clark's own telling, his interest in representing the deposed Iraqi leader was inflamed when media reports started coming in of Mr. Hussein's arrest in a spider-hole hideout in the desert. He said he was "shocked" by the images he saw. "The savage presentation of [Mr. Hussein], disheveled, with his mouth open, people probing in his mouth, the dehumanization," he said. "I represented Indian peoples for many years, and I can't tell you how many Indians I've worked with called after they saw the picture and said, 'That's exactly the way they treated us.' And this is hardly the road to peace if you want respect for human dignity. "I wrote to him a year ago in December, shortly after he was arrested," he continued. "I'd also written to Tariq Aziz right after he turned himself in April of '03, because I thought it was essential that they have independent contact immediately to assure their proper treatment. And I was repeatedly turned down as to both. "I did it because, obviously, these cases are extremely important in terms of history and in terms of reconciliation of peoples, and in terms of belief in truth and justice as a priority over force and violence," Mr. Clark said. "It's about addressing the concept of victor's justice, which is only the exercise of power. If you really want peace, you have to satisfy people about the honor of your purpose." Mr. Clark has not been able to meet with Mr. Hussein since he sent his letter. "There has not been anything approaching adequate contact with him," he said. "None of his family has seen him; only one lawyer has seen him, and that was in the first half of December- a full year after his arrest. It was by a single person, with soldiers standing by, hearing, with whatever other type of surveillance there might have been. "And there's not adequate contact with that lawyer, who's an Iraqi. So for a defense to be developed, there has to be extensive communication with the principal person whose life it involves. "He is a decisive, knowledgeable person," Mr. Clark said, "and has to play a major role in every aspect of choosing a defense team and preparing a defense. The lack of access to him is a major violation. Our Supreme Court has thrown cases out where a person wasn't given access to independent non-police parties within 48 hours of arrest, within less than 12 hours. Here you've got 12 months. That sounds technical, but it's not technical at all-it's the essential beginning." It's not that he's never met Mr. Hussein. Mr. Clark's history with the former Iraqi leader dates back to the first Gulf War, when Mr. Clark traveled to Iraq to protest the U.S .-led coalition's bombing campaign. He spent 14 days chronicling the destruction and later defied sanctions by returning on dozens of aid missions. He met with Mr. Hussein on at least four of these occasions, including a month-long visit just before the March 2003 invasion. "I've met with him I think four times, probably averaged two to three hours at a time," he said. "In presence he is reserved, quiet, thoughtful-dignified, you might say, in the old-fashioned sense. I'm not a big fan of dignity in the old-fashioned sense of stuffiness or posture." Could he see how that might be praising with faint damnation a man who is said to have ordered the deaths of some 300,000 of his own citizens? "I have long believed that one of the greatest barriers to peace is demonization," Mr. Clark said. "It has always been necessary in war for soldiers to demonize the enemy. Now, with the mass media saturating the public with perceptions that come from very slim contact with actuality and are heavily influenced by desire and prejudice, we demonize." And if other lawyers might blanch at the argument that it was the American media who demonized Saddam-wasn't he something of a demon to begin with? If it were a simple referendum on Mr. Hussein's treatment of the Kurds or political dissidents, who could possibly represent him in good faith? But what if the trial of Saddam Hussein is really a referendum on the American campaign in Iraq? "Demonization is the most dangerous form of prejudice," Mr. Clark continued. "Once you call something evil, it's easy to justify anything you might do to harm that evil. Evil has no rights, it has no human dignity, it has to be destroyed. That's how you get your Fallujas, your Abu Ghraibs, your shock- and-awes." And, like many civil-rights lawyers, Mr. Clark believes he's representing a client in a court that is fundamentally flawed. "A tribunal that doesn't meet the standards of international law can do enormous harm. International law requires first that a tribunal be created by legal authority, by pre-existing legal authority," he argued. "That's referred to as competence. After competence comes independence-it can't be subject to political power. And finally, it has to be impartial. If it's not impartial, what's the point? Why don't you just go ahead and say 'Hang him' instead of this ruse? "Now, the present Iraqi court meets none of those standards. It was a creation of the U.S. military occupation, the so-called governing council, which was appointed by the U.S. And who becomes the first judge of the court? Chalabi's nephew. I mean, suppose he's the most honorable person in the world, this nephew? Is it really conceivable that that's the person that ought to be judge in a world as big as this? So you don't have independence, because everything depends on what the U.S. does for the court: financing, training, selection and everything else. You don't have competence, because it's not legal. And you don't have impartiality, as far as can be told from the appearance. "The only existing court that is competent and independent and impartial is the International Criminal Court, which came into existence July 1, 2002. It's a court the U.S. opposed. It's a court the U.S. tragically weakened, but it's been approved by more than 120 countries. "The judges were appointed not by the U.S., but the Iraqis, and after the new government comes to power, they will have to be reconfirmed," said Michael Scharf, a human-rights lawyer at Case Western Reserve who has helped train Iraqi judges, when Mr. Clark's claims were put before him. "Not only that: The judges who I work with are extremely independent people. They have no particular love for the United States. These are people who were chosen for their expertise and independence." Mr. Clark is 77 years old, stooped and slender. He was wearing New Balance sneakers and a worn blue button-down shirt tucked into a pair of wool or polyester pants that might have dated from his early political career. He has wide-set eyes, a bit like a crawfish. And to many, his movements are just as mysterious-sideways, quirky, puzzling. "Ramsey is a mystery," said Melvin Wulf, an old colleague who shared a law practice with Mr. Clark during the late 1970's and early 1980's, in an earlier interview. "I saw him every day, but I didn't know him any better at the end of five years than I knew him on the first day. He plays himself very close to the vest, consults with no one except for himself." Outside the room, the office manager, Ben Cheney, brother of the slain civil-rights activist, typed at a keyboard. A few unlikely magazines- The New Yorker ,Gourmet ,Opera News -sat in a stack in the waiting room for visitors. Like some small-town doctor's office, there were no visitors and the office was quiet-nothing that would suggest that this was the home away from home of one of the most controversial attorneys in the United States. It all started in the last hoary week of 2004, when Mr. Clark jetted over to Jordan for a conference with 20 or so other attorneys on Dec. 28 to start forming their strategy. Reaction to Mr. Clark's trip was swift and certain across the political spectrum. On the right, bloggers for Web sites like RightNation declared that he should be "tried for sedition and treason." The New York Sun accused him of losing all "credibility when it comes to claiming to be for peace." Even some of his left-wing comrades rolled their eyes when they heard that he'd signed on to represent a man who had allegedly ordered 300,000 political killings. "I do think that Saddam, like anybody else, does have a right to a fair trial and a competent lawyer. I'm just not sure why Ramsey Clark needs to do that," said Leslie Cagan, a longtime peace and justice activist. "Personally, I wish he didn't do some of those things, because he is one of the few public well-known leftists in this country, and it does make our work harder sometimes." Conservatives loathe Mr. Clark, but even staunch progressives don't always know what to make of him, and some of his closest friends say he can't be easily defined: Is he a valiant "dissenter" in the tradition of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, as his friend Victor Navasky suggested? Or is he an old ideologue, as others have charged, who is driven above all by his ties to a Communist splinter group called the Workers World Party? Is he a profile in courage, or a study in eccentricity? Perhaps predictably, Mr. Clark presents himself as neither. A rangy Texan with a down-home Southern drawl, he seems to move to his own unapologetic drumbeat. He is not without supporters, including some colleagues who argued that Mr. Clark will provide Mr. Hussein with a competent defense, a necessary component of a fair trial. "[Mr. Clark] has a very good point: The international legal issues are compelling in some ways," said Alan Dershowitz, who has worked both with and against Mr. Clark on a number of cases. "I think it has to be perceived as a fair trial, and Ramsey's being involved increases the chances that it will be perceived as a fair trial, because he is a very good lawyer-very smart and very tough." Mr. Clark is used to being in the center of the storm. Over the years, he has become a fixture of national and international crime scenes, taking on the kind of thorny cases that have earned him comparisons to the crusading civil-liberties lawyer Clarence Darrow on the one hand-and to Benedict Arnold on the other. "I think he seems to have some kind of inner compass that tells him that this situation is unfair, and because of that we have to get involved in it," said Abdeen Jabara, an old friend and lawyer who formerly ran the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "I don't think I've ever met anybody who is as principled in his beliefs to fight for the underdog." Long before he joined Saddam Hussein's defense team, before he became the mascot of the anti-Establishment, Ramsey Clark was himself a pedigreed member of the political elite. Born into an influential Texas family, he came from a long line of lawyers who moved effortlessly within the highest levels of law and government. His maternal grandfather was a member of the Texas Supreme Court; his paternal grandfather was president of the Texas Bar Association. His father, Tom C. Clark, was a law- and-order lawyer with close ties to Lyndon B. Johnson. At Mr. Johnson's urging, President Harry S. Truman named the elder Mr. Clark his Attorney General in 1945. Four years later, Mr. Truman appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Early in his life, the young Ramsey rebelled at least twice against these Clark family precedents. He tried to join the Marines when he was 13, on Dec. 8, 1941, "and it probably would have been pretty dangerous," he laughed. "As far as I can tell, I've always had a fierce opposition to violence," he said. "I can remember when I was in fifth or sixth grade, the subject of capital punishment came up. And I was shy and quiet and rarely said much, but I really got upset and I just was passionately against it." But when he was 17, he did drop out of high school-against his father's wishes-to join the Marine Corps and fight in World War II. Several years later, he defied his father again when he chose to go to the more progressive-minded University of Chicago Law School rather than Harvard Law. Following law school, Mr. Clark headed back to Texas and appeared, at least on the surface, to return to the path his father and grandfathers had carved out before him. He married his college sweetheart, Georgia Welch, and went to work for the family's Dallas law firm. He stayed there for 10 years, specializing in antitrust work, until, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy made him an Assistant Attorney General in brother Robert Kennedy's Justice Department. Mr. Clark arrived in Washington as the Justice Department was taking on a bigger role in enforcing civil rights. He roved the South as part of Robert Kennedy's "riot squad" and ultimately helped to draft the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. "I went in '61, and because I was from Texas I could pass, so I was used extensively in the South," he said. "I was in charge of supervising the desegregation of all public schools in '62 in the South. There were only five, but it was a big job-doing just one of them was a big job. You had to worry about children being beat up, their homes being firebombed. It seemed incredibly important, exciting and a privilege to be involved in that." His outspokenness and sharp positions-from his support of civil rights to his opposition to wire-tapping and the death penalty-ultimately earned him the nickname "the Preacher" among his Justice Department colleagues. "[Ramsey Clark] was liberal, though he was much more restrained than he is today," recalled Nicholas Katzenbach, who worked alongside Mr. Clark for some six years, first as Deputy Attorney General and then as Attorney General. "Still, I think he was far more liberal than his dad." Indeed, Mr. Clark bumped squarely against his father's own, more conservative legal judgments several times during his years in the Justice Department. Most notably, when Johnson appointed him Attorney General in 1967, one of his first steps was to drop the case against Judith Coplon, a Justice Department clerk who had been charged during the early McCarthy days with passing secrets to her Soviet lover. Mr. Clark's father had brought the case when he was Attorney General. "It seemed to me a quite fascinating thing to do," said Mr. Navasky, who became close friends with Mr. Clark in the late 1960's while writing the book Kennedy Justice . "Ramsey was appointed under the cloud that he got the job [of Attorney General] because his family was Texas buddies of the Johnson family. But I came to the conclusion, both from my interviews and what he did in the Justice Department, that he was a kind of civil-libertarian Attorney General, which is very unusual." This civil-libertarian streak didn't always go over well in the Johnson cabinet, however. During his two years as Attorney General, Mr. Clark found himself at odds with the administration over everything from wire-tapping to prison reform to the Vietnam War. "President Johnson knew I [opposed the war in Vietnam] before he appointed me Attorney General," Mr. Clark said. "And he didn't put me on the National Security Council, which every Attorney General before me had been on and every Attorney General since me had been on. He would call me over once in a while to some meeting on the war when he wanted an extreme position, and I remember one breakfast, the question was whether to bomb north of a famous parallel, I can't remember which one. And the guys were arguing "yes-no-yes-no" as to whether you could bomb north of the line, and when it came to me I said, 'I don't think you can bomb on either side of the line.' Because bombing is just killing people, and you didn't know who the hell you were killing-you were killing civilians. It was just a shameful, sick thing." When Richard Nixon denounced Mr. Clark in a campaign speech in 1968, Johnson reportedly deadpanned, "I had to sit on my hands so I wouldn't cheer it." But Mr. Clark said his relationship with Johnson was friendly. "I never had any real conflict with him. But he [did] say to me one time, 'Some people think you're destroying the Democratic Party.' And I said, 'I'm not even in politics, I'm just doing the law.'" Mr. Clark never spoke out publicly against the administration, and he never resigned, despite his apparent misgivings about Vietnam. "You know, I had a choice of resigning," Mr. Clark recalled, "and it's something I considered-it's something I thought was important and respected. But I also thought what I was doing was important-was more important in the sense of its direct impact on lives. And I saw an environment around me in which everything I had been trying to do would be swept away. I already felt that the civil-rights movement after the Watts riots in '65 was in deep trouble. So I couldn't see giving up on that. And I had no role in the Vietnam business, because I wasn't even on the Security Council." Some of Mr. Clark's colleagues have suggested that he is still doing penance for this period of his life-in particular, for prosecuting war resisters like Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin and boxing legend Muhammad Ali. "Standing by, being Attorney General during the Vietnam War without resigning, is not a particularly heroic position to have taken," said his old colleague, Mr. Wulf. "I sometimes speculate- and this is absolute speculation-that what he's doing is a kind of atonement for having been Attorney General for Lyndon Johnson at the time of the Vietnam War, and for having in fact initiated the indictment against Dr. Spock and the others." As in most cases, Mr. Clark was as unapologetic about his indictment of Spock as he has since become about his Johnson administration apostasy. "I personally authorized the case against William Sloane Coffin, who came down to marry our son a few years later. I visited him and stayed in his home in '69, at Yale. Dr. Spock I became very close friends with. And I really haven't had regrets about the case. I think the government has the duty to protect laws that it believes are constitutional, and I believe the Selective Service Act was constitutional." Still, there's no question that Mr. Clark veered sharply leftward after his Johnson years. Beginning in the early 1970's, Mr. Clark took a string of headline-grabbing "movement" cases, amassing a docket that read like a Who's Who of the decade's radicals and revolutionaries. In 1973, he defended the Harrisburg Seven, a group of peace activists who were accused, among other things, of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger. One year later, he joined famed radical lawyer William Kunstler in representing two of the Attica Brothers who had been accused of killing a prison guard. Around the same time, he also launched an upstart campaign for U.S. Senate against New York Republican Jacob Javits. (At the state Democratic convention in 1974, Frank Serpico nominated him and Attica Brother Herbert X. Blyden seconded it.) Running as a Democrat, he argued for a 50 percent cut in the defense budget and refused to take contributions above $100. Mr. Navasky managed the operation. During the next two decades, Mr. Clark began taking on clients who hovered further and further on the political fringes, clients who were not merely controversial but downright incendiary. He often framed these cases in the old language of civil rights, but these clients were hardly left-wing "cause" clients in the traditional sense (though there were some of those as well). For instance, he took on the case of Karl Linnas, an alleged former Nazi. And he defended-and supposedly befriended- Lyndon LaRouche, the political-cult guru. In the early 1990's, Mr. Clark represented Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb general who was indicted on war crimes. More recently, he gave legal advice to Slobodon Milosevic, the former Yugoslavian president who was also charged with war crimes. Now, of course, there's Saddam Hussein. Taken together, these clients make up quite a rogues' gallery, and some of Mr. Clark's friends and colleagues have been almost as confounded by his legal choices as his critics. To help explain, they have dreamed up a raft of different theories. On the one side are those who believe that Mr. Clark is, above all, a civil libertarian in the Clarence Darrow tradition. To these friends, he is a hero, albeit at times an eccentric one. "He's represented a lot of bad guys. I would say bad guys are entitled to a lawyer. Dracula should have a lawyer, but it's not going to be me," said Michael Steven Smith, a New York City attorney and author. "It's probably not a position taken by most movement lawyers, but it's still a principled position." But other friends and colleagues have said they suspect he is driven primarily by ideology, and not just the standard lefty ideology. "I support many of the causes he supports, but I also vehemently disagree with some of the choices he's made, because I perceive him as thinking that any enemy of the United States is a friend of his, and I think that leads him into representing people he should not," said Beth Stevens, an attorney who represented a group of Bosnian Muslim women who sued Mr. Karadzic in 1993. And yet for a man who sticks to certain basic principles of justice, even when the circumstances of the world seem to be pressing their defense to the point of absurdity, Mr. Clark had a deceptively simple answer for the choices he's made. "You know, we tend to demean here the idea that you're innocent until proven guilty, and most people are going to chuckle when you say that in connection with a case like Saddam Hussein," said Mr. Clark, responding to his critics. "But the main meaning is that truth is hard to find. You don't really know, you have to search for it-you have to inquire diligently, be very skeptical." You may reach Lizzy Ratner via email at: lratner@observer.com . ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 21) Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 GISpecial 3A5 ThomasFBarton@earthlink.net A Message From The Iraq Resistance Islamic Jihad Army - A message in English "We are simple people who chose principles over fear." Propaganda or disinformation? You decide. Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 Title: Communiqué Number 6 The media platoon of the Islamic Jihad Army. On the 27th of Shawal 1425h. 10 December 2004 People of the world! These words come to you from those who up to the day of the invasion were struggling to survive under the sanctions imposed by the criminal regimes of the U.S. and Britain . We are simple people who chose principles over fear. We have suffered crimes and sanctions, which we consider the true weapons of mass destruction. Years and years of agony and despair, while the condemned UN traded with our oil revenues in the name of world stability and peace. Over two million innocents died waiting for a light at the end of a tunnel that only ended with the occupation of our country and the theft of our resources. After the crimes of the administrations of the U.S. and Britain in Iraq , we have chosen our future. The future of every resistance struggle ever in the history of man. It is our duty, as well as our right, to fight back the occupying forces, which their nations will be held morally and economically responsible; for what their elected governments have destroyed and stolen from our land. We have not crossed the oceans and seas to occupy Britain or the U.S. nor are we responsible for 9/11. These are only a few of the lies that these criminals present to cover their true plans for the control of the energy resources of the world, in face of a growing China and a strong unified Europe . It is Ironic that the Iraqi's are to bear the full face of this large and growing conflict on behalf of the rest of this sleeping world. We thank all those, including those of Britain and the U.S. , who took to the streets in protest against this war and against Globalism. We also thank France , Germany and other states for their position, which least to say are considered wise and balanced, til now. Today, we call on you again. We do not require arms or fighters, for we have plenty. We ask you to form a world wide front against war and sanctions. A front that is governed by the wise and knowing. A front that will bring reform and order. New institutions that would replace the now corrupt. Stop using the U.S. dollar, use the Euro or a basket of currencies. Reduce or halt your consumption of British and U.S. products. Put an end to Zionism before it ends the world. Educate those in doubt of the true nature of this conflict and do not believe their media for their casualties are far higher than they admit. We only wish we had more cameras to show the world their true defeat. The enemy is on the run. They are in fear of a resistance movement they can not see nor predict. We, now choose when, where, and how to strike. And as our ancestors drew the first sparks of civilization, we will redefine the word Âconquest. Today we write a new chapter in the arts of urban warfare. Know that by helping the Iraqi people you are helping yourselves, for tomorrow may bring the same destruction to you. In helping the Iraqi people does not mean dealing for the Americans for a few contracts here and there. You must continue to isolate their strategy. This conflict is no longer considered a localized war. Nor can the world remain hostage to the never-ending and regenerated fear that the American people suffer from in general. We will pin them here in Iraq to drain their resources, manpower, and their will to fight. We will make them spend as much as they steal, if not more. We will disrupt, then halt the flow of our stolen oil, thus, rendering their plans useless. And the earlier a movement is born, the earlier their fall will be. And to the American soldiers we say, you can also choose to fight tyranny with us. Lay down your weapons, and seek refuge in our mosques, churches and homes. We will protect you. And we will get you out of Iraq , as we have done with a few others before you. Go back to your homes, families, and loved ones. This is not your war. Nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq . And to George W. Bush, we say, ÂYou have asked us to ÂBring it onÂ, and so have we. Like never expected. Have you another challenge? Marxism mailing list Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 22) The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter George Monbiot Guardian Tuesday January 4, 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1382857,00.html There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry. The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1,000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry. Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the west, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other people's shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy. But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets? The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq. The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war. It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid: less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq. The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact, components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid programme than lost. To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms. But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja. Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness. While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry. ·You can join the campaign against global poverty at: www.makepovertyhistory.org www.monbiot.com Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 23) National Task Force for Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Update - December 11, 2004 meeting in New York City (Reviewed by Attorney Robert R. Bryan) LEGAL UPDATE: Mumia's case is simultaneously being heard in two different courts presently: the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (appellate court) and the Pennsylvania State Court of Common Pleas (trial court), both of which sit in Philadelphia. The Third Circuit (the appellate court) Procedure In July 2004, both Robert Bryan and the state of Pennsylvania submitted briefs on the effect of the 06-24-04 United States Supreme Court decision in Beard v. Banks on Mumia's case. On 07-29-04, Robert filed a memorandum of law on the affect of Banks for Mumia, and requested a stay of the proceedings in this matter pending the outcome of the issues simultaneously being litigated in the Pennsylvania trial court before Judge Pamela Dembe. On 10-19-04, the appellate court entered an order denying the 07-29-04 request from Robert Bryan for a stay of the proceedings. What this means is that the issues currently pending before the appellate court are moving forward. The next step involves putting these issues on what is called a "briefing schedule," which has yet to be done by the appellate court. In other words, Robert has yet to receive notice from the appellate court as to when briefs will be due on the issues currently before it. Robert initially filed for a stay of these proceedings because of the active litigation pending before Judge Dembe in the trial court in Philadelphia, and argued against having to litigate one case in two courts at the same time. The matters before Judge Dembe cannot be resolved by the Third Circuit, but must first be addressed at the trial level in the state system. Additionally, Robert Bryan is currently working on a brief to be filed with this court requesting that additional issues be certified for appeal from district court Judge Yohn's 2001 habeas decision, which certified only one claim for relief: racial bias in jury selection, also known as the Batson claim. Mumia's former attorneys filed the original motion on this issue, which Robert plans to supplement, requesting that additional issues be certified on appeal to the appellate court. What are the possible outcomes? There are four possibilities: the Third Circuit could (1) deny this request outright, (2) only allow a few of the 29 issues raised by Mumia's writ for habeas corpus, (3) send the case back to Judge William Yohn to apply the standard set out in Miller-El (see below), or (4) wait for Mumia's Batson issue to be resolved before moving forward on this one. More immediately, Robert plans to file a motion for remand back down to the district court on the issues raised by Terri Maurer-Carter's affidavit. Terri Maurer-Carter is the court reporter who overheard trial judge Albert Sabo-who presided over Mumia's 1982 "trial," and 1995, 1996, and 1997 Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) appellate hearings in Philadelphia-say: "Yeah, and I'm going to help 'em [the prosecution] fry the n****r." Issues There are two issues before the appellate court, which will be explained below. First, what did the United States Supreme Court decide in Beard v. Banks, and how does that affect Mumia? In July 2004, the appellate court allowed both Robert Bryan and the state of Pennsylvania to submit briefs on the affect of Banks on Mumia's case. The issue was whether Mumia's case was affected by the recent United States Supreme Court decision in Beard v. Banks. George Banks was sentenced to death in 1982. After his state appeals were exhausted, he sought habeas relief in federal district court and was denied. On appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Banks' death sentence was found to be unconstitutional, and the decision of the district court was reversed. The appellate court held that jury instructions during Banks' sentencing led jurors to believe they could not vote against the death penalty unless they all agreed on mitigating evidence-evidence that would have inclined them not to vote for a death sentence. The appellate court reasoned that these jury instructions violated the United States Supreme Court's 1988 ruling in Mills v. Maryland. However, the Third Circuit did not decide whether the rule of Mills was retroactive. In other words, could Banks benefit from the United States Supreme Court's 1988 decision in Mills where his conviction became final in 1987? Thus, when Banks' case was next brought before the United States Supreme Court on appeal, the Court sent the case back down to the Third Circuit to decide this issue. The appellate court then decided that the rule created by the Supreme Court in Mills was retroactive and that Banks could benefit. The case was again appealed to the Supreme Court and on 06-24-04, the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Third Circuit and declared that the rule of law created in Mills was not retroactive. In a 5-to-4 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court found that the rule announced in Mills-that sentencing schemes could not prevent jurors from considering mitigating evidence that had not been accepted unanimously when deciding whether to apply the death penalty-was a new rule of law that was not a "watershed rule of criminal procedure implicating the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding." Finding that the rule of Mills was not a "watershed rule," the United States Supreme Court said that Mills could not be applied retroactively and that Banks' conviction was constitutional. What does this mean? Basically, it means that a "Mills challenge" to a death sentence is only applicable where the sentencing relief sought is for a person whose conviction became final after the rule of Mills was decided in 1988. Seemingly, the Court has said that relief is available to those whose convictions post-date Mills, creating what is called in the law a "bright line rule." Robert Bryan argued in his brief that Mumia benefits from the rule of Mills because his conviction became final in 1990. The state of Pennsylvania has argued that Mumia should not get the benefit of Mills, despite this seemingly bright line rule, and there have been several exchanges back and forth (one as recent as 10-31-04) through the filing of papers with the appellate court on this issue. This matter is still pending. If Mumia wins on this issue, that he does get the benefit of Mills, his case will go back to the trial level in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas. The state of Pennsylvania will have two choices, either (1) sentence Mumia to life imprisonment, or (2) grant Mumia a full jury trial on the issue of whether he should be sentenced to life imprisonment or death. A full jury trial, or penalty-phase hearing, means that Mumia is back to 1982 in terms of the issue of sentencing. The state of Pennsylvania will put on evidence of guilt and aggravation to argue for a death sentence. Robert Bryan will then be able to put on evidence of innocence and mitigation. However, the only decision the jury can make should there be a new penalty-phase hearing is life imprisonment or death. If Mumia loses, then the state of Pennsylvania can sign another death warrant, side-stepping Yohn's 2001 habeas decision. However, there still remains another issue pending before the appellate court: the issue of jury selection, Mumia's Batson claim. Second, what is Mumia's Batson claim? The issue of racial bias in jury selection, Mumia's Batson claim, is also still pending before the appellate court. This issue was the only issue Judge Yohn allowed to be appealed to the Third Circuit. In other words, this is the only guilt-phase appellate issue Yohn certified to go before the appellate court. Recently, the United State Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Thomas Miller-El. A summary of that case from an article in the 12-05-04 NYT is as follows: "In an 8-to-1 decision last year, the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to rethink its "dismissive and strained interpretation" of the proof in the case, and to consider more seriously the substantial evidence suggesting that prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from Mr. Miller-El's jury. Prosecutors used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 out of 11 eligible black jurors, and they twice used a local procedure called a jury shuffle to move blacks lower on the list of potential jurors, the decision said. The jury ultimately selected, which had one black member, convicted Mr. Miller-El, a black man who is now 53, of killing a clerk at a Holiday Inn in Dallas in 1985. Instead of considering much of the evidence recited by the Supreme Court majority, the appeals court engaged in something akin to plagiarism. In February, it again rejected Mr. Miller-El's claims, in a decision that reproduced, virtually verbatim and without attribution, several paragraphs from the sole dissenting opinion in last year's Supreme Court decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas." According to Attorney Bryan, Miller-El deals with two issues: (1) racism in jury selection and (2) the certification of appellate issues by federal district courts. Regarding racial bias in jury selection, should the United States Supreme Court decide in favor of Miller-El on this issue, Mumia's position will be strengthened. Furthermore, there is also good case law in the Third Circuit on this issue that should also support Mumia's case. As for the certification of issues for appeal by the lower federal courts, the Supreme Court appears to be saying that these courts have too high a standard. In other words, they have made it such that unless a petitioner can prove a certain win on appeal, then that issue will not move forward. But if a certain win was apparent, then there would be no need for an appeal because the district court would have granted relief in the first instance, right? If Miller-El succeeds on this issue, then Robert will be in a better position to argue that Judge Yohn violated the proper standard and set the bar to high for his certificates of appealability. If Mumia wins his Batson claim, there will be a completely new trial, meaning there will be a new trial to decide guilt or innocence. If there is an acquittal, Mumia will be released. If Mumia is found guilty, there will be a penalty-phase hearing. The Pennsylvania State Court of Common Pleas (trial court) Procedure With regards to the newly discovered evidence presented to this court through the affidavits of William Pate and Yvette Williams, Robert Bryan has requested a hearing on the issues this evidence raises in relation to Mumia's conviction. Currently pending before Judge Dembe is a motion to dismiss that was filed by the state of Pennsylvania. This new evidence has not been presented in federal court because the issues it raises have not yet been resolved by Dembe in the state court system. Robert Bryan has replied to this motion, and was forced by Dembe in September 2004 to qualify himself to handle a capital case, despite his years of experience in these matters. Robert has handled hundreds of capital cases. Interestingly, there is a new state law in Pennsylvania that requires defense attorneys handling capital litigation to demonstrate that they are qualified to handle such matters, but that law was not in effect when Dembe challenged Robert's ability to handle Mumia's case. If Judge Dembe decides in Mumia's favor, then he would get a new trial. If Dembe denies relief, then Robert will appeal that decision through to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It should be noted that if Dembe or the Pennsylvania appellate courts grants Mumia relief, there will be no need to remain in federal court-another reason why Robert has argued against the lifting of the stay by the Third Circuit. Issues There are two issues before the trial court: the fabricated confession of Pricilla Durham and that the false testimony the state of Pennsylvania put on during the trial through their key witness Cynthia White. William Pate is the half-brother of Pricilla Durham. In his affidavit, he says that Durham lied about the confession she claimed Mumia made at the hospital on the night he was shot and Faulkner died. Yvette Williams said in her affidavit that Cynthia White was not present during the shooting, but appeared sometime thereafter. HEARING SET FOR MUMIA ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2005 Dear Friends: Today official notification was received that on Friday, February 11, 2005, there will be a hearing concerning Mumia Abu-Jamal in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia before Judge Pamela Pryor Dembe. The hearing will be pursuant to the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus we filed December 8, 2003 on Mumia's behalf. Next month the court will issue a memorandum that is to include preliminary rulings on the petition. At that time she will direct counsel as to how she wishes to proceed. The hearing will be in the Criminal Justice Center, Philadelphia, but to date no courtroom has been assigned. The issues raised in our habeas corpus petition are: 1. The State Manipulated A Purported Eyewitness To Falsely Identify Petitioner As The Shooter, In Violation Of His Rights Under The Fifth, Sixth Eighth, And Fourteenth Amendments To The United States Constitution. 2. Petitioner Was Found Guilty And Sentenced To Death Through The Use Of A Fabricated Confession, In Violation Of The Fifth, Eighth And Fourteenth Amendments. We will advise when more is known about the upcoming hearing. With best wishes, Robert ======= Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan 2088 Union Street, Suite 4 San Francisco, California 94123-4124 Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal Black legislators support Mumia's release On Dec. 3, the National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL) passed a resolution during its conference in Philadelphia calling for the freedom of African American political prisoner and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. This comes on the heels of another important resolution passed at the NAACP national convention on July 15 that demanded a new trial for Abu-Jamal and condemned the racist application of the death penalty by the criminal justice system. The state legislators' resolution reads: WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial in Phila delphia was characterized by illegal suppression of evidence, police coercion, illegal exclusion of Black jurors, and grotesquely unfair and unconstitutional rulings by the judge; and WHEREAS the trial judge, Albert Sabo, has been quoted in a sworn statement to have vowed at the time of the trial to help the prosecution 'fry the n--'; and WHEREAS subsequent appellate rulings have bent the law out of shape to sustain the guilty verdict of that trial; and WHEREAS the appellate courts have also refused to consider strong evidence of Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence, most notably a confession by Arnold Beverly to the crime; and WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal still is incarcerated on Death Row and still faces a death sentence; and WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal's case is now on appeal before the federal Third Circuit and the state court system; and WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal has for decades as a journalist fought courage ously against racism and for the human rights of all people; and WHEREAS the continued unjust incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal represents a threat to the civil rights of all people, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the National Caucus of Black State Legislators demands that the courts consider the evidence of innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal and that he be released from prison; and THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the NCBSL demands that Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell instruct his Attorney General to take over the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal from the Philadelphia County District Attorney's office and actually pursue justice; namely, go to court, make a legal confession of error, and stipulate that the conviction be vacated; THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the NCBSL will communicate its views on this matter to Gov. Rendell, 225 Main Capitol Bldg., Harris burg, PA 17120, and to the appropriate courts in consultation with the legal defense team of Mumia Abu-Jamal; and THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the NCBSL will work with the legal defense team of Mumia Abu-Jamal to petition the courts to file any necessary friend of the court brief on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 24) U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN http://nytimes.com/2005/01/02/international/worldspecial4/ 02quake.html?ei=5094 &en=92dbe740aaf891ca&hp=&ex=1104642000&partner=homepage&pagewanted= print&posit ion= The Times article below presents more evidence for the need to divert all US forces from Iraq (where of course they had no business being in the first place) to tsunami disaster areas. Especially right now with the lack of transport equipment and infrastructure and the need to reach isolated victims quickly, every last US helicopter should leave Iraq immediately, be used to ferry aid to victims and to ferry injured out -- and then when their job is done, to come home. And it's the job of the antiwar movement to get back out in the streets to fight for this! January 2, 2005 AID U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN Substantial aid finally began reaching desperate refugees in devastated areas of northern Sumatra yesterday as American warships, led by the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, arrived offshore and a fleet of helicopters airlifted critical supplies to stricken towns in Aceh Province. Flying through pounding rains, a dozen Sea Hawk helicopters from the Lincoln ferried food, water, medicines, tents and other supplies from warehouses at Banda Aceh airport to refugees in decimated Indonesian coastal towns and inland villages that had been virtually cut off when the tsunami destroyed roads, bridges and communications a week ago. It was the beginning of what was expected to become a steady stream of international aid for Indonesia and a dozen other countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean, where estimates of the dead hovered between 140,000 and 150,000. Serious injuries were believed to exceed 500,000, and the likelihood of epidemics of cholera and other diseases threatened to send the totals much higher. As the first trickle of supplies broke through, the global relief effort to save an estimated five million homeless survivors of last weekend's undersea earthquake and tsunami was reinforced yesterday when Japan raised its pledge of aid from $30 million to $500 million, the largest contribution so far. Combined with a $350 million pledge by the United States on Friday, this brought the total contributions of more than 40 nations to $2 billion, according to the United Nations. [Page 9.] The United Nations will begin a new world appeal for money in New York this week, and Secretary General Kofi Annan will arrive in Jakarta on Thursday to convene a meeting of major donor nations to map strategy for the relief campaign. Private donations, which have flooded charitable organizations around the world, are expected to add hundreds of millions to the relief programs. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, in his first comments on the disaster, said the world faced a long-term relief commitment. "At first it seemed a terrible disaster, a terrible tragedy," he said. "But I think as the days have gone on, people have recognized it as a global catastrophe. There will be months, if not years, of work ahead of us." President Bush too spoke of a long commitment. "We offer our love and compassion, and our assurance that America will be there to help," he said in his weekly radio address from his ranch in Crawford, Tex. He cited a host of problems - communications, roads and medical facilities damaged or washed out - but promised that help was coming, and, indeed, had already begun to arrive. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the president's brother, were expected to arrive in the region today with a team of experts to tour some stricken areas and to assess the needs. Their schedule was still being worked out, officials said. The need is indeed enormous, especially in Aceh Province, where towns and villages were destroyed. Meulaboh, on Aceh's west coast, was flattened, and as many as 40,000 of the 120,000 residents were killed. It lay buried under mountains of mud and debris yesterday as Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, flew in to see the devastation. Other firsthand reports of the devastation in Aceh were provided by the pilots and crew members of the helicopters that, from dawn to sunset on New Year's Day, shuttled 25,000 pounds of supplies to refugees. "There is nothing left to speak of at these coastal communities," Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Vorce, a pilot from San Diego, told The Associated Press. He told of a swath of destruction two miles deep from the coasts, with trees mowed down, roads washed away and only foundations where buildings once stood. Besides airdrops by the American helicopters, fleets of cargo planes from Australia, New Zealand and other nations continued to land at Banda Aceh and Medan, ferrying in tons of supplies. But bad roads, destroyed bridges, a lack of fuel and trucks, and other problems continued to hamper the distribution. While the Abraham Lincoln and four accompanying ships represented the vanguard of American emergency aid to Indonesia, American officials said seven more vessels led by the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard were steaming west from the South China Sea with more supplies and were expected to be off the coast of Sri Lanka in the coming week, a Pentagon spokesman said. Military officials said that yet another convoy, six slower-moving ships loaded with food, water, blankets and a 500-bed portable hospital, was en route from Guam, but was not expected to reach the stricken region for about two weeks. Capt. Rodger Welch of the Navy, representing the operations directorate of the military's Pacific Command, said late Saturday that the American relief mission likely was the largest in the region in at least 50 years. "And we are only beginning this effort," he added. About 10,000 to 12,000 American military personnel were now involved, mostly aboard the Lincoln and Bonhomme Richard groups. In Sri Lanka, flash floods yesterday forced the evacuation of thousands of people from low-lying areas hard hit by the tsunami, which killed more than 28,700 there. At least 15 camps where 30,000 refugees had been sheltering were evacuated after storms dumped 13 inches of rain over the eastern coastal region. Weeklong efforts to bury the dead in Sri Lanka and coastal areas of India were winding down, and government and private aid workers said they were turning their attention increasingly to sheltering the survivors in more sanitary refugee camps, while the homes of an estimated one million displaced persons are rebuilt. "This is where we are going to see a rise in communicable diseases, diarrhea, measles, upper respiratory infections," said David Overlack, a health care specialist surveying camps in Sri Lanka for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. World Health Organization workers have noted "a slight increase in the reporting of diarrheal illness" in areas of Sri Lanka and Indonesia affected by the tsunami, David Nabarro, an official of the United Nations agency, said in an interview yesterday. But the increase does not mean an epidemic, he said. There have been no outbreaks of cholera or other diseases, he said, adding that it is too early for such outbreaks to occur. Aid workers praised Sri Lankan officials and volunteers for their efforts to bury the dead quickly and to place 600,000 homeless people in schools, temples and mosques. An outpouring of donations from Sri Lankans has prevented shortages of food and clothing, officials said. Jeffrey J. Lunstead, the American ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, said the first planeload of American relief supplies had arrived in Sri Lanka - plastic sheeting to house 3,600 people and 5,400 cans of fresh water. He said most of the American aid would be aimed at reconstruction, rather than emergency food and medicines. To that end, American military officials said 1,500 marines and 20 helicopters would be deployed in the next few days to clear debris and aid survivors in devastated areas of Sri Lanka. The first contingent of 200 was expected to arrive today. Reporting for this article was contributed by Ian Fisher in Sri Lanka, Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez in Indonesia,Thom Shanker in Washington and Lawrence K. Altman in New York. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 25) IRAQ: Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say 04 Jan 2005 14:56:16 GMT Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/ 121b671d950efc3ac031b54b55118d85.htm FALLUJAH, 4 January (IRIN) - "It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children. It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started," Dr Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, director of the main hospital in Fallujah city, some 60 km west of Baghdad, told IRIN. According to al-Iyssaue, the hospital emergency team has recovered more than 700 bodies from rubble where houses and shops once stood, adding that more than 550 were women and children. He said a very small number of men were found in these places and most were elderly. Doctors at the hospital claim that many bodies had been found in a mutilated condition, some without legs or arms. Two babies were found at their homes, who are believed to have died from malnutrition, according to a specialist at the hospital. Al-Iyssaue added these numbers were only from nine neighbourhoods of the city and that 18 others had not yet been reached, as they were waiting for help from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) to make it easier for them to enter. He explained that many of the dead had been already buried by civilians from the Garma and Amirya districts of Fallujah after approval from US-led forces nearly three weeks ago, and those bodies had not been counted. IRCS officials told IRIN they needed more time to give an accurate death toll, adding that the city was completely uninhabitable. Marxism mailing list Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 26) The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. Adding to Jim's post: ETAN (many will know Ben Terrall's work with and for ETAN here). Marc Sapir writes that Allan Nairn was Dennis Bernstein's guest on Flashpoints Thurs., Dec. 30 and that: The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. I Just heard the scoop on Indonesia (from Alan Nairn, plus an Indonesian UC Berkeley professor and a fellow with nonviolence international). The Indonesian military yesterday began a new major military campaign in Aceh province (where perhaps 80,000 are dead) attacking villages (that are still standing) in an effort to wipe out the independence movement. They will be sending in another 15,000 troops to complement the 50,000 that have been used to impose martial law the past year. While claiming to be doing relief work they are hampering the relief efforts and will steal as much money as they can from relief work. The U.S. is likely to be asked by Indonesia to put the Aceh popular resistance movement on it's list of terrorist organizations and there is fear that under Condoleeza that will be approved. That will then make most Indonesians in the U.S. and around the world terrorist collaborators as they try to help their families and the independence movement get out from under the terror of the Indonesian military. Please tell people who want to send financial aid to the Tsunami victims of Indonesia to go through the East Timor Action Network not through government channels. They can be contacted at www.ETAN.org Aceh, the region closest to the earthquake, has been almost entirely sealed from foreign presence since the beginning of martial law in May 2003. There are rumors that the Indonesian government is now debating whether to allow foreign organizations access to Aceh. The U.S. government has offered assistance. Every second delayed contributes to needless death, sickness and suffering. This is clearly not the time for politics to supersede dire humanitarian needs. East Timor ACTION Network ALERT Donate to Aceh relief Go to the website for information re: contacting your congressional reps and about how to donate to grassroots efforts in Aceh: http://www.etan.org/action/action2/23alert.htm#Donate%20to%20Aceh%20relief Beware Medecins sans Frontieres: At 11:41 PM -0800 1/3/05, echo wrote: Medecins Sans Frontieres was arrogant and controlling at the Colomoncagua refugee camp. Didn't want to trust the community with the supplies and pharmaceuticals. The survivors at Colomoncagua were organized on an anarchist basis, with every person regardless of age or sex contributing with whatever knowledge or skill he or she possessed. They had lived so long because they were responsible. adding that the US is moving to displace UNICEF in relief work, and use the opportunity to tighten military control. (Again on Flashpoints yesterday, Monday the 3rd, the Acehnese head-of-state-in-exile was interviewed, and reported that Indonesian soldiers are shooting survivors who try to bury the dead, a practice sickeningly familiar from Palestine and Iraq.) more on military repression of Acehnese: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-25.htm ''We are now carrying out two duties: humanitarian work and the security operation,'' he told the daily. ''The raids to quell the secessionist movement in Aceh will continue unless the president issues a decree to lift the civil emergency and assign us to merely play a humanitarian role in Aceh.''<< and: Published January 4th, 2005, in The Age, Melbourne, Australia. Kantha Shakti (Strength to Women) is a partner group supported by IWDA. Rapists, abusers prey on disaster victims By Liz Minchin January 5, 2005 First their lives were torn apart by the tsunami; now women and children are being pursued by human predators. With millions left homeless and vulnerable throughout south Asia, some survivors have been further traumatised by shocking acts of violence, including gang rape, kidnapping, child abuse and the mutilation of corpses. Most of the reported violence has been in Sri Lanka, where a national women's group, Kantha Shakti (Strength of Women), has warned that "many, many" children and women are believed to have been abducted, mostly in the chaotic south. "Lots of children are being abducted and taken away for slavery . . . This [i]s happening on a large scale," Kantha Shakti executive director Rohini Weerasinghe told The Age. Even on the day the tsunami struck, women were abducted, she said. There has been no news of those women since. Other reports of abuse have been equally shocking. (I will send the full report to anyone who requests it) In Sri Lanka, non-government groups, including Kantha Shakti, are trying to raise money to send trained locals into the camps to tackle abuse. Donations to Kantha Shakti in Sri Lanka can be made through the International Women's Development Agency at www.iwda.org.au or by calling +(61-3) 9650 5574 during business hours or + (61-425) 712 478 after hours. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 28) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ EDITOR'S NOTE: As The Nation was going to press, Canada's willingness to take in Americans resisting the Iraq war became more concrete. In a year-end review with Canada's Global National, Prime Minister Paul Martin said that Canada was prepared to accept U.S. citizens who do not want to serve in the war. According to the report, when reminded that former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau opened Canada's doors to draft dodgers and deserters during the Vietnam War, Martin said: "In terms of immigration, we are a country of immigrants and we will take immigrants from around the world. I'm not going to discriminate." Asked whether Martin was referring to Jeremy Hinzman's request for refugee status, a spokesperson said that Martin "was not commenting on any individual case and certainly was not sending a signal to the immigration board." Still, Hinzman's attorney Jeffry House tells The Nation that the prime minister's remarks represent "a step in the right direction." Protests over the conduct of the Iraq war are mounting from what seems an unlikely place: the ranks of the military. In early December, eight soldiers sued in federal court to overturn the stop-loss policy that has extended their tour of duty indefinitely. At Camp Buehring in the Kuwaiti desert, Army National Guard Specialist Thomas Wilson, cheered on by his fellow soldiers, demanded that Donald Rumsfeld explain why the troops had to rummage through garbage heaps for scraps to armor their vehicles. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has admitted that some 5,500 enlisted soldiers have deserted since the "liberation" of Iraq began. While these disgruntled grunts don't explicitly challenge the validity of the war itself, their decision to complain formally, or even to quit, strongly suggests a dwindling of faith in the mission. Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, of the 82nd Airborne, has made his second thoughts public. As he told me this past March, "The war is bogus. There weren't any weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war was not pursued in self-defense, and as such it is illegal. I decided I could not participate in such a criminal enterprise." On December 6-8, while his comrades were filing suit and confronting Rumsfeld, Hinzman was making this argument before Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) in a bid for asylum as a principled deserter from the US Army. In doing so, he was putting the war itself on trial, articulating clearly the doubts that are beginning to tug at the conscience of some US troops. Hinzman enlisted in the Army in 2001, making what he calls a typical "Faustian bargain" - trading service for college - and looking for a way to be part of something "bigger than myself," where he might "live for ideals rather than just to consume." But in basic training, as drills focused on "breaking down the human inhibition to killing," he began to realize he had made the wrong choice. Aghast at finding himself joining in training chants like, "What makes the grass grow? Blood, blood, bright red blood," he filed for conscientious objector status, serving in noncombat duty in Afghanistan while his application was in process. Back at Fort Bragg in late 2003, his CO application denied, Hinzman received word that his unit would be shipping out to Iraq in a few days. He and his wife got into their Chevy with their toddler and drove to Toronto, arriving there January 3 of last year. He is the first of three deserters to ask for refugee protection. A ruling is expected in February. As is typical in a case making a novel claim or with a high public profile, the Canadian government intervened, asserting that Hinzman does not fit the definition of a refugee: someone who is fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution. Canada also argued - and in an interim ruling issued about two weeks before the hearing, the IRB judge agreed - that the question of the war's legality is irrelevant to the case. The government is not revealing its reasoning, but one can imagine a number of competing concerns pulsing beneath it: on the one hand, a reluctance to embarrass its bullying trading partner; on the other, an intense domestic opposition to the Iraq War. At the same time, Canada may be anxious about the possibility of an American draft, despite the Bush Administration's repeated denials that one is coming. Some thirty-five years ago, an estimated 60,000 men and women resisting the Vietnam War surged north. (In those days, they could simply present themselves at the border and apply for landed immigrant status; since then, Canada has instituted a refugee determination procedure.) One of them was Jeffry House, Hinzman's attorney. He regrets losing "our cleanest argument": While refugee law states that prosecution is not persecution, House intended to show that it is indeed persecution to punish someone for refusing to take part in a war that is illegal under international law, which sanctions war only when it is undertaken in self-defense or with authorization of the United Nations Security Council. Still, House explains, even if the illegality of the decision to go to war is off the table, the question of how the war is being waged remains relevant to Hinzman's claim. "What's happening on the ground in Iraq is violating Geneva Conventions and international human rights law," House says. "No one should be forced to participate." From the cells of Abu Ghraib to the living rooms of Falluja, any number of examples can make the case. Marine Sgt. Jimmy Massey, who served in Iraq during the invasion in March 2003, testified on Hinzman's behalf, explaining, he told me, that "it's the system, not the individual soldier, that is the problem. Even atrocities are standard operating procedure." At the hearing, he recounted in graphic and shocking detail how his unit killed more than thirty innocent Iraqi civilians at checkpoints, "lighting them up" with machine gun fire. He also described how Marines shot dead unarmed Iraqi demonstrators who posed no threat. "I was never clear on who was the enemy and who was not," he said. "When you don't know who the enemy is, what are you doing there?" A Marine Corps spokesman has said that none of the acts Massey described violated rules of engagement. If Hinzman is denied at the IRB, there are possibilities for appeal. And then, House notes, "the question of the illegality of the war has to be confronted politically." After all, Prime Minister Paul Martin may have promised to help with Iraq's elections, but his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, declined to join the "coalition" forces without a nod from the UN Security Council. And the current Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, is on record challenging the war under international law. In answering Specialist Wilson's question at Camp Buehring, Rumsfeld smugly told the 2,000 assembled soldiers, "You go to war with the army you have." In his brave stand, Jeremy Hinzman suggests another option: The army can refuse to go at all. (c) 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EarthU/ * To visit your group on the web, go to: * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ufpj-iraq/ * * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: * ufpj-iraq-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com * * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 29) Iraq War is Bad for Business By Jim Lobe Peace and Justice News from FPIF http://www.fpif.org/ January 4, 2005 Introducing a new commentary from Foreign Policy In Focus On top of the human and financial costs of the war in Iraq, the Bush administration's foreign policy may be costing U.S. corporations business overseas, according to a new survey of 8,000 international consumers released this week by the Seattle-based Global Market Insite (GMI) Inc. Brands closely identified with the U.S., such as Marlboro cigarettes, America Online (AOL), McDonald's, American Airlines, and Exxon-Mobil, are particularly at risk. GMI, an independent market research company, conducted the internet survey with consumers in eight countries from Dec. 10-12. One-third of all consumers in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom said that U.S. foreign policy, particularly the "war on terror" and the occupation of Iraq, constituted their strongest impression of the United States. Twenty percent of respondents in Europe and Canada said they consciously avoided buying U.S. products as a protest against those policies. That finding was consistent with a similar poll carried out by GMI three weeks after Bush's November election victory. Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, online at http://www.fpif.org He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service. See new FPIF commentary online at: http://www.presentdanger.org/commentary/2004/0412europoll.html printer-friendly pdf version at: http://www.presentdanger.org/pdf/gac/0412europoll.pdf For More Analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus: Mainstream Media Miss Rumsfeld's "Dirty Wars" Talk By Jim Lobe (December 1, 2004) http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0412rumsfeld.html Neocon Wish List By Jim Lobe (November 11, 2004) http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0411wish.html Security Scholars Say Iraq War Most Misguided Policy Since Vietnam By Jim Lobe (October 13, 2004) http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0410scholars.html Interhemispheric Resource Center is proud to announce that, in conjunction with our 25th anniversary, we have changed our name to International Relations Center. Please visit our website at www.irc-online.org new logo and check back in the coming months as we begin the integration and improvement of all of our program and project websites. As International Relations Center we remain IRC and committed to our mission of: working to make the U.S. a more responsible member of the global community by promoting progressive strategic dialogues that lead to new citizen-based agendas. Produced and distributed by FPIF:ÂA Think Tank Without Walls, a joint program of International Relations Center (IRC) and Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). For more information, visit http://www.fpif.org If you would like to add a name to the ÂWhatÂs New At FPIF specific region or topic list, please email: communications@irc-online.org with Âsubscribe and giving your area of interest. To add your name to this list, send a blank email to: peaceandjustice- subscribe@lists.riseup.net To unsubscribe, send a blank email to: peaceandjustice-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net. International Relations Center (IRC) (formerly Interhemispheric Resource Center) http://www.irc-online.org/ Outreach Coordinator Email: communications@irc-online.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 30) The Numbers Beyond the Bling In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail By Ward Harkavy January 4th, 2005 3:26 PM Village Voice.com While hiphop's being celebrated, life on the streets during its 30 years of existence has gotten much tougher. Income inequality in the U.S. began climbing 30 years ago, reversing a nearly 50-year trend. And the prison population has soared. Hardest hit have been African Americans, whose folk culture has made cash registers ring. America is now No. 1 in the percentage of its population in prison and No. 1 in income inequality among industrialized nations. Here are a few statistics: Approximately 1 million African American men under 40 are behind bars. Twelve percent of African American men ages 20 to 34 are behind bars, compared with 1.6 percent of white men in the same age group. Thirteen percent of Black male adults, 1.4 million total, are disenfranchised. In a dozen states, 30 to 40 percent of young Black men will permanently lose the right to vote because of being convicted felons. Fifty percent of New York City's Black males are unemployed. Black people are 13 percent of drug users, about the same as their percentage of the U.S. population, but 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession are Black, 55 percent of those convicted of drug charges are Black, and 74 percent of those sent to prison are Black. Sale of five grams of crack means a five-year minimum sentence under federal guidelines; it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to warrant the same sentence. Crack is the only drug whose sale as a first offense can trigger a federal mandatory minimum sentence. In 1994, 90 percent of those convicted of federal crack offenses were Black, 6 percent were Latino, and fewer than 4 percent were white. Powder cocaine? 30 percent Black, 43 percent Latino, and 26 percent white. In 1986, shortly before federal mandatory minimum sentences were imposed, the average federal crack sentence for African Americans was 11 percent higher than for whites. In 1990, after the guidelines went into effect, the average sentence was 49 percent higher for African Americans than for whites. The average crack defendant is sentenced to 115 months, compared with 77 months for those in powder cocaine cases. The majority of crack users, however, are white. Despite similar or equal rates of illegal drug use during pregnancy, African Americans are 10 times more likely than whites to be reported by social-service agencies for prenatal drug use. People die younger in Harlem than in Bangladesh. The leading causes of death in poor Black neighborhoods are not AIDS, drugs, or homicide. They are "unrelenting stress," "cardiovascular disease," "cancer," and "untreated medical conditions." In the past 25 years, one-third of public hospitals in the U.S. have closed, mainly in rural areas and inner cities. Wealth disparity is even more pronounced than income disparity. The top 1 percent of all U.S. households own 38 percent of all wealth (property, cash, savings, stock value, and insurance policies-minus mortgage payments, credit card debt, and other debts). Wealth inequality generally fell from 1929 to the mid '70s. Since then, it's doubled. Five percent of Americans own 59 percent of all wealth; the top 20 percent own 83 percent of all wealth. The bottom 20 percent have zero wealth. Excluding owner-occupied housing, the inequality is worse: 1 percent of families hold half of all non-home wealth. Ten percent of families own 85 percent of financial securities and 90 percent of all business assets. The average African American family has 60 percent of the income of the average white family. But the average African American family has only 18 percent of the wealth of the average white family. In the U.S., 1 percent of American families own 38 percent of all wealth. In Great Britain, it's 22 or 23 percent. Until the early '70s, we had less wealth inequality than Britain. More than 34 million Americans are officially "poor," a class including nearly 25 percent of all African Americans and more than 20 percent of all Latinos. The minimum wage has fallen by about 35 percent in real terms since its peak in 1968. Overall, American female infants' life expectancy is 19th in the world; male babies' is 31st, tied with Brunei. Of the 13 wealthiest countries, the U.S. is last or near the bottom in terms of infant mortality and birth weight. African Americans are 12.2 percent of the population but account for 37 percent of all AIDS cases. Latinos are 11.9 percent of the population but account for 19.2 percent of all AIDS cases. The fastest-growing population of those infected with the AIDS virus is African American women. Sources include Multinational Monitor, Drug Policy Alliance, Edward N. Wolff (Jerome Levy Economics Institute), New England Journal of Medicine, Economic Policy Institute, United for a Fair Economy, U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Jonah Goldberg (The Philadelphia Inquirer), The Washington Post, The American Prospect, and Gary Fields (The Wall Street Journal) A Chronology of U.S. Military Fatalities Since 'Mission Accomplished,' Part II Marxism mailing list Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 31) Powell declares tsunami aid part of global war on terror Imperialism in Samaritan's clothing By Bill Van Auken World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org 6 January 2005 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/powl-j061.shtml During his whirlwind tour of the tsunami-devastated nations of South Asia, US Secretary of State Colin Powell let slip that the begrudging and belated funding offered by Washington to the ongoing relief effort is all part of its "global war on terror." Speaking of US aid and the participation of the American military in relief efforts, Powell declared: "It dries up those pools of dissatisfaction that might give rise to terrorist activity. That supports not only our national security interest but the national security interests of the countries involved." Noting that the majority of the victims of the tsunami were Muslims, the US Secretary of State continued: "We'd be doing it regardless of religion, but I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action." Powell's trip is largely an exercise in damage control. It is aimed at overcoming the well-founded international perception that the government of the most powerful imperialist country in the world- and specifically its president, George W. Bush-reacted with appalling indifference to the worst natural catastrophe in living memory. The US Secretary of State has been accompanied by Florida's Governor Jeb Bush, who seems to be acting as a personal emissary for his older brother, while exploiting the international tragedy to further his own political ambitions by appearing to be grappling with a global crisis. What of the claim that Washington's reaction to the massive destruction and lost of life wrought by the tsunami is an expression of "American generosity, American values in action"? Generosity implies selflessness, hardly a characteristic of US foreign policy. On the contrary, the successive decisions to increase US aid from an obscene $15 million, to $35 million and finally $350 million were taken with a calculated view toward the immense damage that Washington's miserliness was inflicting upon US imperialism's global image. As Powell acknowledges, the aid is part and parcel of a "war on terror" that is directed at furthering US global economic and political hegemony by means of military power and aggression. No doubt, the shock of the tsunami's devastation and the unimaginable loss of human life have led to expressions of what might genuinely be described as "American values," but not from the administration in Washington. The open-heartedness and political naiveté associated with the generosity of the American people has been on display across the United States, with students and youth organizing bake sales and other activities to raise money for the victims, and many thousands donating to fund appeals. It is noteworthy that US television and newspapers have accurately portrayed the scale of the disaster. Once American ruling circles determined that the Bush administration's initial disdain for the suffering caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake was untenable, the corporate media conglomerates swung into action, providing non-stop coverage of the catastrophe. Graphic and chilling images of rows of corpses, parents carrying the bodies of their young children and villages reduced to rubble have been shown nightly to US viewing audiences. One cannot help contrast this coverage to the media's cowardly and complicit silence in response to the human catastrophe created by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Images of the dead, of sobbing parents clutching the bodies of children killed by US bombardments and of blocks reduced to rubble are readily available, but rigorously censored by America's vaunted free press. Describing a helicopter flight over Banda Aceh in Indonesia, Powell said he had "never seen anything like it" in his military and government career. "I cannot imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave," he said. "The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing." Perhaps the US Secretary of State would have benefited from a low-flying helicopter ride over the Iraqi city of Fallujah, though continued resistance to the US occupiers there would no doubt have precluded such a tour. Such a flight would have afforded a view of what a man-made tsunami has left of one of Iraq's principal urban centers. The fabled "city of mosques" lies in ruins as the result of a tidal wave of fire and steel unleashed by US warplanes, artillery and tanks. What of the horror of the Iraqi families who heard the roar of ceaseless US aerial bombardment and the thunder of cannon barrages for days before American tanks finished laying waste to their city? Does Colin Powell try to imagine what went through their minds? How many of their lives were snuffed out is something that neither the US government nor the US mass media even bothers to consider. While the Pentagon and the media continuously spoke only of US forces killing "rebels" and "terrorists" in Fallujah, the reports emerging from initial attempts at recovery in the city tell a very different story. The director of Fallujah's main hospital has reported that an emergency team from the facility has thus far recovered more than 700 bodies from the city's rubble. More than 550 were women and children, while the majority of the men were elderly. Babies have been found dead in their homes from malnutrition. The search has thus far only extended to a fraction of the city, with other areas still inaccessible because of fighting. The deaths in Fallujah are not included in the credible estimate made in a study published last October in the British medical journal Lancet of over 100,000 additional violent deaths in Iraq since the US invasion, the majority the result of US bombardments. The figure, which equals two thirds of the current estimated death toll from the tsunami, has received scant attention in the American media. In addition to these violent deaths, there are many thousands more-particularly among young children-caused by the destruction of the country's infrastructure, resulting in a lack of safe drinking water and the unavailability of refrigeration and basic medicines. Taken together, this human toll represents a manmade calamity that is on a par with the natural disaster that has struck South Asia. As for "American values," it is fair to ask whose values were expressed in the vile torture chambers created by the US military and the CIA in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and many lesser-known American detention facilities serving the "war on terror"? Whose values led military interrogators and guards to shock Iraqi prisoners with electrodes, light them on fire and subject them to sexual abuse and humiliation? It is now clear that the orders that gave rise-and continue to sanction -such atrocities came from the White House itself, embraced by Bush and given a pseudo-legal justification by the man he has nominated to serve as US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales. Behind these depraved actions lie the "values" of a predatory and corrupt ruling elite that is prepared to carry out mass murder and torture in order to further enrich itself. It has been able to continue the criminal enterprise in Iraq only by systematically lying to the American people and, with the media's collaboration, covering up the scale of its crimes. The hopes, more or less openly expressed by various leading figures in Washington, that the participation of the US military in relief efforts in South Asia will somehow erase the searing images of torture that emerged from Abu Ghraib or of the mass destruction in Fallujah, will prove vain. Few will be convinced that US imperialism has suddenly become a philanthropic institution. Even after twice raising its aid pledge, Washington's spending on tsunami relief would barely cover two days of its continuing war in Iraq. On the scales of American capitalism, "values" are measured in dollars and cents, and the whole world knows it. A little over a century ago, the great revolutionist Rosa Luxemburg wrote an imperishable essay on the reaction of the great powers to another devastating natural disaster, the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pelee that wiped out 40,000 people, virtually the entire population of the French Caribbean colony of Martinique. [ See "Martinique" http:// www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1902/05/15.htm ] She brilliantly exposed the hypocritical expressions of sorrow over the loss of life and pretensions of humanitarianism emanating from the capitals of France, Britain, the US, Germany and Russia. The governments of each of these countries, she pointed out, were responsible for bloodbaths carried out either against their own working class or in savagely repressing anti-colonial resistance from Africa to the Philippines. Luxemburg wrote: "And now they have all turned to Martinique, all one heart and one mind again; they help, rescue, dry the tears and curse the havoc-wreaking volcano. Mt. Pelee, greathearted giant, you can laugh; you can look down in loathing at these benevolent murderers, at these weeping carnivores, at these beasts in Samaritan's clothing. But a day will come when another volcano lifts its voice of thunder: a volcano that is seething and boiling, whether you need it or not, and will sweep the whole sanctimonious, blood-splattered culture from the face of the earth. And only on its ruins will the nations come together in true humanity, which will know but one deadly foe-blind, dead nature." In the light of recent events, these words remain evergreen. The juxtaposition of massive human suffering and imperialist hypocrisy that has characterized the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami is symptomatic of a society rent by inequality and oppression and ripe for social revolution. Copyright 1998-2004 World Socialist Web Site All rights reserved ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 32) Israel's "Days of Penitence" Drown Gaza In a Sea Of Blood By Mohammed Omer Washington Report , December 2004, pages 10-12 http://www.washington-report.org/archives/December_2004/0412010.html [Sharon picked his moment well, when America was preoccupied with its presidential campaign and its invasion of Iraq, to decimate the civilian population of Gaza...ds] JABALYA CAMP, Northern Gaza, Oct. 10, 2004--It smells unbelievably bad here. To walk down any street--if you dare to--you skirt, or sometimes unavoidably walk through, pools of blood. There are shreds of human flesh--some of them unrecognizable as human remains--all over, on rooftops, plastered to broken windows, on the street. The stench of rotting blood mixes with the more acrid odor of flesh burned to black char by the rockets fired by the Israeli army's American-made Apache helicopters. The sky is full of black smoke, some from the rocket explosions, but even more, it sometimes seems, from the endless fires of tires and other debris that people keep stoking. The smoke confuses the heat-seeking unmanned drone surveillance planes, so setting fires in any relatively open area may draw fire and let a bomb explode somewhat harmlessly. All this smoke mixed with plaster and cement dust is a blessing and a curse. The stench of burning flesh and rotting blood masks to some extent the smell of raw sewage from broken sewer pipes and the tens of thousands of bodies unwashed for over a week now. Water to drink is a rare and precious commodity here--baths and showers have become impossible luxuries. Your eyes inevitably tear up from all the smoke--but then, that protects you a tiny bit from some of the more harrowing sights: recognizable body parts--a piece of a leg, an obvious part of a torso, and fingers--more scattered, individual, recognizable fingers than anyone should ever have to see. Volunteer crews are gathering these human fragments and bringing them to Jabalya's two hospitals, but the ambulances cannot possibly keep up with the flood of newly dead and injured. Funeral processions are everywhere, as are "houses of mourning" --the tents bereaved families set up in which to receive their families and friends. In fact, however, every house here--whether relatively intact or partly or wholly destroyed by the IDF tanks and bulldozers --is a house of mourning. And nothing protects you from the sounds--the tears and laments of the mothers and fathers, husbands, wives and children of the dead, the screams of the injured, the wail of ambulance sirens, sniper fire, the thud of tank shells and the too-frequent explosions as another Apache shell explodes. Time is distorted here--hours feel like days, days like weeks or months. This is Jabalya Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip, one of the most crowded places on earth, where 106,000 men, women and children, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed civilians, have been under an all-out attack for over a week now. It is only when I sit down to write up my notes made here in the last few days that the cruelty of the IDF name for this attack-- "Days of Penitence"--hits me. They are not just slaughtering unarmed civilians, but language itself. "Penitence," as I understand it, is voluntary remorse for wrongdoing. Is this massacre supposed to induce remorse in its victims? Are they supposed to mourn the deaths of four or five Israeli soldiers and two Israeli children, and accept the death of more than 60 Palestinian civilians as some kind of justice? To those of us trapped in Jabalya, it seems like Days of Revenge. It is unquestionably collective punishment, and illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps we should not be surprised. Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has announced this attack will last "as long as necessary," that is, until there is "no further danger" from the Palestinian resistance's homemade rockets. Sharon, of course, engineered the massacres of Sabra and Shatila over 20 years ago. Now, he is doing much the same, but with vastly improved weaponry. Of course, the militant factions exist, and have been striking here and there during this last week, but they are vastly outnumbered, not to mention out-gunned, by the Israelis. Hamas, on its side, has distributed leaflets in Gaza City vowing to continue the rocket attacks on the illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza and any Israeli towns and cities their homemade ordnance can reach. International protests have been muted, and stymied by United States support for Israel. The lone, feeble voice from the U.S. State Department urged Israel to keep its "response" "proportional"--after, of course, the obligatory mantra, "Israel has a right to defend itself." A strongly worded resolution condemning the attack brought before the U.N. at the beginning of the week was defeated by the U.S. veto. There is no refuge anywhere in Jabalya. The hospitals are chaotic, supplies are short and all medical personnel have been working around the clock for days now. I saw Abu Nidal, the father of 14-year-old Nidal Al Madhuwn, struggle to maintain his composure as he asked the exhausted doctors and ambulance drivers, "Was my son killed? Has he been killed?" (In fact, the boy was dead on arrival.) The majority of the dead and injured have been teens and children, obvious non- combatants. I interviewed Dr. Mahmoud Al Asali, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who told me he was forced to assume the Israeli army has been deliberately targeting civilians. Most of those injured by gunfire, he said, were wounded in the upper parts of their bodies, indicating the Israeli sharpshooters must have orders to shoot to kill. Palestinian doctors have removed many flechettes from the dead and injured, indicating the IDF are using illegal fragmentation bombs. These release razor-sharp flechettes as they explode. Dr. Al Asali says these illegal fragmentation devices greatly increase the number of deaths and the number and severity of injuries. The IDF has refused to comment on this. The hospital staffs and ambulance crews are so overextended that they are using volunteers for the gruesome task of collecting, sorting and attempting to match scattered human remains to return as much as possible to bereaved families. One of these medical workers, Ahmed Abu Saal, 26, from Kamal Adwan Hospital, told me, "One enormous difficulty we face is that these powerful bombs can scatter the parts of a single victim over a wide area. It is quite possible parts of one person could end up in Al Awda hospital in the east of the camp, while other parts of the same victim end up with us here on the western side of the camp." Shreds of clothing sometimes can help with the matching. The Israeli army has frequently shot at the medical teams and at journalists. So far, two ambulance drivers have been injured, and a cameraman from Ramattan News Agency has been hurt. Of course, the ambulance crews and press all wear identifying gear. Israel has closed all borders into Gaza and has severely restricted all movement within the Gaza Strip. There are three major "zones" separated by sealed military checkpoints, but recent days have seen numerous new checkpoints, roads closed by cement block and sand obstructions. People cannot move between cities, not even ambulances bringing patients to hospitals. Moreover, the main Israel-Gaza crossing is closed, even to international NGOs, humanitarian relief groups, and foreign journalists. Intense as the military attack has been, it is certainly not the only danger to the people here. Many families now have been without food and water for days. In Tel Al Zatar, the eastern part of Jabalya, I interviewed Umm Ramzi, an elderly lady who spoke to me through the gaping hole a tank shell had left in her house. "We have been appealing to the Red Cross, to save our lives and the lives of our children," she said, "but nobody has responded." Although they are well aware that the civilians need help, most of the NGO workers and relief organizations have assumed-- logically enough--that they cannot get through the Israeli military lines that completely surround Jabalya. I managed to reach Simon Schorno, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), by phone. "I'm on my way to Gaza now," he told me. "We have been talking to the IDF to get permission to bring food and water, but we were not able to get an OK for complete food distribution." Concerning the absence of the Red Cross in the past few days, when many families were in urgent need, Mr. Schorno said, "I feel terrible. We are trying to do our best to get food and water inside, but the damaged streets also delay us from reaching the people." A number of eyewitnesses among the camp residents told me the Israeli army has commandeered several high buildings as sniper posts and basically shoots anything that moves. One of the most recent victims was Islam Dueidar, 14, who took a chance during an apparent lull in firing to buy bread for her mother. However, she was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. In the southern part of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has increased the number of tanks and bulldozers in all parts of Khan Younis and Rafah. There has been shelling every night, with many injured and killed. Looking back on it now, I can say without reservation that the attack on Jabalya was far worse than last May's so-called "Operation Rainbow," which killed 40 in my hometown of Rafah and prompted an international outcry. Now, the silence from America, in particular, seems to condone turning the Gaza Strip into a killing field. Sharon picked his moment well, when America was preoccupied with its presidential campaign and its invasion of Iraq, to decimate the civilian population of Gaza. I was in the middle of the worst of Operation Rainbow and called it hell, but I was wrong. In Gaza, hell has more depths than Dante ever dreamed of, and in Jabalya the people suffered a far worse hell. How many more hells must people here endure before the world speaks out? Mohammed Omer lives in Rafah, Gaza, where he maintains the Web site - Modern "war" is state terrorism directed against civilians. - The purpose of u.s. actions toward Iraq over the last 14 years (2 horrific illegal bombing invasions, and 12 years of illegal, immoral sanctions) is to destroy Iraq as a nation, the fulfillment of the neo-con dream of "ending nations" that defy usrael. Forget what bush, klinton and others say, forget stated intentions, just look at what they do, and what they have done. - If my men could think, they would not fight. - Napoleon - The most outlandish conspiracy theory of them all (and the most widely accepted): 19 hijackers from a third world terrorist group armed with boxcutters forced 3 planes into 3 of the nation's most important and symbolic structures with no assistance from US government / intelligence insiders. -http://www.oilempire.us/conspiracy.html - It's too late for religions to fight over market share. Adopting a particular religion is not the way. It's no good for us to "become" Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists. Rather, we must be like Jesus, without necessarily being a Christian, be like Buddha, without necessarily being a Buddhist. In order to do this, we need to study these religions a little, not use them for political ends.. - paraphrase of Robert Thurman (author of Anger) being interviewed by Chris Welch on Living Room, KPFA-FM Radio, 11-18-04 Daniel Stone justice_freedom@earthlink.net ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-THURSDAY, JAN. 6, 2005 - PART 1
1) NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM CENTRO DEL PUEBLO 474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO) www.bauaw.org 2) STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F. 3) Let's Hit the Streets To Defend Abortion Rights! Saturday, January 22 4) PICTURES OF WAR 5) ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca directed by Francesca Prada, Jan. 14-19, 8:00pm, JON SIMS CENTER 1519 Mission, Between Van Ness and 11th Sts., SF 6) Military's Test at High Schools Brings a Salvo of Concerns By Liz F. Kay Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm 7) Honoring 32nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (A resolution put before the S.F. Board of Supervisors 8) WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION, the movie will be at the Red Vic Theatre in S.F. for two days: Jan.4th and 5th. Check newspapers for details. For more information contact: Richard Castro Outreach & Special Distribution Cinema Libre Studio 818.349.8822 Ph. 818.349.9922 Fax www.cinemalibrestudio.com 9) The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losing. By Amer Jubran January 2, 2005 10) Update on National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice 11) Zarqawi Qaeda-Linked Group Kills Iraq Governor-Web DUBAI (Reuters) Tue Jan 4, 2005 08:21 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7231891&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news 12) Iraq Battling More Than 200,000 Insurgents: Intelligence Chief Agence France-Presse Baghdad - Iraq Monday 03 January 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405W.shtml 13) U.S. May Add Advisers to Aid Iraq's Military By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04military.html?o ref=login&hp&ex=1104814800&en=1d44abe6f1fb9a3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage 14) 5 U.S. Troops Are Killed, and Baghdad Governor Is Slain By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER. BAGHDAD, Iraq January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04cnd-iraq.html?h p&ex=1104901200&en=774671f9e3bc3432&ei=5094&partner=homepage 15) Supreme Court to Rule on Executing Young Killers By ADAM LIPTAK January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04juvenile.html?hp&ex=1104901200& en=ceb849ee6735d090&ei=5094&partner=homepage 16) Prosecution Concludes Case in Terror Trial (Lynne Stewart) By JULIA PRESTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/nyregion/04stewart.html 17) Limits Eased on Killing of Wolves By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04wolf.html 18) UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WINTER/SPRING ORGANIZING DRIVE TO END THE U.S. WAR ON IRAQ From: "Carwil James" < carwil@falseignorance.info > To: "Direct Action to Stop the War" < directaction@lists.riseup.net > Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 11:51 AM Subject: [DASW] UFPJ Presents [ending the] Iraq [War] Strategy ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING: www.bauaw.org SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM CENTRO DEL PUEBLO 474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO) A message from Carole Seligman, BAUAW: "We should be in the streets demanding billions for relief, not a penny for war! ESPECIALLY as all predictions are that the death toll could double without adequate relief. Tens of thousands of lives could be saved. We could call on the international antiwar groups who linked up twice around international antiwar days to call coordinated pickets at every US embassy demanding transfer of funds from bombing Fallujah [and the war on Iraq as a whole] to tsunami relief, and on the same day(s) picket Federal buildings around the U.S." [Note: the above is a section of an email sent to me with exactly what I think we should do. The national antiwar organizations could set it in motion on an emergency basis and I'll just bet that antiwar people all over the U.S. and the world will adopt it as their own and build it actively. Carole Seligman] ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 2) STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get a permit. (With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War) The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th. We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush and to the War. We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to protest our government or any of its official representatives. Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and peaceful protest. If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who oppose this war. We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold banners at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20. Students should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center. Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table for Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 3) Let's Hit the Streets To Defend Abortion Rights! Saturday, January 22 Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to attend a counter demonstration! What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco! Make your opinion heard! Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 4) PICTURES OF WAR PLEASE ACCESS: ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were taken from inside Fallujah. These are of much higher quality. Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional pictures added which I did not have before. http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page= 1 More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list. (c)2004 Dahr Jamail. All images and text are protected by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email. Iraq_Dispatches mailing list http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/ view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138 Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 5) ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca directed by Francesca Prada, Jan. 14-19, 8:00pm, JON SIMS CENTER 1519 Mission, Between Van Ness and 11th Sts., SF (The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP. Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you plan to come to the show.) JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29) JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th 8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away) seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402 to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031 Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19, fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 6) Military's Test at High Schools Brings a Salvo of Concerns By Liz F. Kay Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm A few days before her holiday break, South River High School junior Emily Hawse took a three-hour standardized test offered by military officials that suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits. Hawse, 16, of Davidsonville said she did not realize until the day of the exam that it had a military link. She said students were told not to go to the Edgewater school that morning if they didn't want to take the test, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. "We couldn't go to class if we wanted to," said Hawse, who is undecided about her future but said it doesn't include the military. Emily Hawse, a junior at South River High School, said she didn't know until the day she took the aptitude test that it was part of a Defense Department program. (Sun photo by Elizabeth Malby) At a time of heightened awareness of military recruitment, the aptitude test offered free by the Defense Department is drawing criticism. Although Baltimore area school districts have made the test available for years, some Anne Arundel County students and their parents complained recently when the test was scheduled during class time at some schools, and it was unclear to some students that they could opt out. The tests have also raised concerns in other places. In a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb, a high school junior refused to take the exam. And critics of the program say they field inquiries from all over the country. They say military recruiters use the test to identify students with skills that would be useful in the armed forces. "You're getting hot leads as opposed to cold leads," said Oskar Castro, an associate with the Youth and Militarism Program of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. Area school and military officials defend the test as a valuable career-planning tool. "This is actually a community service that the Department of Defense provides to help every generation of youth find where they fit in the world about them," said Chris Arendt, deputy director of accession policy at the Pentagon. In the Baltimore area, nearly 1,400 Anne Arundel students took the test last school year, along with about 1,000 from Baltimore County, nearly 500 from Baltimore, 181 from Carroll County and 573 from Howard County. In Howard, three schools with ROTC programs offer the test, school district officials said. Baltimore administers the test to seniors on a voluntary basis, generally at career and technology schools, and at schools with ROTC programs. Baltimore County makes it available to students who request it. Anne Arundel County school officials say the test is not mandatory but acknowledge that the message might not have been clear to all students, given the many standardized tests they must take. "This is one of the first times where kids get to choose whether they take a test," said Jonathan Brice, spokesman for the Anne Arundel schools. Next year, officials said, they will emphasize that the test is voluntary. The test, which has been given to recruits since 1968, measures verbal and math skills, and knowledge in areas such as automotive maintenance and repair, electronics and mechanics. It was expanded to schools at the urging of the federal Labor and Education departments, Defense Department officials say. Military recruitment of high school students has come under scrutiny recently with the war in Iraq continuing. Such efforts were criticized in the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11. In addition, the federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools that receive federal funding to provide military recruiters with students' names, addresses and phone numbers unless parents have opted out. Schools also must allow recruiters to have the same access to campuses that colleges have. The military's vocational aptitude test is not part of the No Child Left Behind requirement, and the test's "career explorations" Web site says students who agree to take the test aren't making any obligations. Nationwide, 722,450 students took the test during the past school year, according to the Defense Department. That includes more than 8,700 Maryland students from 175 schools. The assessment has evolved several times since it was developed from tests used by branches of the military, said Arendt, a Navy captain. He said he remembers taking an early version of the test while he was in high school in the 1970s. "It gave me, as a student, a good idea about what I could and could not look forward to in careers," he said. Students or parents who are concerned about how information about them is used have options, he said. One is to indicate on the test that they do not want their results released to military recruiters. "They get the results, and it's transparent to us," Arendt said. Some students and their families aren't aware of that option, Castro said. For more than 18 years, the committee has answered questions about the test from families who encounter it in their schools. As for casting the test as a career-planning tool, he said, "We think it's a disingenuous use of the test." Area school officials say the tests can suggest opportunities in military and civilian jobs. "It's a career-interest inventory," said Rhonda C. Gill, Anne Arundel's director of pupil services. "It's not done in any way, shape or form to focus kids on going into the military." In Carroll County, all seven high schools have made the test available to students since the late 1970s, said Barbara Guthrie, the school system's guidance supervisor. Typically, a handful of students sign up for it at each school, she said, but at Winters Mill High School, 70 students took the test this year. "It's helpful to students and parents as well, but you use it in combination with lots of other assessments in schools to help students figure out future plans and what their abilities are," Guthrie said. Although some Anne Arundel schools administer the test more formally than schools in other counties, officials noted that students aren't required to take it. Of 250 South River juniors, 70 chose not to take the test on one of the two days it was offered last month. While ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders were taking the PSAT countywide in October, a little more than half of the seniors at Broadneck High School took the military test, said guidance counselor Joe Kozik, as did seniors at North County and other high schools. At Broadneck, several parents called to get more information about the test. "I think the Iraq war has certainly raised concerns on multiple levels," said Broadneck Principal Cindy Hudson. The test serves a purpose for military recruiters. Kozik noted that recruiters are especially interested in the test results of five Broadneck students this year. Because of the reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind, Kozik said, "whether you take this test or not ... we by law have to provide your name to the federal government." At South River High School, some juniors left their classes to take the test two weeks ago. Others remained in class or went to school later rather than take it. Emily Hawse said knowing the test's military connection earlier would not have kept her from taking it. "I was thinking that this might help me for college," she said. Her mother, Monica M. Hawse, agreed that the test would be useful but added, "I think everybody - kids, parents, teachers - should know it's affiliated with the military." Megan Lloyd, 16, a junior from Edgewater, said she learned about the test when a military recruiter spoke to her class. She was interested in anything that could help her decide what path to pursue and was not concerned about the military connection. "The man who came into our social studies class made me feel comfortable about it," she said after classes one day. "It's not like they're going to hound you about it," said fellow Edgewater resident Charlie Fischer, 16, who is considering the armed forces and college. "Or at least, we hope not," Lloyd said. Sun staff writers Athima Chansanchai and Laura Loh contributed to this article. (c) Copyright 2004 Baltimore Sun ### Common Dreams NewsCenter (c) Copyrighted 1997-2004 www.commondreams.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 7) Honoring 32nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (A resolution put before the S.F. Board of Supervisors Resolution recognizing January 22, 2005 as "Stand Up For Choice Day" in honor of the 32nd anniversary of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade establishing a woman's constitutional right to decide when and if to have a child; and further supporting the local Pro-Choice community demonstrating in San Francisco to defend a woman's right to choose safe and legal abortion and birth control and further urging all legal authorities to fully facilitate the protection of the right of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures in an ever-increasingly hostile anti-choice climate on the federal level and in state legislatures and courts throughout the country. WHEREAS, The 1973 landmark United States Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade (the "Roe decision") recognized the right of women to control their reproductive lives is central to their ability to participate fully and equally in the economic and social spheres of society; and WHEREAS, The Roe decision states that (1) the decision to have an abortion is accorded the highest level of constitutional protection, like any other fundamental constitutional right, (2) state laws regarding abortion must be neutral with respect to influencing a woman's decision whether or not to have an abortion, (3) in the period before a fetus is viable, the government may restrict abortion only to protect a woman's health, and (4) after a fetus becomes viable, a state government may prohibit abortion, provided that such state's laws must permit abortion where necessary to protect a women's health or life; and WHEREAS, The protected right to make childbearing decisions, including abortion, has enabled women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were often unattainable prior to the Roe decision; and WHEREAS, The Center for Reproductive Rights reports that prior to the Roe decision, between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred in the United States each year; and WHEREAS, In 1992, the United States Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (the "Casey decision"), where, although it upheld a woman's right to choose, it also allowed federal, state and local laws that favor fetal rights and burden a woman's choice to have abortion, as long as the burden is not "undue;" and WHEREAS, The Casey decision has unlocked the door to hundreds of state and federal criminal restrictions designed to discourage women from accessing abortion and to promote the rights of the fetus throughout pregnancy; and WHEREAS, According to the Allen Gutmacher Institute (AGI), since 1996, more than 300 criminal abortion restrictions have been enacted by state and federal legislatures, none of which would have been constitutional under the original Roe decision; and WHEREAS. According to Planned Parenthood, only eight states, including California, do not mandate parental involvement before a minor can obtain an abortion; and WHEREAS, According to AGI, as of January 1, 2004, twenty-one (21) states will have laws in effect that require a woman to wait for a period of time, usually twenty four (24) hours, but up to as many as seventy-two (72) hours, after receiving state-directed counseling before she can receive an abortion; and WHEREAS, These restrictions on access to abortion particularly discriminate against young women, poor women and women of color; and WHEREAS, AGI indicates that 87 percent of all counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider; and WHEREAS, For the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, anti-choice officials are firmly in control of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government; and WHEREAS, The United States Supreme Court is only one vacancy away from eliminating the Constitutional right to abortion; and WHEREAS, Anti-choice leaders in the Bush Administration and the federal government are imposing their anti-choice ideology on the world's most vulnerable women worldwide by blocking international family planning funding and promoting ineffective and harmful abstinence-only programs abroad; and WHEREAS, On January 22nd, people from all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond will gather to defend one of our most prized rights and liberties, the freedom of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures; now, therefore, be RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors recognizes January 22nd, 2005 as "Stand Up for Choice Day" in honor of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision of Roe. v. Wade, which established a woman's constitutional right to decide when and if to have a child; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors support the local Pro-Choice community demonstrating in San Francisco to defend a woman's right to choose safe and legal abortion and birth control; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors urge all legal authorities to fully facilitate the protection of the right of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures in an ever- increasingly hostile anti-choice climate on the federal level and in state legislatures and courts throughout the country. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 8) WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION, the movie will be at the Red Vic Theatre in S.F. for two days: Jan.4th and 5th. Check newspapers for details. For more information contact: Richard Castro Outreach & Special Distribution Cinema Libre Studio 818.349.8822 Ph. 818.349.9922 Fax www.cinemalibrestudio.com ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 9) The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losing. By Amer Jubran January 2, 2005 "I am surprised that the forces are not using air-lifting C-130 airplanes to avoid ground transportation, which is costing us about a hundred soldiers every month," said commanding Colonel John Jumpier of the US Air Force during a press conference in December. About 2,000 military convoys must use the Iraqi highways to supply the spread-out US forces with water, food, fuel and other essential supplies. Jumpier said, "It will not be efficient to serve our troops, but it's a chance to save some lives." He added, "I know that there will be an increase in the chances of getting these slow and low altitude flying C-130's shot down, but it's a risk that we should take." A first look at this statement and one would conclude, correctly, that it is a very dangerous situation on the ground for US occupying forces. Their lack of control inside the cities of Iraq is now matched by their lack of control over the highways between them. When US military leaders have to decide which deadly option to choose from, it reflects a tone of despair where the safety of the troops is no longer an important issue. No one is able to define the mission of the troops in Iraq, or for how long this mission will last. No one at all, including George W. Bush, can explain the US strategy in Iraq. This is because there is no strategy. With the Iraqi resistance raging, it is not clear why the US is occupying this country and why the US is so willing to sacrifice its soldiers there. While news sources are divided between either concealing or exaggerating the number of those killed in Iraq, other important statistics about US soldiers are forgotten. These statistics give a shocking picture about the truth of what is happening in Iraq. For example, CBS's 60 Minutes reported last fall that 300 soldiers migrated to Canada when they received orders to join their units heading to Iraq. 60 Minutes went on to say that 5,500 US soldiers had deserted for fear of being killed in Iraq. Some refused to join units leaving for Iraq, but most of them escaped after arriving in Iraq by fleeing to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan. As one soldier stated: "They deceived us when they described our mission to Iraq as a walk in the park." He added: "I took off so that they won't write on my grave, Deceived Dead GI in Iraq." Smuggling American GI's is a booming business in Iraq these days. For $1,000 and his/her weapon and uniform, any US soldier can get him or herself out of Iraq through Kurdistan. Last April, a female US soldier was captured by the Kurds, allies of the US, dressed like a Kurdish woman with a face veil, attempting to cross into Turkey. According to the New York Times, a Pentagon study revealed that one in every six soldiers who served in Iraq requires immediate psychological treatment. Over a million soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last two years. Steven Robinson, a NY Times military expert, believes that the number needing treatment could jump from one to three soldiers in every six. "There is a train loaded with people who need help that will be coming to town for the next thirty five years," said Robinson. These figures are the worst for the US since the Vietnam War. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was supposed to be short and swift. Soldiers were promised that it would be an easy victory and that they would be home in time for the summer of 2003. Instead, urban fighting like that in the city of Fallujah last November, which provided unlimited possibilities for resistance hideouts, booby-trapped houses, and roads full of roadside bombs, put US soldiers in the position of having to live every single minute of the day in fear of an attack. In addition, seeing Iraqis and not being able to distinguish who is a friend and who is an enemy causes severe anxiety to soldiers. Paul Raykhouve, commander of a Florida National Guard platoon who served in Iraq for ten months, was quoted during CBS Sixty Minutes saying: "The enemy is everywhere, in every street, looking at you from every window, in every alley. One cannot think straight because of nerve-wracking fear." Frightened troops lacking both certainty about their mission and a strong conviction about what they are doing often end up committing war crimes, such as killing prisoners or injured people. They see in these crimes an opportunity to get even with their enemy. Racism combines with fear to make this killing possible. It then becomes important to win acceptance among other soldiers to justify the crimes. The poor training and poor education of these soldiers also stands in the way of reason and critical thinking. They learn to copy existing models of behavior, without a code of ethics or outside authority to prevent violations of rules of warfare. Even those soldiers who are not convinced that it is okay to commit war crimes find it hard to resist. Both the political and military leadership of the US forces are directly responsible for providing a large -scale coverup of these crimes. Soldiers are subjected to an emotional extortion known as "Uniform Code of Loyalty and Secrecy." Furthermore, the political strength of the US is used to provide immunity for these soldiers from an international war crimes tribunal. This leads to normalizing the criminal behavior of servicemen, who know they can act with impunity. Caught in frenzy of mass killing, most soldiers develop psychological stress and mental trauma as a result of serving in Iraq. This stress, predictably, has been taken out on defenseless Iraqi civilians. Many Iraqis are killed everyday simply because US soldiers suspected that they were resistance members. The horrific stories about US soldiers executing wounded Iraqis or sexually assaulting Iraqi prisoners reveal the severe psychological conditions that US troops are living under. Upon finishing service in Iraq, these soldiers will no longer have Iraqis to murder at will. The weapons they were trained to use will be left behind. These two things -- without their knowing it -- had become important in their lives. Without them their return to US society, where there is little social support, will often mean poverty, alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, divorce, and suicide. In order not to face themselves, the lies they were told, and the crimes they committed, these soldiers will return to what they learned in Iraq - crime, drug trafficking, prostitution, rape, armed robbery, child abuse, racism, and rallying around the flag. The government of the US will then have to engage in another massive coverup. This time it will be to avoid admitting any responsibility for the psychological illnesses of its servicemen, and for providing no resources to treat them. Damaged soldiers will become a supply of felons to the US justice system, which long ago stopped caring about any kind of social justice. The justice system will in turn deliver the veterans to the prison system, the US's largest growth industry. Information about the number of US causalities in Iraq is available on a web site of the Pentagon or known as the "War Hub" at www.pentagon.gov. This information covers only those who are officially US citizens enlisted with different military services. Hired security contractors, or mercenaries, and recruits who are not citizens who enlisted to obtain a "green card," are not counted or mentioned. A large number of the green card recruits are from Mexico and Central America. There are no organizations to look after their rights or help them once they're in Iraq. Most of them are buried in Iraq when killed. A videotape produced and distributed by the "Majles Shora Al-Mojahideen in Fallujah," one of the most important military wings of the Iraqi resistance, showed a burial site discovered outside the Iraqi city of Samara with tens of bodies in US military body bags. The dead where dressed in US uniforms. It is estimated that as many as 40% of the US troops serving in Iraq are green card recruits. The website of the Pentagon divides the causalities in Iraq into three categories: 1)"Combat Causalities" -- 1,300 dead, and 9,000 injured since March, 2003. Both figures are false. 2) "Non-Combat Causalities." The site does not report how many of these were injured or killed. Last fall, 60 Minutes concluded that the figure could be around 3,000 killed and over 25,000 injured. 3) "Coalition Causalities." Information under this category was posted briefly, then deleted. The figures showed 750 killed and 1,034 injured. It is not clear who these people were. If they were "coalition forces," then why are their countries not claiming them? The US government has gained a reputation of systematically lying to its population and the rest of the world, but a few facts about Iraq are emerging despite efforts to conceal them: * Political stability and security in Iraq is non-existent. This goes to the heart of the claimed US goal in Iraq. The US justified its removal by military means of Saddam as a way to create a better and more stable country. Instead, Iraqis are caught in poverty, hunger, and terrible violence every day as a direct result of US forces. Iraq is not a better place today, as Tony Blair and George Bush have claimed. And after Fallujah no one any longer believes the US is trying to bring freedom to the Iraqis. * That great lie, the "war on terrorism," has failed to crush what the US calls international terrorism. US citizens are not safer today than they were on September 11, 2001. In fact, the most powerful force in the US -- its military machine - is now completely vulnerable to lethal attacks by the ever-growing Iraqi resistance. Normally, the military is established to defend or attack those labeled enemies of the state. In the case of the US, its military is designed to twist the arms of those who do not agree with its imperial agenda. The US is clearly involved in practicing terrorism by military means to achieve its strategic interests everywhere around the globe. But in Iraq, the mighty US military, with over 150,000 well-armed troops, is very nervous and suffers from low morale, and in the eyes of the world has lost the moral edge. Furthermore, the war is not a well supported cause in the US. This time the risk of getting killed in Iraq is real. This time the enemy is real. The US public must decide on supporting a policy of war that is killing their own children and the Iraqi people, or fighting against the war by taking drastic measures --measures that go beyond vigils and feel-good political demonstrations. We may be sure that if what we are told about Iraq by the US government does not look good, the actual truth must be a great deal worse. Knowing the truth is a big burden. The truth about Iraq is that the US ÂMighty GIÂs are not so mighty! Announce mailing list Announce@onepalestine.org http://mail.onepalestine.org/mailman/listinfo/announce_onepalestine.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 10) Update on National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice We are happy to let you know that after a great deal of work we have secured a great site for the National Assembly on the weekend of Feb. 19-21...the Millennium Hotel in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The hotel is easy to get to from the airport, and St. Louis is in driving distance from many cities. The hotel is across the street from the famous Arch on the Mississippi River. I visited the hotel last week and so we know it has all of the facilities we will need to help ensure a successful assembly, and we have been able to negotiate an excellent price. As Feb. 19 is about seven weeks away we encourage your group or organization to start the process of selecting delegates to represent you at the National Assembly. We are still working out financial details but have decided that the minimal registration fee for the assembly will include accommodations and food for up to two delegates from each UFPJ member group (local affiliates or chapters of national organizations that are members of UFPJ will only have one delegate). All the details will be worked out and emailed to you by the end of this week. Registration for the assembly will be available on the United for Peace and Justice web site next week. Travel is the responsibility of the member groups. During the National Assembly United for Peace and Justice will decide on a strategic framework, as well as specific strategy, program and organizing proposals. There will be speakers and small group discussions on the war in Iraq, and the State of the U.S. and the Anti-War Movement and much more. The coalition will elect a new national Steering Committee. Cultural and analytical presenters and some special guests as well as a dance party will round out the weekend. I also want to introduce the coordinator of the National Assembly, Diane Lent. Diane has been a volunteer with UFPJ and has worked on many of the mobilizations in New York. She has a long history in the peace and justice movement and has coordinated similar gatherings for progressive organizations. We'll let you know as soon as the assembly registration is set up on the web site and in the coming weeks you will be getting a lot more information about the assembly. In the meantime, if you have any questions please feel free to contact Diane either by phone at the national office (212-868-5545) or by email (greenelent@earthlink.net). peace, Leslie Cagan National Coordinator UFPJ@mediajumpstart.net https://secure.mediajumpstart.net/mailman/listinfo/ufpj ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 11) Zarqawi Qaeda-Linked Group Kills Iraq Governor-Web DUBAI (Reuters) Tue Jan 4, 2005 08:21 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7231891&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news DUBAI (Reuters) - A group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said it had assassinated Baghdad governor Ali al-Haidri Tuesday, according to an Internet statement. "A group of mujahideen of the Qaeda Organization for Holy War in Iraq assassinated a tyrant and American agent, the governor of Baghdad Ali Haidri," said the statement, which was posted on an Islamist site. "We warn every traitor and ally of the Jews and the Christians that this will be your fate," it added. Gunmen killed Haidri in Iraq's highest-profile assassination in eight months and a suicide bomber killed 11 people at a police checkpoint Tuesday in an escalating campaign to wreck an election due on Jan. 30. Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest suicide bombings and attacks in Iraq. Haidri had survived a previous assassination attempt in September. (c) Reuters 2005 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 12) Iraq Battling More Than 200,000 Insurgents: Intelligence Chief Agence France-Presse Baghdad - Iraq Monday 03 January 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405W.shtml Baghdad - Iraq's insurgency counts more than 200,000 active fighters and sympathisers, the country's national intelligence chief told AFP, in the bleakest assessment to date of the armed revolt waged by Sunni Muslims. "I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people," Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani said in an interview ahead of the January 30 elections. Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter. The numbers far exceed any figure presented by the US military in Iraq, which has struggled to get a handle on the size of the resistance since toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. A senior US military officer declined to endorse or dismiss the spy chief's numbers. "As for the size of the insurgency, we don't have good resolution on the size," the officer said on condition of anonymity. Past US military assessments on the insurgency's size have been revised upwards from 5,000 to 20,000 full and part-time members, in the last half year, most recently in October. Defense experts said it was impossible to divine the insurgency's total number, but called Shahwani's estimate a valid guess, with as much credence, if not more, than any US numbers. "I believe General Shahwani's estimation, given that he is referring predominantly to active sympathizers and supporters and to part-time as well as full-time active insurgents, may not be completely out of the ballpark," said defense analyst Bruce Hoffman who served as an advisor to the US occupation in Iraq and now works for US-based think-tank RAND Corporation. Compared to the coalition's figure, he said: "General Shahwani's - however possibly high it may be, might well give a more accurate picture of the situation." Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, put Shahwani's estimates on an equal footing with the American's. "The Iraqi figures do... recognize the reality that the insurgency in Iraq has broad support in Sunni areas while the US figures down play this to the point of denial." Shahwani said the resistance enjoys wide backing in the provinces of Baghdad, Babel, Salahuddin, Diyala, Nineveh and Tamim, homes to Sunni Arabs who fear they will lose influence after the elections. Insurgents have gained strength through Iraq's tight-knit tribal bonds and links to the old 400,000-strong Iraqi army, dissolved by the US occupation in May 2003 two months after the US-led invasion, he said. "People are fed up after two years, without improvement. People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army was hundreds of thousands. You'd expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers." The rebels have turned city neighborhoods and small towns around central Iraq into virtual no-go zones despite successful US military efforts to reclaim former enclaves like Samarra and Fallujah, he said. "What are you going to call the situation here (in Baghdad) when 20 to 30 men can move around with weapons and no one can get them in Adhamiyah, Dura and Ghazaliya," he said, naming neighborhoods in the capital. The spy chief also questioned the success of the November campaign to retake Fallujah, which US forces have hailed as a major victory against the resistance. "What we have now is an empty city almost destroyed... and most of the insurgents are free. They have gone either to Mosul or to Baghdad or other areas." Shahwani pointed to a resurgent Baath party as the key to the insurgency's might. The Baath has split into three factions, with the deadliest being the branch still paying allegiance to jailed dictator Saddam Hussein, he said. Shahwani said the core Baath fighting strength was more than 20,000. Operating out of Syria, Saddam's half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan and former aide Mohamed Yunis al-Ahmed are providing funding and tapping their connections to old army divisions, particularily in Mosul, Samarra, Baquba, Kirkuk and Tikrit. Saddam's henchman, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, still on the lam in Iraq, is also involved, he said. Another two factions, which have broken from Saddam, are also around, but have yet to mount any attacks. The Baath are complemented by Islamist factions ranging from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda affiliate to Ansar al-Sunna and Ansar al-Islam. Asked if the insurgents were winning, Shahwani answered: "I would say they aren't losing." (c) Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 13) U.S. May Add Advisers to Aid Iraq's Military By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04military.html?o ref=login&hp&ex=1104814800&en=1d44abe6f1fb9a3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 - Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, is reviewing a proposal to add hundreds of American military advisers to work directly with Iraqi units, whose disappointing performance could jeopardize the long-term American exit strategy from Iraq, senior military officials said Monday. Americans are training Iraqi police officers and national guard troops to replace them in securing the country, but the results over all have been troubling, with growing desertion rates in the most violent provinces, gaps in leadership, and poor battlefield performance, American military officers and troops say. The advisers would bolster the Iraqi will to fight, help train officers who would lead the troops, curb desertion and provide Iraqi forces with the confidence that American units would back them up - in some cases fighting alongside them if needed, military and Pentagon officials said. Several hundred American troops are already embedded with Iraqi units, following a long tradition in American military actions. But the proposal would greatly expand this presence. The details of the proposal are still being discussed among American and Iraqi officials, and more troops would probably not be embedded until after the Jan. 30 elections, in which Iraqi forces will play a crucial part. Embedding more Americans with Iraqis would mean diverting perhaps several hundred additional American troops away from combat operations, military officials said. There are 150,000 American forces in Iraq. Although diverting soldiers might be risky at a time when commanders say they need troops to press offensives against insurgents, the plan addresses a widely acknowledged need. American commanders have praised the skills of some Iraqi forces, particularly new commando units that have seen combat throughout the country. But the Americans have criticized other Iraqi forces for their slovenly appearance and lack of commitment, raising questions about how soldiers and marines will respond tojoining such units. There has been widespread concern in the Bush administration about the poor performance of Iraqi troops. President Bush himself discussed the issue in a news conference on Dec. 20. "They've got some generals in place and they've got foot soldiers in place, but the whole command structure necessary to have a viable military is not in place," he said. "And so they're going to spend a lot of time and effort on achieving that objective." If approved, the plan would expand and standardize steps already taken by some American units, including the Army's First Cavalry Division and some Marine Corps units, to enhance the training that the Iraqi Army, National Guard and police forces receive after boot camp. "The development of Iraqi security forces is, in my view, necessarily the main effort," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of American forces in northern Iraq, said in an e-mail message from his headquarters in Mosul on Monday. "Building capable and loyal Iraqi forces is what will eventually lead to the defeat of the insurgency and to a sufficiently stable environment so that U.S. and other forces can begin to reduce our presence." General Ham, noting the earlier efforts by some units, said, "It's time to apply it on a larger scale." "It seems to me that this is something we want to start doing in the immediate post-election period," he said. The proposal that General Casey and his top aides are weighing has received support in principle from Pentagon officials at a time when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been urging commanders in Iraq to accelerate the creation of Iraqi security forces and to improve their quality, a senior Pentagon official said Monday. General Casey, at a Pentagon news conference on Dec. 16, said an exhaustive internal review of the military's campaign plan for Iraq concluded that training the local police and building a better border patrol were two of three essential areas that were well behind schedule. The other area was establishing effective Iraqi intelligence services. Proponents of embedding programs readily acknowledge that they will lose the American troops for active combat operations, but they insist that the Iraqis' training and confidence has improved. "It's cost us," Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, an assistant commander of the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad, told reporters last week of the division's 540 soldiers who are now assigned to Iraqi National Guard units in the city. But, he added, "It pays dividends." Some influential lawmakers, however, including Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee and who recently visited troops in Iraq, have expressed pessimism that Iraqis will be able to develop independent security forces potent enough to thwart the insurgency. "The raw material is lacking in the willpower and commitment after they receive this training to really shoulder the heavy responsibilities," he said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on Dec. 19. On paper, there are reasons for worry and for hope, military officials say. There are plans to produce a total of 179,600 police and border patrol officers. Of about 116,000 officers on duty now, only 73,000 are fully trained and equipped, according to Pentagon statistics on Dec. 27. About half of a projected 100,000 Iraqi Army, National Guard and commando troops are now operating. There are now 10-man adviser and support teams with each of 27 regular Iraqi Army and intervention force battalions (nine of which are still in training), their nine brigade headquarters (three still in training) and their three division headquarters, senior military officials in Iraq said. In addition, adviser teams from Army Special Forces and other American units are with most of the Iraqi National Guard forces. Expanding on those adviser teams, the proposal before General Casey would probably provide 10-man teams with 45 existing and 20 emerging national guard battalions. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is providing small teams to help train new Iraqi border police officers, a military official in Iraq said. Some details of the new plan were first reported by CNN on Dec. 26. Some of the most ambitious plans are to bolster the abilities of the Iraqi police. The new Iraqi government has fielded about a dozen police commando units or other specialized units, whose performance American officers have largely praised. The commandos include former Iraqi special forces troops and have performed well, combining commando skills and weaponry with police powers to make arrests, a senior allied official in Baghdad said Monday. The approach would also provide assistance and mentoring to the 3,500 basic police graduates that academies in Iraq and Jordan are churning out every month. After the insurgent attacks on police stations in Mosul in November, in which most of the city's police officers abandoned their posts, American officials, working closely with the Iraqi government, have toughened the training to resemble more paramilitary operations and have enforced policies to cut down on Iraqis' skipping out on leave. In Mosul, American forces have been assigned to all police stations. On Saturday, Iraqi security forces and their American advisers fought off a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a police station in the southeast part of the city. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said it was the 12th time since Nov. 10 that insurgents had tried to take over a police station, none of which have fallen to rebels in that period. Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Erik Eckholm from Baghdad. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 14) 5 U.S. Troops Are Killed, and Baghdad Governor Is Slain By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER. BAGHDAD, Iraq January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04cnd-iraq.html?h p&ex=1104901200&en=774671f9e3bc3432&ei=5094&partner=homepage BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 4 - Four American soldiers and a marine were killed today and three other soldiers were wounded on a day that also saw the assassination of the governor of Baghdad, one of the highest-profile killings of an Iraqi official in months. In other violence, a bomb-laden fuel truck killed eight Iraqi commandos and two other people when it crashed into a checkpoint in western Baghdad about 9 a.m. today, according to an Interior Ministry official. Sixty others were wounded in the attack, which happened near the scene of two deadly car bombings on Monday. Three soldiers with the First Cavalry Division died and two were wounded when an improvised bomb went off at about 11 a.m. in north Baghdad. About 30 minutes later a soldier with the First Infantry Division was killed and another was wounded, the military said, when a bomb exploded near Balad, site of an American air base about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The marine with the First Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action while carrying out security operations in Al Anbar Province, a restive Sunni region west of the capital, the military said. The Baghdad governor, Ali al-Haidari, was attacked and killed in a roadside ambush after he left his home, the Interior Ministry said. The Associated Press reported that six of the governor's bodyguards were also killed. He was the most senior official assassinated in the city since the head of the Governing Council was killed last May. Mr. Haidari survived a previous assassination attempt in September. Later, an insurgent group led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and linked to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the ambush, according to a message and video posted on an Islamist Internet site. The group has taken responsibility for many previous deadly attacks in Iraq. Insurgents have repeatedly attacked Iraqi officials as well as members of the country's security forces, accusing them of collaborating with foreign occupiers. The steady violence prompted Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, to urge the United Nations to to look into whether the country should go ahead with its scheduled Jan. 30 election. "Definitely the United Nations, as an independent umbrella of legitimacy, should really take the responsibility by seeing whether that is possible or not," Mr. al-Yawar, a Sunni Arab sheik, told Reuters in an interview. "On a logical basis, there are signs that it will be a tough call to hold the election," he said, in comments that pulled back from a statement he made on a visit to Washington in December. On that visit with President Bush, both men reinforced their message that elections must go ahead as scheduled, despite the violence. Mr. al-Yawar's comments today came after Prime Minister Ayad Allawi telephoned President Bush on Monday and discussed the many impediments still facing the country as it heads toward elections in 27 days, according to senior American officials familiar with the contents of the call. The officials insisted that Dr. Allawi, Iraq's interim leader, did not tell Mr. Bush that the elections should be delayed, though his defense minister said in Cairo on Monday that the voting could be postponed to ensure greater participation by Sunnis. "There was no substantive conversation about delay," a senior administration official said. Dr. Allawi, the official said, "wasn't even a bit wobbly" on that point. But some officials in Washington and in Iraq interpreted the telephone call as a sign that Dr. Allawi, who is clearly concerned his own party could be headed to defeat if the election is held on schedule, may be preparing the ground to make the case for delay to Mr. Bush. "Clearly the thinking on this is still in motion in Baghdad," a senior administration official said Monday evening. "And President Bush is holding firm," the official said, telling Dr. Allawi that the Iraqi government has met every deadline so far, including assuming power from the United States in June. Mr. Bush has publicly insisted that the elections must go forward on Jan. 30, as scheduled, and said any delay would mean giving in to the insurgents who have vowed to stop the elections from taking place. Dr. Allawi's call, on Mr. Bush's first day back in Washington after a weeklong break at his Texas ranch, came just hours after a wave of bombing attacks left at least 20 people dead, including one blast near the interim prime minister's Baghdad party headquarters. Another killed three British citizens and an American in a convoy of the American security firm Kroll Inc. In addition to the 20 or more deaths - a figure that included suicide bombers - dozens were injured. The attacks, which followed a car bombing north of Baghdad on Sunday that killed 18 Iraqi troops, were the latest attempt by insurgents to destabilize the country and intimidate Iraqis in the weeks before the parliamentary elections. The insurgents' targets are Iraqis who work with American forces, especially in Sunni areas, in hopes of frightening people from the polls. Some groups have already warned of major attacks on Election Day. While White House officials were hesitant to give many details of the discussion between Dr. Allawi and Mr. Bush, they said the Iraqi leader brought up questions of security and the ferocity of the insurgency. "It was a discussion about the impediments," said an official who reviewed a transcript of the call. "But no one suggested the impediments could not be overcome." Yet Dr. Allawi's cabinet is already showing signs of weakening on the question of holding the elections this month. The defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, suggested during his Cairo visit that a postponement would encourage Sunnis to participate; American and Iraqi officials have been concerned that if the Sunnis are blocked from voting or boycott the election, the outcome will not be considered legitimate. But an American Embassy official said the United States wanted the elections to proceed as scheduled, and an official with Iraq's independent election commission told The Associated Press that there were no plans for a delay. No one affiliated with Prime Minister Allawi's party, the Iraqi National Accord, was hurt in the suicide car bombing Monday morning near the party's headquarters in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. But the blast killed two Iraqi police officers and one other person in addition to the car's driver while injuring at least 25 others, according to Iraqi officials. The Iraqi police said the bomb detonated after the police rained gunfire on the vehicle to stop it from passing a checkpoint. The suicide bomber drove a Chevrolet Caprice with the markings of a Baghdad taxicab and rammed the checkpoint near the party headquarters just west of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified American compound in central Baghdad. The victims were taken to Yarmouk Hospital. Ahmed Thamir, a 21-year-old soldier slightly wounded in the attack, stood guard outside the hospital with a Kalashnikov rifle. "It's hard to trust anyone nowadays," he said. The group that calls itself the Army of Ansar al-Sunna took responsibility for the attack in an Internet posting. In the message, the group warned "apostates" that if they "do not repent from your infidelity," it had other bombers ready to "kill you one by one." The group has claimed a string of attacks, including the Dec. 21 bombing of a mess tent in Mosul that killed 14 American servicemen and 8 other people. Many recent attacks against Iraqi troops and officials have occurred in the heavily Sunni areas north of Baghdad, a region where the deadliest attacks took place on Monday. In the first attack, shortly before 8 a.m., a car bomb killed 4 Iraqi National Guard soldiers and wounded 14 more near a military base in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division. The attack was not far from where insurgents killed 18 Iraqi troops and a civilian the day before by detonating an explosives-laden vehicle next to a bus full of national guardsmen. Early Monday afternoon, six Iraqi National Guard troops were killed and four wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Tikrit, farther north of Baghdad, with a roadside bomb. The attackers used an artillery shell for ammunition in the attack, which happened at 2:40 p.m., Sergeant Cowens said. There were reports of other attacks across Iraq. In Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq, one Iraqi policeman was killed and two were wounded when a homemade bomb hidden in a decapitated body exploded as the policemen approached the body, the government said in a statement. The attack on a car carrying employees of Kroll Inc., the New York-based risk consulting and security firm, occurred at 3:45 p.m. at a checkpoint where people leave Baghdad's fortified Green Zone to get onto the road to the airport. A Kroll official said that four people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed into their car, including two British employees of Kroll. "It was a suicide attack on a convoy coming from the airport," said Pat Wood, Kroll's vice president for corporate communications. The other victims were an American woman, Tracy Hushin, of Islip, N.Y., with the consulting firm BearingPoint, and a British citizen working for a subcontractor of the company, an announcement by BearingPoint said. Despite the violence, American officials say the election must be held, as planned, on Jan. 30. For one thing, they say, the Iraqi interim constitution mandates the timing. There have already been extensive preparations by the American military for the elections, they say. Some Sunni leaders have called for a delay, worried that the intimidation tactics will keep many voters home and lead to severe Sunni under representation in the new government. Mr. Shaalan made his suggestion for a delay Monday as he sought help from other Arab nations to persuade Iraq's Sunnis to take part. Richar A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article and David E. Sanger from Washington. Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 15) Supreme Court to Rule on Executing Young Killers By ADAM LIPTAK January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04juvenile.html?hp&ex=1104901200& en=ceb849ee6735d090&ei=5094&partner=homepage In August, six months after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty, Robert Acuna, a high school student from Baytown, Tex., was put on trial for his life. The jury convicted Mr. Acuna of killing two elderly neighbors, James and Joyce Carroll, when he was 17, shooting them "execution style," as prosecutors described it, and stealing their car. At sentencing, when jurors weighed his crime against factors counseling leniency, Mr. Acuna's youth should have counted in his favor. Instead, his brooding and volatile adolescent demeanor may have hurt more than helped, and the Houston jury sentenced him to die. "They probably thought that he wasn't showing remorse," said Mr. Acuna's mother, Barbara. Renee Magee, who prosecuted Mr. Acuna, now 18, agreed that his behavior at the trial had alienated the jury. "He was very nonchalant," Ms. Magee said. "He laughed at inappropriate things. He still didn't quite get the magnitude of everything he did." Mr. Acuna is the latest person to enter death row for a crime committed before age 18. He may also be the last. If the Supreme Court prohibits the execution of 16- and 17-year-olds in a case it accepted a year ago, involving a Missouri man, the lives of Mr. Acuna and 71 other juvenile offenders on death row will be spared. A central issue before the court, which is expected to rule in the next few months, is whether the plummeting number of such death sentences - there were two last year - lends weight to the argument that putting youths on death row amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Supporters of the juvenile death penalty argue that the small number proves instead that the system works and that juries are making discerning choices on whom to sentence to death, taking due account of the defendants' youth and reserving the ultimate punishment for the worst of the worst. But a look at the cases of some of the juvenile offenders now on death row raises questions about how reliable and consistent juries have been in making those decisions. Age can shape every aspect of a capital case. Crimes committed by teenagers are often particularly brutal, attracting great publicity and fierce prosecutions. Adolescents are more likely to confess, and are not adept at navigating the justice system. Jurors' reactions to teenagers' demeanor and appearance can be quite varied. The defendants they see have aged an average of two years between the crime and the trial. And jurors may not necessarily accept expert testimony concerning recent research showing that the adolescent brain is not fully developed. The Supreme Court in 1988 banned the execution of those under 16 at the time of their crimes. During arguments in October on whether to move that categorical line to 18, Justice Antonin Scalia said the drop in juvenile death sentences was proof that juries could be trusted to sort through and weigh evidence about defendants' youth and culpability. "It doesn't surprise me that the death penalty for 16- to 18-year-olds is rarely imposed," Justice Scalia said. "I would expect it would be. But it's a question of whether you leave it to the jury to evaluate the person's youth and take that into account or whether you adopt a hard rule." Juries in capital cases involving juvenile offenders certainly place great weight on the defendants' youth. The defendants seldom testify, but jurors inspect them closely and draw conclusions from how they look and handle themselves. And the very same factors may cut both ways. Adolescent recklessness may suggest diminished responsibility to some and a terrible danger to others. The youth of Christopher Simmons, the defendant whose case is now before the Supreme Court, was such a double-edged sword. Mr. Simmons was 17 in 1993, when he and a friend robbed, bound and gagged Shirley Crook, 46, and pushed her into a river, where she drowned. During Mr. Simmons's sentencing hearing, a Missouri prosecutor s coffed at the notion that Mr. Simmons's age should count as a mitigating factor in his favor. "Seventeen years old," the prosecutor, George McElroy, said. "Isn't that scary? Doesn't that scare you? Mitigating? Quite the contrary, I submit. Quite the contrary." Mr. Acuna had a tough-looking buzz cut at the time of the killings, said Tim Carroll, the son of the couple Mr. Acuna killed. At the trial, he looked different. "He appeared as though someone had tried to make him look 8 years old all over again," Mr. Carroll said. "His hair was all combed down, almost in little bangs." That did not sway Mr. Acuna's jury. But the youthful appearance of Lee Malvo, the teenager who participated in the sniper shootings in the Washington area in 2002, may have saved his life. Mr. Malvo, who is short and slight, wore boyish, baggy sweaters most days. Although a Virginia jury convicted him of a killing he committed at 17, it voted against putting him to death. "He's very lucky that he looks a lot younger than he is," Robert F. Horan Jr., the lead prosecutor in the case, said at the time. But Mr. Malvo is growing older, and he still faces capital charges in other states. "They're talking about letting him grow a five o'clock shadow and then trying him in Alabama or Louisiana," said Victor L. Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and an expert on the juvenile death penalty, referring to prosecutors in those states. "Prosecutors don't mind delay in juvenile death penalty cases." Beyond wrestling with the appearance of youth, juries must also often balance the brutality and recklessness of much juvenile crime against young people's immaturity. Studies support the common view that adolescents tend to be reckless and do not calculate the risks and consequences of their actions as adults do. They are moodier, more susceptible to peer pressure and do not have an acute sense of mortality. The law seems to recognize this, with most states using 18 as the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in many areas, including the ability to vote and to serve on a jury. Mr. Carroll, the murdered couple's son, said a categorical rule made no sense in the context of the death penalty. "If you're going to make the argument that someone's cognitive reasoning is not developed at 17 years and 8 months but would be at 18," he said, "we should rethink whether they should be able to drive, and make split-second decisions in an 8,000- pound vehicle, or get married, or have children." When the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Simmons case, a brief supporting Missouri submitted by Alabama and five other states with the juvenile death penalty received particular attention. It set out, in plainspoken prose, the disturbing stories of 10 murders committed by seven young killers, all on death row in Alabama. The cases cited in the Alabama brief are in many ways typical, Professor Streib said. "The capital crimes committed by juveniles," he said, "are often classic adolescent male bizarreness, often sexual and all the more revolting for that reason." Mr. Carroll said Mr. Acuna's killings were sadistic. "The evidence given in the case very strongly indicates that he made my father kneel and shot him in the back of the head, e xecution-style," Mr. Carroll said. "My mother, who could not walk without the help of a walker - this fellow shot her in the side of her face and blew her teeth out all over the kitchen floor." Mr. Acuna then gave the woman time to wipe the blood from her mouth with a paper towel, Mr. Carroll said. "And then he moved in," Mr. Carroll said, "to shoot her through the brain when he thought it was time." If their youth can make teenage defendants wilder and their crimes more odious, it can also trip them up when they start navigating the legal system. According to a study of the juvenile offenders on death row by The New York Times, 56 percent confessed or gave incriminating statements to the authorities. Mr. Acuna was in the minority. "Juveniles are more likely to be more compliant, more naïve and less likely to believe that police do not have their best interests in mind," said Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern who has studied false confessions by juvenile defendants. "They are more likely to confess simply to bring an end to the interview process and take their chances in court." In the case of Mr. Acuna, the evidence in the case was largely circumstantial. He was found with James Carroll's wallet in a Dallas motel. The murdered couple's car was outside, and it contained the murder weapon. Juries have in recent years been increasingly reluctant to sentence teenagers to death, and the number of death sentences imposed on juvenile offenders is now almost at the vanishing point. In 2003 and 2004, only two juvenile offenders were sentenced to death in the United States. The average annual number in the 1990's was slightly more than 10. From 1999 to 2003, according to a study to be published in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the number of juvenile death sentences per 100 homicide arrests of those under 18 dropped to 0.2 from 1.6. "Over the past five years, there has been a very strong decline in willingness of juries and judges to sentence adolescents to death," said Jeffrey Fagan, a co-author of the study with Valerie West. "The decline is greater than you would expect knowing the decline in the homicide rate, the decline in juvenile homicide arrests and the decline in adult death sentences." It can be hard to say, then, what made the crimes of Mr. Acuna and Eric Morgan, the only two juvenile offenders sentenced to die last year, worse than other murders committed by teenagers around the nation. Mr. Morgan was convicted of killing a convenience store clerk in South Carolina during a robbery. The jury that spared Mr. Malvo's life heard many days of testimony about his difficult childhood in Jamaica and about the influence that his surrogate father and accomplice, John A. Muhammad, wielded over him. Mr. Acuna's lawyers had less to work with. "Robert wasn't on drugs, he wasn't abused, he wasn't mentally retarded or mentally ill," Ms. Acuna, his mother, said. The prosecutor, Ms. Magee, agreed that there had been nothing in the youth's personal life that would help explain the killings. Mr. Acuna's lawyers were left to rely almost entirely on his age in pleading for his life, and that was not enough, Ms. Magee said. "The crime just far outweighed the mitigating factor that he was a juvenile offender," she said. Ms. Acuna said it was hard to listen to Ms. Magee's pleas for her son's death at the trial. "Here is my son that I love and that I protect with my life," she said. "And here's a person who stands up and says, 'I'm going to do everything that I can to legally kill him.' " At bottom, Professor Streib said, only a few themes run through the 72 men on death row whose lives depend on how the Supreme Court rules on the juvenile death penalty. Most of the men, unlike Mr. Acuna, come from troubled backgrounds, and all committed terrible crimes. But that is true of many thousands of other juvenile killers. "It's not a rational process," Professor Streib said. "We can't look at juveniles on death row and say they are the worst of the worst. Some have killed entire families. Some shot a clerk while robbing a convenience store like thousands of others, and you have no idea why lightning struck in this or that case." Toby Lyles, Tom Torok and Margot Williams contributed reporting for this article. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 16) Prosecution Concludes Case in Terror Trial By JULIA PRESTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/nyregion/04stewart.html A federal prosecutor yesterday wrapped up the government's case against Lynne F. Stewart, a lawyer accused of aiding terrorists, by charging that she had released a bellicose statement to the news media on behalf of an imprisoned client because she secretly wanted to help violent militants overthrow the Egyptian government. The prosecutor, Andrew Dember, an assistant United States attorney, assailed the basic tenet of Ms. Stewart's defense: that she had conveyed messages to the news media from her client as part of a legal strategy to secure his eventual release from jail. The client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian Islamic cleric who is blind, is serving a life sentence in federal prison for a failed plot to bomb the United Nations building, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other New York sites. "None of the things that Stewart did in this case has anything to do with any legal matter, nothing to do with being a lawyer," Mr. Dember thundered to the jury, concluding an unusually long closing argument that lasted two and a half days. Ms. Stewart was dealing with "illegal matters, not legal matters," he charged. The case centers on a statement Ms. Stewart gave to a reporter after visiting Mr. Abdel Rahman in jail in May 2000, in which the sheik said he was withdrawing his support for a cease-fire his followers in Egypt had observed since 1997. Ms. Stewart had agreed in writing to prison rules that barred her from helping the sheik communicate with the press. To make his point, Mr. Dember replayed for the jury, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, an excerpt from a television interview Ms. Stewart gave in 2002, a few weeks after her arrest, to Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. After many weeks of presenting the government's main evidence - secret F.B.I. audio and video recordings of telephone calls and meetings involving Ms. Stewart and two co-defendants - prosecutors had introduced the interview video at the end, almost as an afterthought. In the interview, Ms. Stewart acknowledged that she had agreed not to convey messages from the sheik to the news media. She also said the sheik's best hope for getting out of his American jail would be a seizure of power by his party in Egypt, which could then negotiate a prisoner exchange to bring him home. Mr. Dember charged that Ms. Stewart knew that many of the sheik's followers were designated as terrorists and might jump at the chance to return to war in their country. "She had all the power in the world to stop it," Mr. Dember said of the sheik's message to his followers. "But she didn't want to stop it." Ms. Stewart remained composed at the defendants' table, at times even looking amused. Noting during a break that her chief lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, will begin his closing arguments as early as tomorrow, she said, "Just wait!" Mr. Dember asserted that it was "nonsense" for Ms. Stewart to say that the sheik's news release was part of her plan to persuade Egypt to let him return home to serve out his sentence there. The prosecutor pointed out that United States and Egyptian officials would be unlikely to send the sheik back to his country when he was supporting renewed violence there. Mr. Dember provided only vague details when it came to demonstrating connections between Ms. Stewart and the activities of a co-defendant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who dealt extensively by telephone with militants who were labeled terrorists by the United States. The prosecutor acknowledged that Ms. Stewart, in dozens of hours of secretly recorded phone calls, never said she undertook any action to promote violent revolution in Egypt. Instead, he based his allegations heavily on general statements Ms. Stewart had made supporting what she called revolutionary violence in apartheid South Africa and against the government of Israel. Mr. Dember aimed some of his most intense anger against the other co-defendant, Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic interpreter who translated the sheik's conversations for Ms. Stewart and read letters and newspapers to the cleric. "He had all the power to say, 'No!' " Mr. Dember said, raising his voice, about Mr. Yousry's role in translating the sheik's cease-fire message. Beginning his summation in the afternoon, a lawyer for Mr. Yousry, David Stern, said his client had always followed the guidance of Ms. Stewart and other lawyers. "He honestly believed that what he was doing was not criminal," Mr. Stern said. "His only job was to translate." Mr. Stern showed the jury that Mr. Yousry had once referred to the sheik and his followers as "garbage," and had repeatedly rejected the sheik's political views. Mr. Stern played a video excerpt of a prison meeting where Mr. Yousry had questioned the sheik about an edict issued under his name that called for the murder of Jews. "None of your business!" the sheik had barked contemptuously at Mr. Yousry. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 17) Limits Eased on Killing of Wolves By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04wolf.html DENVER, Jan. 3 - Killing a gray wolf in Idaho or Montana will soon get easier under new rules issued Monday by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The animals are still formally protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, but starting in 30 days, they can be killed if a landowner believes a wolf is in the process of attacking livestock or other animals. The old rules required physical evidence of an actual attack - bite marks or a carcass. "Under the old rule, he had to have its teeth in; under the new rule he can be a foot away chasing them," said Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the Wildlife Service. State wildlife management officials were also given greater flexibility in controlling wolf populations to maintain the deer and elk herds upon which wolves often feed. State and federal officials said that the looser standards, part of the process of removing wolves from federal protections, reflected a robust recovery by wolves in the northern Rocky Mountain region. The recovery has surpassed all expectations since the first experimental populations were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996, the officials said. "The old rule was written to protect 25 to 50 wolves, and we now have over 500," said Idaho's governor, Dirk Kempthorne, in a conference call with reporters. "The dynamics have changed." Environmentalists said that the federal estimate of wolf mortality - about 10 percent a year under the more flexible guidelines - is deeply uncertain and could end up being much greater. "Ten percent in a large, healthy population might not have much impact, but we still have wolves struggling with recovery in some areas," said Nina Fascione, a vice president for field conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group based in Washington. "With all the increased flexibility, I would be surprised if the impact is just 10 percent," Ms. Fascione said. Wyoming, which also has a substantial wolf population, was not included in the new rules because the Fish and Wildlife Service has not approved the state's proposed wolf management plan. Gale A. Norton, who as secretary of the interior oversees the wildlife service, said that the full removal of gray wolves from federal protections would proceed only when all three states in the recovery area had plans in place. Ms. Norton said the old, stricter rules about wolf killing would still apply in Wyoming for now. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 18) UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WINTER/SPRING ORGANIZING DRIVE TO END THE U.S. WAR ON IRAQ From: "Carwil James" < carwil@falseignorance.info > To: "Direct Action to Stop the War" < directaction@lists.riseup.net > Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 11:51 AM Subject: [DASW] UFPJ Presents [ending the] Iraq [War] Strategy As the U.S. war against Iraq approaches the end of its second year, there are no signs of any change in U.S. foreign policy or any let-up in the fighting. People throughout this country and around the world have marched, rallied, lobbied, participated in actions of nonviolent civil disobedience, passed resolutions in their unions and religious institutions, and much more. But the Bush Administration has claimed the U.S. election results as a mandate for continued war and occupation, the death toll ? among Iraqis and U.S. servicepeople -- mounts every day, and the U.S. is increasing troop levels rather than taking steps toward military disengagement. United for Peace and Justice believes that, in order to bring an end to the war and bring the troops home, the antiwar movement must reshape its work. Yes, we need to continue with mass mobilizations and public protests ? in fact, we need to increase their size and visibility. At the same time, we must broaden the active core of our movement, give it greater strategic focus, and intensify our resistance. Ending the war will not be an easy task, nor will it happen overnight. To succeed, the anti-war movement needs to expand our numbers; involve new organizations and communities; and focus pressure strategically on the weak points in the Administration's war program ? its moral bankruptcy, the massive human costs, its financial cost, and the intensifying need for new military recruits. The proposal below is for a specific program of activism during the first three months of 2005, but it flows from a larger, longer -term vision of organizing that we hope member groups will embrace and continue into the future. Strategy We believe that there are three crucial weak points in the Administration's war strategy. The Bush Administration cannot fight this war without taxpayer funding, soldiers willing to die, and the ability to contain domestic opposition to acceptable levels. The anti-war movement should focus its energies on increasing the war's unpopularity, particularly by emphasizing the horrific loss of life on all sides; by highlighting the war's escalating financial cost, and the consequences of war spending for our communities; and by disrupting the Pentagon's ability to recruit new troops. Public opinion polls suggest that support for the war continues to erode as the conflict drags on and the death toll mounts. The staggering cost of the war creates the practical basis for building durable alliances between groups whose main priority may be winning social and economic justice at home (e.g. civil rights groups, labor, clergy, community groups) with those who focus primarily on ending the war abroad. More and more combat veterans are resisting their call-ups; the Army and National Guard are having difficulty meeting their recruitment goals; and the military is overstretching itself in Iraq. The anti-war movement can: * offer those who oppose the war but are not yet active with simple, high-visibility ways to express their views * intensify opposition to the war among those who are active and raise the level of popular unrest * build pressure at the Congressional district level to freeze, then cut, funding and troop levels * work to reduce military enlistments and support dissenting soldiers, combat veterans, reservists, and their families who are s peaking out against the war or refusing to serve. To do these things successfully, anti-war organizations will need to engage in a concerted program of base- and alliance -building, ongoing visibility and protest activities, strategic pressure campaigns, and campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance. This organizing drive is one central component of this larger strategy for ending the war. UFPJ has just created a new civil resistance working group, and specific proposals for action will soon be circulated. We are also developing detailed suggestions for how member groups can organize pressure campaigns around funding for the war and military recruitment, including targeting members of Congress. We are developing a grassroots media campaign to draw public attention to civilian casualties in Iraq, and we will also continue to provide organizing ideas and calls to action around other key developments and issues in Iraq: e.g., free and fair elections are not possible under occupation; no foreign control of Iraqi oil; the humanitarian crisis intensifies; the U.S. must respect human rights and international law. Vision for this Organizing Drive This coordinated campaign - includes a series of activities, with each one promoting and building the next, intended to broaden the organized base of the antiwar movement. The activities ? ranging from a "white ribbon" visibility campaign to coordinated days of outreach to local town hall meetings ? are designed to provide opportunities for intensive, face-to-face organizing, in order to reach and involve people who have not previously taken action against the war. UFPJ will provide a series of tools and resources to help member groups reach their goals through this work. To participate in this organizing drive, a group need not commit to every activity or date; many groups will wish to tailor the calendar, activities, and goals to fit their organizational capacity and local needs. Some member groups of UFPJ are already engaged in this type of base- and alliance-building work on a regular basis and may choose to participate in just a few components of the organizing drive. Organizing Goals We encourage each organization that participates in this organizing drive, no matter its size, to set concrete goals for expansion over the coming months. The specific goals may vary depending on the organization's constituency, location, and mission, but we suggest the following: * build strong, ongoing relationships with a targeted number of organizations or communities that have not previously been directly engaged in anti-war work, particularly communities of color, labor, and faith-based organizations (for groups in small towns, the goal might be three new relationships; groups in urban areas might aim to build a dozen or more) * double the number of contacts your organization has (on your email list, phone bank, and/or mailing list) * double the number of active participants in your group's day-to-day work * distribute at least ten times as many white ribbons in your community as you have contacts (on your email list, phone bank, and/or mailing list) ? e.g., if you have an email list of 500 people, aim to distribute at least 5000 ribbons * using these new relationships and contacts as a base, organize a local action on March 19, the two-year anniversary of the war, that is larger than any action your group has organized to date Organizing Drive Components Alliance-Building Meetings: We encourage member groups to expand local peace and justice coalitions by setting up meetings in early 2005 with potential allies such as unions; black, Latino, Arab, and other community of color organizations; religious institutions; student groups; and community organizations. The goals are to build new relationships; identify issues these groups are working on or concerned about; identify ways in which the Iraq war is making it more difficult to win gains in these struggles; explore opportunities to work together in those areas of intersection. While we hope for a concerted national alliance-building push in January and February, we believe that these types of meetings should be a regular part of every group's organizing work, and these connections need to be built at the local level. Days of Outreach: We are proposing a series of national days of outreach, where member groups of UFPJ mobilize their members to talk to large numbers of new people. The purpose is two-fold: to educate and persuade people about the reasons to oppose the war; and to identify potential new activists from those who are already opposed to the war and gather their contact information, with the goal of involving them in future anti-war activities. Concretely, groups will be encouraged to hand out leaflets to educate about the human toll of the war and its cost to our communities; distribute white ribbons to increase the visibility of anti-war sentiment; gather signatures on a national anti-war petition as a way of obtaining new contacts for their ongoing organizing effort; and publicize key upcoming events in their community (such as a February 4 town hall meeting and/or March 19 protest on the two-year-anniversary of the war). Town Hall Meetings: We are proposing that groups all around the country convene town hall meetings on February 4 or some other locally suitable date, to discuss what the war is costing their communities: most dramatically, in lost funding for crucial social programs; but also in lives, if your community has lost U.S. servicepeople in the conflict, and in the drain on firefighters and other first responders sent to Iraq through the National Guard. These town hall meetings will occur shortly after President Bush delivers his State of the Union Address and around the time Congress is expected to debate $100 billion in additional appropriations for Iraq, dramatizing the Bush Administration's misplaced priorities. Through their focus on the connection between the cost of the war and the issues facing communities here at home, these town hall meetings will provide an important opportunity to build or strengthen alliances with groups working for social and economic justice. They will also serve as an opportunity to identify and get to know potential new activists, help build a sense of connection among people across the country who oppose the war, and encourage strategic discussion about what it will take to bring the war to an end. UFPJ will distribute suggested questions for discussion that local facilitators can use to help frame debate during the meeting. Campaign Tools United for Peace and Justice will provide member groups with a series of tools to help with this organizing campaign. These will include tips for maximizing the effectiveness of the alliance-building meetings, days of outreach, and town hall meetings. We will also provide a petition for the national petition drive; educational leaflets that can be modified for local use; and visibility tools such as white ribbons, buttons, magnets, and posters. Campaign Calendar December Launch the White Ribbon Campaign; attend public holiday events in your community and pass out small fliers/cards with white ribbons attached urging people to visibly say No to the War in Iraq this holiday season. For more information about the White Ribbon Campaign click here: Late Dec. United for Peace and Justice will issue a call for coordinated local actions on March 19 to mark the second anniversary of the war, with strong support for the mobilization in Fayetteville, NC (home of Ft. Bragg) Early Jan Launch a national petition drive to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, highlighting our message of "end the war, bring the troops home ? rebuild our communities" Jan 15/17 National Days of Outreach ? contact churches, labor, and community groups in the African-American community who are organizing events, to discuss how we could help to highlight the peace message that was a centerpiece of Dr. King's legacy; fliers and ribbons could be distributed at MLK parades and events, highlighting this message and inviting people to January 20 counter-inaugural activities and the February 4 Town Hall Meeting Jan 20 Inauguration Day ? National Day of Mourning and Resistance, protests in Washington, D.C. and in communities all around the country Jan 29 National Day of Outreach ? distribute leaflets and white ribbons, gather petition signatures, promote the February Town Hall meetings Feb 4 Town Hall Meetings: Ending the War / Rebuilding Our Communities Feb 19-21 UFPJ National Assembly March 8 National Day of Outreach on International Women's Day? distribute leaflets and white ribbons, gather petition signatures, promote the March 19 actions March 19 Global Day of Action to Protest the Second Anniversary of the Iraq War This is the announcement list for Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW). To remove yourself from this list, send an email to directaction-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net . ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
BAUAW NEWSLETTER-WEDNESDAY, JAN. 5, 2005
1) NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING: SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM CENTRO DEL PUEBLO 474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO) www.bauaw.org 2) STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F. 3) Let's Hit the Streets To Defend Abortion Rights! Saturday, January 22 4) PICTURES OF WAR 5) ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca directed by Francesca Prada, Jan. 14-19, 8:00pm, JON SIMS CENTER 1519 Mission, Between Van Ness and 11th Sts., SF 6) Military's Test at High Schools Brings a Salvo of Concerns By Liz F. Kay Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm 7) Honoring 32nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (A resolution put before the S.F. Board of Supervisors 8) WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION, the movie will be at the Red Vic Theatre in S.F. for two days: Jan.4th and 5th. Check newspapers for details. For more information contact: Richard Castro Outreach & Special Distribution Cinema Libre Studio 818.349.8822 Ph. 818.349.9922 Fax www.cinemalibrestudio.com 9) The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losing. By Amer Jubran January 2, 2005 10) Update on National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice 11) Zarqawi Qaeda-Linked Group Kills Iraq Governor-Web DUBAI (Reuters) Tue Jan 4, 2005 08:21 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7231891&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news 12) Iraq Battling More Than 200,000 Insurgents: Intelligence Chief Agence France-Presse Baghdad - Iraq Monday 03 January 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405W.shtml 13) U.S. May Add Advisers to Aid Iraq's Military By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04military.html?o ref=login&hp&ex=1104814800&en=1d44abe6f1fb9a3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage 14) 5 U.S. Troops Are Killed, and Baghdad Governor Is Slain By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER. BAGHDAD, Iraq January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04cnd-iraq.html?h p&ex=1104901200&en=774671f9e3bc3432&ei=5094&partner=homepage 15) Supreme Court to Rule on Executing Young Killers By ADAM LIPTAK January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04juvenile.html?hp&ex=1104901200& en=ceb849ee6735d090&ei=5094&partner=homepage 16) Prosecution Concludes Case in Terror Trial (Lynne Stewart) By JULIA PRESTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/nyregion/04stewart.html 17) Limits Eased on Killing of Wolves By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04wolf.html 18) UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WINTER/SPRING ORGANIZING DRIVE TO END THE U.S. WAR ON IRAQ From: "Carwil James" < carwil@falseignorance.info > To: "Direct Action to Stop the War" < directaction@lists.riseup.net > Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 11:51 AM Subject: [DASW] UFPJ Presents [ending the] Iraq [War] Strategy 19) The Pentagon says that more than 10,000 US military personnel have been wounded in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. Story from BBC NEWS: Published: 2005/01/05 10:33:34 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4147705.stm 20) Ramsey Clark: Why I'm Taking Saddam's Case By Lizzy Ratner http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage1.asp# 21) Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 GISpecial 3A5 ThomasFBarton@earthlink.net 22) The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter George Monbiot Guardian Tuesday January 4, 2005 23) National Task Force for Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Update - December 11, 2004 meeting in New York City (Reviewed by Attorney Robert R. Bryan) 24) U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN http://nytimes.com/2005/01/02/international/worldspecial4/02quake.html?ei=50 94 &en=92dbe740aaf891ca&hp=&ex=1104642000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&pos it ion= 25) IRAQ: Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say 04 Jan 2005 14:56:16 GMT Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/121b671d950efc3ac031b54b55118d 85.htm 26) The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. 27) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ 28) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ 29) Iraq War is Bad for Business By Jim Lobe Peace and Justice News from FPIF http://www.fpif.org/ January 4, 2005 Introducing a new commentary from Foreign Policy In Focus --------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING: www.bauaw.org SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM CENTRO DEL PUEBLO 474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO) In a message dated 12/29/04 4:09:45 PM, caroseligman writes: "We should be in the streets demanding billions for relief, not a penny for war! ESPECIALLY as all predictions are that the death toll could double without adequate relief. Tens of thousands of lives could be saved. We could call on the international antiwar groups who linked up twice around international antiwar days to call coordinated pickets at every US embassy demanding transfer of funds from bombing Fallujah [and the war on Iraq as a whole] to tsunami relief, and on the same day(s) picket Federal buildings around the U.S." [Note: the above is a section of an email sent to me with exactly what I think we should do. The national antiwar organizations could set it in motion on an emergency basis and I'll just bet that antiwar people all over the U.S. and the world will adopt it as their own and build it actively. Carole Seligman] ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 2) STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get a permit. (With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War) The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th. We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush and to the War. We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to protest our government or any of its official representatives. Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and peaceful protest. If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who oppose this war. We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold banners at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20. Students should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center. Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table for Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 3) Let's Hit the Streets To Defend Abortion Rights! Saturday, January 22 Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to attend a counter demonstration! What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco! Make your opinion heard! Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 4) PICTURES OF WAR PLEASE ACCESS: ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were taken from inside Fallujah. These are of much higher quality. Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional pictures added which I did not have before. http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page= 1 More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list. (c)2004 Dahr Jamail. All images and text are protected by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email. Iraq_Dispatches mailing list http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/ view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138 Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 5) ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca directed by Francesca Prada, Jan. 14-19, 8:00pm, JON SIMS CENTER 1519 Mission, Between Van Ness and 11th Sts., SF (The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP. Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you plan to come to the show.) JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29) JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th 8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away) seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402 to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031 Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19, fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world-- and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia-- on a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 6) Military's Test at High Schools Brings a Salvo of Concerns By Liz F. Kay Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm A few days before her holiday break, South River High School junior Emily Hawse took a three-hour standardized test offered by military officials that suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits. Hawse, 16, of Davidsonville said she did not realize until the day of the exam that it had a military link. She said students were told not to go to the Edgewater school that morning if they didn't want to take the test, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. "We couldn't go to class if we wanted to," said Hawse, who is undecided about her future but said it doesn't include the military. Emily Hawse, a junior at South River High School, said she didn't know until the day she took the aptitude test that it was part of a Defense Department program. (Sun photo by Elizabeth Malby) At a time of heightened awareness of military recruitment, the aptitude test offered free by the Defense Department is drawing criticism. Although Baltimore area school districts have made the test available for years, some Anne Arundel County students and their parents complained recently when the test was scheduled during class time at some schools, and it was unclear to some students that they could opt out. The tests have also raised concerns in other places. In a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb, a high school junior refused to take the exam. And critics of the program say they field inquiries from all over the country. They say military recruiters use the test to identify students with skills that would be useful in the armed forces. "You're getting hot leads as opposed to cold leads," said Oskar Castro, an associate with the Youth and Militarism Program of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. Area school and military officials defend the test as a valuable career-planning tool. "This is actually a community service that the Department of Defense provides to help every generation of youth find where they fit in the world about them," said Chris Arendt, deputy director of accession policy at the Pentagon. In the Baltimore area, nearly 1,400 Anne Arundel students took the test last school year, along with about 1,000 from Baltimore County, nearly 500 from Baltimore, 181 from Carroll County and 573 from Howard County. In Howard, three schools with ROTC programs offer the test, school district officials said. Baltimore administers the test to seniors on a voluntary basis, generally at career and technology schools, and at schools with ROTC programs. Baltimore County makes it available to students who request it. Anne Arundel County school officials say the test is not mandatory but acknowledge that the message might not have been clear to all students, given the many standardized tests they must take. "This is one of the first times where kids get to choose whether they take a test," said Jonathan Brice, spokesman for the Anne Arundel schools. Next year, officials said, they will emphasize that the test is voluntary. The test, which has been given to recruits since 1968, measures verbal and math skills, and knowledge in areas such as automotive maintenance and repair, electronics and mechanics. It was expanded to schools at the urging of the federal Labor and Education departments, Defense Department officials say. Military recruitment of high school students has come under scrutiny recently with the war in Iraq continuing. Such efforts were criticized in the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11. In addition, the federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools that receive federal funding to provide military recruiters with students' names, addresses and phone numbers unless parents have opted out. Schools also must allow recruiters to have the same access to campuses that colleges have. The military's vocational aptitude test is not part of the No Child Left Behind requirement, and the test's "career explorations" Web site says students who agree to take the test aren't making any obligations. Nationwide, 722,450 students took the test during the past school year, according to the Defense Department. That includes more than 8,700 Maryland students from 175 schools. The assessment has evolved several times since it was developed from tests used by branches of the military, said Arendt, a Navy captain. He said he remembers taking an early version of the test while he was in high school in the 1970s. "It gave me, as a student, a good idea about what I could and could not look forward to in careers," he said. Students or parents who are concerned about how information about them is used have options, he said. One is to indicate on the test that they do not want their results released to military recruiters. "They get the results, and it's transparent to us," Arendt said. Some students and their families aren't aware of that option, Castro said. For more than 18 years, the committee has answered questions about the test from families who encounter it in their schools. As for casting the test as a career-planning tool, he said, "We think it's a disingenuous use of the test." Area school officials say the tests can suggest opportunities in military and civilian jobs. "It's a career-interest inventory," said Rhonda C. Gill, Anne Arundel's director of pupil services. "It's not done in any way, shape or form to focus kids on going into the military." In Carroll County, all seven high schools have made the test available to students since the late 1970s, said Barbara Guthrie, the school system's guidance supervisor. Typically, a handful of students sign up for it at each school, she said, but at Winters Mill High School, 70 students took the test this year. "It's helpful to students and parents as well, but you use it in combination with lots of other assessments in schools to help students figure out future plans and what their abilities are," Guthrie said. Although some Anne Arundel schools administer the test more formally than schools in other counties, officials noted that students aren't required to take it. Of 250 South River juniors, 70 chose not to take the test on one of the two days it was offered last month. While ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders were taking the PSAT countywide in October, a little more than half of the seniors at Broadneck High School took the military test, said guidance counselor Joe Kozik, as did seniors at North County and other high schools. At Broadneck, several parents called to get more information about the test. "I think the Iraq war has certainly raised concerns on multiple levels," said Broadneck Principal Cindy Hudson. The test serves a purpose for military recruiters. Kozik noted that recruiters are especially interested in the test results of five Broadneck students this year. Because of the reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind, Kozik said, "whether you take this test or not ... we by law have to provide your name to the federal government." At South River High School, some juniors left their classes to take the test two weeks ago. Others remained in class or went to school later rather than take it. Emily Hawse said knowing the test's military connection earlier would not have kept her from taking it. "I was thinking that this might help me for college," she said. Her mother, Monica M. Hawse, agreed that the test would be useful but added, "I think everybody - kids, parents, teachers - should know it's affiliated with the military." Megan Lloyd, 16, a junior from Edgewater, said she learned about the test when a military recruiter spoke to her class. She was interested in anything that could help her decide what path to pursue and was not concerned about the military connection. "The man who came into our social studies class made me feel comfortable about it," she said after classes one day. "It's not like they're going to hound you about it," said fellow Edgewater resident Charlie Fischer, 16, who is considering the armed forces and college. "Or at least, we hope not," Lloyd said. Sun staff writers Athima Chansanchai and Laura Loh contributed to this article. (c) Copyright 2004 Baltimore Sun ### Common Dreams NewsCenter (c) Copyrighted 1997-2004 www.commondreams.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 7) Honoring 32nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (A resolution put before the S.F. Board of Supervisors Resolution recognizing January 22, 2005 as "Stand Up For Choice Day" in honor of the 32nd anniversary of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade establishing a woman's constitutional right to decide when and if to have a child; and further supporting the local Pro- Choice community demonstrating in San Francisco to defend a woman's right to choose safe and legal abortion and birth control and further urging all legal authorities to fully facilitate the protection of the right of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures in an ever-increasingly hostile anti-choice climate on the federal level and in state legislatures and courts throughout the country. WHEREAS, The 1973 landmark United States Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade (the "Roe decision") recognized the right of women to control their reproductive lives is central to their ability to participate fully and equally in the economic and social spheres of society; and WHEREAS, The Roe decision states that (1) the decision to have an abortion is accorded the highest level of constitutional protection, like any other fundamental constitutional right, (2) state laws regarding abortion must be neutral with respect to influencing a woman's decision whether or not to have an abortion, (3) in the period before a fetus is viable, the government may restrict abortion only to protect a woman's health, and (4) after a fetus becomes viable, a state government may prohibit abortion, provided that such state's laws must permit abortion where necessary to protect a women's health or life; and WHEREAS, The protected right to make childbearing decisions, including abortion, has enabled women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were often unattainable prior to the Roe decision; and WHEREAS, The Center for Reproductive Rights reports that prior to the Roe decision, between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred in the United States each year; and WHEREAS, In 1992, the United States Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (the "Casey decision"), where, although it upheld a woman's right to choose, it also allowed federal, state and local laws that favor fetal rights and burden a woman's choice to have abortion, as long as the burden is not "undue;" and WHEREAS, The Casey decision has unlocked the door to hundreds of state and federal criminal restrictions designed to discourage women from accessing abortion and to promote the rights of the fetus throughout pregnancy; and WHEREAS, According to the Allen Gutmacher Institute (AGI), since 1996, more than 300 criminal abortion restrictions have been enacted by state and federal legislatures, none of which would have been constitutional under the original Roe decision; and WHEREAS. According to Planned Parenthood, only eight states, including California, do not mandate parental involvement before a minor can obtain an abortion; and WHEREAS, According to AGI, as of January 1, 2004, twenty-one (21) states will have laws in effect that require a woman to wait for a period of time, usually twenty four (24) hours, but up to as many as seventy-two (72) hours, after receiving state-directed counseling before she can receive an abortion; and WHEREAS, These restrictions on access to abortion particularly discriminate against young women, poor women and women of color; and WHEREAS, AGI indicates that 87 percent of all counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider; and WHEREAS, For the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, anti-choice officials are firmly in control of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government; and WHEREAS, The United States Supreme Court is only one vacancy away from eliminating the Constitutional right to abortion; and WHEREAS, Anti-choice leaders in the Bush Administration and the federal government are imposing their anti-choice ideology on the world's most vulnerable women worldwide by blocking international family planning funding and promoting ineffective and harmful abstinence-only programs; and WHEREAS, On January 22nd, people from all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond will gather to defend one of our most prized rights and liberties, the freedom of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures; now, therefore, be RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors recognizes January 22nd, 2005 as "Stand Up for Choice Day" in honor of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision of Roe. v. Wade, which established a woman's constitutional right to decide when and if to have a child; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors support the local Pro-Choice community demonstrating in San Francisco to defend a woman's right to choose safe and legal abortion and birth control; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors urge all legal authorities to fully facilitate the protection of the right of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures in an ever- increasingly hostile anti-choice climate on the federal level and in state legislatures and courts throughout the country. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 8) WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION, the movie will be at the Red Vic Theatre in S.F. for two days: Jan.4th and 5th. Check newspapers for details. For more information contact: Richard Castro Outreach & Special Distribution Cinema Libre Studio 818.349.8822 Ph. 818.349.9922 Fax www.cinemalibrestudio.com ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 9) The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losing. By Amer Jubran January 2, 2005 "I am surprised that the forces are not using air-lifting C-130 airplanes to avoid ground transportation, which is costing us about a hundred soldiers every month," said commanding Colonel John Jumpier of the US Air Force during a press conference in December. About 2,000 military convoys must use the Iraqi highways to supply the spread-out US forces with water, food, fuel and other essential supplies. Jumpier said, "It will not be efficient to serve our troops, but it's a chance to save some lives." He added, "I know that there will be an increase in the chances of getting these slow and low altitude flying C-130's shot down, but it's a risk that we should take." A first look at this statement and one would conclude, correctly, that it is a very dangerous situation on the ground for US occupying forces. Their lack of control inside the cities of Iraq is now matched by their lack of control over the highways between them. When US military leaders have to decide which deadly option to choose from, it reflects a tone of despair where the safety of the troops is no longer an important issue. No one is able to define the mission of the troops in Iraq, or for how long this mission will last. No one at all, including George W. Bush, can explain the US strategy in Iraq. This is because there is no strategy. With the Iraqi resistance raging, it is not clear why the US is occupying this country and why the US is so willing to sacrifice its soldiers there. While news sources are divided between either concealing or exaggerating the number of those killed in Iraq, other important statistics about US soldiers are forgotten. These statistics give a shocking picture about the truth of what is happening in Iraq. For example, CBS's 60 Minutes reported last fall that 300 soldiers migrated to Canada when they received orders to join their units heading to Iraq. 60 Minutes went on to say that 5,500 US soldiers had deserted for fear of being killed in Iraq. Some refused to join units leaving for Iraq, but most of them escaped after arriving in Iraq by fleeing to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan. As one soldier stated: "They deceived us when they described our mission to Iraq as a walk in the park." He added: "I took off so that they won't write on my grave, Deceived Dead GI in Iraq." Smuggling American GI's is a booming business in Iraq these days. For $1,000 and his/her weapon and uniform, any US soldier can get him or herself out of Iraq through Kurdistan. Last April, a female US soldier was captured by the Kurds, allies of the US, dressed like a Kurdish woman with a face veil, attempting to cross into Turkey. According to the New York Times, a Pentagon study revealed that one in every six soldiers who served in Iraq requires immediate psychological treatment. Over a million soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last two years. Steven Robinson, a NY Times military expert, believes that the number needing treatment could jump from one to three soldiers in every six. "There is a train loaded with people who need help that will be coming to town for the next thirty five years," said Robinson. These figures are the worst for the US since the Vietnam War. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was supposed to be short and swift. Soldiers were promised that it would be an easy victory and that they would be home in time for the summer of 2003. Instead, urban fighting like that in the city of Fallujah last November, which provided unlimited possibilities for resistance hideouts, booby-trapped houses, and roads full of roadside bombs, put US soldiers in the position of having to live every single minute of the day in fear of an attack. In addition, seeing Iraqis and not being able to distinguish who is a friend and who is an enemy causes severe anxiety to soldiers. Paul Raykhouve, commander of a Florida National Guard platoon who served in Iraq for ten months, was quoted during CBS Sixty Minutes saying: "The enemy is everywhere, in every street, looking at you from every window, in every alley. One cannot think straight because of nerve-wracking fear." Frightened troops lacking both certainty about their mission and a strong conviction about what they are doing often end up committing war crimes, such as killing prisoners or injured people. They see in these crimes an opportunity to get even with their enemy. Racism combines with fear to make this killing possible. It then becomes important to win acceptance among other soldiers to justify the crimes. The poor training and poor education of these soldiers also stands in the way of reason and critical thinking. They learn to copy existing models of behavior, without a code of ethics or outside authority to prevent violations of rules of warfare. Even those soldiers who are not convinced that it is okay to commit war crimes find it hard to resist. Both the political and military leadership of the US forces are directly responsible for providing a large -scale coverup of these crimes. Soldiers are subjected to an emotional extortion known as "Uniform Code of Loyalty and Secrecy." Furthermore, the political strength of the US is used to provide immunity for these soldiers from an international war crimes tribunal. This leads to normalizing the criminal behavior of servicemen, who know they can act with impunity. Caught in frenzy of mass killing, most soldiers develop psychological stress and mental trauma as a result of serving in Iraq. This stress, predictably, has been taken out on defenseless Iraqi civilians. Many Iraqis are killed everyday simply because US soldiers suspected that they were resistance members. The horrific stories about US soldiers executing wounded Iraqis or sexually assaulting Iraqi prisoners reveal the severe psychological conditions that US troops are living under. Upon finishing service in Iraq, these soldiers will no longer have Iraqis to murder at will. The weapons they were trained to use will be left behind. These two things -- without their knowing it -- had become important in their lives. Without them their return to US society, where there is little social support, will often mean poverty, alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, divorce, and suicide. In order not to face themselves, the lies they were told, and the crimes they committed, these soldiers will return to what they learned in Iraq - crime, drug trafficking, prostitution, rape, armed robbery, child abuse, racism, and rallying around the flag. The government of the US will then have to engage in another massive coverup. This time it will be to avoid admitting any responsibility for the psychological illnesses of its servicemen, and for providing no resources to treat them. Damaged soldiers will become a supply of felons to the US justice system, which long ago stopped caring about any kind of social justice. The justice system will in turn deliver the veterans to the prison system, the US's largest growth industry. Information about the number of US causalities in Iraq is available on a web site of the Pentagon or known as the "War Hub" at www.pentagon.gov. This information covers only those who are officially US citizens enlisted with different military services. Hired security contractors, or mercenaries, and recruits who are not citizens who enlisted to obtain a "green card," are not counted or mentioned. A large number of the green card recruits are from Mexico and Central America. There are no organizations to look after their rights or help them once they're in Iraq. Most of them are buried in Iraq when killed. A videotape produced and distributed by the "Majles Shora Al-Mojahideen in Fallujah," one of the most important military wings of the Iraqi resistance, showed a burial site discovered outside the Iraqi city of Samara with tens of bodies in US military body bags. The dead where dressed in US uniforms. It is estimated that as many as 40% of the US troops serving in Iraq are green card recruits. The website of the Pentagon divides the causalities in Iraq into three categories: 1)"Combat Causalities" -- 1,300 dead, and 9,000 injured since March, 2003. Both figures are false. 2) "Non-Combat Causalities." The site does not report how many of these were injured or killed. Last fall, 60 Minutes concluded that the figure could be around 3,000 killed and over 25,000 injured. 3) "Coalition Causalities." Information under this category was posted briefly, then deleted. The figures showed 750 killed and 1,034 injured. It is not clear who these people were. If they were "coalition forces," then why are their countries not claiming them? The US government has gained a reputation of systematically lying to its population and the rest of the world, but a few facts about Iraq are emerging despite efforts to conceal them: * Political stability and security in Iraq is non-existent. This goes to the heart of the claimed US goal in Iraq. The US justified its removal by military means of Saddam as a way to create a better and more stable country. Instead, Iraqis are caught in poverty, hunger, and terrible violence every day as a direct result of US forces. Iraq is not a better place today, as Tony Blair and George Bush have claimed. And after Fallujah no one any longer believes the US is trying to bring freedom to the Iraqis. * That great lie, the "war on terrorism," has failed to crush what the US calls international terrorism. US citizens are not safer today than they were on September 11, 2001. In fact, the most powerful force in the US -- its military machine - is now completely vulnerable to lethal attacks by the ever-growing Iraqi resistance. Normally, the military is established to defend or attack those labeled enemies of the state. In the case of the US, its military is designed to twist the arms of those who do not agree with its imperial agenda. The US is clearly involved in practicing terrorism by military means to achieve its strategic interests everywhere around the globe. But in Iraq, the mighty US military, with over 150,000 well-armed troops, is very nervous and suffers from low morale, and in the eyes of the world has lost the moral edge. Furthermore, the war is not a well supported cause in the US. This time the risk of getting killed in Iraq is real. This time the enemy is real. The US public must decide on supporting a policy of war that is killing their own children and the Iraqi people, or fighting against the war by taking drastic measures --measures that go beyond vigils and feel-good political demonstrations. We may be sure that if what we are told about Iraq by the US government does not look good, the actual truth must be a great deal worse. Knowing the truth is a big burden. The truth about Iraq is that the US ÂMighty GIÂs are not so mighty! Announce mailing list Announce@onepalestine.org http://mail.onepalestine.org/mailman/listinfo/announce_onepalestine.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 10) Update on National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice We are happy to let you know that after a great deal of work we have secured a great site for the National Assembly on the weekend of Feb. 19-21...the Millennium Hotel in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The hotel is easy to get to from the airport, and St. Louis is in driving distance from many cities. The hotel is across the street from the famous Arch on the Mississippi River. I visited the hotel last week and so we know it has all of the facilities we will need to help ensure a successful assembly, and we have been able to negotiate an excellent price. As Feb. 19 is about seven weeks away we encourage your group or organization to start the process of selecting delegates to represent you at the National Assembly. We are still working out financial details but have decided that the minimal registration fee for the assembly will include accommodations and food for up to two delegates from each UFPJ member group (local affiliates or chapters of national organizations that are members of UFPJ will only have one delegate). All the details will be worked out and emailed to you by the end of this week. Registration for the assembly will be available on the United for Peace and Justice web site next week. Travel is the responsibility of the member groups. During the National Assembly United for Peace and Justice will decide on a strategic framework, as well as specific strategy, program and organizing proposals. There will be speakers and small group discussions on the war in Iraq, and the State of the U.S. and the Anti-War Movement and much more. The coalition will elect a new national Steering Committee. Cultural and analytical presenters and some special guests as well as a dance party will round out the weekend. I also want to introduce the coordinator of the National Assembly, Diane Lent. Diane has been a volunteer with UFPJ and has worked on many of the mobilizations in New York. She has a long history in the peace and justice movement and has coordinated similar gatherings for progressive organizations. We'll let you know as soon as the assembly registration is set up on the web site and in the coming weeks you will be getting a lot more information about the assembly. In the meantime, if you have any questions please feel free to contact Diane either by phone at the national office (212-868-5545) or by email (greenelent@earthlink.net). peace, Leslie Cagan National Coordinator UFPJ@mediajumpstart.net https://secure.mediajumpstart.net/mailman/listinfo/ufpj ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 11) Zarqawi Qaeda-Linked Group Kills Iraq Governor-Web DUBAI (Reuters) Tue Jan 4, 2005 08:21 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7231891&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news DUBAI (Reuters) - A group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said it had assassinated Baghdad governor Ali al-Haidri Tuesday, according to an Internet statement. "A group of mujahideen of the Qaeda Organization for Holy War in Iraq assassinated a tyrant and American agent, the governor of Baghdad Ali Haidri," said the statement, which was posted on an Islamist site. "We warn every traitor and ally of the Jews and the Christians that this will be your fate," it added. Gunmen killed Haidri in Iraq's highest-profile assassination in eight months and a suicide bomber killed 11 people at a police checkpoint Tuesday in an escalating campaign to wreck an election due on Jan. 30. Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest suicide bombings and attacks in Iraq. Haidri had survived a previous assassination attempt in September. (c) Reuters 2005 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 12) Iraq Battling More Than 200,000 Insurgents: Intelligence Chief Agence France-Presse Baghdad - Iraq Monday 03 January 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405W.shtml Baghdad - Iraq's insurgency counts more than 200,000 active fighters and sympathisers, the country's national intelligence chief told AFP, in the bleakest assessment to date of the armed revolt waged by Sunni Muslims. "I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people," Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani said in an interview ahead of the January 30 elections. Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter. The numbers far exceed any figure presented by the US military in Iraq, which has struggled to get a handle on the size of the resistance since toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. A senior US military officer declined to endorse or dismiss the spy chief's numbers. "As for the size of the insurgency, we don't have good resolution on the size," the officer said on condition of anonymity. Past US military assessments on the insurgency's size have been revised upwards from 5,000 to 20,000 full and part-time members, in the last half year, most recently in October. Defense experts said it was impossible to divine the insurgency's total number, but called Shahwani's estimate a valid guess, with as much credence, if not more, than any US numbers. "I believe General Shahwani's estimation, given that he is referring predominantly to active sympathizers and supporters and to part-time as well as full-time active insurgents, may not be completely out of the ballpark," said defense analyst Bruce Hoffman who served as an advisor to the US occupation in Iraq and now works for US-based think-tank RAND Corporation. Compared to the coalition's figure, he said: "General Shahwani's - however possibly high it may be, might well give a more accurate picture of the situation." Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, put Shahwani's estimates on an equal footing with the American's. "The Iraqi figures do... recognize the reality that the insurgency in Iraq has broad support in Sunni areas while the US figures down play this to the point of denial." Shahwani said the resistance enjoys wide backing in the provinces of Baghdad, Babel, Salahuddin, Diyala, Nineveh and Tamim, homes to Sunni Arabs who fear they will lose influence after the elections. Insurgents have gained strength through Iraq's tight-knit tribal bonds and links to the old 400,000-strong Iraqi army, dissolved by the US occupation in May 2003 two months after the US-led invasion, he said. "People are fed up after two years, without improvement. People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army was hundreds of thousands. You'd expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers." The rebels have turned city neighborhoods and small towns around central Iraq into virtual no-go zones despite successful US military efforts to reclaim former enclaves like Samarra and Fallujah, he said. "What are you going to call the situation here (in Baghdad) when 20 to 30 men can move around with weapons and no one can get them in Adhamiyah, Dura and Ghazaliya," he said, naming neighborhoods in the capital. The spy chief also questioned the success of the November campaign to retake Fallujah, which US forces have hailed as a major victory against the resistance. "What we have now is an empty city almost destroyed... and most of the insurgents are free. They have gone either to Mosul or to Baghdad or other areas." Shahwani pointed to a resurgent Baath party as the key to the insurgency's might. The Baath has split into three factions, with the deadliest being the branch still paying allegiance to jailed dictator Saddam Hussein, he said. Shahwani said the core Baath fighting strength was more than 20,000. Operating out of Syria, Saddam's half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan and former aide Mohamed Yunis al-Ahmed are providing funding and tapping their connections to old army divisions, particularily in Mosul, Samarra, Baquba, Kirkuk and Tikrit. Saddam's henchman, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, still on the lam in Iraq, is also involved, he said. Another two factions, which have broken from Saddam, are also around, but have yet to mount any attacks. The Baath are complemented by Islamist factions ranging from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda affiliate to Ansar al-Sunna and Ansar al-Islam. Asked if the insurgents were winning, Shahwani answered: "I would say they aren't losing." (c) Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 13) U.S. May Add Advisers to Aid Iraq's Military By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04military.html?o ref=login&hp&ex=1104814800&en=1d44abe6f1fb9a3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 - Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, is reviewing a proposal to add hundreds of American military advisers to work directly with Iraqi units, whose disappointing performance could jeopardize the long- term American exit strategy from Iraq, senior military officials said Monday. Americans are training Iraqi police officers and national guard troops to replace them in securing the country, but the results over all have been troubling, with growing desertion rates in the most violent provinces, gaps in leadership, and poor battlefield performance, American military officers and troops say. The advisers would bolster the Iraqi will to fight, help train officers who would lead the troops, curb desertion and provide Iraqi forces with the confidence that American units would back them up - in some cases fighting alongside them if needed, military and Pentagon officials said. Several hundred American troops are already embedded with Iraqi units, following a long tradition in American military actions. But the proposal would greatly expand this presence. The details of the proposal are still being discussed among American and Iraqi officials, and more troops would probably not be embedded until after the Jan. 30 elections, in which Iraqi forces will play a crucial part. Embedding more Americans with Iraqis would mean diverting perhaps several hundred additional American troops away from combat operations, military officials said. There are 150,000 American forces in Iraq. Although diverting soldiers might be risky at a time when commanders say they need troops to press offensives against insurgents, the plan addresses a widely acknowledged need. American commanders have praised the skills of some Iraqi forces, particularly new commando units that have seen combat throughout the country. But the Americans have criticized other Iraqi forces for their slovenly appearance and lack of commitment, raising questions about how soldiers and marines will respond tojoining such units. There has been widespread concern in the Bush administration about the poor performance of Iraqi troops. President Bush himself discussed the issue in a news conference on Dec. 20. "They've got some generals in place and they've got foot soldiers in place, but the whole command structure necessary to have a viable military is not in place," he said. "And so they're going to spend a lot of time and effort on achieving that objective." If approved, the plan would expand and standardize steps already taken by some American units, including the Army's First Cavalry Division and some Marine Corps units, to enhance the training that the Iraqi Army, National Guard and police forces receive after boot camp. "The development of Iraqi security forces is, in my view, necessarily the main effort," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of American forces in northern Iraq, said in an e-mail message from his headquarters in Mosul on Monday. "Building capable and loyal Iraqi forces is what will eventually lead to the defeat of the insurgency and to a sufficiently stable environment so that U.S. and other forces can begin to reduce our presence." General Ham, noting the earlier efforts by some units, said, "It's time to apply it on a larger scale." "It seems to me that this is something we want to start doing in the immediate post-election period," he said. The proposal that General Casey and his top aides are weighing has received support in principle from Pentagon officials at a time when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been urging commanders in Iraq to accelerate the creation of Iraqi security forces and to improve their quality, a senior Pentagon official said Monday. General Casey, at a Pentagon news conference on Dec. 16, said an exhaustive internal review of the military's campaign plan for Iraq concluded that training the local police and building a better border patrol were two of three essential areas that were well behind schedule. The other area was establishing effective Iraqi intelligence services. Proponents of embedding programs readily acknowledge that they will lose the American troops for active combat operations, but they insist that the Iraqis' training and confidence has improved. "It's cost us," Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, an assistant commander of the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad, told reporters last week of the division's 540 soldiers who are now assigned to Iraqi National Guard units in the city. But, he added, "It pays dividends." Some influential lawmakers, however, including Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee and who recently visited troops in Iraq, have expressed pessimism that Iraqis will be able to develop independent security forces potent enough to thwart the insurgency. "The raw material is lacking in the willpower and commitment after they receive this training to really shoulder the heavy responsibilities," he said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on Dec. 19. On paper, there are reasons for worry and for hope, military officials say. There are plans to produce a total of 179,600 police and border patrol officers. Of about 116,000 officers on duty now, only 73,000 are fully trained and equipped, according to Pentagon statistics on Dec. 27. About half of a projected 100,000 Iraqi Army, National Guard and commando troops are now operating. There are now 10-man adviser and support teams with each of 27 regular Iraqi Army and intervention force battalions (nine of which are still in training), their nine brigade headquarters (three still in training) and their three division headquarters, senior military officials in Iraq said. In addition, adviser teams from Army Special Forces and other American units are with most of the Iraqi National Guard forces. Expanding on those adviser teams, the proposal before General Casey would probably provide 10-man teams with 45 existing and 20 emerging national guard battalions. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is providing small teams to help train new Iraqi border police officers, a military official in Iraq said. Some details of the new plan were first reported by CNN on Dec. 26. Some of the most ambitious plans are to bolster the abilities of the Iraqi police. The new Iraqi government has fielded about a dozen police commando units or other specialized units, whose performance American officers have largely praised. The commandos include former Iraqi special forces troops and have performed well, combining commando skills and weaponry with police powers to make arrests, a senior allied official in Baghdad said Monday. The approach would also provide assistance and mentoring to the 3,500 basic police graduates that academies in Iraq and Jordan are churning out every month. After the insurgent attacks on police stations in Mosul in November, in which most of the city's police officers abandoned their posts, American officials, working closely with the Iraqi government, have toughened the training to resemble more paramilitary operations and have enforced policies to cut down on Iraqis' skipping out on leave. In Mosul, American forces have been assigned to all police stations. On Saturday, Iraqi security forces and their American advisers fought off a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a police station in the southeast part of the city. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said it was the 12th time since Nov. 10 that insurgents had tried to take over a police station, none of which have fallen to rebels in that period. Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Erik Eckholm from Baghdad. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 14) 5 U.S. Troops Are Killed, and Baghdad Governor Is Slain By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER. BAGHDAD, Iraq January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04cnd-iraq.html?h p&ex=1104901200&en=774671f9e3bc3432&ei=5094&partner=homepage BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 4 - Four American soldiers and a marine were killed today and three other soldiers were wounded on a day that also saw the assassination of the governor of Baghdad, one of the highest-profile killings of an Iraqi official in months. In other violence, a bomb-laden fuel truck killed eight Iraqi commandos and two other people when it crashed into a checkpoint in western Baghdad about 9 a.m. today, according to an Interior Ministry official. Sixty others were wounded in the attack, which happened near the scene of two deadly car bombings on Monday. Three soldiers with the First Cavalry Division died and two were wounded when an improvised bomb went off at about 11 a.m. in north Baghdad. About 30 minutes later a soldier with the First Infantry Division was killed and another was wounded, the military said, when a bomb exploded near Balad, site of an American air base about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The marine with the First Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action while carrying out security operations in Al Anbar Province, a restive Sunni region west of the capital, the military said. The Baghdad governor, Ali al-Haidari, was attacked and killed in a roadside ambush after he left his home, the Interior Ministry said. The Associated Press reported that six of the governor's bodyguards were also killed. He was the most senior official assassinated in the city since the head of the Governing Council was killed last May. Mr. Haidari survived a previous assassination attempt in September. Later, an insurgent group led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and linked to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the ambush, according to a message and video posted on an Islamist Internet site. The group has taken responsibility for many previous deadly attacks in Iraq. Insurgents have repeatedly attacked Iraqi officials as well as members of the country's security forces, accusing them of collaborating with foreign occupiers. The steady violence prompted Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, to urge the United Nations to to look into whether the country should go ahead with its scheduled Jan. 30 election. "Definitely the United Nations, as an independent umbrella of legitimacy, should really take the responsibility by seeing whether that is possible or not," Mr. al-Yawar, a Sunni Arab sheik, told Reuters in an interview. "On a logical basis, there are signs that it will be a tough call to hold the election," he said, in comments that pulled back from a statement he made on a visit to Washington in December. On that visit with President Bush, both men reinforced their message that elections must go ahead as scheduled, despite the violence. Mr. al-Yawar's comments today came after Prime Minister Ayad Allawi telephoned President Bush on Monday and discussed the many impediments still facing the country as it heads toward elections in 27 days, according to senior American officials familiar with the contents of the call. The officials insisted that Dr. Allawi, Iraq's interim leader, did not tell Mr. Bush that the elections should be delayed, though his defense minister said in Cairo on Monday that the voting could be postponed to ensure greater participation by Sunnis. "There was no substantive conversation about delay," a senior administration official said. Dr. Allawi, the official said, "wasn't even a bit wobbly" on that point. But some officials in Washington and in Iraq interpreted the telephone call as a sign that Dr. Allawi, who is clearly concerned his own party could be headed to defeat if the election is held on schedule, may be preparing the ground to make the case for delay to Mr. Bush. "Clearly the thinking on this is still in motion in Baghdad," a senior administration official said Monday evening. "And President Bush is holding firm," the official said, telling Dr. Allawi that the Iraqi government has met every deadline so far, including assuming power from the United States in June. Mr. Bush has publicly insisted that the elections must go forward on Jan. 30, as scheduled, and said any delay would mean giving in to the insurgents who have vowed to stop the elections from taking place. Dr. Allawi's call, on Mr. Bush's first day back in Washington after a weeklong break at his Texas ranch, came just hours after a wave of bombing attacks left at least 20 people dead, including one blast near the interim prime minister's Baghdad party headquarters. Another killed three British citizens and an American in a convoy of the American security firm Kroll Inc. In addition to the 20 or more deaths - a figure that included suicide bombers - dozens were injured. The attacks, which followed a car bombing north of Baghdad on Sunday that killed 18 Iraqi troops, were the latest attempt by insurgents to destabilize the country and intimidate Iraqis in the weeks before the parliamentary elections. The insurgents' targets are Iraqis who work with American forces, especially in Sunni areas, in hopes of frightening people from the polls. Some groups have already warned of major attacks on Election Day. While White House officials were hesitant to give many details of the discussion between Dr. Allawi and Mr. Bush, they said the Iraqi leader brought up questions of security and the ferocity of the insurgency. "It was a discussion about the impediments," said an official who reviewed a transcript of the call. "But no one suggested the impediments could not be overcome." Yet Dr. Allawi's cabinet is already showing signs of weakening on the question of holding the elections this month. The defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, suggested during his Cairo visit that a postponement would encourage Sunnis to participate; American and Iraqi officials have been concerned that if the Sunnis are blocked from voting or boycott the election, the outcome will not be considered legitimate. But an American Embassy official said the United States wanted the elections to proceed as scheduled, and an official with Iraq's independent election commission told The Associated Press that there were no plans for a delay. No one affiliated with Prime Minister Allawi's party, the Iraqi National Accord, was hurt in the suicide car bombing Monday morning near the party's headquarters in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. But the blast killed two Iraqi police officers and one other person in addition to the car's driver while injuring at least 25 others, according to Iraqi officials. The Iraqi police said the bomb detonated after the police rained gunfire on the vehicle to stop it from passing a checkpoint. The suicide bomber drove a Chevrolet Caprice with the markings of a Baghdad taxicab and rammed the checkpoint near the party headquarters just west of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified American compound in central Baghdad. The victims were taken to Yarmouk Hospital. Ahmed Thamir, a 21-year-old soldier slightly wounded in the attack, stood guard outside the hospital with a Kalashnikov rifle. "It's hard to trust anyone nowadays," he said. The group that calls itself the Army of Ansar al-Sunna took responsibility for the attack in an Internet posting. In the message, the group warned "apostates" that if they "do not repent from your infidelity," it had other bombers ready to "kill you one by one." The group has claimed a string of attacks, including the Dec. 21 bombing of a mess tent in Mosul that killed 14 American servicemen and 8 other people. Many recent attacks against Iraqi troops and officials have occurred in the heavily Sunni areas north of Baghdad, a region where the deadliest attacks took place on Monday. In the first attack, shortly before 8 a.m., a car bomb killed 4 Iraqi National Guard soldiers and wounded 14 more near a military base in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division. The attack was not far from where insurgents killed 18 Iraqi troops and a civilian the day before by detonating an explosives-laden vehicle next to a bus full of national guardsmen. Early Monday afternoon, six Iraqi National Guard troops were killed and four wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Tikrit, farther north of Baghdad, with a roadside bomb. The attackers used an artillery shell for ammunition in the attack, which happened at 2:40 p.m., Sergeant Cowens said. There were reports of other attacks across Iraq. In Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq, one Iraqi policeman was killed and two were wounded when a homemade bomb hidden in a decapitated body exploded as the policemen approached the body, the government said in a statement. The attack on a car carrying employees of Kroll Inc., the New York-based risk consulting and security firm, occurred at 3:45 p.m. at a checkpoint where people leave Baghdad's fortified Green Zone to get onto the road to the airport. A Kroll official said that four people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed into their car, including two British employees of Kroll. "It was a suicide attack on a convoy coming from the airport," said Pat Wood, Kroll's vice president for corporate communications. The other victims were an American woman, Tracy Hushin, of Islip, N.Y., with the consulting firm BearingPoint, and a British citizen working for a subcontractor of the company, an announcement by BearingPoint said. Despite the violence, American officials say the election must be held, as planned, on Jan. 30. For one thing, they say, the Iraqi interim constitution mandates the timing. There have already been extensive preparations by the American military for the elections, they say. Some Sunni leaders have called for a delay, worried that the intimidation tactics will keep many voters home and lead to severe Sunni under representation in the new government. Mr. Shaalan made his suggestion for a delay Monday as he sought help from other Arab nations to persuade Iraq's Sunnis to take part. Richar A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article and David E. Sanger from Washington. Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 15) Supreme Court to Rule on Executing Young Killers By ADAM LIPTAK January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04juvenile.html?hp&ex=1104901200& en=ceb849ee6735d090&ei=5094&partner=homepage In August, six months after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty, Robert Acuna, a high school student from Baytown, Tex., was put on trial for his life. The jury convicted Mr. Acuna of killing two elderly neighbors, James and Joyce Carroll, when he was 17, shooting them "execution style," as prosecutors described it, and stealing their car. At sentencing, when jurors weighed his crime against factors counseling leniency, Mr. Acuna's youth should have counted in his favor. Instead, his brooding and volatile adolescent demeanor may have hurt more than helped, and the Houston jury sentenced him to die. "They probably thought that he wasn't showing remorse," said Mr. Acuna's mother, Barbara. that his behavior at the trial had alienated the jury. "He was very nonchalant," Ms. Magee said. "He laughed at inappropriate things. He still didn't quite get the magnitude of everything he did." 1) NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING: SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM CENTRO DEL PUEBLO 474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO) www.bauaw.org 2) STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F. 3) Let's Hit the Streets To Defend Abortion Rights! Saturday, January 22 4) PICTURES OF WAR 5) ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca directed by Francesca Prada, Jan. 14-19, 8:00pm, JON SIMS CENTER 1519 Mission, Between Van Ness and 11th Sts., SF 6) Military's Test at High Schools Brings a Salvo of Concerns By Liz F. Kay Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm 7) Honoring 32nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (A resolution put before the S.F. Board of Supervisors 8) WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION, the movie will be at the Red Vic Theatre in S.F. for two days: Jan.4th and 5th. Check newspapers for details. For more information contact: Richard Castro Outreach & Special Distribution Cinema Libre Studio 818.349.8822 Ph. 818.349.9922 Fax www.cinemalibrestudio.com 9) The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losing. By Amer Jubran January 2, 2005 10) Update on National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice 11) Zarqawi Qaeda-Linked Group Kills Iraq Governor-Web DUBAI (Reuters) Tue Jan 4, 2005 08:21 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7231891&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news 12) Iraq Battling More Than 200,000 Insurgents: Intelligence Chief Agence France-Presse Baghdad - Iraq Monday 03 January 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405W.shtml 13) U.S. May Add Advisers to Aid Iraq's Military By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04military.html?o ref=login&hp&ex=1104814800&en=1d44abe6f1fb9a3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage 14) 5 U.S. Troops Are Killed, and Baghdad Governor Is Slain By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER. BAGHDAD, Iraq January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04cnd-iraq.html?h p&ex=1104901200&en=774671f9e3bc3432&ei=5094&partner=homepage 15) Supreme Court to Rule on Executing Young Killers By ADAM LIPTAK January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04juvenile.html?hp&ex=1104901200& en=ceb849ee6735d090&ei=5094&partner=homepage 16) Prosecution Concludes Case in Terror Trial (Lynne Stewart) By JULIA PRESTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/nyregion/04stewart.html 17) Limits Eased on Killing of Wolves By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04wolf.html 18) UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WINTER/SPRING ORGANIZING DRIVE TO END THE U.S. WAR ON IRAQ From: "Carwil James" < carwil@falseignorance.info > To: "Direct Action to Stop the War" < directaction@lists.riseup.net > Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 11:51 AM Subject: [DASW] UFPJ Presents [ending the] Iraq [War] Strategy 19) The Pentagon says that more than 10,000 US military personnel have been wounded in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. Story from BBC NEWS: Published: 2005/01/05 10:33:34 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4147705.stm 20) Ramsey Clark: Why I'm Taking Saddam's Case By Lizzy Ratner http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage1.asp# 21) Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 GISpecial 3A5 ThomasFBarton@earthlink.net 22) The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter George Monbiot Guardian Tuesday January 4, 2005 23) National Task Force for Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Update - December 11, 2004 meeting in New York City (Reviewed by Attorney Robert R. Bryan) 24) U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN http://nytimes.com/2005/01/02/international/worldspecial4/02quake.html?ei=50 94 &en=92dbe740aaf891ca&hp=&ex=1104642000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&pos it ion= 25) IRAQ: Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say 04 Jan 2005 14:56:16 GMT Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/121b671d950efc3ac031b54b55118d 85.htm 26) The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. 27) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ 28) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ 29) Iraq War is Bad for Business By Jim Lobe Peace and Justice News from FPIF http://www.fpif.org/ January 4, 2005 Introducing a new commentary from Foreign Policy In Focus ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 1) NEXT BAY AREA UNITED AGAINST WAR MEETING: www.bauaw.org SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 11AM CENTRO DEL PUEBLO 474 VALENCIA STREET (NEAR 16TH STREET IN SAN FRANCISCO) In a message dated 12/29/04 4:09:45 PM, caroseligman writes: "We should be in the streets demanding billions for relief, not a penny for war! ESPECIALLY as all predictions are that the death toll could double without adequate relief. Tens of thousands of lives could be saved. We could call on the international antiwar groups who linked up twice around international antiwar days to call coordinated pickets at every US embassy demanding transfer of funds from bombing Fallujah [and the war on Iraq as a whole] to tsunami relief, and on the same day(s) picket Federal buildings around the U.S." [Note: the above is a section of an email sent to me with exactly what I think we should do. The national antiwar organizations could set it in motion on an emergency basis and I'll just bet that antiwar people all over the U.S. and the world will adopt it as their own and build it actively. Carole Seligman] ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 2) STOP THE WAR ON IRAQ! BRING OUR TROOPS HOME NOW! ALL OUT JANUARY 20TH, 5:00 P.M., CIVIC CENTER, S.F. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kkk1928.jpg This link brings you to a photo of the KKK marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC in 1928. Evidently they were able to get a permit. (With many thanks to Kwame Somburu for supplying the link. This site has a plethora of information about the KKK.... Bonnie Weinstein, Bay Area United Against War) The U.S. government is not allowing antiwar/anti-Bush protestors onto Pennsylvania Ave. along the inauguration route Jan. 20th. We have a constitutional right to protest the inauguration. BAUAW encourages all to show up in DC and come to Pennsylvania Avenue with your signs and banners and express your opposition to Bush and to the War. We demand equal access along the rout for all. We have a right to protest our government or any of its official representatives. Nothing gives the government the right to disallow legal and peaceful protest. If you can't go to DC, come out Jan. 20, 5pm, Civic Center, SF. in solidarity with all protestors in Washington and everywhere who oppose this war. We are encouraging everyone to participate somehow by wearing buttons and signs at work, at school and on the bus; hold banners at freeway entrances, and crowded shopping areas etc. on Jan. 20. Students should hold rallies and march to the Civic Center. Come to our next meeting and pick a place to flyer or table for Jan. 20 or hold a sign during the day, on Jan. 20 if you can. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 3) Let's Hit the Streets To Defend Abortion Rights! Saturday, January 22 Emboldened rightwing abortion foes have had the nerve to announce a march in San Francisco on the anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade decision! Show them that San Francisco is a reproductive rights town -- save the date and plan to attend a counter demonstration! What is needed in response is a multi-issue, militant, united front of women, people of all colors, queers, immigrants, workers and everyone targeted by the rightwing to show that the anti-abortionists are not welcome in San Francisco! Make your opinion heard! Details of assembly time and place will be announced soon. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 4) PICTURES OF WAR PLEASE ACCESS: ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches ** ** http://dahrjamailiraq.com ** I have obtained the originals of the photos I recently posted which were taken from inside Fallujah. These are of much higher quality. Some of the comments have been updated, and there are some additional pictures added which I did not have before. http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page= 1 More writing, photos and commentary at http://dahrjamailiraq.com You can visit http://dahrjamailiraq.com/email_list/ to subscribe or unsubscribe to the email list. (c)2004 Dahr Jamail. All images and text are protected by United States and international copyright law. If you would like to reprint Dahr's Dispatches on the web, you need to include this copyright notice and a prominent link to the DahrJamailIraq.com website. Any other use of images and text including, but not limited to, reproduction, use on another website, copying and printing requires the permission of Dahr Jamail. Of course, feel free to forward Dahr's dispatches via email. Iraq_Dispatches mailing list http://lists.dahrjamailiraq.com/mailman/listinfo/iraq_dispatches http://dahrjamailiraq.com/gallery/ view_album.php?set_albumName=album28&page=1 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/message/26138 Virginion Pilot via AP - Photos - click here http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=79598&ran=187050 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 5) ITALIAN.QUEER.DANGEROUS a one-man show featuring Tommi Avicolli Mecca directed by Francesca Prada, Jan. 14-19, 8:00pm, JON SIMS CENTER 1519 Mission, Between Van Ness and 11th Sts., SF (The most important thing is for folks to make reservations ASAP. Seating is limited. Please take a moment to call 554-0402 if you plan to come to the show.) JANUARY 14-29 (Friday and Saturday nights only: 14, 15; 21, 22; 28, 29) JON SIMS CENTER, 1519 Mission/between Van Ness and 11th 8pm, $5-10 sliding scale (no one turned away) seating is limited, for reservations: 415-554-0402 to volunteer to help with the show, call 415-552-6031 Through monologue and spoken word, well-known San Francisco queer activist and writer Tommi Avicolli Mecca tells his story of growing up in South Philly's working-class Little Italy. At age 19, fired up with new pride in being gay, he came out to the world--and his traditional Roman Catholic southern Italian famiglia--on a TV talk show. The rest is history, and the subject of this performance. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 6) Military's Test at High Schools Brings a Salvo of Concerns By Liz F. Kay Published on Monday, January 3, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-02.htm A few days before her holiday break, South River High School junior Emily Hawse took a three-hour standardized test offered by military officials that suggests possible careers for students while helping to identify promising recruits. Hawse, 16, of Davidsonville said she did not realize until the day of the exam that it had a military link. She said students were told not to go to the Edgewater school that morning if they didn't want to take the test, called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. "We couldn't go to class if we wanted to," said Hawse, who is undecided about her future but said it doesn't include the military. Emily Hawse, a junior at South River High School, said she didn't know until the day she took the aptitude test that it was part of a Defense Department program. (Sun photo by Elizabeth Malby) At a time of heightened awareness of military recruitment, the aptitude test offered free by the Defense Department is drawing criticism. Although Baltimore area school districts have made the test available for years, some Anne Arundel County students and their parents complained recently when the test was scheduled during class time at some schools, and it was unclear to some students that they could opt out. The tests have also raised concerns in other places. In a Buffalo, N.Y., suburb, a high school junior refused to take the exam. And critics of the program say they field inquiries from all over the country. They say military recruiters use the test to identify students with skills that would be useful in the armed forces. "You're getting hot leads as opposed to cold leads," said Oskar Castro, an associate with the Youth and Militarism Program of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group. Area school and military officials defend the test as a valuable career-planning tool. "This is actually a community service that the Department of Defense provides to help every generation of youth find where they fit in the world about them," said Chris Arendt, deputy director of accession policy at the Pentagon. In the Baltimore area, nearly 1,400 Anne Arundel students took the test last school year, along with about 1,000 from Baltimore County, nearly 500 from Baltimore, 181 from Carroll County and 573 from Howard County. In Howard, three schools with ROTC programs offer the test, school district officials said. Baltimore administers the test to seniors on a voluntary basis, generally at career and technology schools, and at schools with ROTC programs. Baltimore County makes it available to students who request it. Anne Arundel County school officials say the test is not mandatory but acknowledge that the message might not have been clear to all students, given the many standardized tests they must take. "This is one of the first times where kids get to choose whether they take a test," said Jonathan Brice, spokesman for the Anne Arundel schools. Next year, officials said, they will emphasize that the test is voluntary. The test, which has been given to recruits since 1968, measures verbal and math skills, and knowledge in areas such as automotive maintenance and repair, electronics and mechanics. It was expanded to schools at the urging of the federal Labor and Education departments, Defense Department officials say. Military recruitment of high school students has come under scrutiny recently with the war in Iraq continuing. Such efforts were criticized in the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11. In addition, the federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools that receive federal funding to provide military recruiters with students' names, addresses and phone numbers unless parents have opted out. Schools also must allow recruiters to have the same access to campuses that colleges have. The military's vocational aptitude test is not part of the No Child Left Behind requirement, and the test's "career explorations" Web site says students who agree to take the test aren't making any obligations. Nationwide, 722,450 students took the test during the past school year, according to the Defense Department. That includes more than 8,700 Maryland students from 175 schools. The assessment has evolved several times since it was developed from tests used by branches of the military, said Arendt, a Navy captain. He said he remembers taking an early version of the test while he was in high school in the 1970s. "It gave me, as a student, a good idea about what I could and could not look forward to in careers," he said. Students or parents who are concerned about how information about them is used have options, he said. One is to indicate on the test that they do not want their results released to military recruiters. "They get the results, and it's transparent to us," Arendt said. Some students and their families aren't aware of that option, Castro said. For more than 18 years, the committee has answered questions about the test from families who encounter it in their schools. As for casting the test as a career-planning tool, he said, "We think it's a disingenuous use of the test." Area school officials say the tests can suggest opportunities in military and civilian jobs. "It's a career-interest inventory," said Rhonda C. Gill, Anne Arundel's director of pupil services. "It's not done in any way, shape or form to focus kids on going into the military." In Carroll County, all seven high schools have made the test available to students since the late 1970s, said Barbara Guthrie, the school system's guidance supervisor. Typically, a handful of students sign up for it at each school, she said, but at Winters Mill High School, 70 students took the test this year. "It's helpful to students and parents as well, but you use it in combination with lots of other assessments in schools to help students figure out future plans and what their abilities are," Guthrie said. Although some Anne Arundel schools administer the test more formally than schools in other counties, officials noted that students aren't required to take it. Of 250 South River juniors, 70 chose not to take the test on one of the two days it was offered last month. While ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders were taking the PSAT countywide in October, a little more than half of the seniors at Broadneck High School took the military test, said guidance counselor Joe Kozik, as did seniors at North County and other high schools. At Broadneck, several parents called to get more information about the test. "I think the Iraq war has certainly raised concerns on multiple levels," said Broadneck Principal Cindy Hudson. The test serves a purpose for military recruiters. Kozik noted that recruiters are especially interested in the test results of five Broadneck students this year. Because of the reporting requirements of No Child Left Behind, Kozik said, "whether you take this test or not ... we by law have to provide your name to the federal government." At South River High School, some juniors left their classes to take the test two weeks ago. Others remained in class or went to school later rather than take it. Emily Hawse said knowing the test's military connection earlier would not have kept her from taking it. "I was thinking that this might help me for college," she said. Her mother, Monica M. Hawse, agreed that the test would be useful but added, "I think everybody - kids, parents, teachers - should know it's affiliated with the military." Megan Lloyd, 16, a junior from Edgewater, said she learned about the test when a military recruiter spoke to her class. She was interested in anything that could help her decide what path to pursue and was not concerned about the military connection. "The man who came into our social studies class made me feel comfortable about it," she said after classes one day. "It's not like they're going to hound you about it," said fellow Edgewater resident Charlie Fischer, 16, who is considering the armed forces and college. "Or at least, we hope not," Lloyd said. Sun staff writers Athima Chansanchai and Laura Loh contributed to this article. (c) Copyright 2004 Baltimore Sun ### Common Dreams NewsCenter (c) Copyrighted 1997-2004 www.commondreams.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 7) Honoring 32nd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (A resolution put before the S.F. Board of Supervisors Resolution recognizing January 22, 2005 as "Stand Up For Choice Day" in honor of the 32nd anniversary of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade establishing a woman's constitutional right to decide when and if to have a child; and further supporting the local Pro-Choice community demonstrating in San Francisco to defend a woman's right to choose safe and legal abortion and birth control and further urging all legal authorities to fully facilitate the protection of the right of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures in an ever-increasingly hostile anti-choice climate on the federal level and in state legislatures and courts throughout the country. WHEREAS, The 1973 landmark United States Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade (the "Roe decision") recognized the right of women to control their reproductive lives is central to their ability to participate fully and equally in the economic and social spheres of society; and WHEREAS, The Roe decision states that (1) the decision to have an abortion is accorded the highest level of constitutional protection, like any other fundamental constitutional right, (2) state laws regarding abortion must be neutral with respect to influencing a woman's decision whether or not to have an abortion, (3) in the period before a fetus is viable, the government may restrict abortion only to protect a woman's health, and (4) after a fetus becomes viable, a state government may prohibit abortion, provided that such state's laws must permit abortion where necessary to protect a women's health or life; and WHEREAS, The protected right to make childbearing decisions, including abortion, has enabled women to pursue educational and employment opportunities that were often unattainable prior to the Roe decision; and WHEREAS, The Center for Reproductive Rights reports that prior to the Roe decision, between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred in the United States each year; and WHEREAS, In 1992, the United States Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (the "Casey decision"), where, although it upheld a woman's right to choose, it also allowed federal, state and local laws that favor fetal rights and burden a woman's choice to have abortion, as long as the burden is not "undue;" and WHEREAS, The Casey decision has unlocked the door to hundreds of state and federal criminal restrictions designed to discourage women from accessing abortion and to promote the rights of the fetus throughout pregnancy; and WHEREAS, According to the Allen Gutmacher Institute (AGI), since 1996, more than 300 criminal abortion restrictions have been enacted by state and federal legislatures, none of which would have been constitutional under the original Roe decision; and WHEREAS. According to Planned Parenthood, only eight states, including California, do not mandate parental involvement before a minor can obtain an abortion; and WHEREAS, According to AGI, as of January 1, 2004, twenty-one (21) states will have laws in effect that require a woman to wait for a period of time, usually twenty four (24) hours, but up to as many as seventy-two (72) hours, after receiving state-directed counseling before she can receive an abortion; and WHEREAS, These restrictions on access to abortion particularly discriminate against young women, poor women and women of color; and WHEREAS, AGI indicates that 87 percent of all counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider; and WHEREAS, For the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided, anti-choice officials are firmly in control of both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government; and WHEREAS, The United States Supreme Court is only one vacancy away from eliminating the Constitutional right to abortion; and WHEREAS, Anti-choice leaders in the Bush Administration and the federal government are imposing their anti-choice ideology on the world's most vulnerable women worldwide by blocking international family planning funding and promoting ineffective and harmful abstinence-only programs abroad; and WHEREAS, On January 22nd, people from all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond will gather to defend one of our most prized rights and liberties, the freedom of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures; now, therefore, be RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors recognizes January 22nd, 2005 as "Stand Up for Choice Day" in honor of the landmark 1973 United States Supreme Court decision of Roe. v. Wade, which established a woman's constitutional right to decide when and if to have a child; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors support the local Pro-Choice community demonstrating in San Francisco to defend a woman's right to choose safe and legal abortion and birth control; and, be it FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Board of Supervisors urge all legal authorities to fully facilitate the protection of the right of women to control their reproductive health, lives and futures in an ever-increasingly hostile anti-choice climate on the federal level and in state legislatures and courts throughout the country. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 8) WMD: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION, the movie will be at the Red Vic Theatre in S.F. for two days: Jan.4th and 5th. Check newspapers for details. For more information contact: Richard Castro Outreach & Special Distribution Cinema Libre Studio 818.349.8822 Ph. 818.349.9922 Fax www.cinemalibrestudio.com ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 9) The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losing. By Amer Jubran January 2, 2005 "I am surprised that the forces are not using air-lifting C-130 airplanes to avoid ground transportation, which is costing us about a hundred soldiers every month," said commanding Colonel John Jumpier of the US Air Force during a press conference in December. About 2,000 military convoys must use the Iraqi highways to supply the spread-out US forces with water, food, fuel and other essential supplies. Jumpier said, "It will not be efficient to serve our troops, but it's a chance to save some lives." He added, "I know that there will be an increase in the chances of getting these slow and low altitude flying C-130's shot down, but it's a risk that we should take." A first look at this statement and one would conclude, correctly, that it is a very dangerous situation on the ground for US occupying forces. Their lack of control inside the cities of Iraq is now matched by their lack of control over the highways between them. When US military leaders have to decide which deadly option to choose from, it reflects a tone of despair where the safety of the troops is no longer an important issue. No one is able to define the mission of the troops in Iraq, or for how long this mission will last. No one at all, including George W. Bush, can explain the US strategy in Iraq. This is because there is no strategy. With the Iraqi resistance raging, it is not clear why the US is occupying this country and why the US is so willing to sacrifice its soldiers there. While news sources are divided between either concealing or exaggerating the number of those killed in Iraq, other important statistics about US soldiers are forgotten. These statistics give a shocking picture about the truth of what is happening in Iraq. For example, CBS's 60 Minutes reported last fall that 300 soldiers migrated to Canada when they received orders to join their units heading to Iraq. 60 Minutes went on to say that 5,500 US soldiers had deserted for fear of being killed in Iraq. Some refused to join units leaving for Iraq, but most of them escaped after arriving in Iraq by fleeing to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan. As one soldier stated: "They deceived us when they described our mission to Iraq as a walk in the park." He added: "I took off so that they won't write on my grave, Deceived Dead GI in Iraq." Smuggling American GI's is a booming business in Iraq these days. For $1,000 and his/her weapon and uniform, any US soldier can get him or herself out of Iraq through Kurdistan. Last April, a female US soldier was captured by the Kurds, allies of the US, dressed like a Kurdish woman with a face veil, attempting to cross into Turkey. According to the New York Times, a Pentagon study revealed that one in every six soldiers who served in Iraq requires immediate psychological treatment. Over a million soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last two years. Steven Robinson, a NY Times military expert, believes that the number needing treatment could jump from one to three soldiers in every six. "There is a train loaded with people who need help that will be coming to town for the next thirty five years," said Robinson. These figures are the worst for the US since the Vietnam War. "Operation Iraqi Freedom" was supposed to be short and swift. Soldiers were promised that it would be an easy victory and that they would be home in time for the summer of 2003. Instead, urban fighting like that in the city of Fallujah last November, which provided unlimited possibilities for resistance hideouts, booby-trapped houses, and roads full of roadside bombs, put US soldiers in the position of having to live every single minute of the day in fear of an attack. In addition, seeing Iraqis and not being able to distinguish who is a friend and who is an enemy causes severe anxiety to soldiers. Paul Raykhouve, commander of a Florida National Guard platoon who served in Iraq for ten months, was quoted during CBS Sixty Minutes saying: "The enemy is everywhere, in every street, looking at you from every window, in every alley. One cannot think straight because of nerve-wracking fear." Frightened troops lacking both certainty about their mission and a strong conviction about what they are doing often end up committing war crimes, such as killing prisoners or injured people. They see in these crimes an opportunity to get even with their enemy. Racism combines with fear to make this killing possible. It then becomes important to win acceptance among other soldiers to justify the crimes. The poor training and poor education of these soldiers also stands in the way of reason and critical thinking. They learn to copy existing models of behavior, without a code of ethics or outside authority to prevent violations of rules of warfare. Even those soldiers who are not convinced that it is okay to commit war crimes find it hard to resist. Both the political and military leadership of the US forces are directly responsible for providing a large -scale coverup of these crimes. Soldiers are subjected to an emotional extortion known as "Uniform Code of Loyalty and Secrecy." Furthermore, the political strength of the US is used to provide immunity for these soldiers from an international war crimes tribunal. This leads to normalizing the criminal behavior of servicemen, who know they can act with impunity. Caught in frenzy of mass killing, most soldiers develop psychological stress and mental trauma as a result of serving in Iraq. This stress, predictably, has been taken out on defenseless Iraqi civilians. Many Iraqis are killed everyday simply because US soldiers suspected that they were resistance members. The horrific stories about US soldiers executing wounded Iraqis or sexually assaulting Iraqi prisoners reveal the severe psychological conditions that US troops are living under. Upon finishing service in Iraq, these soldiers will no longer have Iraqis to murder at will. The weapons they were trained to use will be left behind. These two things -- without their knowing it -- had become important in their lives. Without them their return to US society, where there is little social support, will often mean poverty, alcohol, drugs, domestic violence, divorce, and suicide. In order not to face themselves, the lies they were told, and the crimes they committed, these soldiers will return to what they learned in Iraq - crime, drug trafficking, prostitution, rape, armed robbery, child abuse, racism, and rallying around the flag. The government of the US will then have to engage in another massive coverup. This time it will be to avoid admitting any responsibility for the psychological illnesses of its servicemen, and for providing no resources to treat them. Damaged soldiers will become a supply of felons to the US justice system, which long ago stopped caring about any kind of social justice. The justice system will in turn deliver the veterans to the prison system, the US's largest growth industry. Information about the number of US causalities in Iraq is available on a web site of the Pentagon or known as the "War Hub" at www.pentagon.gov. This information covers only those who are officially US citizens enlisted with different military services. Hired security contractors, or mercenaries, and recruits who are not citizens who enlisted to obtain a "green card," are not counted or mentioned. A large number of the green card recruits are from Mexico and Central America. There are no organizations to look after their rights or help them once they're in Iraq. Most of them are buried in Iraq when killed. A videotape produced and distributed by the "Majles Shora Al-Mojahideen in Fallujah," one of the most important military wings of the Iraqi resistance, showed a burial site discovered outside the Iraqi city of Samara with tens of bodies in US military body bags. The dead where dressed in US uniforms. It is estimated that as many as 40% of the US troops serving in Iraq are green card recruits. The website of the Pentagon divides the causalities in Iraq into three categories: 1)"Combat Causalities" -- 1,300 dead, and 9,000 injured since March, 2003. Both figures are false. 2) "Non-Combat Causalities." The site does not report how many of these were injured or killed. Last fall, 60 Minutes concluded that the figure could be around 3,000 killed and over 25,000 injured. 3) "Coalition Causalities." Information under this category was posted briefly, then deleted. The figures showed 750 killed and 1,034 injured. It is not clear who these people were. If they were "coalition forces," then why are their countries not claiming them? The US government has gained a reputation of systematically lying to its population and the rest of the world, but a few facts about Iraq are emerging despite efforts to conceal them: * Political stability and security in Iraq is non-existent. This goes to the heart of the claimed US goal in Iraq. The US justified its removal by military means of Saddam as a way to create a better and more stable country. Instead, Iraqis are caught in poverty, hunger, and terrible violence every day as a direct result of US forces. Iraq is not a better place today, as Tony Blair and George Bush have claimed. And after Fallujah no one any longer believes the US is trying to bring freedom to the Iraqis. * That great lie, the "war on terrorism," has failed to crush what the US calls international terrorism. US citizens are not safer today than they were on September 11, 2001. In fact, the most powerful force in the US -- its military machine - is now completely vulnerable to lethal attacks by the ever-growing Iraqi resistance. Normally, the military is established to defend or attack those labeled enemies of the state. In the case of the US, its military is designed to twist the arms of those who do not agree with its imperial agenda. The US is clearly involved in practicing terrorism by military means to achieve its strategic interests everywhere around the globe. But in Iraq, the mighty US military, with over 150,000 well-armed troops, is very nervous and suffers from low morale, and in the eyes of the world has lost the moral edge. Furthermore, the war is not a well supported cause in the US. This time the risk of getting killed in Iraq is real. This time the enemy is real. The US public must decide on supporting a policy of war that is killing their own children and the Iraqi people, or fighting against the war by taking drastic measures --measures that go beyond vigils and feel-good political demonstrations. We may be sure that if what we are told about Iraq by the US government does not look good, the actual truth must be a great deal worse. Knowing the truth is a big burden. The truth about Iraq is that the US ÂMighty GIÂs are not so mighty! Announce mailing list Announce@onepalestine.org http://mail.onepalestine.org/mailman/listinfo/announce_onepalestine.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 10) Update on National Assembly of United for Peace and Justice We are happy to let you know that after a great deal of work we have secured a great site for the National Assembly on the weekend of Feb. 19-21...the Millennium Hotel in downtown St. Louis, Missouri. The hotel is easy to get to from the airport, and St. Louis is in driving distance from many cities. The hotel is across the street from the famous Arch on the Mississippi River. I visited the hotel last week and so we know it has all of the facilities we will need to help ensure a successful assembly, and we have been able to negotiate an excellent price. As Feb. 19 is about seven weeks away we encourage your group or organization to start the process of selecting delegates to represent you at the National Assembly. We are still working out financial details but have decided that the minimal registration fee for the assembly will include accommodations and food for up to two delegates from each UFPJ member group (local affiliates or chapters of national organizations that are members of UFPJ will only have one delegate). All the details will be worked out and emailed to you by the end of this week. Registration for the assembly will be available on the United for Peace and Justice web site next week. Travel is the responsibility of the member groups. During the National Assembly United for Peace and Justice will decide on a strategic framework, as well as specific strategy, program and organizing proposals. There will be speakers and small group discussions on the war in Iraq, and the State of the U.S. and the Anti-War Movement and much more. The coalition will elect a new national Steering Committee. Cultural and analytical presenters and some special guests as well as a dance party will round out the weekend. I also want to introduce the coordinator of the National Assembly, Diane Lent. Diane has been a volunteer with UFPJ and has worked on many of the mobilizations in New York. She has a long history in the peace and justice movement and has coordinated similar gatherings for progressive organizations. We'll let you know as soon as the assembly registration is set up on the web site and in the coming weeks you will be getting a lot more information about the assembly. In the meantime, if you have any questions please feel free to contact Diane either by phone at the national office (212-868-5545) or by email (greenelent@earthlink.net). peace, Leslie Cagan National Coordinator UFPJ@mediajumpstart.net https://secure.mediajumpstart.net/mailman/listinfo/ufpj ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 11) Zarqawi Qaeda-Linked Group Kills Iraq Governor-Web DUBAI (Reuters) Tue Jan 4, 2005 08:21 AM ET http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7231891&src=eD ialog/GetContent§ion=news DUBAI (Reuters) - A group led by al Qaeda ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said it had assassinated Baghdad governor Ali al-Haidri Tuesday, according to an Internet statement. "A group of mujahideen of the Qaeda Organization for Holy War in Iraq assassinated a tyrant and American agent, the governor of Baghdad Ali Haidri," said the statement, which was posted on an Islamist site. "We warn every traitor and ally of the Jews and the Christians that this will be your fate," it added. Gunmen killed Haidri in Iraq's highest-profile assassination in eight months and a suicide bomber killed 11 people at a police checkpoint Tuesday in an escalating campaign to wreck an election due on Jan. 30. Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest suicide bombings and attacks in Iraq. Haidri had survived a previous assassination attempt in September. (c) Reuters 2005 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 12) Iraq Battling More Than 200,000 Insurgents: Intelligence Chief Agence France-Presse Baghdad - Iraq Monday 03 January 2005 http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010405W.shtml Baghdad - Iraq's insurgency counts more than 200,000 active fighters and sympathisers, the country's national intelligence chief told AFP, in the bleakest assessment to date of the armed revolt waged by Sunni Muslims. "I think the resistance is bigger than the US military in Iraq. I think the resistance is more than 200,000 people," Iraqi intelligence service director General Mohamed Abdullah Shahwani said in an interview ahead of the January 30 elections. Shahwani said the number includes at least 40,000 hardcore fighters but rises to more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter. The numbers far exceed any figure presented by the US military in Iraq, which has struggled to get a handle on the size of the resistance since toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003. A senior US military officer declined to endorse or dismiss the spy chief's numbers. "As for the size of the insurgency, we don't have good resolution on the size," the officer said on condition of anonymity. Past US military assessments on the insurgency's size have been revised upwards from 5,000 to 20,000 full and part-time members, in the last half year, most recently in October. Defense experts said it was impossible to divine the insurgency's total number, but called Shahwani's estimate a valid guess, with as much credence, if not more, than any US numbers. "I believe General Shahwani's estimation, given that he is referring predominantly to active sympathizers and supporters and to part-time as well as full-time active insurgents, may not be completely out of the ballpark," said defense analyst Bruce Hoffman who served as an advisor to the US occupation in Iraq and now works for US-based think-tank RAND Corporation. Compared to the coalition's figure, he said: "General Shahwani's - however possibly high it may be, might well give a more accurate picture of the situation." Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, put Shahwani's estimates on an equal footing with the American's. "The Iraqi figures do... recognize the reality that the insurgency in Iraq has broad support in Sunni areas while the US figures down play this to the point of denial." Shahwani said the resistance enjoys wide backing in the provinces of Baghdad, Babel, Salahuddin, Diyala, Nineveh and Tamim, homes to Sunni Arabs who fear they will lose influence after the elections. Insurgents have gained strength through Iraq's tight-knit tribal bonds and links to the old 400,000-strong Iraqi army, dissolved by the US occupation in May 2003 two months after the US-led invasion, he said. "People are fed up after two years, without improvement. People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army was hundreds of thousands. You'd expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers." The rebels have turned city neighborhoods and small towns around central Iraq into virtual no-go zones despite successful US military efforts to reclaim former enclaves like Samarra and Fallujah, he said. "What are you going to call the situation here (in Baghdad) when 20 to 30 men can move around with weapons and no one can get them in Adhamiyah, Dura and Ghazaliya," he said, naming neighborhoods in the capital. The spy chief also questioned the success of the November campaign to retake Fallujah, which US forces have hailed as a major victory against the resistance. "What we have now is an empty city almost destroyed... and most of the insurgents are free. They have gone either to Mosul or to Baghdad or other areas." Shahwani pointed to a resurgent Baath party as the key to the insurgency's might. The Baath has split into three factions, with the deadliest being the branch still paying allegiance to jailed dictator Saddam Hussein, he said. Shahwani said the core Baath fighting strength was more than 20,000. Operating out of Syria, Saddam's half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan and former aide Mohamed Yunis al-Ahmed are providing funding and tapping their connections to old army divisions, particularily in Mosul, Samarra, Baquba, Kirkuk and Tikrit. Saddam's henchman, Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, still on the lam in Iraq, is also involved, he said. Another two factions, which have broken from Saddam, are also around, but have yet to mount any attacks. The Baath are complemented by Islamist factions ranging from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda affiliate to Ansar al-Sunna and Ansar al-Islam. Asked if the insurgents were winning, Shahwani answered: "I would say they aren't losing." (c) Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 13) U.S. May Add Advisers to Aid Iraq's Military By ERIC SCHMITT WASHINGTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04military.html?o ref=login&hp&ex=1104814800&en=1d44abe6f1fb9a3e&ei=5094&partner=homepage WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 - Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq, is reviewing a proposal to add hundreds of American military advisers to work directly with Iraqi units, whose disappointing performance could jeopardize the long-term American exit strategy from Iraq, senior military officials said Monday. Americans are training Iraqi police officers and national guard troops to replace them in securing the country, but the results over all have been troubling, with growing desertion rates in the most violent provinces, gaps in leadership, and poor battlefield performance, American military officers and troops say. The advisers would bolster the Iraqi will to fight, help train officers who would lead the troops, curb desertion and provide Iraqi forces with the confidence that American units would back them up - in some cases fighting alongside them if needed, military and Pentagon officials said. Several hundred American troops are already embedded with Iraqi units, following a long tradition in American military actions. But the proposal would greatly expand this presence. The details of the proposal are still being discussed among American and Iraqi officials, and more troops would probably not be embedded until after the Jan. 30 elections, in which Iraqi forces will play a crucial part. Embedding more Americans with Iraqis would mean diverting perhaps several hundred additional American troops away from combat operations, military officials said. There are 150,000 American forces in Iraq. Although diverting soldiers might be risky at a time when commanders say they need troops to press offensives against insurgents, the plan addresses a widely acknowledged need. American commanders have praised the skills of some Iraqi forces, particularly new commando units that have seen combat throughout the country. But the Americans have criticized other Iraqi forces for their slovenly appearance and lack of commitment, raising questions about how soldiers and marines will respond tojoining such units. There has been widespread concern in the Bush administration about the poor performance of Iraqi troops. President Bush himself discussed the issue in a news conference on Dec. 20. "They've got some generals in place and they've got foot soldiers in place, but the whole command structure necessary to have a viable military is not in place," he said. "And so they're going to spend a lot of time and effort on achieving that objective." If approved, the plan would expand and standardize steps already taken by some American units, including the Army's First Cavalry Division and some Marine Corps units, to enhance the training that the Iraqi Army, National Guard and police forces receive after boot camp. "The development of Iraqi security forces is, in my view, necessarily the main effort," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, commander of American forces in northern Iraq, said in an e-mail message from his headquarters in Mosul on Monday. "Building capable and loyal Iraqi forces is what will eventually lead to the defeat of the insurgency and to a sufficiently stable environment so that U.S. and other forces can begin to reduce our presence." General Ham, noting the earlier efforts by some units, said, "It's time to apply it on a larger scale." "It seems to me that this is something we want to start doing in the immediate post-election period," he said. The proposal that General Casey and his top aides are weighing has received support in principle from Pentagon officials at a time when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been urging commanders in Iraq to accelerate the creation of Iraqi security forces and to improve their quality, a senior Pentagon official said Monday. General Casey, at a Pentagon news conference on Dec. 16, said an exhaustive internal review of the military's campaign plan for Iraq concluded that training the local police and building a better border patrol were two of three essential areas that were well behind schedule. The other area was establishing effective Iraqi intelligence services. Proponents of embedding programs readily acknowledge that they will lose the American troops for active combat operations, but they insist that the Iraqis' training and confidence has improved. "It's cost us," Brig. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, an assistant commander of the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad, told reporters last week of the division's 540 soldiers who are now assigned to Iraqi National Guard units in the city. But, he added, "It pays dividends." Some influential lawmakers, however, including Senator John W. Warner, a Virginia Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee and who recently visited troops in Iraq, have expressed pessimism that Iraqis will be able to develop independent security forces potent enough to thwart the insurgency. "The raw material is lacking in the willpower and commitment after they receive this training to really shoulder the heavy responsibilities," he said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" on Dec. 19. On paper, there are reasons for worry and for hope, military officials say. There are plans to produce a total of 179,600 police and border patrol officers. Of about 116,000 officers on duty now, only 73,000 are fully trained and equipped, according to Pentagon statistics on Dec. 27. About half of a projected 100,000 Iraqi Army, National Guard and commando troops are now operating. There are now 10-man adviser and support teams with each of 27 regular Iraqi Army and intervention force battalions (nine of which are still in training), their nine brigade headquarters (three still in training) and their three division headquarters, senior military officials in Iraq said. In addition, adviser teams from Army Special Forces and other American units are with most of the Iraqi National Guard forces. Expanding on those adviser teams, the proposal before General Casey would probably provide 10-man teams with 45 existing and 20 emerging national guard battalions. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is providing small teams to help train new Iraqi border police officers, a military official in Iraq said. Some details of the new plan were first reported by CNN on Dec. 26. Some of the most ambitious plans are to bolster the abilities of the Iraqi police. The new Iraqi government has fielded about a dozen police commando units or other specialized units, whose performance American officers have largely praised. The commandos include former Iraqi special forces troops and have performed well, combining commando skills and weaponry with police powers to make arrests, a senior allied official in Baghdad said Monday. The approach would also provide assistance and mentoring to the 3,500 basic police graduates that academies in Iraq and Jordan are churning out every month. After the insurgent attacks on police stations in Mosul in November, in which most of the city's police officers abandoned their posts, American officials, working closely with the Iraqi government, have toughened the training to resemble more paramilitary operations and have enforced policies to cut down on Iraqis' skipping out on leave. In Mosul, American forces have been assigned to all police stations. On Saturday, Iraqi security forces and their American advisers fought off a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a police station in the southeast part of the city. A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Paul Hastings, said it was the 12th time since Nov. 10 that insurgents had tried to take over a police station, none of which have fallen to rebels in that period. Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Erik Eckholm from Baghdad. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 14) 5 U.S. Troops Are Killed, and Baghdad Governor Is Slain By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and DAVID E. SANGER. BAGHDAD, Iraq January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/international/middleeast/04cnd-iraq.html?h p&ex=1104901200&en=774671f9e3bc3432&ei=5094&partner=homepage BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 4 - Four American soldiers and a marine were killed today and three other soldiers were wounded on a day that also saw the assassination of the governor of Baghdad, one of the highest-profile killings of an Iraqi official in months. In other violence, a bomb-laden fuel truck killed eight Iraqi commandos and two other people when it crashed into a checkpoint in western Baghdad about 9 a.m. today, according to an Interior Ministry official. Sixty others were wounded in the attack, which happened near the scene of two deadly car bombings on Monday. Three soldiers with the First Cavalry Division died and two were wounded when an improvised bomb went off at about 11 a.m. in north Baghdad. About 30 minutes later a soldier with the First Infantry Division was killed and another was wounded, the military said, when a bomb exploded near Balad, site of an American air base about 50 miles north of Baghdad. The marine with the First Marine Expeditionary Force was killed in action while carrying out security operations in Al Anbar Province, a restive Sunni region west of the capital, the military said. The Baghdad governor, Ali al-Haidari, was attacked and killed in a roadside ambush after he left his home, the Interior Ministry said. The Associated Press reported that six of the governor's bodyguards were also killed. He was the most senior official assassinated in the city since the head of the Governing Council was killed last May. Mr. Haidari survived a previous assassination attempt in September. Later, an insurgent group led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and linked to Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the ambush, according to a message and video posted on an Islamist Internet site. The group has taken responsibility for many previous deadly attacks in Iraq. Insurgents have repeatedly attacked Iraqi officials as well as members of the country's security forces, accusing them of collaborating with foreign occupiers. The steady violence prompted Iraq's interim president, Ghazi al-Yawar, to urge the United Nations to to look into whether the country should go ahead with its scheduled Jan. 30 election. "Definitely the United Nations, as an independent umbrella of legitimacy, should really take the responsibility by seeing whether that is possible or not," Mr. al-Yawar, a Sunni Arab sheik, told Reuters in an interview. "On a logical basis, there are signs that it will be a tough call to hold the election," he said, in comments that pulled back from a statement he made on a visit to Washington in December. On that visit with President Bush, both men reinforced their message that elections must go ahead as scheduled, despite the violence. Mr. al-Yawar's comments today came after Prime Minister Ayad Allawi telephoned President Bush on Monday and discussed the many impediments still facing the country as it heads toward elections in 27 days, according to senior American officials familiar with the contents of the call. The officials insisted that Dr. Allawi, Iraq's interim leader, did not tell Mr. Bush that the elections should be delayed, though his defense minister said in Cairo on Monday that the voting could be postponed to ensure greater participation by Sunnis. "There was no substantive conversation about delay," a senior administration official said. Dr. Allawi, the official said, "wasn't even a bit wobbly" on that point. But some officials in Washington and in Iraq interpreted the telephone call as a sign that Dr. Allawi, who is clearly concerned his own party could be headed to defeat if the election is held on schedule, may be preparing the ground to make the case for delay to Mr. Bush. "Clearly the thinking on this is still in motion in Baghdad," a senior administration official said Monday evening. "And President Bush is holding firm," the official said, telling Dr. Allawi that the Iraqi government has met every deadline so far, including assuming power from the United States in June. Mr. Bush has publicly insisted that the elections must go forward on Jan. 30, as scheduled, and said any delay would mean giving in to the insurgents who have vowed to stop the elections from taking place. Dr. Allawi's call, on Mr. Bush's first day back in Washington after a weeklong break at his Texas ranch, came just hours after a wave of bombing attacks left at least 20 people dead, including one blast near the interim prime minister's Baghdad party headquarters. Another killed three British citizens and an American in a convoy of the American security firm Kroll Inc. In addition to the 20 or more deaths - a figure that included suicide bombers - dozens were injured. The attacks, which followed a car bombing north of Baghdad on Sunday that killed 18 Iraqi troops, were the latest attempt by insurgents to destabilize the country and intimidate Iraqis in the weeks before the parliamentary elections. The insurgents' targets are Iraqis who work with American forces, especially in Sunni areas, in hopes of frightening people from the polls. Some groups have already warned of major attacks on Election Day. While White House officials were hesitant to give many details of the discussion between Dr. Allawi and Mr. Bush, they said the Iraqi leader brought up questions of security and the ferocity of the insurgency. "It was a discussion about the impediments," said an official who reviewed a transcript of the call. "But no one suggested the impediments could not be overcome." Yet Dr. Allawi's cabinet is already showing signs of weakening on the question of holding the elections this month. The defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, suggested during his Cairo visit that a postponement would encourage Sunnis to participate; American and Iraqi officials have been concerned that if the Sunnis are blocked from voting or boycott the election, the outcome will not be considered legitimate. But an American Embassy official said the United States wanted the elections to proceed as scheduled, and an official with Iraq's independent election commission told The Associated Press that there were no plans for a delay. No one affiliated with Prime Minister Allawi's party, the Iraqi National Accord, was hurt in the suicide car bombing Monday morning near the party's headquarters in Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. But the blast killed two Iraqi police officers and one other person in addition to the car's driver while injuring at least 25 others, according to Iraqi officials. The Iraqi police said the bomb detonated after the police rained gunfire on the vehicle to stop it from passing a checkpoint. The suicide bomber drove a Chevrolet Caprice with the markings of a Baghdad taxicab and rammed the checkpoint near the party headquarters just west of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified American compound in central Baghdad. The victims were taken to Yarmouk Hospital. Ahmed Thamir, a 21-year-old soldier slightly wounded in the attack, stood guard outside the hospital with a Kalashnikov rifle. "It's hard to trust anyone nowadays," he said. The group that calls itself the Army of Ansar al-Sunna took responsibility for the attack in an Internet posting. In the message, the group warned "apostates" that if they "do not repent from your infidelity," it had other bombers ready to "kill you one by one." The group has claimed a string of attacks, including the Dec. 21 bombing of a mess tent in Mosul that killed 14 American servicemen and 8 other people. Many recent attacks against Iraqi troops and officials have occurred in the heavily Sunni areas north of Baghdad, a region where the deadliest attacks took place on Monday. In the first attack, shortly before 8 a.m., a car bomb killed 4 Iraqi National Guard soldiers and wounded 14 more near a military base in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, said Master Sgt. Robert Cowens, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division. The attack was not far from where insurgents killed 18 Iraqi troops and a civilian the day before by detonating an explosives-laden vehicle next to a bus full of national guardsmen. Early Monday afternoon, six Iraqi National Guard troops were killed and four wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol near Tikrit, farther north of Baghdad, with a roadside bomb. The attackers used an artillery shell for ammunition in the attack, which happened at 2:40 p.m., Sergeant Cowens said. There were reports of other attacks across Iraq. In Tal Afar, a city in northern Iraq, one Iraqi policeman was killed and two were wounded when a homemade bomb hidden in a decapitated body exploded as the policemen approached the body, the government said in a statement. The attack on a car carrying employees of Kroll Inc., the New York-based risk consulting and security firm, occurred at 3:45 p.m. at a checkpoint where people leave Baghdad's fortified Green Zone to get onto the road to the airport. A Kroll official said that four people were killed when a suicide bomber rammed into their car, including two British employees of Kroll. "It was a suicide attack on a convoy coming from the airport," said Pat Wood, Kroll's vice president for corporate communications. The other victims were an American woman, Tracy Hushin, of Islip, N.Y., with the consulting firm BearingPoint, and a British citizen working for a subcontractor of the company, an announcement by BearingPoint said. Despite the violence, American officials say the election must be held, as planned, on Jan. 30. For one thing, they say, the Iraqi interim constitution mandates the timing. There have already been extensive preparations by the American military for the elections, they say. Some Sunni leaders have called for a delay, worried that the intimidation tactics will keep many voters home and lead to severe Sunni under representation in the new government. Mr. Shaalan made his suggestion for a delay Monday as he sought help from other Arab nations to persuade Iraq's Sunnis to take part. Richar A. Oppel Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article and David E. Sanger from Washington. Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 15) Supreme Court to Rule on Executing Young Killers By ADAM LIPTAK January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04juvenile.html?hp&ex=1104901200& en=ceb849ee6735d090&ei=5094&partner=homepage In August, six months after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of the juvenile death penalty, Robert Acuna, a high school student from Baytown, Tex., was put on trial for his life. The jury convicted Mr. Acuna of killing two elderly neighbors, James and Joyce Carroll, when he was 17, shooting them "execution style," as prosecutors described it, and stealing their car. At sentencing, when jurors weighed his crime against factors counseling leniency, Mr. Acuna's youth should have counted in his favor. Instead, his brooding and volatile adolescent demeanor may have hurt more than helped, and the Houston jury sentenced him to die. "They probably thought that he wasn't showing remorse," said Mr. Acuna's mother, Barbara. Renee Magee, who prosecuted Mr. Acuna, now 18, agreed that his behavior at the trial had alienated the jury. "He was very nonchalant," Ms. Magee said. "He laughed at inappropriate things. He still didn't quite get the magnitude of everything he did." Mr. Acuna is the latest person to enter death row for a crime committed before age 18. He may also be the last. If the Supreme Court prohibits the execution of 16- and 17-year-olds in a case it accepted a year ago, involving a Missouri man, the lives of Mr. Acuna and 71 other juvenile offenders on death row will be spared. A central issue before the court, which is expected to rule in the next few months, is whether the plummeting number of such death sentences - there were two last year - lends weight to the argument that putting youths on death row amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Supporters of the juvenile death penalty argue that the small number proves instead that the system works and that juries are making discerning choices on whom to sentence to death, taking due account of the defendants' youth and reserving the ultimate punishment for the worst of the worst. But a look at the cases of some of the juvenile offenders now on death row raises questions about how reliable and consistent juries have been in making those decisions. Age can shape every aspect of a capital case. Crimes committed by teenagers are often particularly brutal, attracting great publicity and fierce prosecutions. Adolescents are more likely to confess, and are not adept at navigating the justice system. Jurors' reactions to teenagers' demeanor and appearance can be quite varied. The defendants they see have aged an average of two years between the crime and the trial. And jurors may not necessarily accept expert testimony concerning recent research showing that the adolescent brain is not fully developed. The Supreme Court in 1988 banned the execution of those under 16 at the time of their crimes. During arguments in October on whether to move that categorical line to 18, Justice Antonin Scalia said the drop in juvenile death sentences was proof that juries could be trusted to sort through and weigh evidence about defendants' youth and culpability. "It doesn't surprise me that the death penalty for 16- to 18-year-olds is rarely imposed," Justice Scalia said. "I would expect it would be. But it's a question of whether you leave it to the jury to evaluate the person's youth and take that into account or whether you adopt a hard rule." Juries in capital cases involving juvenile offenders certainly place great weight on the defendants' youth. The defendants seldom testify, but jurors inspect them closely and draw conclusions from how they look and handle themselves. And the very same factors may cut both ways. Adolescent recklessness may suggest diminished responsibility to some and a terrible danger to others. The youth of Christopher Simmons, the defendant whose case is now before the Supreme Court, was such a double-edged sword. Mr. Simmons was 17 in 1993, when he and a friend robbed, bound and gagged Shirley Crook, 46, and pushed her into a river, where she drowned. During Mr. Simmons's sentencing hearing, a Missouri prosecutor scoffed at the notion that Mr. Simmons's age should count as a mitigating factor in his favor. "Seventeen years old," the prosecutor, George McElroy, said. "Isn't that scary? Doesn't that scare you? Mitigating? Quite the contrary, I submit. Quite the contrary." Mr. Acuna had a tough-looking buzz cut at the time of the killings, said Tim Carroll, the son of the couple Mr. Acuna killed. At the trial, he looked different. "He appeared as though someone had tried to make him look 8 years old all over again," Mr. Carroll said. "His hair was all combed down, almost in little bangs." That did not sway Mr. Acuna's jury. But the youthful appearance of Lee Malvo, the teenager who participated in the sniper shootings in the Washington area in 2002, may have saved his life. Mr. Malvo, who is short and slight, wore boyish, baggy sweaters most days. Although a Virginia jury convicted him of a killing he committed at 17, it voted against putting him to death. "He's very lucky that he looks a lot younger than he is," Robert F. Horan Jr., the lead prosecutor in the case, said at the time. But Mr. Malvo is growing older, and he still faces capital charges in other states. "They're talking about letting him grow a five o'clock shadow and then trying him in Alabama or Louisiana," said Victor L. Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and an expert on the juvenile death penalty, referring to prosecutors in those states. "Prosecutors don't mind delay in juvenile death penalty cases." Beyond wrestling with the appearance of youth, juries must also often balance the brutality and recklessness of much juvenile crime against young people's immaturity. Studies support the common view that adolescents tend to be reckless and do not calculate the risks and consequences of their actions as adults do. They are moodier, more susceptible to peer pressure and do not have an acute sense of mortality. The law seems to recognize this, with most states using 18 as the dividing line between childhood and adulthood in many areas, including the ability to vote and to serve on a jury. Mr. Carroll, the murdered couple's son, said a categorical rule made no sense in the context of the death penalty. "If you're going to make the argument that someone's cognitive reasoning is not developed at 17 years and 8 months but would be at 18," he said, "we should rethink whether they should be able to drive, and make split-second decisions in an 8,000-pound vehicle, or get married, or have children." When the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Simmons case, a brief supporting Missouri submitted by Alabama and five other states with the juvenile death penalty received particular attention. It set out, in plainspoken prose, the disturbing stories of 10 murders committed by seven young killers, all on death row in Alabama. The cases cited in the Alabama brief are in many ways typical, Professor Streib said. "The capital crimes committed by juveniles," he said, "are often classic adolescent male bizarreness, often sexual and all the more revolting for that reason." Mr. Carroll said Mr. Acuna's killings were sadistic. "The evidence given in the case very strongly indicates that he made my father kneel and shot him in the back of the head, execution-style," Mr. Carroll said. "My mother, who could not walk without the help of a walker - this fellow shot her in the side of her face and blew her teeth out all over the kitchen floor." Mr. Acuna then gave the woman time to wipe the blood from her mouth with a paper towel, Mr. Carroll said. "And then he moved in," Mr. Carroll said, "to shoot her through the brain when he thought it was time." If their youth can make teenage defendants wilder and their crimes more odious, it can also trip them up when they start navigating the legal system. According to a study of the juvenile offenders on death row by The New York Times, 56 percent confessed or gave incriminating statements to the authorities. Mr. Acuna was in the minority. "Juveniles are more likely to be more compliant, more naïve and less likely to believe that police do not have their best interests in mind," said Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern who has studied false confessions by juvenile defendants. "They are more likely to confess simply to bring an end to the interview process and take their chances in court." In the case of Mr. Acuna, the evidence in the case was largely circumstantial. He was found with James Carroll's wallet in a Dallas motel. The murdered couple's car was outside, and it contained the murder weapon. Juries have in recent years been increasingly reluctant to sentence teenagers to death, and the number of death sentences imposed on juvenile offenders is now almost at the vanishing point. In 2003 and 2004, only two juvenile offenders were sentenced to death in the United States. The average annual number in the 1990's was slightly more than 10. From 1999 to 2003, according to a study to be published in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the number of juvenile death sentences per 100 homicide arrests of those under 18 dropped to 0.2 from 1.6. "Over the past five years, there has been a very strong decline in willingness of juries and judges to sentence adolescents to death," said Jeffrey Fagan, a co-author of the study with Valerie West. "The decline is greater than you would expect knowing the decline in the homicide rate, the decline in juvenile homicide arrests and the decline in adult death sentences." It can be hard to say, then, what made the crimes of Mr. Acuna and Eric Morgan, the only two juvenile offenders sentenced to die last year, worse than other murders committed by teenagers around the nation. Mr. Morgan was convicted of killing a convenience store clerk in South Carolina during a robbery. The jury that spared Mr. Malvo's life heard many days of testimony about his difficult childhood in Jamaica and about the influence that his surrogate father and accomplice, John A. Muhammad, wielded over him. Mr. Acuna's lawyers had less to work with. "Robert wasn't on drugs, he wasn't abused, he wasn't mentally retarded or mentally ill," Ms. Acuna, his mother, said. The prosecutor, Ms. Magee, agreed that there had been nothing in the youth's personal life that would help explain the killings. Mr. Acuna's lawyers were left to rely almost entirely on his age in pleading for his life, and that was not enough, Ms. Magee said. "The crime just far outweighed the mitigating factor that he was a juvenile offender," she said. Ms. Acuna said it was hard to listen to Ms. Magee's pleas for her son's death at the trial. "Here is my son that I love and that I protect with my life," she said. "And here's a person who stands up and says, 'I'm going to do everything that I can to legally kill him.' " At bottom, Professor Streib said, only a few themes run through the 72 men on death row whose lives depend on how the Supreme Court rules on the juvenile death penalty. Most of the men, unlike Mr. Acuna, come from troubled backgrounds, and all committed terrible crimes. But that is true of many thousands of other juvenile killers. "It's not a rational process," Professor Streib said. "We can't look at juveniles on death row and say they are the worst of the worst. Some have killed entire families. Some shot a clerk while robbing a convenience store like thousands of others, and you have no idea why lightning struck in this or that case." Toby Lyles, Tom Torok and Margot Williams contributed reporting for this article. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 16) Prosecution Concludes Case in Terror Trial By JULIA PRESTON January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/nyregion/04stewart.html A federal prosecutor yesterday wrapped up the government's case against Lynne F. Stewart, a lawyer accused of aiding terrorists, by charging that she had released a bellicose statement to the news media on behalf of an imprisoned client because she secretly wanted to help violent militants overthrow the Egyptian government. The prosecutor, Andrew Dember, an assistant United States attorney, assailed the basic tenet of Ms. Stewart's defense: that she had conveyed messages to the news media from her client as part of a legal strategy to secure his eventual release from jail. The client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian Islamic cleric who is blind, is serving a life sentence in federal prison for a failed plot to bomb the United Nations building, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other New York sites. "None of the things that Stewart did in this case has anything to do with any legal matter, nothing to do with being a lawyer," Mr. Dember thundered to the jury, concluding an unusually long closing argument that lasted two and a half days. Ms. Stewart was dealing with "illegal matters, not legal matters," he charged. The case centers on a statement Ms. Stewart gave to a reporter after visiting Mr. Abdel Rahman in jail in May 2000, in which the sheik said he was withdrawing his support for a cease-fire his followers in Egypt had observed since 1997. Ms. Stewart had agreed in writing to prison rules that barred her from helping the sheik communicate with the press. To make his point, Mr. Dember replayed for the jury, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, an excerpt from a television interview Ms. Stewart gave in 2002, a few weeks after her arrest, to Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. After many weeks of presenting the government's main evidence - secret F.B.I. audio and video recordings of telephone calls and meetings involving Ms. Stewart and two co-defendants - prosecutors had introduced the interview video at the end, almost as an afterthought. In the interview, Ms. Stewart acknowledged that she had agreed not to convey messages from the sheik to the news media. She also said the sheik's best hope for getting out of his American jail would be a seizure of power by his party in Egypt, which could then negotiate a prisoner exchange to bring him home. Mr. Dember charged that Ms. Stewart knew that many of the sheik's followers were designated as terrorists and might jump at the chance to return to war in their country. "She had all the power in the world to stop it," Mr. Dember said of the sheik's message to his followers. "But she didn't want to stop it." Ms. Stewart remained composed at the defendants' table, at times even looking amused. Noting during a break that her chief lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, will begin his closing arguments as early as tomorrow, she said, "Just wait!" Mr. Dember asserted that it was "nonsense" for Ms. Stewart to say that the sheik's news release was part of her plan to persuade Egypt to let him return home to serve out his sentence there. The prosecutor pointed out that United States and Egyptian officials would be unlikely to send the sheik back to his country when he was supporting renewed violence there. Mr. Dember provided only vague details when it came to demonstrating connections between Ms. Stewart and the activities of a co-defendant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who dealt extensively by telephone with militants who were labeled terrorists by the United States. The prosecutor acknowledged that Ms. Stewart, in dozens of hours of secretly recorded phone calls, never said she undertook any action to promote violent revolution in Egypt. Instead, he based his allegations heavily on general statements Ms. Stewart had made supporting what she called revolutionary violence in apartheid South Africa and against the government of Israel. Mr. Dember aimed some of his most intense anger against the other co-defendant, Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic interpreter who translated the sheik's conversations for Ms. Stewart and read letters and newspapers to the cleric. "He had all the power to say, 'No!' " Mr. Dember said, raising his voice, about Mr. Yousry's role in translating the sheik's cease-fire message. Beginning his summation in the afternoon, a lawyer for Mr. Yousry, David Stern, said his client had always followed the guidance of Ms. Stewart and other lawyers. "He honestly believed that what he was doing was not criminal," Mr. Stern said. "His only job was to translate." Mr. Stern showed the jury that Mr. Yousry had once referred to the sheik and his followers as "garbage," and had repeatedly rejected the sheik's political views. Mr. Stern played a video excerpt of a prison meeting where Mr. Yousry had questioned the sheik about an edict issued under his name that called for the murder of Jews. "None of your business!" the sheik had barked contemptuously at Mr. Yousry. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 17) Limits Eased on Killing of Wolves By KIRK JOHNSON DENVER January 4, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/national/04wolf.html DENVER, Jan. 3 - Killing a gray wolf in Idaho or Montana will soon get easier under new rules issued Monday by the Fish and Wildlife Service. The animals are still formally protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, but starting in 30 days, they can be killed if a landowner believes a wolf is in the process of attacking livestock or other animals. The old rules required physical evidence of an actual attack - bite marks or a carcass. "Under the old rule, he had to have its teeth in; under the new rule he can be a foot away chasing them," said Ed Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the Wildlife Service. State wildlife management officials were also given greater flexibility in controlling wolf populations to maintain the deer and elk herds upon which wolves often feed. State and federal officials said that the looser standards, part of the process of removing wolves from federal protections, reflected a robust recovery by wolves in the northern Rocky Mountain region. The recovery has surpassed all expectations since the first experimental populations were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996, the officials said. "The old rule was written to protect 25 to 50 wolves, and we now have over 500," said Idaho's governor, Dirk Kempthorne, in a conference call with reporters. "The dynamics have changed." Environmentalists said that the federal estimate of wolf mortality - about 10 percent a year under the more flexible guidelines - is deeply uncertain and could end up being much greater. "Ten percent in a large, healthy population might not have much impact, but we still have wolves struggling with recovery in some areas," said Nina Fascione, a vice president for field conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group based in Washington. "With all the increased flexibility, I would be surprised if the impact is just 10 percent," Ms. Fascione said. Wyoming, which also has a substantial wolf population, was not included in the new rules because the Fish and Wildlife Service has not approved the state's proposed wolf management plan. Gale A. Norton, who as secretary of the interior oversees the wildlife service, said that the full removal of gray wolves from federal protections would proceed only when all three states in the recovery area had plans in place. Ms. Norton said the old, stricter rules about wolf killing would still apply in Wyoming for now. Copyright 2005 The New York Times ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 18) UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WINTER/SPRING ORGANIZING DRIVE TO END THE U.S. WAR ON IRAQ From: "Carwil James" < carwil@falseignorance.info > To: "Direct Action to Stop the War" < directaction@lists.riseup.net > Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 11:51 AM Subject: [DASW] UFPJ Presents [ending the] Iraq [War] Strategy As the U.S. war against Iraq approaches the end of its second year, there are no signs of any change in U.S. foreign policy or any let-up in the fighting. People throughout this country and around the world have marched, rallied, lobbied, participated in actions of nonviolent civil disobedience, passed resolutions in their unions and religious institutions, and much more. But the Bush Administration has claimed the U.S. election results as a mandate for continued war and occupation, the death toll ? among Iraqis and U.S. servicepeople -- mounts every day, and the U.S. is increasing troop levels rather than taking steps toward military disengagement. United for Peace and Justice believes that, in order to bring an end to the war and bring the troops home, the antiwar movement must reshape its work. Yes, we need to continue with mass mobilizations and public protests ? in fact, we need to increase their size and visibility. At the same time, we must broaden the active core of our movement, give it greater strategic focus, and intensify our resistance. Ending the war will not be an easy task, nor will it happen overnight. To succeed, the anti-war movement needs to expand our numbers; involve new organizations and communities; and focus pressure strategically on the weak points in the Administration's war program ? its moral bankruptcy, the massive human costs, its financial cost, and the intensifying need for new military recruits. The proposal below is for a specific program of activism during the first three months of 2005, but it flows from a larger, longer-term vision of organizing that we hope member groups will embrace and continue into the future. Strategy We believe that there are three crucial weak points in the Administration's war strategy. The Bush Administration cannot fight this war without taxpayer funding, soldiers willing to die, and the ability to contain domestic opposition to acceptable levels. The anti-war movement should focus its energies on increasing the war's unpopularity, particularly by emphasizing the horrific loss of life on all sides; by highlighting the war's escalating financial cost, and the consequences of war spending for our communities; and by disrupting the Pentagon's ability to recruit new troops. Public opinion polls suggest that support for the war continues to erode as the conflict drags on and the death toll mounts. The staggering cost of the war creates the practical basis for building durable alliances between groups whose main priority may be winning social and economic justice at home (e.g. civil rights groups, labor, clergy, community groups) with those who focus primarily on ending the war abroad. More and more combat veterans are resisting their call-ups; the Army and National Guard are having difficulty meeting their recruitment goals; and the military is overstretching itself in Iraq. The anti-war movement can: * offer those who oppose the war but are not yet active with simple, high-visibility ways to express their views * intensify opposition to the war among those who are active and raise the level of popular unrest * build pressure at the Congressional district level to freeze, then cut, funding and troop levels * work to reduce military enlistments and support dissenting soldiers, combat veterans, reservists, and their families who are speaking out against the war or refusing to serve To do these things successfully, anti-war organizations will need to engage in a concerted program of base- and alliance-building, ongoing visibility and protest activities, strategic pressure campaigns, and campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance. This organizing drive is one central component of this larger strategy for ending the war. UFPJ has just created a new civil resistance working group, and specific proposals for action will soon be circulated. We are also developing detailed suggestions for how member groups can organize pressure campaigns around funding for the war and military recruitment, including targeting members of Congress. We are developing a grassroots media campaign to draw public attention to civilian casualties in Iraq, and we will also continue to provide organizing ideas and calls to action around other key developments and issues in Iraq: e.g., free and fair elections are not possible under occupation; no foreign control of Iraqi oil; the humanitarian crisis intensifies; the U.S. must respect human rights and international law. Vision for this Organizing Drive This coordinated campaign - includes a series of activities, with each one promoting and building the next, intended to broaden the organized base of the antiwar movement. The activities ? ranging from a "white ribbon" visibility campaign to coordinated days of outreach to local town hall meetings ? are designed to provide opportunities for intensive, face-to-face organizing, in order to reach and involve people who have not previously taken action against the war. UFPJ will provide a series of tools and resources to help member groups reach their goals through this work. To participate in this organizing drive, a group need not commit to every activity or date; many groups will wish to tailor the calendar, activities, and goals to fit their organizational capacity and local needs. Some member groups of UFPJ are already engaged in this type of base- and alliance-building work on a regular basis and may choose to participate in just a few components of the organizing drive. Organizing Goals We encourage each organization that participates in this organizing drive, no matter its size, to set concrete goals for expansion over the coming months. The specific goals may vary depending on the organization's constituency, location, and mission, but we suggest the following: * build strong, ongoing relationships with a targeted number of organizations or communities that have not previously been directly engaged in anti-war work, particularly communities of color, labor, and faith-based organizations (for groups in small towns, the goal might be three new relationships; groups in urban areas might aim to build a dozen or more) * double the number of contacts your organization has (on your email list, phone bank, and/or mailing list) * double the number of active participants in your group's day-to-day work * distribute at least ten times as many white ribbons in your community as you have contacts (on your email list, phone bank, and/or mailing list) ? e.g., if you have an email list of 500 people, aim to distribute at least 5000 ribbons * using these new relationships and contacts as a base, organize a local action on March 19, the two-year anniversary of the war, that is larger than any action your group has organized to date Organizing Drive Components Alliance-Building Meetings: We encourage member groups to expand local peace and justice coalitions by setting up meetings in early 2005 with potential allies such as unions; black, Latino, Arab, and other community of color organizations; religious institutions; student groups; and community organizations. The goals are to build new relationships; identify issues these groups are working on or concerned about; identify ways in which the Iraq war is making it more difficult to win gains in these struggles; explore opportunities to work together in those areas of intersection. While we hope for a concerted national alliance-building push in January and February, we believe that these types of meetings should be a regular part of every group's organizing work, and these connections need to be built at the local level. Days of Outreach: We are proposing a series of national days of outreach, where member groups of UFPJ mobilize their members to talk to large numbers of new people. The purpose is two-fold: to educate and persuade people about the reasons to oppose the war; and to identify potential new activists from those who are already opposed to the war and gather their contact information, with the goal of involving them in future anti-war activities. Concretely, groups will be encouraged to hand out leaflets to educate about the human toll of the war and its cost to our communities; distribute white ribbons to increase the visibility of anti-war sentiment; gather signatures on a national anti-war petition as a way of obtaining new contacts for their ongoing organizing effort; and publicize key upcoming events in their community (such as a February 4 town hall meeting and/or March 19 protest on the two-year-anniversary of the war). Town Hall Meetings: We are proposing that groups all around the country convene town hall meetings on February 4 or some other locally suitable date, to discuss what the war is costing their communities: most dramatically, in lost funding for crucial social programs; but also in lives, if your community has lost U.S. servicepeople in the conflict, and in the drain on firefighters and other first responders sent to Iraq through the National Guard. These town hall meetings will occur shortly after President Bush delivers his State of the Union Address and around the time Congress is expected to debate $100 billion in additional appropriations for Iraq, dramatizing the Bush Administration's misplaced priorities. Through their focus on the connection between the cost of the war and the issues facing communities here at home, these town hall meetings will provide an important opportunity to build or strengthen alliances with groups working for social and economic justice. They will also serve as an opportunity to identify and get to know potential new activists, help build a sense of connection among people across the country who oppose the war, and encourage strategic discussion about what it will take to bring the war to an end. UFPJ will distribute suggested questions for discussion that local facilitators can use to help frame debate during the meeting. Campaign Tools United for Peace and Justice will provide member groups with a series of tools to help with this organizing campaign. These will include tips for maximizing the effectiveness of the alliance-building meetings, days of outreach, and town hall meetings. We will also provide a petition for the national petition drive; educational leaflets that can be modified for local use; and visibility tools such as white ribbons, buttons, magnets, and posters. Campaign Calendar December Launch the White Ribbon Campaign; attend public holiday events in your community and pass out small fliers/cards with white ribbons attached urging people to visibly say No to the War in Iraq this holiday season. For more information about the White Ribbon Campaign click here: Late Dec. United for Peace and Justice will issue a call for coordinated local actions on March 19 to mark the second anniversary of the war, with strong support for the mobilization in Fayetteville, NC (home of Ft. Bragg) Early Jan Launch a national petition drive to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, highlighting our message of "end the war, bring the troops home ? rebuild our communities" Jan 15/17 National Days of Outreach ? contact churches, labor, and community groups in the African-American community who are organizing events, to discuss how we could help to highlight the peace message that was a centerpiece of Dr. King's legacy; fliers and ribbons could be distributed at MLK parades and events, highlighting this message and inviting people to January 20 counter-inaugural activities and the February 4 Town Hall Meeting Jan 20 Inauguration Day ? National Day of Mourning and Resistance, protests in Washington, D.C. and in communities all around the country Jan 29 National Day of Outreach ? distribute leaflets and white ribbons, gather petition signatures, promote the February Town Hall meetings Feb 4 Town Hall Meetings: Ending the War / Rebuilding Our Communities Feb 19-21 UFPJ National Assembly March 8 National Day of Outreach on International Women's Day? distribute leaflets and white ribbons, gather petition signatures, promote the March 19 actions March 19 Global Day of Action to Protest the Second Anniversary of the Iraq War This is the announcement list for Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW). To remove yourself from this list, send an email to directaction-unsubscribe@lists.riseup.net . ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 19) US Wounded in Iraq Reaches 10,000 The Pentagon says that more than 10,000 US military personnel have been wounded in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003. Story from BBC NEWS: Published: 2005/01/05 10:33:34 GMT http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4147705.stm Newly published figures show that more than 5,000 of the wounded have been unable to return to duty. Many have been left with serious injuries such as lost limbs and sight, mostly as a result of the blast effects of roadside bombs. More than 1,300 US troops have been killed. The latest figures underline that an equally telling price is being paid in the number of US soldiers being wounded there, says the BBC's Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs. Advances in military medicine and body armour mean that many have survived wounds that they would not have done in previous conflicts. In Iraq on Wednesday, a car bomb killed two Iraqi civilians and wounded 10 others in Baghdad. Police say the bomb exploded near a petrol station in the western district of Amiriyah. The explosion came a day after gunmen assassinated the governor of Baghdad province, and in a separate attack killed at least 10 people outside the headquarters of the Iraqi National Guard. (c) BBC MMV ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 21) Ramsey Clark: Why I'm Taking Saddam's Case By Lizzy Ratner http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage1.asp# "You can't be sure of how the trial will go," said longtime Manhattan civil-rights attorney Ramsey Clark, wagging a long, slender forefinger. "But you could say that if it's properly done, it will be the biggest trial of this century." Mr. Clark was talking about the trial of Saddam Hussein, whom he recently signed on to represent before a special tribunal in Baghdad. For the man who has represented Leonard Peltier, the Harrisburg Seven and the Attica Brothers, but also prosecuted war resisters in the Johnson administration-indeed, for the man who, as a young Marine Corps courier, witnessed the Nuremberg trials after World War II-calling it the "trial of the century" was no small thing. Ramsey Clark was in his office, in a loft on East 12th Street in the East Village, speaking like a law professor across a large slab of a wooden table. He'd just returned a few days before from a visit to Jordan, where he met with other members of Mr. Hussein's legal team as well as the families of both Mr. Hussein and former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. In the room hung an Salvadoran solidarity poster and a painting by Mr. Peltier. The painting is of an old Native American woman with a single tear running down her cheek; it's called Big Lady Mountain . By Mr. Clark's own telling, his interest in representing the deposed Iraqi leader was inflamed when media reports started coming in of Mr. Hussein's arrest in a spider-hole hideout in the desert. He said he was "shocked" by the images he saw. "The savage presentation of [Mr. Hussein], disheveled, with his mouth open, people probing in his mouth, the dehumanization," he said. "I represented Indian peoples for many years, and I can't tell you how many Indians I've worked with called after they saw the picture and said, 'That's exactly the way they treated us.' And this is hardly the road to peace if you want respect for human dignity. "I wrote to him a year ago in December, shortly after he was arrested," he continued. "I'd also written to Tariq Aziz right after he turned himself in April of '03, because I thought it was essential that they have independent contact immediately to assure their proper treatment. And I was repeatedly turned down as to both. "I did it because, obviously, these cases are extremely important in terms of history and in terms of reconciliation of peoples, and in terms of belief in truth and justice as a priority over force and violence," Mr. Clark said. "It's about addressing the concept of victor's justice, which is only the exercise of power. If you really want peace, you have to satisfy people about the honor of your purpose." Mr. Clark has not been able to meet with Mr. Hussein since he sent his letter. "There has not been anything approaching adequate contact with him," he said. "None of his family has seen him; only one lawyer has seen him, and that was in the first half of December-a full year after his arrest. It was by a single person, with soldiers standing by, hearing, with whatever other type of surveillance there might have been. "And there's not adequate contact with that lawyer, who's an Iraqi. So for a defense to be developed, there has to be extensive communication with the principal person whose life it involves. "He is a decisive, knowledgeable person," Mr. Clark said, "and has to play a major role in every aspect of choosing a defense team and preparing a defense. The lack of access to him is a major violation. Our Supreme Court has thrown cases out where a person wasn't given access to independent non-police parties within 48 hours of arrest, within less than 12 hours. Here you've got 12 months. That sounds technical, but it's not technical at all-it's the essential beginning." It's not that he's never met Mr. Hussein. Mr. Clark's history with the former Iraqi leader dates back to the first Gulf War, when Mr. Clark traveled to Iraq to protest the U.S.-led coalition's bombing campaign. He spent 14 days chronicling the destruction and later defied sanctions by returning on dozens of aid missions. He met with Mr. Hussein on at least four of these occasions, including a month-long visit just before the March 2003 invasion. "I've met with him I think four times, probably averaged two to three hours at a time," he said. "In presence he is reserved, quiet, thoughtful-dignified, you might say, in the old-fashioned sense. I'm not a big fan of dignity in the old-fashioned sense of stuffiness or posture." Could he see how that might be praising with faint damnation a man who is said to have ordered the deaths of some 300,000 of his own citizens? "I have long believed that one of the greatest barriers to peace is demonization," Mr. Clark said. "It has always been necessary in war for soldiers to demonize the enemy. Now, with the mass media saturating the public with perceptions that come from very slim contact with actuality and are heavily influenced by desire and prejudice, we demonize." And if other lawyers might blanch at the argument that it was the American media who demonized Saddam-wasn't he something of a demon to begin with? If it were a simple referendum on Mr. Hussein's treatment of the Kurds or political dissidents, who could possibly represent him in good faith? But what if the trial of Saddam Hussein is really a referendum on the American campaign in Iraq? "Demonization is the most dangerous form of prejudice," Mr. Clark continued. "Once you call something evil, it's easy to justify anything you might do to harm that evil. Evil has no rights, it has no human dignity, it has to be destroyed. That's how you get your Fallujas, your Abu Ghraibs, your shock-and-awes." And, like many civil-rights lawyers, Mr. Clark believes he's representing a client in a court that is fundamentally flawed. "A tribunal that doesn't meet the standards of international law can do enormous harm. International law requires first that a tribunal be created by legal authority, by pre-existing legal authority," he argued. "That's referred to as competence. After competence comes independence-it can't be subject to political power. And finally, it has to be impartial. If it's not impartial, what's the point? Why don't you just go ahead and say 'Hang him' instead of this ruse? "Now, the present Iraqi court meets none of those standards. It was a creation of the U.S. military occupation, the so-called governing council, which was appointed by the U.S. And who becomes the first judge of the court? Chalabi's nephew. I mean, suppose he's the most honorable person in the world, this nephew? Is it really conceivable that that's the person that ought to be judge in a world as big as this? So you don't have independence, because everything depends on what the U.S. does for the court: financing, training, selection and everything else. You don't have competence, because it's not legal. And you don't have impartiality, as far as can be told from the appearance. "The only existing court that is competent and independent and impartial is the International Criminal Court, which came into existence July 1, 2002. It's a court the U.S. opposed. It's a court the U.S. tragically weakened, but it's been approved by more than 120 countries. "The judges were appointed not by the U.S., but the Iraqis, and after the new government comes to power, they will have to be reconfirmed," said Michael Scharf, a human-rights lawyer at Case Western Reserve who has helped train Iraqi judges, when Mr. Clark's claims were put before him. "Not only that: The judges who I work with are extremely independent people. They have no particular love for the United States. These are people who were chosen for their expertise and independence." Mr. Clark is 77 years old, stooped and slender. He was wearing New Balance sneakers and a worn blue button-down shirt tucked into a pair of wool or polyester pants that might have dated from his early political career. He has wide-set eyes, a bit like a crawfish. And to many, his movements are just as mysterious-sideways, quirky, puzzling. "Ramsey is a mystery," said Melvin Wulf, an old colleague who shared a law practice with Mr. Clark during the late 1970's and early 1980's, in an earlier interview. "I saw him every day, but I didn't know him any better at the end of five years than I knew him on the first day. He plays himself very close to the vest, consults with no one except for himself." Outside the room, the office manager, Ben Cheney, brother of the slain civil-rights activist, typed at a keyboard. A few unlikely magazines- The New Yorker ,Gourmet ,Opera News -sat in a stack in the waiting room for visitors. Like some small-town doctor's office, there were no visitors and the office was quiet-nothing that would suggest that this was the home away from home of one of the most controversial attorneys in the United States. It all started in the last hoary week of 2004, when Mr. Clark jetted over to Jordan for a conference with 20 or so other attorneys on Dec. 28 to start forming their strategy. Reaction to Mr. Clark's trip was swift and certain across the political spectrum. On the right, bloggers for Web sites like RightNation declared that he should be "tried for sedition and treason." The New York Sun accused him of losing all "credibility when it comes to claiming to be for peace." Even some of his left-wing comrades rolled their eyes when they heard that he'd signed on to represent a man who had allegedly ordered 300,000 political killings. "I do think that Saddam, like anybody else, does have a right to a fair trial and a competent lawyer. I'm just not sure why Ramsey Clark needs to do that," said Leslie Cagan, a longtime peace and justice activist. "Personally, I wish he didn't do some of those things, because he is one of the few public well-known leftists in this country, and it does make our work harder sometimes." Conservatives loathe Mr. Clark, but even staunch progressives don't always know what to make of him, and some of his closest friends say he can't be easily defined: Is he a valiant "dissenter" in the tradition of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, as his friend Victor Navasky suggested? Or is he an old ideologue, as others have charged, who is driven above all by his ties to a Communist splinter group called the Workers World Party? Is he a profile in courage, or a study in eccentricity? Perhaps predictably, Mr. Clark presents himself as neither. A rangy Texan with a down-home Southern drawl, he seems to move to his own unapologetic drumbeat. He is not without supporters, including some colleagues who argued that Mr. Clark will provide Mr. Hussein with a competent defense, a necessary component of a fair trial. "[Mr. Clark] has a very good point: The international legal issues are compelling in some ways," said Alan Dershowitz, who has worked both with and against Mr. Clark on a number of cases. "I think it has to be perceived as a fair trial, and Ramsey's being involved increases the chances that it will be perceived as a fair trial, because he is a very good lawyer-very smart and very tough." Mr. Clark is used to being in the center of the storm. Over the years, he has become a fixture of national and international crime scenes, taking on the kind of thorny cases that have earned him comparisons to the crusading civil-liberties lawyer Clarence Darrow on the one hand-and to Benedict Arnold on the other. "I think he seems to have some kind of inner compass that tells him that this situation is unfair, and because of that we have to get involved in it," said Abdeen Jabara, an old friend and lawyer who formerly ran the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "I don't think I've ever met anybody who is as principled in his beliefs to fight for the underdog." Long before he joined Saddam Hussein's defense team, before he became the mascot of the anti-Establishment, Ramsey Clark was himself a pedigreed member of the political elite. Born into an influential Texas family, he came from a long line of lawyers who moved effortlessly within the highest levels of law and government. His maternal grandfather was a member of the Texas Supreme Court; his paternal grandfather was president of the Texas Bar Association. His father, Tom C. Clark, was a law-and-order lawyer with close ties to Lyndon B. Johnson. At Mr. Johnson's urging, President Harry S. Truman named the elder Mr. Clark his Attorney General in 1945. Four years later, Mr. Truman appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Early in his life, the young Ramsey rebelled at least twice against these Clark family precedents. He tried to join the Marines when he was 13, on Dec. 8, 1941, "and it probably would have been pretty dangerous," he laughed. "As far as I can tell, I've always had a fierce opposition to violence," he said. "I can remember when I was in fifth or sixth grade, the subject of capital punishment came up. And I was shy and quiet and rarely said much, but I really got upset and I just was passionately against it." But when he was 17, he did drop out of high school-against his father's wishes-to join the Marine Corps and fight in World War II. Several years later, he defied his father again when he chose to go to the more progressive-minded University of Chicago Law School rather than Harvard Law. Following law school, Mr. Clark headed back to Texas and appeared, at least on the surface, to return to the path his father and grandfathers had carved out before him. He married his college sweetheart, Georgia Welch, and went to work for the family's Dallas law firm. He stayed there for 10 years, specializing in antitrust work, until, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy made him an Assistant Attorney General in brother Robert Kennedy's Justice Department. Mr. Clark arrived in Washington as the Justice Department was taking on a bigger role in enforcing civil rights. He roved the South as part of Robert Kennedy's "riot squad" and ultimately helped to draft the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. "I went in '61, and because I was from Texas I could pass, so I was used extensively in the South," he said. "I was in charge of supervising the desegregation of all public schools in '62 in the South. There were only five, but it was a big job-doing just one of them was a big job. You had to worry about children being beat up, their homes being firebombed. It seemed incredibly important, exciting and a privilege to be involved in that." His outspokenness and sharp positions-from his support of civil rights to his opposition to wire-tapping and the death penalty-ultimately earned him the nickname "the Preacher" among his Justice Department colleagues. "[Ramsey Clark] was liberal, though he was much more restrained than he is today," recalled Nicholas Katzenbach, who worked alongside Mr. Clark for some six years, first as Deputy Attorney General and then as Attorney General. "Still, I think he was far more liberal than his dad." Indeed, Mr. Clark bumped squarely against his father's own, more conservative legal judgments several times during his years in the Justice Department. Most notably, when Johnson appointed him Attorney General in 1967, one of his first steps was to drop the case against Judith Coplon, a Justice Department clerk who had been charged during the early McCarthy days with passing secrets to her Soviet lover. Mr. Clark's father had brought the case when he was Attorney General. "It seemed to me a quite fascinating thing to do," said Mr. Navasky, who became close friends with Mr. Clark in the late 1960's while writing the book Kennedy Justice . "Ramsey was appointed under the cloud that he got the job [of Attorney General] because his family was Texas buddies of the Johnson family. But I came to the conclusion, both from my interviews and what he did in the Justice Department, that he was a kind of civil-libertarian Attorney General, which is very unusual." This civil-libertarian streak didn't always go over well in the Johnson cabinet, however. During his two years as Attorney General, Mr. Clark found himself at odds with the administration over everything from wire-tapping to prison reform to the Vietnam War. "President Johnson knew I [opposed the war in Vietnam] before he appointed me Attorney General," Mr. Clark said. "And he didn't put me on the National Security Council, which every Attorney General before me had been on and every Attorney General since me had been on. He would call me over once in a while to some meeting on the war when he wanted an extreme position, and I remember one breakfast, the question was whether to bomb north of a famous parallel, I can't remember which one. And the guys were arguing "yes-no-yes-no" as to whether you could bomb north of the line, and when it came to me I said, 'I don't think you can bomb on either side of the line.' Because bombing is just killing people, and you didn't know who the hell you were killing-you were killing civilians. It was just a shameful, sick thing." When Richard Nixon denounced Mr. Clark in a campaign speech in 1968, Johnson reportedly deadpanned, "I had to sit on my hands so I wouldn't cheer it." But Mr. Clark said his relationship with Johnson was friendly. "I never had any real conflict with him. But he [did] say to me one time, 'Some people think you're destroying the Democratic Party.' And I said, 'I'm not even in politics, I'm just doing the law.'" Mr. Clark never spoke out publicly against the administration, and he never resigned, despite his apparent misgivings about Vietnam. "You know, I had a choice of resigning," Mr. Clark recalled, "and it's something I considered-it's something I thought was important and respected. But I also thought what I was doing was important-was more important in the sense of its direct impact on lives. And I saw an environment around me in which everything I had been trying to do would be swept away. I already felt that the civil-rights movement after the Watts riots in '65 was in deep trouble. So I couldn't see giving up on that. And I had no role in the Vietnam business, because I wasn't even on the Security Council." Some of Mr. Clark's colleagues have suggested that he is still doing penance for this period of his life-in particular, for prosecuting war resisters like Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin and boxing legend Muhammad Ali. "Standing by, being Attorney General during the Vietnam War without resigning, is not a particularly heroic position to have taken," said his old colleague, Mr. Wulf. "I sometimes speculate-and this is absolute speculation-that what he's doing is a kind of atonement for having been Attorney General for Lyndon Johnson at the time of the Vietnam War, and for having in fact initiated the indictment against Dr. Spock and the others." As in most cases, Mr. Clark was as unapologetic about his indictment of Spock as he has since become about his Johnson administration apostasy. "I personally authorized the case against William Sloane Coffin, who came down to marry our son a few years later. I visited him and stayed in his home in '69, at Yale. Dr. Spock I became very close friends with. And I really haven't had regrets about the case. I think the government has the duty to protect laws that it believes are constitutional, and I believe the Selective Service Act was constitutional." Still, there's no question that Mr. Clark veered sharply leftward after his Johnson years. Beginning in the early 1970's, Mr. Clark took a string of headline-grabbing "movement" cases, amassing a docket that read like a Who's Who of the decade's radicals and revolutionaries. In 1973, he defended the Harrisburg Seven, a group of peace activists who were accused, among other things, of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger. One year later, he joined famed radical lawyer William Kunstler in representing two of the Attica Brothers who had been accused of killing a prison guard. Around the same time, he also launched an upstart campaign for U.S. Senate against New York Republican Jacob Javits. (At the state Democratic convention in 1974, Frank Serpico nominated him and Attica Brother Herbert X. Blyden seconded it.) Running as a Democrat, he argued for a 50 percent cut in the defense budget and refused to take contributions above $100. Mr. Navasky managed the operation. During the next two decades, Mr. Clark began taking on clients who hovered further and further on the political fringes, clients who were not merely controversial but downright incendiary. He often framed these cases in the old language of civil rights, but these clients were hardly left-wing "cause" clients in the traditional sense (though there were some of those as well). For instance, he took on the case of Karl Linnas, an alleged former Nazi. And he defended-and supposedly befriended-Lyndon LaRouche, the political-cult guru. In the early 1990's, Mr. Clark represented Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb general who was indicted on war crimes. More recently, he gave legal advice to Slobodon Milosevic, the former Yugoslavian president who was also charged with war crimes. Now, of course, there's Saddam Hussein. Taken together, these clients make up quite a rogues' gallery, and some of Mr. Clark's friends and colleagues have been almost as confounded by his legal choices as his critics. To help explain, they have dreamed up a raft of different theories. On the one side are those who believe that Mr. Clark is, above all, a civil libertarian in the Clarence Darrow tradition. To these friends, he is a hero, albeit at times an eccentric one. "He's represented a lot of bad guys. I would say bad guys are entitled to a lawyer. Dracula should have a lawyer, but it's not going to be me," said Michael Steven Smith, a New York City attorney and author. "It's probably not a position taken by most movement lawyers, but it's still a principled position." But other friends and colleagues have said they suspect he is driven primarily by ideology, and not just the standard lefty ideology. "I support many of the causes he supports, but I also vehemently disagree with some of the choices he's made, because I perceive him as thinking that any enemy of the United States is a friend of his, and I think that leads him into representing people he should not," said Beth Stevens, an attorney who represented a group of Bosnian Muslim women who sued Mr. Karadzic in 1993. And yet for a man who sticks to certain basic principles of justice, even when the circumstances of the world seem to be pressing their defense to the point of absurdity, Mr. Clark had a deceptively simple answer for the choices he's made. "You know, we tend to demean here the idea that you're innocent until proven guilty, and most people are going to chuckle when you say that in connection with a case like Saddam Hussein," said Mr. Clark, responding to his critics. "But the main meaning is that truth is hard to find. You don't really know, you have to search for it-you have to inquire diligently, be very skeptical." You may reach Lizzy Ratner via email at: lratner@observer.com . ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 21) Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 GISpecial 3A5 ThomasFBarton@earthlink.net A Message From The Iraq Resistance Islamic Jihad Army - A message in English "We are simple people who chose principles over fear." Propaganda or disinformation? You decide. Iraqi Resistance speech on videotape December 13 2004 Title: Communiqué Number 6 The media platoon of the Islamic Jihad Army. On the 27th of Shawal 1425h. 10 December 2004 People of the world! These words come to you from those who up to the day of the invasion were struggling to survive under the sanctions imposed by the criminal regimes of the U.S. and Britain . We are simple people who chose principles over fear. We have suffered crimes and sanctions, which we consider the true weapons of mass destruction. Years and years of agony and despair, while the condemned UN traded with our oil revenues in the name of world stability and peace. Over two million innocents died waiting for a light at the end of a tunnel that only ended with the occupation of our country and the theft of our resources. After the crimes of the administrations of the U.S. and Britain in Iraq , we have chosen our future. The future of every resistance struggle ever in the history of man. It is our duty, as well as our right, to fight back the occupying forces, which their nations will be held morally and economically responsible; for what their elected governments have destroyed and stolen from our land. We have not crossed the oceans and seas to occupy Britain or the U.S. nor are we responsible for 9/11. These are only a few of the lies that these criminals present to cover their true plans for the control of the energy resources of the world, in face of a growing China and a strong unified Europe . It is Ironic that the Iraqi's are to bear the full face of this large and growing conflict on behalf of the rest of this sleeping world. We thank all those, including those of Britain and the U.S. , who took to the streets in protest against this war and against Globalism. We also thank France , Germany and other states for their position, which least to say are considered wise and balanced, til now. Today, we call on you again. We do not require arms or fighters, for we have plenty. We ask you to form a world wide front against war and sanctions. A front that is governed by the wise and knowing. A front that will bring reform and order. New institutions that would replace the now corrupt. Stop using the U.S. dollar, use the Euro or a basket of currencies. Reduce or halt your consumption of British and U.S. products. Put an end to Zionism before it ends the world. Educate those in doubt of the true nature of this conflict and do not believe their media for their casualties are far higher than they admit. We only wish we had more cameras to show the world their true defeat. The enemy is on the run. They are in fear of a resistance movement they can not see nor predict. We, now choose when, where, and how to strike. And as our ancestors drew the first sparks of civilization, we will redefine the word Âconquest. Today we write a new chapter in the arts of urban warfare. Know that by helping the Iraqi people you are helping yourselves, for tomorrow may bring the same destruction to you. In helping the Iraqi people does not mean dealing for the Americans for a few contracts here and there. You must continue to isolate their strategy. This conflict is no longer considered a localized war. Nor can the world remain hostage to the never-ending and regenerated fear that the American people suffer from in general. We will pin them here in Iraq to drain their resources, manpower, and their will to fight. We will make them spend as much as they steal, if not more. We will disrupt, then halt the flow of our stolen oil, thus, rendering their plans useless. And the earlier a movement is born, the earlier their fall will be. And to the American soldiers we say, you can also choose to fight tyranny with us. Lay down your weapons, and seek refuge in our mosques, churches and homes. We will protect you. And we will get you out of Iraq , as we have done with a few others before you. Go back to your homes, families, and loved ones. This is not your war. Nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq . And to George W. Bush, we say, ÂYou have asked us to ÂBring it onÂ, and so have we. Like never expected. Have you another challenge? Marxism mailing list Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 22) The victims of the tsunami pay the price of war on Iraq US and British aid is dwarfed by the billions both spend on slaughter George Monbiot Guardian Tuesday January 4, 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1382857,00.html There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Year's Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of Aids. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry. The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1,000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagent's there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying "I just want to do my bit", while the whole queue tried not to cry. Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the west, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other people's shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy. But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets? The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq. The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn). The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war. It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. The UK has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $16bn in foreign aid: less than one ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq. The figures for war and aid are worth comparing because, when all the other excuses for the invasion of Iraq were stripped away, both governments explained that it was being waged for the good of the Iraqis. Let us, for a moment, take this claim at face value. Let us suppose that the invasion and occupation of Iraq had nothing to do with power, domestic politics or oil, but were, in fact, components of a monumental aid programme. And let us, with reckless generosity, assume that more people in Iraq have gained as a result of this aid programme than lost. To justify the war, even under these wildly unsafe assumptions, George Bush and Tony Blair would have to show that the money they spent was a cost-efficient means of relieving human suffering. As it was sufficient to have made a measurable improvement in the lives of all the 2.8 billion people living in absolute poverty, and as there are only 25 million people in Iraq, this is simply not possible. Even if you ignore every other issue - such as the trifling matter of mass killing - the opportunity costs of the Iraq war categorise it as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, such calculations suggest that, on cost grounds alone, a humanitarian war is a contradiction in terms. But our leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between helping people and killing them. The tone of Blair's New Year message was almost identical to that of his tear-jerking insistence that we understand the Iraqi people must be bombed for their own good. The US marines who have now been dispatched to Sri Lanka to help the rescue operation were, just a few weeks ago, murdering the civilians (for this, remember, is an illegal war), smashing the homes and evicting the entire population of the Iraqi city of Falluja. Even within the official aid budgets the two aims are confused: $8.9bn of the aid money the US spends is used for military assistance, anti-drugs operations, counter-terrorism and the Iraq relief and reconstruction fund (otherwise known as the Halliburton benevolent trust). For Bush and Blair, the tsunami relief operation and the Iraq war are both episodes in the same narrative of salvation. The civilised world rides out to rescue foreigners from their darkness. While they spend the money we gave them to relieve suffering on slaughtering the poor, the world must rely for disaster relief on the homeless man emptying his pockets. If our leaders were as generous in helping people as they are in killing them, no one would ever go hungry. ·You can join the campaign against global poverty at: www.makepovertyhistory.org www.monbiot.com Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 23) National Task Force for Mumia Abu-Jamal Legal Update - December 11, 2004 meeting in New York City (Reviewed by Attorney Robert R. Bryan) LEGAL UPDATE: Mumia's case is simultaneously being heard in two different courts presently: the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (appellate court) and the Pennsylvania State Court of Common Pleas (trial court), both of which sit in Philadelphia. The Third Circuit (the appellate court) Procedure In July 2004, both Robert Bryan and the state of Pennsylvania submitted briefs on the effect of the 06-24-04 United States Supreme Court decision in Beard v. Banks on Mumia's case. On 07-29-04, Robert filed a memorandum of law on the affect of Banks for Mumia, and requested a stay of the proceedings in this matter pending the outcome of the issues simultaneously being litigated in the Pennsylvania trial court before Judge Pamela Dembe. On 10-19-04, the appellate court entered an order denying the 07-29-04 request from Robert Bryan for a stay of the proceedings. What this means is that the issues currently pending before the appellate court are moving forward. The next step involves putting these issues on what is called a "briefing schedule," which has yet to be done by the appellate court. In other words, Robert has yet to receive notice from the appellate court as to when briefs will be due on the issues currently before it. Robert initially filed for a stay of these proceedings because of the active litigation pending before Judge Dembe in the trial court in Philadelphia, and argued against having to litigate one case in two courts at the same time. The matters before Judge Dembe cannot be resolved by the Third Circuit, but must first be addressed at the trial level in the state system. Additionally, Robert Bryan is currently working on a brief to be filed with this court requesting that additional issues be certified for appeal from district court Judge Yohn's 2001 habeas decision, which certified only one claim for relief: racial bias in jury selection, also known as the Batson claim. Mumia's former attorneys filed the original motion on this issue, which Robert plans to supplement, requesting that additional issues be certified on appeal to the appellate court. What are the possible outcomes? There are four possibilities: the Third Circuit could (1) deny this request outright, (2) only allow a few of the 29 issues raised by Mumia's writ for habeas corpus, (3) send the case back to Judge William Yohn to apply the standard set out in Miller-El (see below), or (4) wait for Mumia's Batson issue to be resolved before moving forward on this one. More immediately, Robert plans to file a motion for remand back down to the district court on the issues raised by Terri Maurer-Carter's affidavit. Terri Maurer-Carter is the court reporter who overheard trial judge Albert Sabo-who presided over Mumia's 1982 "trial," and 1995, 1996, and 1997 Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) appellate hearings in Philadelphia-say: "Yeah, and I'm going to help 'em [the prosecution] fry the n****r." Issues There are two issues before the appellate court, which will be explained below. First, what did the United States Supreme Court decide in Beard v. Banks, and how does that affect Mumia? In July 2004, the appellate court allowed both Robert Bryan and the state of Pennsylvania to submit briefs on the affect of Banks on Mumia's case. The issue was whether Mumia's case was affected by the recent United States Supreme Court decision in Beard v. Banks. George Banks was sentenced to death in 1982. After his state appeals were exhausted, he sought habeas relief in federal district court and was denied. On appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Banks' death sentence was found to be unconstitutional, and the decision of the district court was reversed. The appellate court held that jury instructions during Banks' sentencing led jurors to believe they could not vote against the death penalty unless they all agreed on mitigating evidence-evidence that would have inclined them not to vote for a death sentence. The appellate court reasoned that these jury instructions violated the United States Supreme Court's 1988 ruling in Mills v. Maryland. However, the Third Circuit did not decide whether the rule of Mills was retroactive. In other words, could Banks benefit from the United States Supreme Court's 1988 decision in Mills where his conviction became final in 1987? Thus, when Banks' case was next brought before the United States Supreme Court on appeal, the Court sent the case back down to the Third Circuit to decide this issue. The appellate court then decided that the rule created by the Supreme Court in Mills was retroactive and that Banks could benefit. The case was again appealed to the Supreme Court and on 06-24-04, the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Third Circuit and declared that the rule of law created in Mills was not retroactive. In a 5-to-4 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court found that the rule announced in Mills-that sentencing schemes could not prevent jurors from considering mitigating evidence that had not been accepted unanimously when deciding whether to apply the death penalty-was a new rule of law that was not a "watershed rule of criminal procedure implicating the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding." Finding that the rule of Mills was not a "watershed rule," the United States Supreme Court said that Mills could not be applied retroactively and that Banks' conviction was constitutional. What does this mean? Basically, it means that a "Mills challenge" to a death sentence is only applicable where the sentencing relief sought is for a person whose conviction became final after the rule of Mills was decided in 1988. Seemingly, the Court has said that relief is available to those whose convictions post-date Mills, creating what is called in the law a "bright line rule." Robert Bryan argued in his brief that Mumia benefits from the rule of Mills because his conviction became final in 1990. The state of Pennsylvania has argued that Mumia should not get the benefit of Mills, despite this seemingly bright line rule, and there have been several exchanges back and forth (one as recent as 10-31-04) through the filing of papers with the appellate court on this issue. This matter is still pending. If Mumia wins on this issue, that he does get the benefit of Mills, his case will go back to the trial level in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas. The state of Pennsylvania will have two choices, either (1) sentence Mumia to life imprisonment, or (2) grant Mumia a full jury trial on the issue of whether he should be sentenced to life imprisonment or death. A full jury trial, or penalty-phase hearing, means that Mumia is back to 1982 in terms of the issue of sentencing. The state of Pennsylvania will put on evidence of guilt and aggravation to argue for a death sentence. Robert Bryan will then be able to put on evidence of innocence and mitigation. However, the only decision the jury can make should there be a new penalty-phase hearing is life imprisonment or death. If Mumia loses, then the state of Pennsylvania can sign another death warrant, side-stepping Yohn's 2001 habeas decision. However, there still remains another issue pending before the appellate court: the issue of jury selection, Mumia's Batson claim. Second, what is Mumia's Batson claim? The issue of racial bias in jury selection, Mumia's Batson claim, is also still pending before the appellate court. This issue was the only issue Judge Yohn allowed to be appealed to the Third Circuit. In other words, this is the only guilt-phase appellate issue Yohn certified to go before the appellate court. Recently, the United State Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Thomas Miller-El. A summary of that case from an article in the 12-05-04 NYT is as follows: "In an 8-to-1 decision last year, the Supreme Court instructed the appeals court to rethink its "dismissive and strained interpretation" of the proof in the case, and to consider more seriously the substantial evidence suggesting that prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from Mr. Miller-El's jury. Prosecutors used peremptory strikes to eliminate 10 out of 11 eligible black jurors, and they twice used a local procedure called a jury shuffle to move blacks lower on the list of potential jurors, the decision said. The jury ultimately selected, which had one black member, convicted Mr. Miller-El, a black man who is now 53, of killing a clerk at a Holiday Inn in Dallas in 1985. Instead of considering much of the evidence recited by the Supreme Court majority, the appeals court engaged in something akin to plagiarism. In February, it again rejected Mr. Miller-El's claims, in a decision that reproduced, virtually verbatim and without attribution, several paragraphs from the sole dissenting opinion in last year's Supreme Court decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas." According to Attorney Bryan, Miller-El deals with two issues: (1) racism in jury selection and (2) the certification of appellate issues by federal district courts. Regarding racial bias in jury selection, should the United States Supreme Court decide in favor of Miller-El on this issue, Mumia's position will be strengthened. Furthermore, there is also good case law in the Third Circuit on this issue that should also support Mumia's case. As for the certification of issues for appeal by the lower federal courts, the Supreme Court appears to be saying that these courts have too high a standard. In other words, they have made it such that unless a petitioner can prove a certain win on appeal, then that issue will not move forward. But if a certain win was apparent, then there would be no need for an appeal because the district court would have granted relief in the first instance, right? If Miller-El succeeds on this issue, then Robert will be in a better position to argue that Judge Yohn violated the proper standard and set the bar to high for his certificates of appealability. If Mumia wins his Batson claim, there will be a completely new trial, meaning there will be a new trial to decide guilt or innocence. If there is an acquittal, Mumia will be released. If Mumia is found guilty, there will be a penalty-phase hearing. The Pennsylvania State Court of Common Pleas (trial court) Procedure With regards to the newly discovered evidence presented to this court through the affidavits of William Pate and Yvette Williams, Robert Bryan has requested a hearing on the issues this evidence raises in relation to Mumia's conviction. Currently pending before Judge Dembe is a motion to dismiss that was filed by the state of Pennsylvania. This new evidence has not been presented in federal court because the issues it raises have not yet been resolved by Dembe in the state court system. Robert Bryan has replied to this motion, and was forced by Dembe in September 2004 to qualify himself to handle a capital case, despite his years of experience in these matters. Robert has handled hundreds of capital cases. Interestingly, there is a new state law in Pennsylvania that requires defense attorneys handling capital litigation to demonstrate that they are qualified to handle such matters, but that law was not in effect when Dembe challenged Robert's ability to handle Mumia's case. If Judge Dembe decides in Mumia's favor, then he would get a new trial. If Dembe denies relief, then Robert will appeal that decision through to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It should be noted that if Dembe or the Pennsylvania appellate courts grants Mumia relief, there will be no need to remain in federal court-another reason why Robert has argued against the lifting of the stay by the Third Circuit. Issues There are two issues before the trial court: the fabricated confession of Pricilla Durham and that the false testimony the state of Pennsylvania put on during the trial through their key witness Cynthia White. William Pate is the half-brother of Pricilla Durham. In his affidavit, he says that Durham lied about the confession she claimed Mumia made at the hospital on the night he was shot and Faulkner died. Yvette Williams said in her affidavit that Cynthia White was not present during the shooting, but appeared sometime thereafter. HEARING SET FOR MUMIA ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2005 Dear Friends: Today official notification was received that on Friday, February 11, 2005, there will be a hearing concerning Mumia Abu-Jamal in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia before Judge Pamela Pryor Dembe. The hearing will be pursuant to the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus we filed December 8, 2003 on Mumia's behalf. Next month the court will issue a memorandum that is to include preliminary rulings on the petition. At that time she will direct counsel as to how she wishes to proceed. The hearing will be in the Criminal Justice Center, Philadelphia, but to date no courtroom has been assigned. The issues raised in our habeas corpus petition are: 1. The State Manipulated A Purported Eyewitness To Falsely Identify Petitioner As The Shooter, In Violation Of His Rights Under The Fifth, Sixth Eighth, And Fourteenth Amendments To The United States Constitution. 2. Petitioner Was Found Guilty And Sentenced To Death Through The Use Of A Fabricated Confession, In Violation Of The Fifth, Eighth And Fourteenth Amendments. We will advise when more is known about the upcoming hearing. With best wishes, Robert ======= Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan 2088 Union Street, Suite 4 San Francisco, California 94123-4124 Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal Black legislators support Mumia's release On Dec. 3, the National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL) passed a resolution during its conference in Philadelphia calling for the freedom of African American political prisoner and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. This comes on the heels of another important resolution passed at the NAACP national convention on July 15 that demanded a new trial for Abu-Jamal and condemned the racist application of the death penalty by the criminal justice system. The state legislators' resolution reads: WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal's 1982 trial in Phila delphia was characterized by illegal suppression of evidence, police coercion, illegal exclusion of Black jurors, and grotesquely unfair and unconstitutional rulings by the judge; and WHEREAS the trial judge, Albert Sabo, has been quoted in a sworn statement to have vowed at the time of the trial to help the prosecution 'fry the n--'; and WHEREAS subsequent appellate rulings have bent the law out of shape to sustain the guilty verdict of that trial; and WHEREAS the appellate courts have also refused to consider strong evidence of Mumia Abu-Jamal's innocence, most notably a confession by Arnold Beverly to the crime; and WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal still is incarcerated on Death Row and still faces a death sentence; and WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal's case is now on appeal before the federal Third Circuit and the state court system; and WHEREAS Mumia Abu-Jamal has for decades as a journalist fought courage ously against racism and for the human rights of all people; and WHEREAS the continued unjust incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal represents a threat to the civil rights of all people, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the National Caucus of Black State Legislators demands that the courts consider the evidence of innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal and that he be released from prison; and THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the NCBSL demands that Pennsylvania Gov. Edward Rendell instruct his Attorney General to take over the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal from the Philadelphia County District Attorney's office and actually pursue justice; namely, go to court, make a legal confession of error, and stipulate that the conviction be vacated; THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the NCBSL will communicate its views on this matter to Gov. Rendell, 225 Main Capitol Bldg., Harris burg, PA 17120, and to the appropriate courts in consultation with the legal defense team of Mumia Abu-Jamal; and THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the NCBSL will work with the legal defense team of Mumia Abu-Jamal to petition the courts to file any necessary friend of the court brief on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 24) U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN http://nytimes.com/2005/01/02/international/worldspecial4/02quake.html?ei=50 94 &en=92dbe740aaf891ca&hp=&ex=1104642000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&pos it ion= The Times article below presents more evidence for the need to divert all US forces from Iraq (where of course they had no business being in the first place) to tsunami disaster areas. Especially right now with the lack of transport equipment and infrastructure and the need to reach isolated victims quickly, every last US helicopter should leave Iraq immediately, be used to ferry aid to victims and to ferry injured out -- and then when their job is done, to come home. And it's the job of the antiwar movement to get back out in the streets to fight for this! January 2, 2005 AID U.S. Copters Speed Pace of Aid for Indonesia Refugees By ROBERT D. McFADDEN Substantial aid finally began reaching desperate refugees in devastated areas of northern Sumatra yesterday as American warships, led by the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, arrived offshore and a fleet of helicopters airlifted critical supplies to stricken towns in Aceh Province. Flying through pounding rains, a dozen Sea Hawk helicopters from the Lincoln ferried food, water, medicines, tents and other supplies from warehouses at Banda Aceh airport to refugees in decimated Indonesian coastal towns and inland villages that had been virtually cut off when the tsunami destroyed roads, bridges and communications a week ago. It was the beginning of what was expected to become a steady stream of international aid for Indonesia and a dozen other countries on the rim of the Indian Ocean, where estimates of the dead hovered between 140,000 and 150,000. Serious injuries were believed to exceed 500,000, and the likelihood of epidemics of cholera and other diseases threatened to send the totals much higher. As the first trickle of supplies broke through, the global relief effort to save an estimated five million homeless survivors of last weekend's undersea earthquake and tsunami was reinforced yesterday when Japan raised its pledge of aid from $30 million to $500 million, the largest contribution so far. Combined with a $350 million pledge by the United States on Friday, this brought the total contributions of more than 40 nations to $2 billion, according to the United Nations. [Page 9.] The United Nations will begin a new world appeal for money in New York this week, and Secretary General Kofi Annan will arrive in Jakarta on Thursday to convene a meeting of major donor nations to map strategy for the relief campaign. Private donations, which have flooded charitable organizations around the world, are expected to add hundreds of millions to the relief programs. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, in his first comments on the disaster, said the world faced a long-term relief commitment. "At first it seemed a terrible disaster, a terrible tragedy," he said. "But I think as the days have gone on, people have recognized it as a global catastrophe. There will be months, if not years, of work ahead of us." President Bush too spoke of a long commitment. "We offer our love and compassion, and our assurance that America will be there to help," he said in his weekly radio address from his ranch in Crawford, Tex. He cited a host of problems - communications, roads and medical facilities damaged or washed out - but promised that help was coming, and, indeed, had already begun to arrive. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, the president's brother, were expected to arrive in the region today with a team of experts to tour some stricken areas and to assess the needs. Their schedule was still being worked out, officials said. The need is indeed enormous, especially in Aceh Province, where towns and villages were destroyed. Meulaboh, on Aceh's west coast, was flattened, and as many as 40,000 of the 120,000 residents were killed. It lay buried under mountains of mud and debris yesterday as Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, flew in to see the devastation. Other firsthand reports of the devastation in Aceh were provided by the pilots and crew members of the helicopters that, from dawn to sunset on New Year's Day, shuttled 25,000 pounds of supplies to refugees. "There is nothing left to speak of at these coastal communities," Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Vorce, a pilot from San Diego, told The Associated Press. He told of a swath of destruction two miles deep from the coasts, with trees mowed down, roads washed away and only foundations where buildings once stood. Besides airdrops by the American helicopters, fleets of cargo planes from Australia, New Zealand and other nations continued to land at Banda Aceh and Medan, ferrying in tons of supplies. But bad roads, destroyed bridges, a lack of fuel and trucks, and other problems continued to hamper the distribution. While the Abraham Lincoln and four accompanying ships represented the vanguard of American emergency aid to Indonesia, American officials said seven more vessels led by the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard were steaming west from the South China Sea with more supplies and were expected to be off the coast of Sri Lanka in the coming week, a Pentagon spokesman said. Military officials said that yet another convoy, six slower-moving ships loaded with food, water, blankets and a 500-bed portable hospital, was en route from Guam, but was not expected to reach the stricken region for about two weeks. Capt. Rodger Welch of the Navy, representing the operations directorate of the military's Pacific Command, said late Saturday that the American relief mission likely was the largest in the region in at least 50 years. "And we are only beginning this effort," he added. About 10,000 to 12,000 American military personnel were now involved, mostly aboard the Lincoln and Bonhomme Richard groups. In Sri Lanka, flash floods yesterday forced the evacuation of thousands of people from low-lying areas hard hit by the tsunami, which killed more than 28,700 there. At least 15 camps where 30,000 refugees had been sheltering were evacuated after storms dumped 13 inches of rain over the eastern coastal region. Weeklong efforts to bury the dead in Sri Lanka and coastal areas of India were winding down, and government and private aid workers said they were turning their attention increasingly to sheltering the survivors in more sanitary refugee camps, while the homes of an estimated one million displaced persons are rebuilt. "This is where we are going to see a rise in communicable diseases, diarrhea, measles, upper respiratory infections," said David Overlack, a health care specialist surveying camps in Sri Lanka for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. World Health Organization workers have noted "a slight increase in the reporting of diarrheal illness" in areas of Sri Lanka and Indonesia affected by the tsunami, David Nabarro, an official of the United Nations agency, said in an interview yesterday. But the increase does not mean an epidemic, he said. There have been no outbreaks of cholera or other diseases, he said, adding that it is too early for such outbreaks to occur. Aid workers praised Sri Lankan officials and volunteers for their efforts to bury the dead quickly and to place 600,000 homeless people in schools, temples and mosques. An outpouring of donations from Sri Lankans has prevented shortages of food and clothing, officials said. Jeffrey J. Lunstead, the American ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, said the first planeload of American relief supplies had arrived in Sri Lanka - plastic sheeting to house 3,600 people and 5,400 cans of fresh water. He said most of the American aid would be aimed at reconstruction, rather than emergency food and medicines. To that end, American military officials said 1,500 marines and 20 helicopters would be deployed in the next few days to clear debris and aid survivors in devastated areas of Sri Lanka. The first Reporting for this article was contributed by Ian Fisher in Sri Lanka, Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez in Indonesia, Thom Shanker in Washington and Lawrence K. Altman in New York. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 25) IRAQ: Death in Fallujah rising, doctors say 04 Jan 2005 14:56:16 GMT Source: Integrated Regional Information Networks http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/121b671d950efc3ac031b54b55118d 85.htm FALLUJAH, 4 January (IRIN) - "It was really distressing picking up dead bodies from destroyed homes, especially children. It is the most depressing situation I have ever been in since the war started," Dr Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, director of the main hospital in Fallujah city, some 60 km west of Baghdad, told IRIN. According to al-Iyssaue, the hospital emergency team has recovered more than 700 bodies from rubble where houses and shops once stood, adding that more than 550 were women and children. He said a very small number of men were found in these places and most were elderly. Doctors at the hospital claim that many bodies had been found in a mutilated condition, some without legs or arms. Two babies were found at their homes, who are believed to have died from malnutrition, according to a specialist at the hospital. Al-Iyssaue added these numbers were only from nine neighbourhoods of the city and that 18 others had not yet been reached, as they were waiting for help from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) to make it easier for them to enter. He explained that many of the dead had been already buried by civilians from the Garma and Amirya districts of Fallujah after approval from US-led forces nearly three weeks ago, and those bodies had not been counted. IRCS officials told IRIN they needed more time to give an accurate death toll, adding that the city was completely uninhabitable. Marxism mailing list Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 26) The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. Adding to Jim's post: ETAN (many will know Ben Terrall's work with and for ETAN here). Marc Sapir writes that Allan Nairn was Dennis Bernstein's guest on Flashpoints Thurs., Dec. 30 and that: The best kept media secret of the week is that the greatest devastation and death occurred and is occurring in Indonesia's Aceh province. I Just heard the scoop on Indonesia (from Alan Nairn, plus an Indonesian UC Berkeley professor and a fellow with nonviolence international). The Indonesian military yesterday began a new major military campaign in Aceh province (where perhaps 80,000 are dead) attacking villages (that are still standing) in an effort to wipe out the independence movement. They will be sending in another 15,000 troops to complement the 50,000 that have been used to impose martial law the past year. While claiming to be doing relief work they are hampering the relief efforts and will steal as much money as they can from relief work. The U.S. is likely to be asked by Indonesia to put the Aceh popular resistance movement on it's list of terrorist organizations and there is fear that under Condoleeza that will be approved. That will then make most Indonesians in the U.S. and around the world terrorist collaborators as they try to help their families and the independence movement get out from under the terror of the Indonesian military. Please tell people who want to send financial aid to the Tsunami victims of Indonesia to go through the East Timor Action Network not through government channels. They can be contacted at www.ETAN.org Aceh, the region closest to the earthquake, has been almost entirely sealed from foreign presence since the beginning of martial law in May 2003. There are rumors that the Indonesian government is now debating whether to allow foreign organizations access to Aceh. The U.S. government has offered assistance. Every second delayed contributes to needless death, sickness and suffering. This is clearly not the time for politics to supersede dire humanitarian needs. East Timor ACTION Network ALERT Donate to Aceh relief Go to the website for information re: contacting your congressional reps and about how to donate to grassroots efforts in Aceh: http://www.etan.org/action/action2/23alert.htm#Donate%20to%20Aceh%20relief Beware Medecins sans Frontieres: At 11:41 PM -0800 1/3/05, echo wrote: Medecins Sans Frontieres was arrogant and controlling at the Colomoncagua refugee camp. Didn't want to trust the community with the supplies and pharmaceuticals. The survivors at Colomoncagua were organized on an anarchist basis, with every person regardless of age or sex contributing with whatever knowledge or skill he or she possessed. They had lived so long because they were responsible. adding that the US is moving to displace UNICEF in relief work, and use the opportunity to tighten military control. (Again on Flashpoints yesterday, Monday the 3rd, the Acehnese head-of-state-in-exile was interviewed, and reported that Indonesian soldiers are shooting survivors who try to bury the dead, a practice sickeningly familiar from Palestine and Iraq.) more on military repression of Acehnese: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0103-25.htm ''We are now carrying out two duties: humanitarian work and the security operation,'' he told the daily. ''The raids to quell the secessionist movement in Aceh will continue unless the president issues a decree to lift the civil emergency and assign us to merely play a humanitarian role in Aceh.''<< and: Published January 4th, 2005, in The Age, Melbourne, Australia. Kantha Shakti (Strength to Women) is a partner group supported by IWDA. Rapists, abusers prey on disaster victims By Liz Minchin January 5, 2005 First their lives were torn apart by the tsunami; now women and children are being pursued by human predators. With millions left homeless and vulnerable throughout south Asia, some survivors have been further traumatised by shocking acts of violence, including gang rape, kidnapping, child abuse and the mutilation of corpses. Most of the reported violence has been in Sri Lanka, where a national women's group, Kantha Shakti (Strength of Women), has warned that "many, many" children and women are believed to have been abducted, mostly in the chaotic south. "Lots of children are being abducted and taken away for slavery . . . This [i]s happening on a large scale," Kantha Shakti executive director Rohini Weerasinghe told The Age. Even on the day the tsunami struck, women were abducted, she said. There has been no news of those women since. Other reports of abuse have been equally shocking. (I will send the full report to anyone who requests it) In Sri Lanka, non-government groups, including Kantha Shakti, are trying to raise money to send trained locals into the camps to tackle abuse. Donations to Kantha Shakti in Sri Lanka can be made through the International Women's Development Agency at www.iwda.org.au or by calling +(61-3) 9650 5574 during business hours or + (61-425) 712 478 after hours. ---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------* 28) War Resisters Go North By Alisa Solomon, The Nation Posted on December 22, 2004, Printed on January 3, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ EDITOR'S NOTE: As The Nation was going to press, Canada's willingness to take in Americans resisting the Iraq war became more concrete. In a year-end review with Canada's Global National, Prime Minister Paul Martin said that Canada was prepared to accept U.S. citizens who do not want to serve in the war. According to the report, when reminded that former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau opened Canada's doors to draft dodgers and deserters during the Vietnam War, Martin said: "In terms of immigration, we are a country of immigrants and we will take immigrants from around the world. I'm not going to discriminate." Asked whether Martin was referring to Jeremy Hinzman's request for refugee status, a spokesperson said that Martin "was not commenting on any individual case and certainly was not sending a signal to the immigration board." Still, Hinzman's attorney Jeffry House tells The Nation that the prime minister's remarks represent "a step in the right direction." Protests over the conduct of the Iraq war are mounting from what seems an unlikely place: the ranks of the military. In early December, eight soldiers sued in federal court to overturn the stop-loss policy that has extended their tour of duty indefinitely. At Camp Buehring in the Kuwaiti desert, Army National Guard Specialist Thomas Wilson, cheered on by his fellow soldiers, demanded that Donald Rumsfeld explain why the troops had to rummage through garbage heaps for scraps to armor their vehicles. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has admitted that some 5,500 enlisted soldiers have deserted since the "liberation" of Iraq began. While these disgruntled grunts don't explicitly challenge the validity of the war itself, their decision to complain formally, or even to quit, strongly suggests a dwindling of faith in the mission. Pfc. Jeremy Hinzman, of the 82nd Airborne, has made his second thoughts public. As he told me this past March, "The war is bogus. There weren't any weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war was not pursued in self-defense, and as such it is illegal. I decided I could not participate in such a criminal enterprise." On December 6-8, while his comrades were filing suit and confronting Rumsfeld, Hinzman was making this argument before Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) in a bid for asylum as a principled deserter from the US Army. In doing so, he was putting the war itself on trial, articulating clearly the doubts that are beginning to tug at the conscience of some US troops. Hinzman enlisted in the Army in 2001, making what he calls a typical "Faustian bargain" - trading service for college - and looking for a way to be part of something "bigger than myself," where he might "live for ideals rather than just to consume." But in basic training, as drills focused on "breaking down the human inhibition to killing," he began to realize he had made the wrong choice. Aghast at finding himself joining in training chants like, "What makes the grass grow? Blood, blood, bright red blood," he filed for conscientious objector status, serving in noncombat duty in Afghanistan while his application was in process. Back at Fort Bragg in late 2003, his CO application denied, Hinzman received word that his unit would be shipping out to Iraq in a few days. He and his wife got into their Chevy with their toddler and drove to Toronto, arriving there January 3 of last year. He is the first of three deserters to ask for refugee protection. A ruling is expected in February. As is typical in a case making a novel claim or with a high public profile, the Canadian government intervened, asserting that Hinzman does not fit the definition of a refugee: someone who is fleeing a well-founded fear of persecution. Canada also argued - and in an interim ruling issued about two weeks before the hearing, the IRB judge agreed - that the question of the war's legality is irrelevant to the case. The government is not revealing its reasoning, but one can imagine a number of competing concerns pulsing beneath it: on the one hand, a reluctance to embarrass its bullying trading partner; on the other, an intense domestic opposition to the Iraq War. At the same time, Canada may be anxious about the possibility of an American draft, despite the Bush Administration's repeated denials that one is coming. Some thirty-five years ago, an estimated 60,000 men and women resisting the Vietnam War surged north. (In those days, they could simply present themselves at the border and apply for landed immigrant status; since then, Canada has instituted a refugee determination procedure.) One of them was Jeffry House, Hinzman's attorney. He regrets losing "our cleanest argument": While refugee law states that prosecution is not persecution, House intended to show that it is indeed persecution to punish someone for refusing to take part in a war that is illegal under international law, which sanctions war only when it is undertaken in self-defense or with authorization of the United Nations Security Council. Still, House explains, even if the illegality of the decision to go to war is off the table, the question of how the war is being waged remains relevant to Hinzman's claim. "What's happening on the ground in Iraq is violating Geneva Conventions and international human rights law," House says. "No one should be forced to participate." From the cells of Abu Ghraib to the living rooms of Falluja, any number of examples can make the case. Marine Sgt. Jimmy Massey, who served in Iraq during the invasion in March 2003, testified on Hinzman's behalf, explaining, he told me, that "it's the system, not the individual soldier, that is the problem. Even atrocities are standard operating procedure." At the hearing, he recounted in graphic and shocking detail how his unit killed more than thirty innocent Iraqi civilians at checkpoints, "lighting them up" with machine gun fire. He also described how Marines shot dead unarmed Iraqi demonstrators who posed no threat. "I was never clear on who was the enemy and who was not," he said. "When you don't know who the enemy is, what are you doing there?" A Marine Corps spokesman has said that none of the acts Massey described violated rules of engagement. If Hinzman is denied at the IRB, there are possibilities for appeal. And then, House notes, "the question of the illegality of the war has to be confronted politically." After all, Prime Minister Paul Martin may have promised to help with Iraq's elections, but his predecessor, Jean Chrétien, declined to join the "coalition" forces without a nod from the UN Security Council. And the current Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, is on record challenging the war under international law. In answering Specialist Wilson's question at Camp Buehring, Rumsfeld smugly told the 2,000 assembled soldiers, "You go to war with the army you have." In his brave stand, Jeremy Hinzman suggests another option: The army can refuse to go at all. (c) 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20826/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EarthU/ * To visit your group on the web, go to: * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ufpj-iraq/ * * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: * ufpj-iraq-unsu | |