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Each political note has its own anchor in case you want to link to it.
The White House is using nasty techniques (borrowed from commercial web sites) to track visitors.
100 journalists went on strike at the Beijing News, whose editor was removed by the government.
The Iraqi resistance has already proved that the neocons were wrong in their belief that they could terrorize a country into surrender through "shock and awe".
Here is a complete translation of the Süddeutsche Zeitung article that says that the Bush forces explicitly encouraged the looting of museums in Iraq?
President Carter's new book takes direct aim at Bush, saying that he is destroying American values.
The article mentions two other interesting books.
Iraqi Kurds are using the Bush forces as cover to prepare their forces to fight Iraqi Arabs.
This kind of strategy is not unusual. I seem to recall that Indonesians used the opportunity provided by the Japanese occupation in World War II to train an army. The Japanese thought this army was going to help them, but what its members had in mind was to fight for independence from the Dutch. I wish I had my copy of Sukarno's biography here to double-check that.
Cindy Sheehan is targeting closet Republicans such as Hillary Clinton for protests, as well as admitted Republicans.
The Bush forces are trying to export one of the features of American "democracy"--more and more people in prison.
Bush changed ICAN rules to give governments more power over top level domains. Kazakhstan has already used this to practice censorship.
The Last Stand of the American Republic.
The editor of the most daring Chinese newspaper has been fired. He tried to act as if he had freedom of the press.
One of the charges against Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk has been dropped. Both charges are due to his having spoken about the mass murders of Armenians and Kurds.
This partial step is not enough to make Turkey a country that respects human rights. Turkey must reform its laws so that no one prosecuted for criticizing the state.
Global warming's effects are accelerating. Without the effects of
disease-causing particulate pollution, it would already be even worse.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Australia privatized the "care" of refugees. The company is now in hot water for killing a baby.
This fits a standard pattern--companies say "We can do this better and cheaper than the state", but they make it no better, only more expensive. By now, this argument won't fool anyone, except those who want to be fooled. Alas, that usually includes the corporate-owned politicians and the corporate-owned media.
A Chinese government study reports that 80% of companies violate labor laws.
Meanwhile, the figure of almost 170 million Chinese unemployed shows how "free trade" treaties function in practice a low-wage treaties. Until all those 170 million get jobs, global wages are not likely to go up.
France is considering affirmative action to counter demonstrable ethnic prejudice in hiring.
The Bush forces say that the government of Iraq can't be trusted to run prisons because it might torture the prisoners.
Mr Bush, didn't you decide these activities are not torture when carried out on your behalf?
Three years ago we already learned that the NSA was doing
illegal spying--on UN
delegations.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
You know that wealth and income are increasingly concentrated.
Here's
more information about how bad it is.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Bush is right: the US faces imminent danger. In fact, several imminent dangers--all from the same ultimate source.
The Bush regime is stonewalling congressmen asking for information about how Bush decided to attack Iraq.
The DEA continued its policy of maximum cruelty by raiding a San Francisco medical marijuana facility. (They ignored the nearby crack-houses.)
The Bush forces used white phosphorus shells to attack people, even though the US Army says this is illegal.
The Bush forces first denied using WP. Then they said that they used it for illumination, and it's irrelevant that people were in the target area. In Bush's War on Integrity, and anything can be described as anything else. His motto is, "What is truth?"
CIA kidnapers in Italy fell into the trap of
cell phone surveillance.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Joost Lagendijk, member of the European Parliament, faces possible criminal charges in Turkey because he accused Turkish troops of provoking violence with Kurdish separatists.
I think the Turkish nationalists who are pushing for this must wish to prevent Turkey from joining the EU. The Turkish government may not like to see a complaint raised against someone who will play a role in the decision of whether to admit Turkey to the EU, but as long as they have censorship laws, it leaves itself wide open for this.
Reportedly Sharon will have surgery to repair a hole in his heart. Now we understand why he has been so callous and cruel: his humane concern for other people must have leaked out through the hole.
Perhaps the surgery will enhance the prospect for peace.
EU fishermen blocked a ban on North Sea cod fishing because it would cut their income. The WWF warns this the cod are on their way to being wiped out; don't the fisherment realize that will cut their income even more. They are simply too short-sighted to survive in this world.
And if our species continues wiping out its food supplies with such stupid decisions, it will prove we were all too short-sighted to survive.
Most of the EU countries are failing to carry out their obligations under the Kyoto treaty.
The Greek government participated in the abduction and torture of Pakistanis in Greece, along with the UK government.
Torture by governments is much more dangerous than the private terrorism they claim to be "protecting" us from.
The music factories are being investigated for price-fixing for downloading music.
No wonder they say they "lose" so much when people share--they gain the benefits of monopoly when people don't share.
Italy is
considering murder charges against the Bush forces soldier who shot at
Giuliana Sgrena and killed Nicola Calipari.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
Following the usual practice of police, the Bush forces fabricated a story to excuse the shooting, but the Italian prosecutors don't accept it.
Republicans cut funds for student loans, and for welfare (but only the kind that's for poor people).
Here is more information on how poor people will pay the price so Bush could cut taxes for the rich.
This law was rushed through with little debate.
How FEMA
threatens the US Constitution.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush regime is
already starting a plan to track the movements of
all cars in the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The idea of charging more for road travel at busy times makes no sense. Drivers already face a considerable penalty for driving when the roads are crowded: it takes longer, and they use more gas, which costs more. If that doesn't make them change the time they travel, extra tolls won't do it either.
What we really want to encourage drivers to do is drive less, regardless of what time. The rational way to do that is by raising the gas tax, but that's exactly what Bush won't allow.
The Bush forces confirm that air attacks on Iraq have greatly increased.
One nasty thing that Islamic governments do is persecute anyone who was a Muslim and converts to anything else. Even Malaysia, which in most respects is not extremist, prohibits this. It is worse in countries such as Iran and Iraq.
In Iran, a celebrated Bahai prisoner of conscience died after 15 years in prison. Someone printed a false story that he had converted to Islam, but since in fact he was still a Bahai, the court took this excuse to pretend he had converted back. He was sentenced to death.
The Islamist climate of "liberated" Iraq puts Iraqi Christians in danger, including the danger they will be punished if any Muslims convert to Christianity.
Bush, who makes such a fuss about being Christian, probably doesn't want to talk about this; but if pressed to, he would probably say that God must have wanted this happen when telling Bush to invade Iraq.
Why not let April Glaspie tell what she really said to Saddam Hussein about whether the US would defend Kuwait?
An Iraqi student leader who organized a protest about election fraud was kidnaped and killed--apparently by a death squad.
"The law, it's me".
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Some of the Sunnis elected to the Iraqi parliament won't be allowed to serve, because they were associated in the past with the Ba'ath party.
If Iraq had really been liberated, as Bush likes to pretend, Iraqis would probably not generally vote for people who had played important Ba'ath party roles. They remember what the Ba'ath party did when it was in power; they can also see how much any individual participated in its wrongs. But they have a worse enemy to deal with now.
Sharon seems to be planning an air attack on Iran, timed to help his election campaign.
Former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid says that the Indonesian
police and intelligence are behind the terrorist bombings in
Indonesia, that the supposed Islamic extremist groups such as Jemaah
Islamiah have been infiltrated by provocateurs. And there's other
evidence to back it up.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The US army tried to order, and intimidate, Bush forces soldiers' families to close their private web site, or give the army control of it.
Palestinians are regularly punished by Israel
simply for being related
to Palestinians who were killed by Israelis--on the grounds that this
makes them more likely to want to retaliate.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-02 because the old link was broken.]
The writer has made a clever connection, because this shows that the Israeli government recognizes--when it suits them to do so--that its policies of violence towards Palestinians create more potential terrorists to retaliate.
Tali Fahima accepted a plea bargain, pleading guilty to a series of minor crimes.
Tali Fahima, an Israeli woman, was accused of collaborating with militants, but it appears all she really did was escort Palestinian children to school. (That's not an easy job in occupied Palestine.)
The government's willingness to bargain supports the idea that the accusations were false, but outcome was a victory for the government anyway. It has succeeded in terrorizing Israelis who might wish to associate with Palestinians, and without even having to present any evidence against one.
Israeli settlers have build dozens of illegal "outposts" on
Palestinian land; the army does not remove them, because secretly the
Israeli government supports them. So the nonviolent protestors of
Bil'in built one outpost on their own land. The army removed it.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
This serves to demonstrate the baldfaced dishonesty of the government's application of its own laws.
After the caravan outpost was destroyed, the villagers put up a new outpost: a tent. An Arab and an Israeli were arrested and beaten while handcuffed; the Arab was severely injured and is now in the hospital.
Abu Baker Mansha in the UK was convicted of thoughtcrime, based on
evidence suggesting he
might have been contemplating killing someone.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
If left alone, he might eventually have committed murder. Or he might have done nothing. To imprison people for things they might have done, for things they may have considered doing, is obviously unjust. In typical Blair style, it has been done by writing the law to define suspicious circumstances as the crime. Such a law is a far greater threat to society than a lone man with a gun.
Ethiopea has charged journalists and antipoverty activists with
treason alongside opposition politicians. They face
execution.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
Although the government's actions are outrageous, a part of its criticisms of the opposition may be true. It is not implausible that the US was trying to fund a mass campaign to drive the government from power; this occurred in the Ukraine and in Georgia, for instance. However, that would not excuse the government from (apparently) rigging elections in the first place.
The Israeli annexation wall has made Bethlehem an "immense prison".
Are the Bush forces disguising uranium poisoning as leishmaniasis?
The meaning of Iraqi sovereignty was demonstrated as the Bush forces depopulated a village near Fallujah. They said the village was too near their base, so they made all the inhabitants homeless.
It's clear how these troops think about the Iraqis they are supposedly helping to "liberate".
There are many reasons for impeaching Bush and Cheney, based on the fundamental ideas embodied in the US Constitution.
Cindy Sheehan writes about the mothers of other men killed by the Bush invasion of Iraq. Some of those men were soldiers in the Bush forces; one was a Spanish journalist; one was in the same battle as Casey Sheehan, but on the other side.
Iraq: Vote Early and Vote Often.
Many Iraqis don't like that policy.
The UK plans to record the movements of all cars, using computers
attached to TV cameras.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Blair's aim, as we have seen for a long time, total surveillance of everyone. This system is only partial surveillance; it may catch some thieves, but they will surely discover holes in it and learn to exploit them. It will work better with dissidents.
A bill proposed in the US Congress would require analog digital and video recorders to recognize special "watermarks" and refuse to record.
The movie companies have been attacking our freedom persistently for a decade--they are no friends of ours. However, for many people the idea of a total boycott of Hollywood seems unthinkable. So I have an alternate proposal: never pay to see a movie unless you have specific reason to believe it is a good one.
This is not an absolute boycott of Hollywood, but in practice it comes pretty close.
The opposition presidential candidate in Egypt has been sentenced to prison for forgery of signatures to register the party. Supporters protested inside and outside the courtroom--apparently the party has plenty of real support, which makes the accusation implausible.
The US has propped up Mubarak as a dictator for decades with lots of money. The current US criticism of Mubarak would be the right thing to say if the US were not still keeping him in power at the same time. The main opposition to Mubarak comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is islamist though not as radical as islamists in some other countries.
The Bush forces arrested the Iraqi minister of the interior, whose ministry ran various torture prisons and runs the death squads.
The article is right that this demonstrates that the "sovereignty" of the new Iraqi government is a sham--if we didn't already know.
This does not mean it was wrong to arrest him. I entirely support the arrest of Bush regime officials who preside over torture and death squads in Iraq. But if this policy is to be meaningful, it must not be limited to the low-level officials who are Iraqi. Their American higher-ups such as Bush and Cheney must be arrested too.
Bush forces soldiers say Bush underestimates their capabilities when he claims they cannot leave Iraq quickly.
Bush is hoping that reducing the number of occupying ground troops in Iraq will reduce non-Iraqi casualties--and that Americans won't know or care about the Iraqis killed by Bush forces bombers.
Dirty Uranium in Iraq is coming back to haunt the US.
I prefer to call it "Dirty Uranium" rather than "Depleted Uranium", because bombs that spread radioactive dust are called "dirty bombs" in all other cases.
Calls to impeach Bush are spreading to the edges of the mainstream.
The Bush regime's searches without search warrants go even further than previously thought.
The IMF gave the Iraqi puppet government a big loan.
Since the IMF operates mainly under the control of the US, there is surely more to this than is described in that story. I might just be a matter of distributing or delaying the costs of the occupation with its death squads. But it could be more. IMF loans usually have conditions, and which are usually nice for foreign investors and nasty for the populace. I wonder what the conditions of these loans are.
The NSA has been spying on
all international phone calls.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Berlusconi defends fascism--and torture.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
When Palestinians fire rockets from Gaza, Israel plans to respond by firing artillery...at civilian areas.
Until now, Israeli bombings of Palestinian civilian areas have been given the excuse that some Palestinian military leader was in the vicinity. Now that is dispensable.
As for the other proposal, to cut electricity for all of Gaza, here's what Human Rights Watch has to say:
See also
here.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
A Chinese reporter faces charges of "revealing state secrets" for telling the New York Times that Jiang Zemin was going to retire from one of his offices.
When the Bushmen call for prosecution of people who tell the public about their crimes, they're taking lessons from China.
French MPs Vote to Legalise Internet File-Sharing
Opinion polls in Israel show that half the population favor
sharing Jerusalem with the Palestinians.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
This would help make it possible to negotiate a peace deal, if Israeli leaders wished to negotiate a peace deal. Paradoxically Sharon remains popular, and his goal is ethnic cleansing.
The Bush forces released 8 Iraqi prisoners, formerly labeled as "high value", admitting they are "no threat".
The Bush forces did not explain why they previously had a different view of these people, or acknowledge that the previous view is mistaken. This suggests that these changing labels reflect nothing more than what the Bush forces want to do with a captive--not evidence or facts.
UK police are now investigating possible UK involvement in CIA torture
flights.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Bliar recently refused to carry out an investigation of this, saying it would "add fuel" to people's concern about the matter. He thinks people should take his word!
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are
spreading. We have squandered the
benefit of antibiotics by using them carelessly.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
Wal-Mart was fined in California for denying workers lunch breaks.
Europe-wide arrest warrants are out for CIA kidnapers.
The families of four Bush forces mercenaries killed in Falluja in 2004 are suing the contractor, saying that it sent them on a mission without adequate numbers or weapons.
I am not unhappy that the Iraqis killed these unofficial soldiers (who might be called "illegal combatants" in Bush regime terminology).
A proposal for peacefully avoiding Iranian development of nuclear
weapons.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The long term issue is the US rogue-state attitude towards use of nuclear weapons, which predates Bush. This encourages other countries to regard nuclear nonproliferation as just another name for US bullying.
Just how bad is the deal that was made at Hong Kong?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
In the UK, the copyright police
demand royalties for playing an
instrument before you buy it.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The copyright bullies know only one emotion, greed, and recognize no limits to their intrusion on people's lives.
The Bush regime asked Turkey to support war against Iran or Syria.
(Turkey refused to cooperate with the conquest of Iraq.)
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
British agents kidnaped and tortured Pakistanis in Greece, then released them with threats to hurt their families if they told anyone what had happened.
Microsoft faces fines of over 2 million dollars per day unless it carries out the EU's order to provide certain interface specs. True to form, Microsoft has pretended to comply, but the specs it offered were woefully incomplete.
Microsoft says this order violates its "intellectual property rights". Microsoft uses that term to create the false impression of a basic principle that never existed. In general, anyone who uses the term "intellectual property" is either trying to confuse you, or confused himself. In this case, we can be confident it is the former.
The US senate compromised to extend the U.S.A. P.A.T. R.I.O.T. act for 6 months, in effect making more time to discuss what to do.
This comes after a filibuster blocked the full extension that Bush wanted.
Democracy campaigners in Hong Kong blocked to plans to change the constitution of the territory, plans which did not lead to democracy.
Chris Hogg seems to be trying to excuse China for denying democracy to anyone who won't necessarily be subservient in applying it.
An amendment to the military spending bill will require the Bush forces to try to count civilian casualties.
I suppose they will undercount, but nonetheless it may help embarrass them.
What the Laws of War say about the Bush forces' conduct in Iraq. For instance, changing the constitution of Iraq is a war crime, and everything that the Bush-installed puppet government does is the Bush forces' responsibility.
The ease of rigging elections on Diebold machines has forced even Governor Bush to recognize the problem.
More information on how the insecurity was demonstrated.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The voting machine company's own "repair" personnel have easy access to the machines; in fact, there's testimony that someone from the manufacturer visited election machines in Ohio just before and after the 2004 election. Thus, direct personal access to any part of the system is not an unreasonable condition in testing the machines for fraudworthiness.
I know of only two safe ways to do the election:
* Voter-verified paper ballots.
* Hard-wired machines that cannot be altered without visibly breaking them. (This is done in India.)
More about Clint Curtis, who testifies he was hired to design a program for election rigging by a man, Feeney, who was since elected to congress.
Various Iraqis have accused militias of coersing voters.
These militias surely include the Badr brigades, connected with Iran, whose members are a large part of the Iraqi police.
Of course, Allawi with his ties to the US and the suspicion of stealing lots of money might not have got many votes even without coercion.
The parties that didn't do well are threatening to boycott the Parliament.
One of the judges on the secret FISA court, which exists to approve wiretaps, has resigned because Bush made a mockery of that court's job.
Media Lens documents how much even the most liberal of newspapers is compelled to uphold the business agenda even while sometimes criticizing it. It documents the pattern of the "engineering of consent".
Since Israel allows settlers to build and expand illegal "outposts" on
Palestinian land, without hindrance, now the Palestinians of Bil'in have
built an outpost on their own land.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The German government let an Uzbek government torturer enter,
and leave again, disregarding the lawsuit filed by his victims.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Representative Conyers has
introduced
resolutions to censure
Bush and Cheney for causes such as launching a war based on lies,
torture, and harassment of political opposition.
[References updated on 2018-05-03 because the old links were broken.]
In Iraq, even if the Bush forces are nowhere around, you're still not safe from them. Here are more details about the aerial bombardment of Iraq.
The Bush forces are not content will torturing and mistreating Iraqis. They lured men from India to work for them in virtual slave conditions, and in danger--and tortured them when they complained.
Iraq's Election Result: a Divided Nation.
Why did Bush order the NSA to spy on Americans when using the FISA procedure is so easy? Perhaps it's so he can spy on political opposition.
Dead soldiers' families' court case for an inquiry into why the UK joined the Bush forces has been rejected.
Republicans tried to sell off public land to mining companies, to help close the deficit caused by their tax cuts.
Censorship in Turkey is really rolling; 60 authors and reporters have been tried. Now a publisher is on trial for a minor side remark in a translated book.
Israel distrupted the Palestinian elections, forbidding residents of East Jerusalem from voting, because it doesn't like the prospects for who might win.
I suspect that "East Jerusalem" really includes various adjoining areas that Israel plans to annex to East Jerusalem.
More than one person has written to inform me about "typos" in the name of Tony Bliar. These inconsistencies are not accidental. Sometimes I use the old spelling, "Blair", which is still used by most news reports. Sometimes I use the more accurate spelling, "Bliar", which indicates the man's dishonesty.
A doctor from Falluja is in Brussels testifying about how the Bush forces destroyed the city. His testimony is here.
Thai police arrested Chinese refugees who were peacefully protesting
in front of the Chinese embassy. The protest was directed at rape and
murder of prisoners by Chinese police.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Since fines of a million dollars a day failed to scare the Transport Workers Union, the Night-Mayor of New York calls them "cowardly".
Colin Powell says European governments knew about CIA "rendition" of suspects.
Powell disingenuously does not distinguish between those "renditions" which transported people to stand trial and those that transported them for torture--so the statement means less than it appears to. Europeans surely knew about the former. If they knew about the latter, they should be prosecuted for it. And from now on they must make it their business to know the difference.
The mass media stand ready to label great thinkiers as incompetents and fools, the moment they start to criticize the crimes of those in power.
In a society whose mass media follow the tyrant to support torture, wars of aggression, and imprisonment without trial, most people will support them--so anyone who doesn't follow along is automatically an "extremist".
Bush defends illegal NSA spying on Americans' phone calls.
When he calls this a "tough decision", that's yet another layer of lie. For Bush, deciding to set aside human rights is not tough--it's a pleasure.
The NSA's illegal spying on Americans helped convince the Senate to block extension of some parts of the U.S.A. P.A.T. R.I.O.T. act. Alas, the democrats who sat on this spying issue give us little to hope for.
I can envision how the Bush forces could be driven out of Iraq by a combination of Iraqi resistance and American opposition. I don't know whether it will happen, but I can see how it might. But I can't see how we can free the US from the callous rich tyrants that rule it.
Tony Benn, for 50 years a UK Labor MP, sees more hope.
The Pentagon is already spying on protest groups and calling them "threats", but this is not enough for Bush. He wants to extend this to various sorts of "threats", meaning political activities.
The Turkish government is starting to take steps to end "honor killings", in which women are punished by their families for having been raped.
I understand the emotions that make some people support the death penalty. All I have to do is imagine the perpetrators of an "honor killing", and I feel like tearing them apart. But I will be a better person if I do not let those feelings run away with me; so I do not endorse the killing of prisoners. Life imprisonment is enough punishment to deter such crimes, if it is applied. The main challenge, for ending "honor killings", is to convict the killers at all.
A federal court ruled that "intelligent design" is just religious creationism in disguise, and that it cannot be taught as biology.
Extinction alert for
800 species--and how to prevent it.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Many US businesses are sure that whoever comes after Bush
will institute CO2 emission limits.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
More about Evo Morales' victory.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
The New York City Transit Authority wants to cut health care for its employees despite its billion-dollar surplus. So they are on strike.
Progress in gel batteries could result in RFIDs readable from 300 feet. If one of them is inserted in something you carry, you could be scanned from a block away! Total monitoring of everyone's movements could be a reality.
Won't Bush be happy.
The reason why Bush persists in his lies, no matter how they are exposed, is that he expects to get away with them. With the media often supporting the lies, it often works.
Venezuela is close to completing the process of raising taxes that foreign oil companies pay. Exxon is holding out, but soon it will lose its leases entirely.
Evo Morales may start Bolivia moving forward on this process.
With all the dishonesty of the people who work for Bush, this one takes the cake. Even as political posturing, it is absurd.
The US has gone well beyond mere meddling in Colombia. Plan Colombia gives the government of Colombia detailed year-by-year instructions to follow. President Uribe, who accepted this, in effect reports to Bush.
Uri Avnery: Sharon,
the pied piper.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Evo Morales won the Bolivian election in the first round.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The WTO has taken another step to promote corporate globalization.
Poor countries seem to have gained small and remote concessions for
their agricultural exports, in exchange for major concessions to the
manufacturing megacorporations.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
This is not final, so there is still a chance for these whole round of talks to go into the trash where it belongs.
The main opposition leader in Uganda got on the ballot for president even though he faces charges of treason and terrorism.
Labeling the political opposition as "terrorist" is fashionable all around the world.
Du Pont believes its secrecy is more important than New Jersey
residents' health.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Two girls for every boy! But it's not Surf City, and it's caused by
chemical pollution--which causes various diseases too.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush regime is holding young children prisoner in places such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
A split in Fatah could reshape the future of Palestine's dealings with Israel.
More information about the student who tried to borrow
the Quotations of Chairman Mao--and the chilling effect that
this surveillance already has.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Rumsfeld says that the McCain amendment has no affect on the US military since their policy has always been not to torture anyone.
Previous notes show this is a lie.
A catalog of false statements made by Bush regime leaders about Iraq.
Are the disasters caused by Bush policies mistakes, unforseen consequences? What if they were intended?
Moving production to poor countries often increases CO2 emissions.
Katherine Jashinski refused to go to Iraq to fight for the Bush forces. She would rather face imprisonment than kill Iraqi civilians.
Here is her statement, posted by Courage to Resist.
See also www.CouragetoResist.org.
Human Rights Watch calls for trial of Sudan's leaders for war crimes.
Their air force
provides air support to militias that kill civilians.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Sudan does not investigate its officials for complicity in this, yet objects to trying them outside the country, such as in the ICC. Does this remind you of another, more powerful rogue state?
The US media are supporting Bush's pretense that he personally can authorize the government to violate laws against domestic surveillance.
Members of Congress, and the New York Times, knew that the NSA was breaking the law by spying on Americans, but they did nothing for a whole year.
The idea of destroying the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches sounds like an absurd fantasy--wouldn't the police notice it? But even if Bush isn't lying about this, they could surely have got the attorney general to sign off on an emergency wiretap. So this is no excuse for trampling people's rights.
Al-Habashi says UK intelligence agents interrogated him in Pakistan, then gave him to the CIA to be taken to Guantanamo. The UK government just confirmed the first part.
The US tortured people in a secret prison in Afghanistan last year.
Israeli anarchists continue to join Palestinians in the nonviolent protests against robbing the lands of Bil'in.
Some Isrealis recognize that killing Palestinians reliably provokes retaliation. Ironically, an Israeli woman was killed by such retaliation immediately after predicting that it would come.
It's only the country's leaders that pretend to be too stupid to recognize this pattern.
An Israeli general suggested troops ought to be shot if they are morally reluctant to carry out illegal orders.
Microsoft is developing a product that lets you keep track of other people's whereabouts through their cell phones--as the police already do.
This is another reason not to carry a cell phone.
Governor Schwarzenegger rejected Tookie Williams' appeal for clemency;
Williams was then executed.
Part of the reason Schwarzenegger cited
was that Williams said he did not commit the murders he was convicted
of.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
I know little of the details of that case, but DNA evidence has shown that a substantial fraction of convicted murderers in the US are Innocent. And those who refuse to confess to the crimes they did not commit may be killed for their honesty.
The US "terrorist"
watchlist for airlines has 80,000 names.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
How the US deals with democracy in Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, and Iraq.
With Evo Morales, running for president of Bolivia.
His policies are rather mild opposition to the empire, and if I were a Bolivian, I would campaign for stronger opposition to global business' power.
The Iraqi resistance nonetheless saw enough value in the elections to urge Iraqis to vote--which is why there were no attacks on voters.
Bush-league sham democracy is not much good in itself, but it can do some good for Iraq if it leads Iraqis to demand the real thing. Real democracy in Iraq would mean that Iraqis, not Bushmen, decide what to do with Iraq's oil and its economy. To achieve this, they will need to kick the Bush forces out of power.
This may involve a political struggle, not necessarily only a military one. It would be most useful for some Iraqis to visit Bolivia, and study how the people drove out two presidents that were agents for global business. People who speak Spanish and Arabic might be needed to help as interpreters.
The McCain anti-torture amendment was destroyed by a compromise which added a loophole that the media have hardly noticed. The loophole doesn't look big, but it can be stretched by the CIA as far as they want to go.
A BBC video shows prison guards in Texas torturing helpless prisoners.
Information from Sibel Edmonds suggests a link between Plamegate and some neocons' involvement in a plot to help Turkey get nuclear weapons.
This connection is not proven; part of the reason we cannot tell whether it is true is that the Bush regime prevents Edmonds from telling us what she knows. However, there is no doubt that Bush is the enemy of the Constitution he is supposed to defend. When the rulers are traitors, patriotism can mean going into exile. Perhaps the best thing Sibel Edmonds could do for her adopted country is to flee to where its leaders cannot stop her from telling its people what she knows of the plots against it.
Homeland Security agents visited a U. Mass. student because he borrowed the Quotations of Chairman Mao through inter-library loan.
This one example would prove that surveillance and political intimidation goes far beyond what could be justified or legitimate in a free society. It also suggests a way to spam them: borrow the Little Red Book through inter-library loan! Then they will either have to waste lots of time, or pull back from doing what they shouldn't be doing anyway.
Bridgestone has been sued for treating its workers in Liberia
like slaves. It does not officially hire children, but fathers
must drag their children along to fill the quota.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The European Union is supporting extremist privatization demands in
the WTO talks.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
I hope that these talks fail completely, because the WTO will not
approve anything unless it
does more harm than good.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Opponents of Syria continue being killed in Lebanon, and Robert Fisk is convinced that Syrians are doing it.
Argentina will follow Brazil in paying off its IMF debt early.
This plan is causing controversy in Argentina.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The IMF has a tendency to impose cruel policies on debtor nations. Paying off the debt could be a good thing, if it is followed by tearing up those cruel policies and telling Bush and the IMF to go stuff it. But will that occur?
Various Bush regime policies have had unintended consequences.
Here is a partial list.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The Ethiopean government charged opposition with leaders treason, after they protested against alleged vote-rigging.
I wonder how long it will take Bush to do this.
Activists in Hong Kong are being systematically harrassed.
This reminds me of what Clinton did to a mass protest against a
meeting in Washington: their headquarters was condemned for fire code
violations a couple of days before the protest.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
It is important to recognize how police stretch and abuse whatever power they are given, so we can judge the likely effects of proposal to give them more power.
How the rationalists of India visit towns to expose the
fraudulent
magic powers of the religious gurus.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The challenges Evo Morales will face if he becomes president of Bolivia.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The police in Peru arrested one of the leaders of last year's massive protests against the US-imposed war on drugs.
Torture degrades us all -- regulating torture makes as much sense as
regulating terrorism, rape or murder.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Camilo Mej?a spent a year in prison for refusing to serve in the Bush forces in Iraq. Now he teaches high school students to see through military recruiting, which often lies to its targets.
A Bush forces officer has been arrested for embezzling around $100,000.
She should have taken hundreds of millions, like Halliburton; then she'd be safe.
The Israeli army shot 13 UN workers in Jenin, across 4 years. One was British, and a British inquest ruled this an unjustified killing.
Whether that will have any effect is not clear.
The so-called terrorist suspects that Bliar has hounded for years are supposedly planning some sort of crime. But the UK police have never even bothered to question them.
Recently we saw that the Pentagon is spying on protest groups, calling
them "threats".
Bush wants a law to expand this operation, in order
to prevent security threats. Now we don't have to guess what kinds of
threats he means.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The NSA also spies on Americans now.
The Bush regime has many ways of stirring up fear of terrorism. One of them is "agroterrorism", the idea that we need to fear terrorists who would put poison in our food as it is grown.
As this article explains, the US agriculture system does so much of
this that terrorists could hardly make it worse if they tried.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The government of Zimbabwe arrested journalists working for an independent radio broadcaster (which broadcasts from outside Zimbabwe).
Bliar's officials denials that CIA
torture flights stopped in the UK
are meeting mistrust in Parliament.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
This is what happens to habitual liars: people learn to distrust whatever they say.
The top 14 corporate evildoers.
The Blair regime wants to deport a woman who escaped from political
violence in the Congo.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Their position is, being attacked just once for political reasons isn't enough to prove you are the target of political violence. Perhaps they insist that you be attacked fatally before they believe it.
UK citizen al-Habashi says the UK handed him to the US for torture in Morocco. He is now in Guantanamo facing a military kangaroo court.
For Bush, the crucial effect of the Iraqi election is that it will provide a "sovereign" government to approve the transfer of Iraq's wealth into the hands of the corporations he works for.
Bush hopes that he can use air power to keep this corporation and its puppet government in power. But if Iraqis want freedom, they will fight on until their country is free of these Bush-imposed chains.
Schwarzenegger's
denial of clemency to Tookie Williams was indirectly
a way of demonizing other famous prisoners who also maintain or
maintained their innocence, and of covering up the doubts about the
evidence that convicted him.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
The courts protect the rights of the wealthy suspect, sometimes too much, but they often trample the rights of the pariah. In recent years, that notably includes Muslims, which is why Muslims can be convicted of planning terrorism based on evidence that rationally only provides grounds to begin to suspect them. But it has included young Black men for decades--especially those who are political, as were some of the men Williams was killed for admiring, even though Williams himself was not.
Thus, convicts innocent of the charges against them are not rare. We can't necessarily tell which ones they are, but we know they are there.
While convicts remain alive in prison, their friends have a strong incentive to look for evidence of their innocence, and official notice must be taken of it. When convicts are shown to be innocent, that embarrasses the authorities. The authorities know they can prevent such embarrassment by killing their mistakes.
The Pentagon, unashamed of exposure of its corruption of Iraqi
journalism,
plans to do even more, world-wide.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
In the US, allowing near-monopoly ISPs to control how their customers
use the Internet
could destroy the Internet as we know it.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
A Swiss official found credible evidence of secret CIA prisons and torture flights in Europe--and demands information from European governments.
A former Bush advisor publicly defends torturing suspects.
The artificial case this speaker uses to justify torture belongs to a class of misleading thought experiments which are unrealistic because of the certainties they assume.
Suppose you ask whether it is justified to shoot a suicide bomber without warning. What if your suicide bomber is just an electrician on his way to an appointment? It has happened. Suppose you ask whether to torture a terrorist to find out the plans. What if he is not a terrorist? It has happened. What if he is a terrorist, but he tells you a fake story that will lead you astray? It has happened. The people who want to shoot without warning, who want to torture, propose artificial scenarios constructed to provide unreal justifications. In reality, you don't know the odds well enough to calculate them.
In real life, no matter what evil you're trying to prevent, you can always find a method so evil that stopping you becomes the principal problem.
If the US is going to do torture, who should the torturers be? Here's one idea: invite the public to bid for torture opportunities.
The European Parliament approved a massive surveillance program intended to record who communicates with whom--and the movements, moment by moment, of every mobile phone. There is very little control over how the data can be used.
Cuba has blocked a group of women dissidents, known as the Ladies in White, from going to Europe to receive an award for their support for human rights. They carry out regular protests about the arrest of their relatives who are political prisoners.
The Pentagon is spying on dissident groups, and calls peaceful protests "threats".
Perhaps they're right. Democracy really is a threat--to tyrants.
There was a large conference in London of opposition to the Iraq war, and it plans large protests on the anniversary of the first attack.
The Badr brigades, whose members seem to populate the Iraqi police death squads, admits it is funded by Iran.
It also threatens openly to massacre attack the supporters of political candidates it doesn't like.
However, it is correct in saying that the other political actors in Iraq are equally corrupt--which includes Allawi and the Bush forces. The soldiers of the Bush forces are not getting rich, but their leaders, such as Bush and Cheney, are corrupt in their motives to send them to kill and die.
Can the various movements for peace and justice unite to hold the Bush
regime officials responsible for the many war crimes they have
ordered?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
Four Dalit women were beaten up after they defied the prohibition
on entering a temple in India.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
I cannot regard the worship of this deity, or any other, as a cause worth getting beat up for. But that does not reduce the wrong committed by those who did the beating, nor the injustice of the caste system.
China has arrested the police commander who gave the order to shoot protestors.
Another Lebanese opponent of Syria was assassinated.
The US government gave several stories about what the FAA and NORAD did on Sep 11, 2001, and they add up to reasons to disbelieve them.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-03 because the old link was broken.]
the Lancet magazine used scientific statistics to estimate 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed. Here's what they did, and how war supporters have tried to discredit or suppress the result.
The US House of representatives voted more than 2 to 1 in favor of McCain's ban on torture. This would be enough to override Bush's veto.
To make this ban effective, it is necessary to make sure that all prisoners held by the US and its agents and subcontractors have the opportunity to go to court if they are tortured.
The European Parliament voted to investigate CIA torture flights.
One architect's confession blew the lid off a failure to effectively enforce Tokyo's building codes for earthquake safety. No one knows how many buildings in Tokyo were improperly built.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-15 because the old link was broken.]
As Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk goes on trial for acknowledging genocide, the real defendent is Turkey.
Iraq after 1000 days of occupation.
During the destruction of Falluja, the al Jazeera camera team was
repeatedly attacked by Bush forces jets, which used their transmitter
to find them.
The CIA does not hesitate to contradict its chief's public statements, when in court protecting itself from investigation into its torture practices.
The US gun companies are
pretending that they will all go out of
business unless Congress gives them immunity.
The
Bush forces operate a "press club" in Iraq, paying reporters to
place stories.
How the CIA paid to set up Judith Miller's stories--and its
tradition of paying journalists goes back to 1950.
The Iraqi parliament election is structured so as to
underrepresent Sunnis.
The Bush forces
found another torture center in Baghdad,
with over 600 malnourished prisoners.
An Iraqi general fled to Jordan and talks about the torture
he has seen under Bush rule.
Was he a general under Saddam Hussein, or also under the Bush forces?
The story seems to suggets the latter, but I'm not certain.
Does someone know?
The French government told the CIA that the Niger uranium
documents were false--a year before Bush cited them as an
excuse for war.
In Mosul, under curfew, with the city cut in half by checkpoints,
the clinics find it hard to open for more than a few hours a day.
The European Commission
cut back a proposed directive
to register industrial chemicals and test their health effects.
A new Ohio law protects future election fraud.
Chavez' supporters
speak of changing Venezuela's constitution so he
can (or will?) remain president for additional years.
I hope they think twice about this. It would be a bad thing to do.
The government of East Timor has suppressed the report of its
own Truth and Reconciliation Commission under pressure from
Indonesia and the US.
Such cowardice can lead to comfort in the short term,
but in the long run it never leads to anything good.
Egypt:
A test of democratic rhetoric versus political Islam.
I propose that the West, rather than fighting against political Islam,
should try to divert it slightly towards more respect for human rights.
Israel's dangerous
nuclear hypocrisy.
The U.S. is threatening to delay the U.N. budget
as a bludgeon for reforms that many countries oppose.
The US air marshalls who shot a man in Miami airport said he made a
bomb threat.
The other passengers say that's not true. The air
marshalls must be taking lessons from cops, whose standard practice
is to lie about the people they have killed.
I'm staying at a place where NPR is on the radio, and I heard this
report first there. Although I had no independent knowledge of the
events, it seemed to me that the news report was too credulous; it
accepted the official story without doubts. That's what the US media
generally do. So I wonder if NPR reported the contrary evidence. I
suspect if NPR did not report this, but I wish I knew for certain.
Police in the US use cell phones to track people's movements, real
time. They can collect records of your past movements without meeting
even the usual standard for a search warrant. Now courts are considering
whether they must meet that standard for real-time tracking.
This is why I do not have a cell phone: I don't want to give the
police a record of everywhere I go. It's not that I have something
specific to hide; rather, it's my duty as a citizen to resist the
total surveillance state.
Legalized prostitution in Germany
allows honest brothels to keep
down pimps and the slave trade (which thrive where prostitution
is illegal).
Greenpeace says that the Montreal conference strengthened
the Kyoto treaty and its future, but showing the US as isolated.
A deal was reached on a fund to invest in
emissions reduction.
Businesses are increasingly recognizing what Bush will not, and
planning to curb CO2 emission.
The Bush regime tried to cancel Clinton's speech at the conference, by
pretending there was a chance it would sign a meaningful treaty if
Clinton did not speak.
Of course, this was a trick--there was never any chance, so Bush's
threat amounted to nothing. He was dangling an absurd false hope.
What shocks me is that Clinton almost fell for the trick.
Despite losing some support, Bush has not abandoned trying to doom the
world to disaster. Merely isolating the Bush regime is not enough.
What the world must do for survival is to slap Bush in the face--day
after day after day.
The unofficial war crimes indictment of Bush, Blair, and others.
In 2002 there was already plenty of reason to be skeptical of the Bush
claims about Iraq. In fact, some of the justifications given for the
first Gulf War were proved false.
The Israeli right wing has used its oppressive occupation of Palestine
as cover to destroy the welfare state, spreading poverty among
Israelis. Peretz, the new Labor Party leader, is running on a
platform of reversing that.
Sharon's campaign consists of killing Palestinian leaders, so as to
provoke terrorist attacks in response, which he can then use to
show how strong he is.
Villagers in Dongzhou, China, protested plans to construct a
coal-fired power plant whose pollution could kill them.
The police
shot and killed dozens of them.
You know Bush is in trouble when even an establishment organ such as
the New York Times criticizes his torture policy.
Afghanistan: 2 Years In Jail For Criticising Islam
The Afghan government should be required to respect human rights,
such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, if it is
to continue to receive western support.
The UK law lords (equivalent of the US Supreme Court) has
ruled out
use of evidence obtained by torture.
Unlike statements by Bush and his henchmen, which really amount to
"We don't admit it is torture". this decision is likely to actually
be obeyed by courts in the UK.
Drug prohibition raises the question of the individual's
cognitive liberty.
I am not sure how far cognitive liberty should extend,
but I am sure the US government restricts it far too much.
Congressman Murtha
continues to attack the war,
and even admits that Iraqis regard the Bush forces
as their enemy.
He doesn't say that the invasion was an evil and criminal act,
but it is still good to see this.
The Bush regime likes to claim that the Bush forces must remain in Iraq
to prevent a disaster whose potential was created by their own invasion.
Like all their justifications for occupying Iraq, it's baloney.
Here's why.
Bush told Republicans that the US Constitution "is just a piece of paper".
A broad range of peaceful protests in the UK have
led to criminal charges under "anti-terror" laws,
confirming that these laws are
really meant to attack
dissidents.
One of Bush's war aims is to give multinational agribusiness
companies
power over Iraqi farmers.
Rice now says that the CIA and US military are forbidden to torture,
but that this is
not a new policy. So it just reaffirms Bush's
long-standing pretense that what they do is not torture.
Shame on those European ministers that accepted this statement
as an excuse to disregard the facts.
Long before Bush, the US government taught other countries' dictators
to torture the opposition.
The Bliar regime
wants to postpone an inquiry into the theft of over a
billion dollars from the Iraqi puppet government, because the results
are likely to implicate Iyad Allawi, the candidate it supports.
In the US:
Donate to NARAL, and send a clever message to the FDA
about
emergency contraception.
James Massey talks about shooting Iraqi civilians,
and the systematic reasons why his unit did this over and over.
Zimbabwe rejected a gift of tents for the million people who were
driven out of their shanties in the city and now have no housing at
all.
The refusal is less puzzling if one considers that these people
supported the opposition party that Mugabe is trying to suppress, and
that he drove them out of the city specifically to attack them.
Naturally he will not let meddling do-gooders undermine the
tribulations he decided to impose on these people.
The Bush forces shamelessly continue their
corruption of Iraqi
journalists despite its exposure.
What this means is that any favorable story about the Bush forces that
comes from Iraq must be assumed to have been written by the Bush
forces. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Will US journalists let Bush fool them again?
Lord Steyn, recently retired from the UK's top courts,
accuses Bush of "war crimes" and "lawlessness on a grand scale".
Anyone who facilitated torture, or prepared the way for it,
is guilty along with the torturers themselves, and this includes
everyone in the UK who supported the acts.
A secret US government memo shows the specific intention to send a
suspect from Guantanamo to another country for torture. Thus, the
attempt to pretend they did not know what they were doing to these
people has been directly refuted.
(Of course, only people who wanted to be fooled were fooled.
But there are plenty of those in the US.)
Some members of the US Congress
called on Bush to start publishing
full casualty figures.
Concealing information about troop losses is a common technique of
dictators throughout history.
A Sunni spokesman says that the Iraqi Resistance will keep fighting
until the Bush forces set a timetable for withdrawal.
I urge people to call them "the Bush forces" so as to help Americans
resist Bush's attempt to manipulate them through their patriotism with
appeals to "support our troops". These are not our troops,
they are Bush's troops.
The Israeli government is putting Mordechai Vanunu on trial
for speaking with foreigners.
This is what Communist countries used to do to their citizens.
Two suicide bombers working together killed 43 Iraqi police
students in the police academy.
The people killed were not civilians--they were collaborating with the
enemy that has conquered their country.
Cindy Sheehan said, "I don't blame the people who killed Casey but the
people who brought us into this, who lied and deceived the world."
The use of secret witnesses in Saddam Hussein's trial means that they
can freely lie if they wish; if they lie, Hussein's defense has no way to
investigate and prove this.
Exxon paid a conservative schemer to draw up a plan to sabotage the
Kyoto treaty.
Remember, the "xx" in "Exxon" is pronounced as a rasping sound in the
back of the mouth, like "ch" in German "ach".
Colonel Westhusing of the Bush forces
committed suicide in Iraq
after he recognized what his mission consisted of.
I would have recommended he desert instead,
but I honor the decision that he made.
The newest desperate right-wing attempt to justify bringing Iraqis to
their knees: to prepare for another war, against Iran.
The Bush regime doesn't care about the
corruption
which diverts the money that is supposed to pay for
"rebuilding Iraq".
Perhaps that's because Bush is not really interested
in rebuilding Iraq--only in pretending to have done so.
The history of torture
as state policy in the US
has continued since before it was the US.
In regard to General Washington's raids on the Seneca indians in 1779,
I suspect that that was because they were fighting on the British side
in the Revolutionary War. By today's standards, destroying the
enemy's homes and farms is a war crime, excused only when practiced
upon Palestinians. In the 1700s, the Seneca would have agreed with
Washington that this was a normal tactic of war. So I won't judge the
raids of long ago as harshly as the torture of helpless prisoners.
Florida adopted a law called the "shoot first" law, which gives anyone
that kills another person (even a bystander) an all-purpose defense:
to say "I felt I was threatened".
This law effectively extends to everyone with a knife or a gun the
immunity currently enjoyed by police when they kill. We can see
how much that is abused by police, and that gives a picture of what
it will do once extended.
There are campaigns to introduce similars laws in other states, too.
The torture policies of the Bush regime are making army officers and
CIA agents start to rebel in disgust. They see that the high
officials who have the principal responsibility for these crimes are
being protected by punishing underlings.
Terrorism in Spain: harmless bombs, preceded by warnings, snarl
traffic.
These warning shots will be cited as a justification for attacking
Europeans' freedom privacy, but the cure is far worse than the
disease. Terrorism is minor as a cause of death in Europe, as in the
US; it is dwarfed by murder, not to mention car accidents. Any
proposal to reduce terrorism at great cost to people's rights is
therefore unjustified.
Descriptions of Saddam Hussein's
torture practices are heart-rending.
There is some doubt whether the witnesses could really remember such
detail of what they saw at the ages of 10 and 15; at the same time,
I would not put any of this past him.
Once we convict and imprison those in charge of torturing,
disappearing and killing of prisoners, Bush and Saddam could be
cellmates.
New York City is
building tide-driven electric generators.
However, even when fully extended, it will be small compared with
the city's electricity needs. Conservation can do far more.
Various US states are trying to impose their own limits
on automobile emissions, to reduce global warming.
The Bush regime has
systematically sabotaged environmental
protection in the US using a wide range of tactics.
Some of these tactics are part of the War on Integrity,
which is the overall Bush approach to governance.
1/4 million protestors marched for democracy in Hong Kong.
Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize lecture.
Professor Al-Arian, a Palestinian activist in the US who was charged
with terrorism, was acquitted on the serious charges. The jury was
deadlocked on some minor charges, and he may have to face another
trial on them.
Al-Arian is one of the political leaders who were hit with a campaign
of fabricated accusations. I probably don't agree fully with their
views, but the idea of America is that they must be free to agitate
for them.
Khaled al Masri is suing the US government for kidnaping and torturing
him. They did it because his name seemed suspicious.
Condoleezza Rice said pretty-sounding words about torture. Here are
facts that contradict them.
An Iraqi doctor describes how the Bush forces have attacked and
destroyed hospitals, arrested surgeons during operations, and
shot at medics trying to pick up wounded.
The article also reports also shot civilians in cold blood as they
tried to leave Falluja following the procedures that had been
announced.
The Bush forces would surely deny most of this, but they have lied so
much that they have no credibility any more.
The tax and banking policies of rich countries encourage the rich
aristocrats of poor countries to move their money into the rich
countrie's banks. This hurts the poor countries.
Life in Iraq is a matter of constant fear of violence.
(This article accepts some questionable Bush assumptions about Al
Qa'ida and Zarqawi, and who is responsible for bombings. I doubt
those assumptions.)
The Islamic regime in Iraq has segregated schools by sex.
Bush may not have had this in mind when he launched his invasion,
but his invasion is responsible for it.
CIA's secret prisoners were shifted to prisons outside Europe, just in
time for Condoleezza Rice's visit there.
As Condoleezza Rice is pressed about torture flights, she follows
standard Bush tactics: keep up the lie no matter how tattered it gets.
This emperor continues to insist that he is fully clothed, no matter
how many people say he is naked. He figures that he can intimidate
enough people, with the help of compliant media and corrupt elections,
that he will never be called to account for anything as long as he
does not admit it.
The Bush forces doctors actively prepare prisoners for torture by examining them to find their weaknesses.
An Iraqi writer has been imprisoned for two years without charges by
the Bush forces. Others in the same prison describe how they were
tortured.
Hormone-mimicking chemicals in the environment--the same ones that
are killing off most of the world's frog species--have dangerous effects
in humans at low levels, too.
People who play violent video games become desensitized to violence,
and this can be measured by their brain waves.
There was a time when a copy of Doom was installed on a computer at
MIT. Many of the students in the group that my office was in played
the game, and needing a distraction, I played it too. But I
discovered that I did not want to play it the same way they did. I
treated the game as a challenge, and worked out how to pass each level
with full health and ammunition without cheating. They seemed to
simply like moving around shooting, using the cheat command as
necessary. The gory corpses of enemies disgusted me, so I tuned them
out in my mind, but the students seemed to revel in the gore of these
imaginary deaths. Eventually I concluded that playing the game was
having a deleterious effect on my mind, and stopped.
Ever since then I have found myself uncomfortable with video games
that seem to revel in imaginary death. I do not favor censorship of
video games, any more than I do censorship of movies. But I would not
have those video games or movies in my home--whether or not there were
children in it. Children should see lovemaking, not violence.
Not content with rigging voting machines, the Republicans of Ohio have
passed a law prohibiting challenges to federal elections, and
systematically disenfranchising many poor people.
Senator Burns, from Montana, appears to have switched his vote to
preserve a loophole for sweatshop operators in the Marianas Islands,
after one of them paid his campaign funds.
Selling votes this way is so frequent that you might thing it isn't
news. But I think we have a duty to condemn legislators that are for
sale, no matter how commonplace that becomes.
A dangerous directive for mandatory "data retention"--that is,
recording info about communications among members of the public--is
being pushed through the European Parliament.
The excuse-of-the-week is "fighting terrorism", but terrorism in
Europe is a small problem: the many existing countermeasures are quite
effective. It is wrong to make society pay a high price--any kind of
high price--just to make a small problem smaller.
The government of France is considering amending a proposed law so
that it would prohibit much, or potentially all, free software.
(The vague wording leaves the scope unclear.)
The prohibition of free software is an amendment to a larger bill that
is unjust without it. Every one of the provisions described
here is unjust--a sign that the government works for the media companies
against the public.
An FCC statement appears to claim veto power over what software you
run, based on the "needs of law enforcement".
The Royal Society in the UK is pursuing its own financial interests as
a science publisher by opposing open access to scientific papers. Now
42 Fellows of the Royal Society have signed an open letter criticizing
this policy.
Islamic militants are attacking the courts in Bangladesh.
Babies get used to the taste of the foods their mothers eat
during pregnancy.
I wonder if this has an effect on the lives of people
who are adopted as newborns.
Americans Welcome Iraqi Troops.
Oil company executives lied to Congress when they said they
had not had meetings with Cheney,
shows a leaked document.
That lying was a crime, but the Bush regime is unlikely to
prosecute its cronies.
Bush plans to replace ground troops with aerial bombing in Iraq
are already under way: there is a substantial air war, being kept
nearly secret.
Egyptian police
barred opposition supporters from the voting
booth, and shot at them. This opposition is Islamist, though not as
extreme as the ones in Iran.
By supporting secular dictators in the Muslim world for decades
(including Saddam Hussein for over a decade), the US has discredited
secularism there. This has created a situation where the only
opposition to dictators comes from Islamic extremists, who often have
majority support, but themselves don't respect human rights.
It is a bad situation, but keeping the dictators in power against the
will of the people does not make it better.
The Burmese military rulers
use brutal torture on political prisoners.
I hope to see the day when the US can set a positive example that
would put pressure on such cruel regimes--but I don't expect it in my
lifetime.
Parodies of Harry Potter books have been suppressed in many countries
with copyright lawsuits.
This is one more reason not to buy Harry Potter books. Meanwhile,
it appears that JK Rowling is not content with her riches, but remains
greedy for every last possible additional penny.
One reader said that the above article gave him the impression that
the Tania Grotter books were simply copies of Harry Potter books, with
a few names changed. If so, the article was misleading. The person
who told me about the Tania Grotter books says they are quite
different from the Harry Potter books. They started as parody, which
can be seen in the article, and then went off in an independent
direction involving Russian folklore.
Here a law professor argues that it is wrong to permit
these take-offs of Harry Potter.
Democrats' opposition to Bush is only partial.
Here's what the real opposition to Bush
plans to do next.
The EU wants to establish a pan-European database about everyone in
Europe, which is
a big step towards total surveillance.
The UN may expand the intervention in Darfur to protect the refugees
who are being killed by Islamic militias.
Would nuclear weapons in Iran's hands be a danger to the world?
Compare Iran with the US.
Islamic militants are
attacking the courts in Bangladesh.
Babies get used to the taste of the
foods their mothers eat
during pregnancy.
I wonder if this has an effect on the lives of people
who are adopted as newborns.
The main Sunni political party in Iraq has
called for the release of
the Christian Peacemaker Team hostages.
If the kidnapers are part of the Iraqi Resistance, we can expect them
to heed this call. So if they don't heed the call, it suggests they
are not part of the Iraqi Resistance.
The Iraqis in a mosque drove Iyad Allawi away by throwing their
shoes at him, and his guards started shooting in the air.
Allawi says someone tried to shoot him, but it seems dubious.
The man Bush wants elected to run Iraq does not seem
to be very popular outside the White House.
Iraq has had Sunnis and Shi'ites for centuries, but it is the Bush
intervention that is polarizing the country between them.
Bush forces officers have given the lie to Bush claims
that the Iraqi resistance is made up of foreigners.
The foreigners fighting in Iraq are mainly in the Bush forces,
and the sooner they are all removed, the less the cruelty of
the occupation will be.
CIA torturers have leaked information about their torture techniques.
Israeli torture has been opposed through the legal system,
but with only partial success.
Who's killing Iraqi intellectuals?.
Law school research shows that it has become commonplace for
businesses to make exaggerated and questionable copyright and
trademark claims that shut down free speech.
The spanish right-wing is trying to rehabilitate Franco, who took
power at the head of an army rebellion against the elected government,
and executed on the order of a million people after he had seized
power.
A Spanish court is investigating CIA use of a Spanish airport
for activities that would make Franco proud.
An unofficial delegation from the US, representing cities, states,
anglers, and even businesses, is pushing against the Bush regime
in climate control talks.
The Microsoft XBox is a test platform for schemes to lock up future
generations of PCs, so that they can only install software that gets authorized by Microsoft.
This is one example of what we call "treacherous computing".
The practice of injecting cows with an artificial hormone, which increases production of milk, also produces a hormone that might increase the risk of breast cancer. The FDA declines to study whether this is dangerous or not.
Palestinian activists in the US have faced systematic persecution,
being arrested on false charges, getting unfair trials, and being
attacked by police both in and out of prison.
Evidence of another case of Bush forces mercenaries shooting Iraqi
civilians for fun.
Given the unlikeliness of finding evidence of any particular case,
these cases for which evidence appears are a small sample of a
widespread practice.
The Bush forces are promoting Iyad Allawi for the Iraqi elections.
After a first career as a bully for Saddam Hussein, he went on to
organize terroristm for the CIA.
The BBC is broadcasting "news reports" from "journalists"
that actually work for the military.
Gay marriage is
now legal in South Africa.
Sony's egregious rootkit DRM system is now the target of lawsuits, but
even better, it is
reopening the issue of whether DRM is legitimate.
Ironically, Sony's rootkit DRM is much easier to bypass than other
kinds of DRM. It suffices to run GNU/Linux, for instance, and it
cannot affect you at all. If Sony switches to a DRM system like
that used in DVDs, it would be a much bigger threat to our freedom.
The small number of internet providers in the US
creates new threats
to the freedom to use the Internet.
Four Venezuelan opposition parties with hardly any voter support
(according to opinion polls) have decided to boycott the
election--they say that it won't be fair.
Boycotting the election must feel better than not getting any votes.
But it's meant to provide Bush with an excuse to attack Venezuela.
This letter warns the US media not to be taken in.
Will the US media heed this warning? We will see.
Bush forces autopsy reports show that 44 prisoners were killed.
The US newspapers have not bothered to mention the story.
I guess that they don't consider it news that the Bush regime would
murder people in custody.
How Bush plans to disguise the theft of Iraq's oil reserves.
The EU is considering new anti-freedom measures,
based irrationally on the fact that a Belgian woman
did a suicide bombing in Iraq.
The unstated premise is that even a minuscule risk of terrorism is a
reason to give up any amount of freedom in the name of preventing it.
Even if we suppose that this really would prevent that minuscule risk,
which is dubious, it seems like a bad deal to me. Terrorist bombings
in Europe happen, but they are rare enough that sacrificing anything
important to reduce them is a mistake.
The reflections of Jim Loney, one of the Christian Peacemaker Team
that was
taken hostage in Iraq by a group that claims to be part
of the resistance.
If they were really in the resistance, I think they would let
these people go.
The congressional Democratic Party is starting a debate its position
on Iraq, which
could lead to real opposition to continued oppression
of that country.
I now see a possibility that the US will take its army away from the
Bush forces. But this gives me only limited enthusiasm because it is
unlikely to reverse the last four years' losses for civil liberties.
America the land of freedom continues to die, and I see no prospect of
bringing it back to life.
Sharon admits that the wall is meant for annexation.
Bliar faces accusations of complicity in torture for allowing the CIA
to ferry prisoners to the dungeon through the UK.
The director of al Jazeera asks: why did you want to bomb me, Mr Bush
and Mr Blair?
Global warming could put northern Europe in a deep freeze.
The ocean currents have already slowed substantially--a few
decades could bring disaster.
Police in Brixton (a part of London) have started
arresting people for
possession of marijuana.
Supposedly this is because pot sellers on the street are annoy
passers-by. If so, why not just arrest the people who do that?
The "best" brigade in the Iraqi Army is already preparing to butcher
Sunnis.
Its officers have no respect for the human rights, political
opposition, or lives of Sunnis.
This is what Bush wants to put in control of Iraq's streets; this is
the "freedom and democracy" that Bush has given to Iraq. Is it an
improvement on Saddam Hussein? Not that I can see.
The only way to prevent their plan for mass murder of Sunnis is if the
resistance fighters manage kick these troops out of Sunni areas before
they can carry it out.
The RIAA plans to sue people
who tell their friends about songs,
according to the Onion.
This is satire, but reality of the RIAA is just as wrong.
Venezuela's
New Popular Movements Grow From Above and From Below
How Bush Created a Theocracy in Iraq.
A Shi'ite theocracy is one possibility in the long run, but it is
still possible that Bush's cronies will get away with stealing Iraq's
oil reserves. Both may happen together.
Most Arabs think of the US as a threat, and consider the Bush invasion
of Iraq as
harmful to peace and democracy in their region.
Political leaders of all parts of Iraq, including the president of the
Iraqi government, met in a conference where they proposed peace talks
with the resistance. The Bush regime does not seem to like this.
Despite Europe's conservation efforts,
it has much further to go
before it can reach a sustainable way of life.
A California gang-member, who while on death row developed a system
for ending gang warfare and keeping kids out of gangs, faces execution
this month unless he gets clemency. A strong international campaign
is supporting him.
Even when people have not done such exemplary good in prison, that
does not justify killing prisoners. The death penalty should
be abolished.
An anticapitalist take on the Iraq war and why US politicians are
now turning against it.
I think it is a mistake to identify a capitalist economic system
(freedom of business activity within regulation) with domination of
politics by a class of the very rich. Today we have both, but either
one can exist without the other.
I don't know how to eliminate the domination part, but I see no reason
to think that it requires eliminating freedom of business activity.
Certain well-chosen regulations, such as those which formerly served
the US well across several decades, ought to do the job.
The Bush regime paid a lot of money for its fake-journalism operating
in Iraq--much more than was needed for the actions we know of. What
else did that money buy? Perhaps Iraqi newspapers? And something
else in the US?
Conservatives in the US see nothing wrong with
corrupting the press.
They reflect the Bush regime's usual attitude: when their lies are
exposed and the consequences hurt, they blame whoever exposed the
lies.
The Iraqi puppet government's rationing is
giving Iraqis less rations
than Hussein's government did while sanctions were in effect.
The Bush regime is negotiating with Iran about what to do in Iraq.
What does this mean?
There are those who say that the Iraqi death squads
are working for Iran. Maybe the Bush regime and Iran
have consciously working together to organize them.
When US politicians talk about "withdrawal" from Iraq,
do they mean
real withdrawal or fake withdrawal?
Even as the Iraqi "national" government plans to sell off Iraq's oil
reserves to foreign companies on the cheap, the Kurds are doing their
own drilling.
Does this presage the division of Iraq?
Allowing Iraq to divide might be the best thing to do, given that it
was an artificial combination in the first place, and the amount of
inter-group hostility there is. But I hope the Kurds won't sell off
the oil reserves to foreign companies.
The presidential elections in Bolivia, previously postponed,
are now
proceeding. A right-wing pro-empire candidate could be chosen by
congress, even though he is likely not to get the most votes.
The Bush forces have paid (i.e., corrupted) many Iraqi journalists
into serving as their propaganda tools by publishing "news stories"
that were written for them and supplied by the Bush forces.
The Iraqi government failed to release the promised report of its
investigation into torture of prisoners. This fuels the suspicion
that it has
no intention of really investigating.
Bush got an exception for the treaty that protects the ozone layer,
for the sake of strawberry farms. So you can pay less for strawberries,
and get skin cancer.
The US Senate
voted against investigating whether torture was used at
Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons overseas. Their eyes are firmly
closed.
I'm very worried about this
plan to make electricity customers to use
power meters that can be monitored remotely.
Will this system enable the electric company to monitor energy use
moment by moment (or even hour by hour)? That would mean that their
records would show when you were home and when you were out. That
would be an invasion of privacy. I don't mind paying for the
electricity I use, but the electric company has no need and no right
to know precisely when I use it.
Several Sunni political and religious leaders have been assassinated
recently. One was assassinated in Falluja, where it would be hard
for Shi'ites to go,
where it is hard for anyone to move around without
Bush forces permission. I think we can be confident the Bush forces
approved this assassination.
Bush forces soldiers danced with glee over the bodies of Iraqi
civilians they had killed.
No wonder they kept reporters out
for so long.
The Bush forces are
making a practice of raiding hospitals,
arresting doctors, and attacking ambulances. They believe
that their enemies should not receive medical care.
Bush forces soldiers sent a robot bomb to kill an Iraqi man
trapped in
a damaged car that could no longer move. And they made a movie of it.
I wonder if that bomb was labeled "freedom and democracy".
Rumsfeld says that Americans in the Bush forces should not intervene
when they find their
Iraqi puppets torturing prisoners, because Iraq
is "sovereign".
If the Iraqi government is so sovereign that it has the right to
torture without interference from Bush, does it also have the right to
refuse to privatize Iraq's oil?
The Bob Woodward scandal is
not going away. While concealing his
knowledge that high officials were involved in outing Plame, he
told the public this was not the case.
The primary witness testifying about implicating Syria in the
assassination of Hariri recanted his testimony--in Syria.
It is entirely plausible that Bush's friends tried to bribe or
threatened him; it is entirely plausible that the Assad regime
threatened him. I can also imagine that he testified so that he could
get Assad to pay him to recant later. I don't know which version of
his story to trust--probably neither one.
Mehlis ought to finish investigate the van that was used for the
bombing, rather than rely on this witness.
Why does Howard (prime minister of Australia) want sedition laws now?
Here's
one theory.
Cunningham's campaign finance corruption
seems to bring in many other
Republicans.
Lawrence Wilkerson says that Cheney was the main advocate of torture
and disregard for the Geneva Conventions--apparently a war crime.
However, Bush's war crimes
go beyond the methods used in the war.
Applying the same principles that were applied in Nuremberg to the
Nazi leaders, the decision to launch a war of aggression was the
central crime.
Some have criticized Nuremberg as "victors' justice".
I think the principles of the Nuremberg trials are admirable.
Whether they are really "victors' justice" will be determined
by whether the US applies the same principles to its own leaders.
Palestinians appealed to the kidnapers of some western aid workers
to release them.
If the kidnapers are working for Bush, I doubt they will heed this call.
If they are really in the Iraqi resistance, they might--but why would
they have kidnaped these aid workers at all?
Poor coutries are asking rich countries to pay them to preserve their
rainforests--which would counterbalance the incentive to cut them
down, while providing the funds to control illegal logging.
Superstitions can be deadly: a thousand old women each year are being
killed as witches in Tanzania.
Human rights volunteers, who went to Iraq to help prisoners imprisoned
and tortured by the Bush forces,
have been kidnaped. I wonder who
might have done it?
Israel refuses to halt "illegal" settlement building. (These
"illegal" settlements have had general government support.)
An American student was convicted of plotting terrorism,
based only on a confession obtained through torture.
The
reports of Saudi and US government agents prove that his
interrogation was a joint project. The US government was thus a
direct participant in how he was treated.
Congressional candidate Tony Trupiano makes "
Impeach Bush" a part
of his campaign.
The US government has supported Islamic extremist terror groups--parts
of that loose affiliation we call Al Qa'ida--around the world for over
two decades, including people who attacked US installations. And this
support continued after Sep 11, 2001.
Former and present officials of the Iraqi government
say that torture and rape of prisoners is common practice.
With examples like Bush and Saddam Hussein to follow,
this is only natural.
These outposts get secret government support in despite of
being "illegal".
Here's
the actual report.
A story about a settlement that Israel is extending.
Congress voted to cut aid to certain countries in Latin
America unless they give US soldiers immunity from war crimes prosecution.
(This article was written before the amendment was adopted.)
These countries should start canceling other treaties with the US, and
if they host US soldiers, they should make those soldiers leave.
Bush plans to withdraw ground troops from Iraq, and replace them with
air power. That would mean fewer Iraqi civilians shot on the street,
and more killed by bombs.
A courageous UK editor--and member of Parliament--says he will
publish the "bomb al Jazeera" memo if he gets a copy,
even at the cost of going to jail.
Various European countries are identifying suspect CIA torture flights
in order to
investigate the torture activities.
Ten forms of injustice
in the trial of Saddam Hussein.
The crime Saddam is being tried for is that he signed death warrants.
Bush has done lots of that. Could we put Bush on trial for this?
Bush should follow the example of Congressman Cunningham: resign
and come clean.
Here are the details of how prosecutor Detlev Mehlis
delivered a false report on a bombing in Berlin, inculpating
Libyans while protecting suspects associated with Western spy agencies.
More information on the various suspects--those protected
and those possibly framed.
The parents of a Danish soldier killed in the Bush forces
are suing their government,
claiming the war is illegal
and violates the Danish constitution.
Will Bush stage a terrorist attack on Congress?
It would serve his
purposes, and it is no worse than what he's already done.
The Bush regime plans to allow the Pentagon to
spy on US civilians.
The Bush forces have extended into Ramadi their systematic pattern of
atrocities against Iraqi civilians.
When that article speaks of Iran,
see this article.
Amnesty International held a protest in London
against the UK's tolerance for torture.
(I wish I had known about this earlier so I could
post it in advance.)
The Bush regime has announced a plan for Iraqization of the war:
removing American troops, while paying Iraqis to do most of the
fighting to keep their country subjugated.
Because Democrats in Congress failed to be skeptical about Bush lies
about Iraq in 2003, it is hard for them to criticize Bush now.
Sea levels are rising faster in the last decade,
and global warming seems to be the cause.
Sharon's new party
completely rejects the idea of "land for peace".
Instead it offers Palestinians "independence" (in tiny pieces of
territory) if they crush all militant resistance to the occupation.
Since the occupation's cruelty generates militant resistance, Sharon
himself can ensure this criterion is not met. Thus, it is an excuse
for refusing to end the cruelty.
Although the policy Sharon has stated is a bad one, I suspect it is a
good thing that he has come out in the open with it.
Deborah Davis is in court because, while on a bus commuting to
work,
she rejected a demand to show her papers for no reason.
As the Bush forces' situation in Iraq continues deteriorating,
the war hawks are starting to disagree over
what to do now.
The city of
Falluja has been turned into a prison
for the few of its inhabitants that are still there.
If you have money, that is considered evidence of being a "terrorist",
which means the Bush forces can steal it.
'Trophy'
video exposes private security contractors shooting up Iraqi
drivers.
Documented examples of brutality like this one are the exceptions.
The usual case is brutality that can never be proved.
Soldiers in prison in the US are treated in ways that come close
to torture. They get no blankets and no heat.
The Bush forces are still planning to remain in Iraq
for many years.
Bush is bullying the UN, saying "serve us or we'll make you irrelevant."
If the UN surrenders to this bullying, it will be irrelevant.
Families of British soldiers killed in Iraq have
gone to court in the
UK calling the war "illegal" and demanding an independent
investigation of how the UK joined the Bush forces.
Here is their web site.
General Odom, who exemplifies the "rational imperialism" faction
of US conservatives, says that the Bush forces should be withdrawn
from Iraq because they can't do anything there but harm.
The Bush forces are using house demolition as a punishment.
I think that collective punishment of civilians violates
one of the Geneva conventions.
A foreign observer who escorts Palestinian children to school in Hebron
was specifically expelled by the Israeli government.
It is standard practice for settlers to harass Palestinians, and
standard practice for the Israeli police to wink at this--it amounts
to an unadmitted policy of ethnic cleansing. The expulsion of
foreigners who get in the way confirms that the government supports
the policy.
Israel continues
demolishing Palestinian homes, too.
People in the Ukraine had high hopes for their peaceful "Orange
Revolution", but the new government has failed to prosecute corrupt
former rulers or reduce corruption. Its only real effect was to give
the Ukraine's support to the US.
Since US funds helped organize the revolution, one must suspect that
that was the aim all along.
Today's carbon dioxide levels are
the highest in 650,000 years.
Detlev Mehlis, who is investigating the assassination of Hariri in
Lebanon, has a past history of investigating acts of terror and
getting the answers that the US wanted. He fits into a long
and deeply orchestrated campaign to impose the New World Order
on Lebanon and Syria.
Dictators are fond of organizing "spontaneous demonstrations". But
the US has perfected the technique; the fact that the organizers are
paid shows through occasionally, but they fool lots of people. In
particular, they always fool the US mass media, which want to be
fooled.
"For some time, I have been suggesting that the aim of Republican
strategy has been a Republican Party that
permanently runs the United
States and a United States that permanently runs the world."
UK police will use a computer game as a sobriety test.
This will offer an opportunity to demand that companies switch from
mandatory drug tests to mandatory sobriety tests. Sobriety tests
would be far more effective for preventing accidents, since they can
be done every day, and can detect dangerous impairment regardless of
its cause, while preserving the employees privacy. (This method is or
was used by a bus company in California.)
Bush forces troops are terrorizing and massacring civilians in Haditha.
And the "Iraqi army" is shooting unarmed civilians in their beds.
Assassins are focusing on professors and doctors.
How the BBC helped cover up, then minimize, the war crimes of Falluja.
If Bush indeed wanted to bomb the headquarters of al Jazeera, it
would have been the finale to a persistent campaign of military
attacks against that TV station.
Blair says nuclear power is the only way to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
However,
a technology forecast suggests that by 2030 solar energy will
be cheaper than other energy sources are now. If this is true, it is
absurd to build atomic plants, since they won't be available until
almost that date.
Journalists' rights groups
asking for clarification of a report that
suggests Bush sought to bomb Aljazeera.
Protestors outside the Bush ranch are being arrested,
just for being there.
Proposed Australian sedition laws
would criminalize the views of
academics and journalists. This supposedly will protect Australians
from "terrorists".
Laws making it a crime to be unable to prove you don't know the answer
to a question are an absurd excuse to imprison whoever the government
wishes. It is part of the same trend that can be seen in the UK:
defining crimes which are situations rather than actions.
The cultural monuments of Iraq are being
destroyed along with
its citizens.
What's
the origin of the cruelty of the occupation of Iraq?
You can see it in the people who enjoy the idea of Bush forces
troops robbing Iraqi civilians.
Stealing alcohol is a small matter compared robbing the oil reserves,
with mass murder and torture, with destroying the nation's
infrastructure and its history. But it shows the disrespect from
which all those wrongs can come.
Meanwhile, wasn't it stupid to attack the kind of not-very-devout
Muslims who would drink alcohol? Which kind of people would you rather
encourage Iraqis to be?
Which country will be the next victim of US foreign policy?
The International Federation of Journalists has
demanded clarification
from Bush and Bliar about actual and threatened attacks on al Jazeera
television.
The Bush regime has
pressed charges against Jose Padilla, who will now
get the day in court that he was always entitled to.
The charges have nothing to do with planning a terrorist attack in the
US, which is what he was originally accused of. We can take this as
confirmation that he was falsely imprisoned for those accusations.
Meanwhile, there is a danger he will not get a fair trial in today's
climate.
Hunger claims 6M children per year, and more children are hungry in
Africa now than in the 90s. In other words,
current policies are
making things worse.
Russia plans to restrict charities, including human rights groups, and
prohibit them from receiving foreign funding. This will effectively
prevent Amnesty International from operating there.
The threat of US-funded subversive groups that organize "spontaneous
protests" is a real one. The governments they have protested
against--in Ukraine and Georgia, for instance--have usually have been
nondemocratic. But it is not clear that the replacements really
are better (except better for Bush).
Blair effectively confirmed the story that Bush wanted to bomb the
headquarters of al Jazeera, by issuing a gag order forbidding British
media from publishing any more information about the leaked memo.
Whoever knows more should tell the details to al Jazeera, so it can
publish them.
Vandana Shiva: Two myths that keep the world poor.
In Sri Lanka, the Tamil independence movement did not allow people in
the areas it controls to vote for the new president. This helps the
hard-line candidate who wants to reopen war against the Tamils.
Sinhalese tried to force Tamils to assimilate, forbidding the use of
the Tamil language, starting in the 1950s. After decades of futile
protests, the Tamils started an armed uprising. However, now that
movement seems to be caught up in trickery, like the Sinhala majority.
Faux News refuses to run an ad criticizing Supreme Court nominee
Alito. It says there is a factual error in the ad, but that seems to
be untrue.
The Bushmen were caught again exaggerating dubious "intelligence"
about Saddam's weapons programs. They were warned "Curveball" could
not be trusted, but he said what they wanted to hear, so they
presented his reports as truth.
Was Zarqawi killed in Mosul?
Or was he killed long ago?
More cases of torture by the Iraqi puppet government.
This government is the child of the Bush regime;
like father, like son.
George Monbiot sums up the war crimes of Falluja.
28% of the wood imported into the UK was illegally logged
from forests that are in danger of being wiped out.
The Blair regime has turned its back on the idea of mandatory
greenhouse gas limits, effectively betraying the environmental
movement and giving full support to Bush.
Genetic engineering of a pest-resistant variety of peas
has failed. They resist pests, but they cause allergic reactions
in mice (and thus perhaps in humans too).
Karl Rove is worried about needing a new job if he is indicted,
so he has prepared a resume.
A leaked secret document says Bush and Blair considered bombing the
headquarters of Al Jazeera television. (This is located in Qatar, a
country with which neither the US nor the UK is at war.) Was it a
joke, or serious? The people who tried to leak it are facing
prosecution.
The Iraqi puppet government has unveiled its plans to privatize Iraq's
oil reserves, confirming
what everyone with eyes open could see about
the reason for "Operation Iraqi Liberation".
The usual feeble neoliberal excuses for privatization were offered,
such as "we don't have enough money without outside investment".
Why don't they have enough? Because they are corrupt, and squandered
more than a billion dollars on corruption.
[Can you find the note about that, it was a few months ago, and
link to it here?]
There will be a referendum next year in Nevada to
legalize small
quantities of marijuana, as well as regulated growing and sale.
The Bush forces call white phosphorus a "chemical weapons"
when accusing Saddam Hussein of using it.
After a mine killed some Bush forces soldiers, the others retaliated
by
shooting some civilians in the neighborhood.
Such reprisals were the Nazi policy when the resistance in occupied
Europe killed German soldiers.
Signs on Bush forces convoys tell Iraqis to stay 100 meters away or be
shot.
And here's
what happens when Iraqi civilians don't see the sign from
100 meters away. Or whenever a Bush forces soldier sees a car and
panics for no reason.
Of course, the Bush forces say they "the car failed to stop".
But whose fault was that?
A Bush forces soldier who cleaned up war debris for 6 months in 2003
now has cancer and many other medical problems. And his daughter was
born without a right hand. Since he has a high level of
Dirty Uranium
in his blood, he thinks that is the cause.
The CIA uses a torture technique that goes
back to the Inquisition.
Of course, the CIA won't admit it is torture.
We need an independent prosecutor to investigate high officials
who may be guilty of authorizing torture.
The US Senate voted to allow Bush to keep "terrorist" suspects in
prison without trial. (If Bush chooses to try them in military
courts, then they get to appeal; but if he does not try them, they
have no hope except to starve themselves to death.)
This is a shameful day for the United States, so-called "land of the
free".
The bill also includes McCain's anti-torture amendment, but if
prisoners cannot go to court when they are tortured, their jailers can
get away with torture even if it is illegal.
Here's
clear evidence of the Bushmen's willingness to stretch the
truth to link Saddam Hussain with Osama bin Laden.
Blair is falling under great pressure for use of cluster bombs.
The unexploded bomblets can often kill children who pick them up.
The US accuses Bolivian presidential candidate Evo Morales of getting
funds from Cuba and Venezuela, but the supposed opposition in his
program is rather tepid. There's no way to make Bolivia independent
without facing sanctions from the US; a leader who doesn't dare to do
so is too weak.
I don't know whether Cuba, or Venezuela, is funding Morales (though
since Cuba is so poor, I doubt it could). If they are doing so, is
that wrong? The US funds lots of political campaigns in other
countries, including probably Bolivia. So this is simply turnabout.
The US Bush forces were forced to
admit using white phosphorus as a
weapon, after previously denying it.
The argument seems convincing that white phosphorus is not a chemical
weapon. It falls a small way on the other side of the line. This
distinction would be relevant in a war crime tribunal against Bush,
though not for Blair, since the UK has ratified additional treaties.
But the crucial thing is to bring Bush before a war crimes tribunal
and investigate what he and his henchmen have done. Once this is
achieved, there will be no shortage of charges to bring.
Here's how the police
attacked Nasser Shneiter village.
The remaining men are in hiding, since they would be arrested
and maybe killed if they are found, while the crops die because
police destroyed the irrigation equipment.
Baghdad has become the city of the gunmen, as militias control parts
of the city while Bush-created paramilitary death squads terrorize it.
The Bush forces established these death squads, which means that
Christian extremist terrorists are in the same league with Islamic
extremist terrorists.
Why did the Bush forces
raid some of their own paramilitaries?
What does this all mean?
An Italian who works in Gaza on an Italian-government-sponsored aid
project was interrogated at length and threatened, then sent back to
Italy. Reasons were not given. It's not the first time this sort
of thing has happened.
A long series of falsehoods about supposed Iraqi weapons and supposed
connections with Al Qa'ida adds up to a
clear intent to deceive the
public and the world.
Thus, as proof surfaces that some of these falsehoods were intentional
lies, it is no surprise. We did not have clear proof before, but we
had enough reason to disbelieve what we were told.
I disagree with that article on one point of interpretation. The
attack on Pearl Harbor was a real surprise attack, because it was
intended by the Japanese Navy as such. A surprise attack doesn't
cease to be a surprise attack just because finds out about it.
Roosevelt's conduct raises other issues, but he did not accuse the
Japanese of anything they had not really done.
Israel keeps expanding the settlements.
And ethnic cleansing proceeds in Hebron, as Palestinians are driven
out.
When a Palestinian kills a Jew, the settlers punish other
Palestinians. When a Jew kills a Palestinian, or many Palestinians,
the army punishes other Palestinians. It's the same way Jews were
treated for centuries in Europe.
Lots of Congressmen are now demanding an investigation into how
the administration ignored the reports of the Able Danger group.
As usual, the Bushmen are blocking the investigation and claiming
it's for "national security".
If we had an independent press, it would be all over the
administration for this, and they would have to allow the
investigation.
I wonder how Able Danger relates to Total Information Awareness.
Buildings in New Orleans that were flooded
are now full of mold spores
that can trigger allergic reactions.
The European Union agreed to take the lead in ending the trade in
diamonds mined by plundering armies in Africa. Civil wars there are
often fueled by this diamond trade. But it won't be easy.
Palestinians trying to harvest their olives face
sudden attacks from
settlers, and harrassment by the army. Sometimes they find the trees
uprooted. But even if none of those things gets in the way, they
often find no olives, because they have been blocked from taking care
of the trees.
The EU has been trying to control greenhouse gas emissions,
but overall they are rising instead of falling.
Ahmad Chalabi, who helped provide Bush with phony "intelligence" that
was useful for lies to justify the war, is now going to be rewarded
by becoming prime minister of Iraq.
The Bush forces themselves occasionally admit that few of the
Iraqi resistance fighters really are foreigners.
I would not trust the rest of what the Bush forces spokesmen say in
this article--things that serve their interests and that they could
lie about without risk. I'll believe they arrested no foreigners in
Tall Afar, because if they had found some, they would be showing them
with glee. But when they say the 1000 people they arrested are
"insurgents", it probably means they arrested 1000 people and labeled
them "insurgents". And I am skeptical that their attack "restored order"
unless it is the peace of the grave.
British-trained Iraqi police killed prisoners by drilling into their
heads. The UK government asked the Iraqi police to investigate this,
but they won't. This has become a scandal in the UK.
The Bush forces have
raided Iraqi torture houses before;
but it was necessary to tell them "insurgents are there"
before they would bother.
"It wasn't torture, because we didn't behead them", says the Iraqi
government.
Taking lessons from Bush again?
When Bush and Blair say that the reason they took away your freedom is
to protect you, remember this.
Protests in Ecuador against the plans for a low-wage
trade treaty with the US
have met with police repression.
Here's what Sony cameras would do,
if they could.
The EFF went to court to make Diebold comply with North Carolina's
laws for public examination of voting machine software.
Of course, no government should use voting machines whose workings are
secret. But being able to study the source code of a voting machine
is not enough to ensure honest elections, because you can never tell
for sure that the code that you studied is the same code that was used
for the election. What if someone patched the code the night before?
Insist on a Voter-Verified Paper Ballot or on the use of machines
that cannot be programmed at all.
Sharon's plan to start a new party should not be seen
as a hope for peace;
he has never wanted peace.
An officer testifies that he taught Bush forces troops to use
white phosphorus to attack people.
The Bush regime admits that phosphorus shells may have killed
civilians in Falluja, but says that's ok because it had "evacuated the
city". But it didn't.
Men were not allowed to leave, remember?
The UK police have admitted they were wrong to adopt a
kill-without-warning policy without public debate.
FEMA is sabotaging efforts to enable the displaced residents of New
Orleans to vote in next year's elections.
This will affect mainly the poor, black voters who vote democrat.
Given the Bush administration's record of looking for clever indirect
ways to stop its enemies from voting, I expect this is no coincidence.
The Bush regime regards democracy as its enemy; when it advocates
democracy, its characteristic dishonesty is at work.
Supporters of the arrested opposition candidate are rioting in Uganda.
The president says that candidate will have to prove he is innocent of
charges such as treason--which seems to be an admission that his trial
will be unfair. In a fair trial, the state has to prove the suspect
guilty.
Bob Woodward's concealment of being told about Valerie Plame was not
just a technical offense.
He was simultaneously writing an authorized
chronicle of the Bush regime, and denouncing Fitzgerald's
investigation. And maybe lied about another reporter.
I don't follow the argument about how this might
undermine the prosecution of Libby; they didn't
explain that clearly.
Here are the contradictions in Woodward's stories over time.
John Dean says that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation is too narrow
and that he is failing to use the powers that previous special counsels
have used.
The UK has a treaty to extradite accused people to the US
without a
hearing where the US has to show there is a real case against him.
The US has not ratified the treaty which requires this (and it should
not), but Blair doesn't mind; for him, any excuse to take away
someone's freedom is sufficient.
The major newspapers of the US
nearly always support the government
and business, but a mass of right-wingers excuse them of "liberal
bias" on the slightest excuse.
When that article worries that US newspapers will disappear, I have to
respond that unless they end their right-wing bias, I won't miss them
much. I don't generally read them, since I am so disappointed with
them every time I do.
Bush has a pattern of using or creating crises to distract undesirable
public attention. What crisis is he planning next?
Results are in: religion (at least Christian) does not generally lead
to moral behavior. Just the opposite.
Some highlights: "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of
a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early
adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion".
(Abortion per se isn't wrong, but frequent recourse to abortion is a
consequence of carelessness about sex.)
"Boys who participate in abstinence programmes are more likely to get
their partners pregnant." (These programs are harmful.)
US Congressman Murtha, an Vietnam veteran who formerly supported the
conquest of Iraq,
now calls for withdrawal of the troops over 6
months.
The departure of the Bush forces will unleash the conflicts that their
policies of division have created. The results will be horrible. But
the longer the Bush forces remain in Iraq, the stronger those
conflicts become, so that the inevitable explosion will be even worse
when it does come.
An artist who was
falsely accused of terrorism now faces other charges
based on stretching the law. As usual, the authorities are
unwilling to admit a mistake; if their first accusation doesn't stick,
they fabricate something else, to uphold their claim that anyone they
accuse is surely guilty.
"Tuna ranching" in the Mediterranean is
so efficient that it will wipe
out the fishery soon, if the fishing companies are not effectively
restrained.
Greenpeace activists occupied a hotel being built in a part of
the Spanish coast that is
supposed to be protected.
Direct evidence that the Bush regime knew its claims about Iraqi
uranium purchases were lies.
The New World Order is like
baptizing a bobcat.
The Bush forces pretend that everyone they killed in Falluja was a
rebel, but they openly said they refused to allow any men to leave the city.
The Man Who Sold the War (and various other wars before it)
Most Americans are in favor of torturing suspects, at least occasionally.
This makes me very sad.
Iraqi paramilitaries,
built up in one way or another by the Bush
regime, kill and torture large numbers of Iraqis. Some of their
tortured prisoners were released by other Bush regime forces.
Mordecai Vanunu was arrested after visiting a Palestinian area.
Vanunu told the world that Israel had nuclear weapons, so they
kidnaped him from Italy and imprisoned him for a long time. He was
released at the end of his sentence, but the Israeli government has
put many restrictions on him, including forbidding him even to speak
with foreigners. He has defied these restrictions before.
Kent State University
has dropped its attempts to expel a student for
putting up a banner during a protest against military recruitment there.
More protests are planned.
Why white phosphorus is a chemical weapon.
More and more countries are filtering or restricting Internet access,
including some that you would not expect.
WSIS seems to have little direct effect on anything important, but it
provides an opportunity to show how bad things are.
A former head of the CIA denounced Cheney as the "Vice President for
Torture".
There has been a breakthrough in opening up travel and
commerce out of Gaza.
Tunisian journalists and human rights activists are on a hunger strike
against censorship.
The "Expression under Repression" event at WSIS
was held despite
demands from the Tunisian government to cancel it.
Doctors condemn the Bush forces for blocking medical care in Iraq,
including "attacks on medical facilities, and the killing and
harassment of health personnel and academics."
Repression in Tunis and the
World Summit on the Information Society.
A study finds marijuana helps people with arthritis.
The Revolutioary Association of Women in Afghanistan criticizes
Afghanistan's elections as
not much real democracy.
RAWA has been fighting for democracy across several decades, against
various kinds of oppressors: Soviet-supported, US-supported, and
Islamic fundamentalist.
A Israeli captain who ordered shooting a 10-year-old Palestinian girl
was found innocent by a military court. This affirms that
Israeli policy is "open season on Palestinians."
How the
Great Firewall of China keeps cyber dissidents in check.
Voluntary sexual affairs between pupils and teachers 'can be
beneficial',
reports a professor who has studied them. Prudes are
outraged.
Bush forces officials made false statements in court
about connections between Iraq and Al Qa'ida.
Reporter Bob Woodward was told about Valerie Plame by a "top
administration official" even before the other reporters were.
He has kept this secret for two years.
An Iraqi student reports on how he was tortured by the Iraqi police.
A conservative former government official has denounced Bush
for torture, saying it is designed to create a phony appearance
of a terrorist threat.
Sony's DRM
rootkit includes illegally
copied free software.
However, we should not let these secondary wrongs distract us from the
worst thing about this DRM: it is DRM. DRM is theft!
Specific "Iraqi police" units have been tied to massacres, but the
Bush regime lets them
go on. Sometimes they hold prisoners as hostages for ransom.
I suspect that the Bush regime deliberately stirs up ethnic conflict
in Iraq--part of a strategy of divide and rule, so often used by
conquerors. I think that these death squads were planned all along by
the people that work for (i.e. handle) Bush.
The
hunger strike of Guantanamo prisoners is continuing, and one
prisoner may be close to death despite force feeding through tubes in
his nose.
I don't believe in "eye for an eye" retaliation, but if anyone is to
get this treatment, it would be Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzalez
and so on.
Is There A
New Labor Party In Israel?
Bush is falsifying the history of how he got the US into the war in
order to
criticize his opponents.
Nonetheless, the senators and congressmen that voted for the war had
plenty of reason to doubt whatever Bush told them--and a few examples
such as Kucinich show it was possible to see through the false
world-view which the specific lies fit into.
Former Bush forces soldier Tony Lagouranis tells about the horrible
things he did and saw done to civilians.
CIA director Tenet reported in 2001 that Iraq was no
threat and probably didn't have WMD.
More evidence that the Amman bombings were not suicide bombings
and that
the official story is a lie.
Uganda's main opposition candidate has been charged with
treason, in an apparent attempt to crush opposition there.
The European Parliament excoriated the US while demanding an inquiry
into secret US torture camps in Poland and Romania. The Bush regime
has effectively admitted that
these camps exist.
Bush wants to cut down on factory reports of pollution.
This will help them "save money" (because they won't have to
clean up their messes).
Rhetoric aside, Blair's position on environmental issues
now follows that of Bush.
The environment was the main area where Blair did not follow the Bush
line; therefore, this change means that the influence in the "special
relationship" between Blair and Bush flows entirely from Bush to
Blair. In effect, the claim to be able to influence Bush is another
Bliar lie.
Indian police have charged a Kashmiri with planting bombs in Delhi, in
conjunction with Pakistanis.
'I treated people who had their skin melted', says a Falluja doctor.
Meanwhile,
there are reports that the Bush forces removed houses and
soil that might have given evidence of use of white phosphorus or
napalm-equivalents.
The Bush forces have arrested thousands of Iraqis, and are arresting more
of them
faster than it is considering whether there is any reason to keep
them in prison. This means even "innocent" Iraqis have to wait a long time
in jail.
I put the word "innocent" in quotes because there's nothing guilty
about being in the Iraqi resistance. That's just being patriotic.
The ACLU is helping some Iraqis who were tortured by the Bush forces
to sue Rumsfeld.
Scott Ritter tells how the CIA corrupted the Iraq weapons inspection
process and used it to support a coup attempt, and how this fits into
the overall history of US policy towards Iraq.
Even in the Bush forces there are some heroes. Joshua Key tells the
story of why he chose to
go into hiding rather than commit further
atrocities in Iraq.
Congressmen including Dennis Kucinich demand an investigation of
the White House Iraq Group and how it rigged intelligence to create
an excuse for war.
A German who fled to Canada was sent
back to Germany to stand trial for
his political views.
Despicable as his views are, it is an injustice to make the expression
of them a crime. The danger of Fascism today does not come from
neo-Nazis; it comes from politicians that suck up to business, such as
Republicans and most Democrats in the US.
If Democrats who supported Bush's war were
fooled by his phony
intelligence reports, that is because they were willing to be fooled.
Were the bombings in Jordan carried out by the US and Israel?
I can't easily view the images referenced in the site, but if I could,
I would hesitate to draw conclusions about them--I am not an explosive
expert. But the info in this page about who was killed is
quite suspicious.
And the fact that
some Israelis were warned--but not the hotel or the
police--is also suspicious.
Medical marijuana grower and activist Steve McWilliams
killed himself
last June, rather than face 6 months in prison with no marijuana to
relieve his chronic pain.
If you are ever in a situation like this, don't kill yourself in
private. Make your death itself be a blow against the tyrant. Plead
innocent; then kill yourself in the courtroom, with the jury and
journalists watching, after defying the judge by shouting, "I'm a
medical marijuana grower. You were going to make those 12 honest
citizens your tools for evil, but I will save them from you. May my
death be on your conscience for as long as you live."
A
UN human rights investigator condemned the Bush regime
for denying food and water to civilians in Iraq.
New York State
joined California and other states in adopting special rules to
reduce CO2 emissions from automobiles.
They refuse to sit idly by while Bush plans the destruction of
civilization.
In Europe, laws and public pressure are making businesses respect the environment.
The US ought to do likewise, but the US government is too much in the
grip of business. Until we have a congress and president who don't
mind telling a business to go jump in the lake, businesses will continue
saying that to the public.
Blair is facing an
impeachment campaign.
In Falluja, a year after the town was half-destroyed by the Bush
forces, they continue making life hell
for the inhabitants there: blowing up their cars, stealing their money,
and shooting them. A large fraction of the city is uninhabitable and
is not being repaired.
The Bush forces surely know that these practices will make most Iraqis
want to fight them. So I think their intention is to crush the
resistance by killing a large fraction of the Sunnis in Iraq--or by
getting Shi'ites and Kurds to do it for them. That, I suspect, is why
they carry out "false flag" terrorist attacks against Shi'ites, which
are then blamed on the resistance.
A human rights lawyer who has worked to defend people tortured
by many countries concludes that the "enemy of all humankind"
speaks with
the voice of the United States government.
However, opposition to this one aspect of the Bush regime's barbarity
is growing in
the US. Even TIME magazine is covering the CIA's murder of a
prisoner.
Unfortunately, we're not seeing similar opposition to the
other tyrannical measures of the Bush regime.
The world's
silence over Israel's Abu Ghraibs.
The US is not the only country whose government seems bent on making
people burn as much oil as possible. It's happening
in China too.
The school board in Dover, PA, voted to teach "intelligent design" in
science class. Then the citizens voted to
replace 8 of the 9 members of the school board with Democrats
who are opposed to this. (The 9th member was not up for
reelection; I'm not sure why.)
The UK
tortured German prisoners during World War II, and tortured
civilians afterward, with conduct worth of Nazis.
A criminal suspect in the UK
faces double jeopardy, part of Blair's assault on the traditional
Rights of Englishmen.
This case is somewhat unusual in that a jury never actually ruled him
innocent. But Blair's law would allow double jeopardy even if that
had occurred. This man may have committed a serious crime, or he may
not. But nobody should have to spend his life being tried over and
over for the same alleged crime.
Global warming caused by CO2 increased the amount of water vapor over
Europe, which results in yet
further warming.
For the Bushmen, torture's out.
Now they call it "abuse".
Some Bush forces veterans with real courage talk about the torture
they saw--and
how the Bush forces tried to gag them.
Pushing for impeachment now is
what Democrats
must do, if they want to reinvigorate their party.
Turkish soldiers were caught carrying out terrorist attacks
which were blamed on the PKK (Kurdish independence movement).
This is part of a broader pattern. Two British Bush forces soldiers
were caught in Basra a few months ago with equipment for terrorist
attacks, which they would blame on al Qa'ida.
If Cheney was involved in the 9/11 attacks, as much evidence suggests
he was, it would be another piece of the same pattern.
The Bush regime transports prisoners for torture to various sites in
Eastern Europe (listed in this story)
in crates meant for transporting
dogs. Just being caged in such a small crate is torture.
The Israeli Labor Party
has a new leader who says the occupation is
immoral and calls for evacuating (some) West Bank settlements.
$9 million
to arrange a meeting with Bush? It's a natural part of the
culture of corruption fostered by the Bush regime at all levels.
The violence in Darfur is getting worse,
as international measures to end it have been far too weak.
Supporters of the occupation of Iraq point to the "mobile bioweapons
vans" as proof that Saddam Hussein had maintained the capability to
produce such
weapons. However, these vans clearly fit another purpose, as the
CIA eventually admitted.
Tying the Iraqi death squads to the Bush forces,
through the swamp
of disinformation.
A report of the Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq
lists many war
crimes carried out by the Bush forces.
A report
that the Bush forces are injecting Iraqi men with some unspecified
drug, at gunpoint.
A
scientific investigation of the collapse of the World Trade Center
towers.
In Afghanistan,
US troops have burned Taliban prisoners alive.
Despicable as the Taliban are--because what they stand for is the
opposite of human rights--once captured they have a right to humane
treatment, just like everyone else.
Bush forces claims that they used white phosphorus only for
illumination of battlefields are
contradicted by their own
publication.
This and countless previous examples show that these people will tell
any lie they think people will believe. They are the forces of
darkness. I'm glad to read that they are having trouble with
recruiting, because that should make it more difficult for them
to invade additional countries.
One congressman is proposing to require Bush to turn over
all drafts of his state of the union speech (making false claims
about Iraq) so as to investigate how the falsehoods got in.
Kucinich's proposal to investigate the White House Iraq Group
(which probably had the job of arranging an excuse for war)
was defeated in committee, 25 to 23.
Meanwhile, Republican congressman Curt Weldon wants an investigation
of whether an intelligence group called
Able Danger informed the
Pentagon about the 9/11 attackers back in 2000, and of what was done
with the information.
People on that team have been
punished for speaking out.
It was reported in 2001 that Clinton's people advised the Bushmen to
give Al Qa'ida high priority as a threat, but that the Bush regime did
just the opposite--at least, in the agencies that were responsible for
preventing such attacks.
The President of China
met with visible protests on his visit
to London.
Rioting in France seems to be subsiding, due mainly to boredom, but
promises of new job training programs might be helping.
However part of that job training program
could have drawbacks. The
proposal is to let youths leave school at age 14 and become
apprentices. This is controversial because it threatens to track the
poor towards vocational education and away from opportunity to rise.
Few of the artifacts stolen from Iraq's museums have been recovered,
or ever are likely to be. And more artifacts are being looted now
from the unexcavated sites,
destroying forever the possibility of
archaeology there.
The Bush forces' invasion led to the theft of our past, which they had
the responsibility to prevent--but they don't care.
The Kansas Board of Education voted to redefine "science" to include
non-natural explanations. Thus, psychic levitation could be taught as
an alternative explanation for airplanes.
Who needs scientific theories such as gravity and aerodynamics, when
we have Intelligent Falling?
Bliar's days in power may be numbered, after
members of all parties
voted to reject internment for 90 days without charges.
However, despite this defeat for Bliar, they nonetheless voted to
reduce civil liberties in the UK--specifically, to allow 28 days'
arrest without charges. There is no reason evidence that such a
change is necessary.
California voters rejected all of Schwarzenegger's ballot
questions, which were designed to apply typical Republican policies.
India's right to information law exposed a
secret plot with the
World Bank for privatizing Delhi's water.
Providing water to India's billion people is a problem that may have
no solution at all. If there were insufficient water supplies, and
investment could make enough water available, private investment would
be one way to do it. (Of course, the government can also make that
investment.) But if global warming makes the rivers that flow from
the Himalayas dry up, investment won't solve the problem.
I think India needs a one-child policy like China's.
The UN condemned the US, and five other countries,
for sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured.
The other countries are Britain, Canada, France, Sweden and
Kyrgyzstan.
Sony's nasty DRM is
accompanied by a "license" for the CD itself. Read about how
nasty it is.
Don't buy Corrupt Disks!
The danger of
martial law in the US.
Dave Airharts, a veteran who now protests military
recruiting, talks about his experiences in the armed forces:
soldiers kicking prisoners for fun in Guantanamo, and shooting cars
full of families in Iraq. The officers encouraged soldiers to consider
Iraqi civilians' lives worthless.
Is white phosphorus, when it melts the skin off children, a chemical
weapon or an incendiary weapon? Is the treaty that prohibits melting
the skin off children in this way the one that the US signed or the
one that the US did not sign? And does it make any difference?
I saw another article which argues that white phosphorus should
be considered a chemical weapon, because the mode of action by
which it melts off children's skin is a matter of chemical action,
not fire. It seems like a good argument to me.
Meanwhile, does anyone know if there is a chemical that neutralizes
white phosphorus?
China executes 10,000 people a year--many of them innocent
of the charges against them. It imprisons dissidents without trial
and tortures them. Meanwhile, it is starting to threaten aggression
against its neighbors.
Bush, go back to China!
Just as the Australian senate is about to have
one day to consider new terror laws, the Australian government
arrested alleged terrorist plotters--showing that additional tyrannical
laws are unnecessary.
UK citizens: sign the pledge to refuse the national ID
card (if 15000 people sign).
France has declared a state of emergency to quell riots that
have spread all
across the country.
Can anyone tell me something about the "social measures" mentioned
briefly in that article? It is necessary in the short term to stop
the riots, but equally necessary in the long term to do something
about their causes. Young people who have committed no crime should
not feel it is necessary to flee from police.
When people criticize Blair for attacking Iraq without authorization
from the UN, he says it's all France's fault, for not granting
that authorization.
I can just imagine a policeman, accused of raiding someone's home and
arresting him without a warrant, saying it's the judge's fault for
refusing to issue the warrant.
The book Fortunate Son, which talks about Bush's use of cocaine,
was censored twice through Bush pressure. Its author died suspiciously
after warning that the police might attack him.
I don't think it is very important whether Bush used cocaine. I think
it is foolish to use cocaine, but not particularly evil; compared to
attacking human rights in the US, or starting a war in Iraq, it is
nothing. But the censorship of this book is very wrong.
Meanwhile, the Republicans now want to probe who
leaked the news about the CIA's secret prisons. It's the same idea: if
you catch them in a crime, they counterattack whoever reported it. If
they are successful, they can get away with murder.
Here's a report
and partial transcript of the Italian TV broadcast about using white
phosphorus and modernized napalm in Falluja.
How the New York Times responded when asked to cover the issue.
The US is already planning how to attack
Syria. This is a war crime.
Cheney's energy task force was studying maps of Iraq before the 9/11
attacks. It seems to be evidence that he was already planning to
start such a war. That too would be a war
crime.
On Nov 2 there were protests across the US to "drive out the
Bush regime". Here's a report on the one that I joined.
Sign the petition for the Dept of Health and Human Services to
take action on a formal petition to recognize the medical value of
marijuana.
Bush's latest
"shia pet" is old Mr. Chalabi.
More
information about Bush's new/old pet.
Bush began preparations for an
invasion of Syria last year.
Today's gays are
forgetting the lessons of safe sex that were learned in the
80s at the cost of so many lives.
Africa's great lakes are
shrinking fast due to human activity.
The European Commission plans
to investigate charges that a secret CIA prison may be
located in Poland or Romania.
The Bush forces are attacking
Husayba with tanks and large bombs. Local people say this is
killing lots of civilians. Experience from Vietnam suggests that the
figures for "insurgents" killed will include the civilians.
The UK prosecution of Bush forces troops for murdering an Iraqi
civilian
has collapsed. Some of the Iraqi witnesses had fabricated
charges of other crimes. That doesn't alter the fact that troops
killed a civilian prisoner and his killers enjoy impunity.
The war
crimes case against the Bush regime.
The Bush forces used white
phosphorus bombs against civilians in Falluja.
A Deadly Interrogation: Can the C.I.A. legally kill
a prisoner? (The Bush regime says "yes".)
Illegal logging of mahogany in Honduras is likely to wipe it out in 15
years. The Honduran government lacks the strength to stop this (and
probably lacks the political will).
The US State Department
disregarded nearly unanimous public objections
and chose RFIDs for new US passports.
Here's
why that is so bad.
(I think that Schneier is mistaken in saying that merely recording
more information about each person is not in itself a danger.
But it is a separate issue from that of the RFID.)
Here's a
larger report on the danger of RFID surveillance.
The chemical BPA, which is found in many plastic objects, can seep out
and gets into human bodies. Since it mimics a hormome,
even minute
quantities of it can damage human health.
Studies that are not funded by companies nearly always find it causes
trouble. Studies funded by companies find no trouble. The reason for
this is clear: funding from business corrupts scientific research.
As Bush was citing information from an al Qa'ida prisoner about
Saddam's cooperation with al Qa'ida,
the Defense Intelligence Agency
had already said he was making it up.
The Bush forces attacked the town of Haditha, turning much of its
population into refugees and crushing most of the town's activity.
This is what Bush means when he speaks of giving Iraq "freedom and
democracy". A doctor was offered $30 as compensation after he was
kicked, bloodied, and left tied up for days. And he was threatened
with punishment if he told the media about it. Typical bully
behavior.
Now they are doing likewise to Al Qaim,
using cluster bombs on urban
areas again. Meanwhile, the "Iraqi" Minister of Defense says that
anyone who treats the wounds of resistance fighters is a "terrorist"
and calls for killing civilians that harbor the resistance. It's
clear whose side he is on, and it isn't Iraq's side.
This is why I refuse to say I "support" these troops. I do extend to
each of them my regrets that he is in Iraq, and my hope that he will
manage to desert before committing any further atrocities, but that is
the kindest word I can offer them.
The developer of Sony's DRM rootkit, found on some Corrupt Disks,
responded to the discovery with
deceptive excuses.
Iraqi witnesses testify about vote-rigging in Iraq,
showing that Bush respects democracy there no more than
he does here.
Since most Americans think Bush should be impeached "if" he
lied in order to invade Iraq, here's
a list of lies.
As Bush tried to sell FTAA to Latin America, Chavez
was outside
speaking to tens of thousands of protestors.
Dick Cheney & co.
have had a plan since the 80s for how the US
should dominate the world. Whatever the problem of the hour,
that plan is always the solution.
A poll shows most Americans want Bush to be impeached "if" he lied to
get the US into war. (We already know there is no "if".)
Today's Republican congressen are unlikely to vote to impeach Bush
no matter what he does, as long as he supports them. So it is useful
to have the Impeachment PAC. Perhaps "I will vote to impeach Bush"
can be a campaign pledge in the 2006 elections.
A government terror campaign is
at work in the Philippines.
Why not let Iraqis vote on
whether the Bush forces should remain in Iraq?
This article claims the report about finding an NSA ethernet key
logger in a laptop is a hoax, and says the text and images were copied
from unrelated documents.
There is more evidence against the specifics of the story itself.
In general, the question of whether you can trust your hardware not to
have malicious functionalities is becoming more difficult as hardware
gets more complex.
If the NSA has not done this now, they could do it next year. So if
you buy a laptop made in the US, how about if you tell me if you find
a suspicious key logger in it?
Colonel Wilkerson says he has documents tying Cheney to the orders for
torture in Iraq (and elsewhere).
The orders were worded in vague terms, a la "Who will squeeze for me
that troublesome suspect", because Cheney hopes that the media will strain
to see in this an excuse to exculpate him.
In Iraq, anyone's unsupported accusation
could put a man in prison.
It takes months, even years, to get out.
US prisoners who were going to testify against a soldier (accused of
torture) have "escaped"--says the Bush regime, through an anonymous
spokesman.
Did they escape to a secret hidden prison camp? Or to the grave?
Merely refusing to state officially what has happened to them
is itself an offense. Governments are supposed to be accountable
for what happens to their prisoners.
My latest song describes what ought to be done to the executives of
companies like Enron.
Amnesty International
has condemned Bliar's plans for new terror laws.
President Chavez
participated in the large protests against a summit meeting
in Argentina where Bush is trying to restart the FTAA.
Putting Libby into the neo-con
context.
A former Bush forces soldier testified that he was told to "shoot
first and ask questions later" against Iraqis, in disregard of the
Geneva Convention.
Alito is more
right-wing than Scalia.
The US is moving steadily towards a police
state. Bush has already created a secret police that reports
only to him.
The Department of Homeland Security has convinced some laptop manufacturers
to
install key-loggers that talk directly to the ethernet port, according
to Hal Turner.
SONY has a
new form of Corrupt Disk. You can't play it on your
computer on a free operating system. The Digital Restrictions
Management let Windows users make a few copies--but the copies are
corrupt too, and only Windows can play them.
It works by installing a "rootkit" on Windows computers--that is,
software that hides in the system, disguising itself from view
while distorting the system's behavior for someone else's ends.
The author of that article deserves credit for investigating
painstakingly, but he should
not have granted any legitimacy to DRM.
SONY is
pretending to have corrected the problem--deceptively.
Ironically, only Windows users are affected by this DRM, which is as
stupid as it is nasty. Thus, you can avoid the problem by using
GNU/Linux instead.
27 Iraqi ex-officials, including former ministers,
face charges of theft.
Now if we can only get Cheney.
A Wal-Mart store reduces local employment by up to 4% and reduces
local wages by 5%. Their CEO is embarrassed, because the supposed
plan to give employees health care has been exposed
as a sham.
The NSA falsified intelligence reports to create an excuse
for the US to fully
enter the Vietnam War.
The Bush forces have started releasing casualty figures for Iraqis,
one-sided figures that do not
include Iraqis killed by the Bush forces.
US plans to
eliminate liability for vaccine-caused illness--even if
the government forces people to take the vaccine--and to keep
information about such problems secret.
Some degree of protection from liability might be acceptable if needed
so that new vaccines will be developed. But this goes too far.
Perhaps in some cases the government should assume the liability,
rather than abolishing it.
There is some progress towards opening a non-Israel-controlled border
crossing from Gaza to Egypt. But mostly Israel is
blocking all progress in negotiations.
Israeli police are preemptively
arresting and holding participants in nonviolent protests--even teenagers.
Madonna's Kabbala guru follows the
example of many other religious leaders: extorting money from vulnerable
credulous people through promises of miracles.
Tyrannical proposed anti-dissent laws in the UK are
meeting strong opposition in Commons. It was not enough to
kill outright, but may be enough to block them anyway.
These proposal should be rejected entirely, not adopted in weakened
form. The UK government already has too much power over dissent.
Meanwhile, it has plenty of ability to deal with real terrorism.
A car bomb
caused many Iraqi casualties outside a mosque in Basra.
It is hard to imagine how a fervent Islamist could justify attacking
Muslims during a principal religious celebration. So I wonder, what
proof is there that the car bomb was set off by a suicide bomber?
Planting a bomb in someone's car without his knowledge is eminently
feasible, and there are accusations that the Bush forces have been
doing just that. Thus my question: is there any specific evidence
that the driver of the car which held the bomb knew about the bomb?
Or did they only determine that the car had a driver, and leap to the
conclusion he was a "suicide bomber"?
If you want to change how big business treats the public, don't make
the mistake of trying to "do it from within". Business for Social
Responsibility, which was founded to try to change harmful business
practices, adopted such a policy; this gave those businesses an
opening to subvert it.
A previous note points out that environmental organizations have been
effective when they stir up public pressure, but ineffective when they
try to work quietly.
In Japan,
a new movement with government support advocates taking life
more slowly, contrary to the overwork ethic.
While Bush was saying that war with Iraq would be a last resort,
the White House Iraq Group was organizing propaganda and lies
to
prepare for the war.
Is Libby taking the fall on behalf of his bosses?
His lies may get him convicted, while preventing
anyone from tracking down what really happened.
(And maybe Bush will pardon him.)
Democrats ought to start
pushing for impeachment of Bush
even though there is no immediate chance of achieving this.
The Bush forces arrested and beat up Iraqi doctors.
Female relatives of Cuban political prisoners, who demand their
release, have been
given a human rights award by the European
Parliament. The prisoners remain imprisoned.
More evidence about secret CIA prisons which disregard the Geneva
Conventions and the US Constitution.
As usual, the Bush regime responds to allegations of torture
with vague blanket denials, which probably indicate that they
have squeezed the word "torture" to exclude the kinds of torture
they practice.
Dubai's only coral reef was
destroyed to build artificial islands
as resorts for millionaires.
The techological plans to build new reefs are worth trying, but it
would have been so much easier to avoid destroying the old one.
Meanwhile, unless these islands are pretty tall, they could be
underwater in a few decades as global warming melts Antarctic ice.
Police lie about their victims in France, too.
It is possible that the police did nothing specifically wrong to these
boys, in the events that led their death, but it appears that a broad
pattern of police brutality is why they felt the need to flee
when they had committed no crime.
Meanwhile, nothing can excuse the lies told about them. The
individuals responsible for those lies tracked down and punished.
Soldiers of the Israeli Artillery Corps have started a campaign
against the use of artillery on Palestinian civilian areas.
Now that Berlusconi, il Ducino, has been
caught helping Bush fabricate
excuses to attack Iraq, he is trying to claim he was opposed to the
war all along.
Whatever the criminal charges will do, Plamegate
has already exposed
the Bush regime's facade of patriotism as a fraud.
The new president of Poland is a right-wing Christian extremist that
would be dear to Bush's heart.
However, his party is also opposed
to overglobalization.
Gold mining creates
environmental disasters.
Not even all Bush forces combat deaths are being reported,
claims this article.
Russia says that the evidence for corruption in the
Iraq oil-for-food program is based on forgeries.
Courageous young Israelis remain in prison for refusing to serve
the occupation.
Rumsfeld's motto: "When faced with an unsolvable problem--expand the
problem." He and Bush are apparently preparing to
expand the disaster
of the Iraq war by attacking Syria.
Military attacks on Syria have already been made.
I'm all in favor of demanding Syrian cooperation with the Hariri
investigation, and everyone else's, too. But the investigation should
be complete, and should not disregard non-Syrian suspects.
Besides, if the Assad regime in Syria falls, where will the Bush
regime send suspects to be tortured?
Col. Lawrence Wilkinson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff
as secretary of state, accused Cheney and Rumsfeld of
conspiring
to eliminate the State Department from foreign policy decisions.
Here's the
complete text of what he said:
Uri Avnery:
How Sharon is trying to eliminate Abbas as a partner to
negotiate with.
Bolivian elections were postponed indefinitely...to prevent the
victory of Evo Morales, who opposes US domination of Bolivia.
As Judith Miller turns out to have been less than a hero, it
has
sent the New York Times into turmoil.
The Times has a long way to go to become truthful. For instance, did
it cover Spain's indictment of Bush forces troops for murder of a
journalist?
The US army dumped 64 million pounds of chemical weapons in the
ocean, and
some of the shells are still dangerous.
Greg Palast: OPEC and the economic conquest of Iraq
High oil prices encourage conservation and reduction of CO2 output.
I don't think they are bad at all.
China is cracking down on environmental monitoring.
US citizens: As Republicans try to claim that Libby's lies were just a
"technicality", write a letter to your local newspaper saying that
lying to start a war is a serious crime.
The MoveOn site provides an
easy way to do it.
The feds got Al Capone for tax evasion--a secondary crime when
compared with the multiple murders he was guilty of. If charges of
perjury and obstruction of justice bring down Libby for protecting the
gangster kingpin he works for, that's justice.
Counting the human cost of the war in Iraq.
A US court ruled that the
FBI needs a specific court order to get
the data on where you were with your cell phone.
That's the right ruling--but I am still not going to carry around a
cell phone, broadcasting my location for permanent records.
Juma al Dossary was tortured in Guantanamo, then threatened with
further punishment more because he
exposed the torture to a visiting
lawyer.
Prosecutor Fitzgerald has extended his investigation to include
the fabrication of the fraudulent "evidence" proving Hussein's
purchase of uranium ore.
This could lead to charges against
Rove and Cheney.
The charges against Libby helped Cheney to remember the principle that
suspects are "innocent until proven guilty"--a principle he
conveniently when it comes to suspects he is not friends with. If
Patrick Fitzgerald were investigating enemies of Bush and Cheney, they
would call for torturing the suspects, or just throwing them in prison
without a trial.
Serbian police have been arrested for a
massacre in Kosovo.
Israel retaliated for a bombing by punishing a large civilian
population. It uses the occasional rare attack as an
excuse to cut
off negotiations until the Palestinian authority cracks down--which it
is in no position to do, because Israel has kept it weak. In effect,
Israel prevents peace and puts the blame on the Palestinians.
Where Plamegate ought to lead.
Peter Zendran is personally fighting back against persistent
harassment by Rhode Island police.
Bush regime officials,
by authorizing torture, have violated a US law
that provides for life imprisonment, even the death penalty.
Bush would clearly get the death penalty under this law, but since the
death penalty is wrong, Bush should spend his life behind bars for
what he has done.
An American in the Bush forces is now
in prison for refusing to go
back to Iraq. I read elsewhere that he followed the procedures for
conscientious objection, but his superiors dishonestly refused to even
recognize that he had done so.
An officer who trained death squads in El Salvador is now
in Iraq doing the same thing.
Rich nations are accused of giving 'nothing' to help
the people made homeless by the Kashmir earthquake.
An autopsy says the Iraqi prisoner was
suffocated to death, but nobody
working for Bush has been charged.
Hofstra University is attacking students who peacefully protested
Coca Cola Company. See the 7th story
in killercoke.org.
A Republican has been convicted of laundering a large amount of money
for the Bush campaign by dividing it up and passing it through various
others.
I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg of the corruption of
Bush campaign finance. But I wonder, why did they bother? The
Republicans were sure to win the vote count, no matter who
won the vote.
The Bush administration withheld crucial information from a Congressional
investigation so as to put blame on the CIA's "mistakes"
for was
in fact the administration's
dishonesty.
Of course, we knew this at the time, but now there's clear proof.
Iran's president
called for the destruction of Israel.
Israel's occupation of Palestine should be ended, because Palestinians
have a right to live a life that isn't a prison. Israeli Jews also
have that right. I don't mention that as often, because it is is not
under much threat; those Palestinians that try armed attacks cannot
harm more than a tiny fraction of Israelis. Iran conceivably could.
The best way to prevent that from really happening is to bring Iran to
peace with the rest of the world.
The Australian government is trying to rush through a terror law that
goes beyond what Bliar and Bush have done. It wanted to keep the
law's text
secret until the last minute, but a state published the
text. The government still plans to rush the bill into law without
allowing time for opponents to study what it means.
What's the rush? There is no possible legitimate reason--only a
tyrant's reason.
Israel has tried to interfere with the weekly Bil'in nonviolent
protests by arresting many of the people who normally participate.
But the protest occurred anyway. Afterwards, some soldiers threw
stones at other soldiers, perhaps as part of a black propaganda
campaign.
Malcolm Kendall-Smith refuses to return to Iraq to fight for the Bush
forces, on the grounds that the war is illegal and his orders to fight
there are illegal too. When the UK military put him on trial for this,
his defense will have to show that Bliar and Dubya committed
the supreme war crime: starting a war of aggression.
Here is a summary of the case against them.
Here are more details on the new terrorist laws that
the
government of Australia wants to impose.
Australia is considering "
biometric passports" with RFIDs. Once
someone cracks the security--which surely is possible--it will be
fairly easy for anyone to snarf the info off the RFID as an Australian
passes by.
Galloway challenges US senators to charge him with perjury,
so he can fight their accusations in court.
Was the
assassination of Hariri carried out by the US and Israel
so as to blame it on Syria?
Leaking the name of Valerie Plame is just a symptom. Here's a summary
of the larger issue: how the Bushmen faked "intelligence"
information, and corrupted its evaluation, so as to fabricate a
case for the war that they had already decided on.
What's the right way to oppose an unjust war? To "support the troops"
and win their support for ending the war, or to condemn what they are
doing? This article says that the latter is both right and more
effective.
I don't agree 100% with its conclusions. I think that any soldiers in
the Bush forces who refuse to fight this war do deserve our admiration
and support. By refusing to participate in the evil, they cease to
deserve criticism for it. And they are probably doing so at great
risk or cost, which takes courage. I think we should admire this
courage.
And the Bush forces troops do deserve one kind of support:
getting them out
of Iraq.
Mothers of murdered innocent Iraqis have a stronger case to plead, as
innocent victims, than mothers of Bush forces troops who died trying
to subjugate Iraq for Bush. However, we don't have to choose one or
the other; we can support both. And when mothers of Bush forces
troops become anti-war activists, like Cindy Sheehan, their work
deserves admiration--like that of any effective anti-war activist.
Speaking of Cindy Sheehan, here's her report on a
protest in DC.
The counter-protestor who was carrying a sign for money is typical of
the dishonesty of the right wing.
Saddam Hussein's defense lawyers have refused to work because they
fear for their lives.
One of them was killed, apparently by Iraqi
police.
Human Rights Watch presented evidence that Saddam Hussein did use
gas against Kurds--not in Hallabja during the Iran-Iraq war,
but afterwards in another location.
Has anything refuted this?
Police in Florida arrested a teenage anti-war protestor
who was holding a sign at the side of the road. Then
they told lies about him to make it look justified.
This is standard police behavior--so common it isn't considered
newsworthy. But if we want a free society, we must not allow police
to get away with such conduct. Police, who can operate openly, are
more dangerous than the same number of gangsters without badges, who
have to hide what they do.
We have to teach every policeman a lesson: if he twists the facts to
harass citizens, or bears false witness against them, he will go to
prison for a long time. Until we achieve this, the police will be a
menace to democracy.
Plamegate:
Worse than Watergate.
An Australian newspaper warns readers: read this story now,
because if the same thing happens with new "anti-terror" laws,
nobody will be allowed to tell the public about it.
If you can find a copy of the article in the Financial Times
about Col. Lawrence Wilkinson's accusations against Cheney
and Rumsfeld, could you email it to me? rms (at) gnu (dot) org.
Even more flaws in Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein worked
with Al Qa'ida.
The Bush regime has admitted sending troops into Syria.
General Karpinski says that the
orders for torture came straight from
the top.
The connections are
outlined here.
Confirming the administration's
continued support for torture, Cheney
is pressing for an exception for the CIA, in the proposed law
that would prohibit torture by US government agents.
The UN Human Rights Commission is now
investigating US violations
of treaties protecting the rights of prisoners.
Republicans are already preparing to smear prosecutor Ferguson, so as
to get their leaders off the hook for crimes such as perjury and
treason.
The new president of Poland is a
right-wing extremist that
would be dear to Bush's heart. This is bringing him into
conflict with the EU.
A new disease:
Gonorrhea Lectim.
The government of New Zealand is planning to introduce "biometric
passports", giving the US what it wants.
If you live in New Zealand, talk to your legislators and government
and say you want them to make these optional--not mandatory!
And spread the word.
Italian intelligence fabricated the fake evidence about Iraqi uranium
purchases, and
brought it directly to the White House after the CIA
rejected it as unbelievable. Berlusconi (il ducino) is tied directly
to these events.
Half of the world's coral reefs
could be dead in 40 years. 20%
already are.
Since coral reefs help protect coasts from storm damage, the death of
reefs will combine with rising seas and increasingly severe
hurricanes, to cause increased damage to coastal areas and increased
loss of land. All three are caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
Suspicion that Bush is deliberately provoking civil war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the puppet government's police are operating as death squads.
As part of Bush's War on Public Safety, the US government officially
lets trucking companies make their drivers
drive for up to 11 hours a
day. As a further blow to public safety, the US government does not
enforce that limit.
In the UK, when the police kill someone, they then demonize him
to
make it look excusable.
In principle, police who kill innocent people can be prosecuted.
In fact, the criteria for doing so effectively give police
total impunity.
Scientists estimate global warming of 1 to 6 degrees C in this
century. 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, a
rise of around 6 degrees nearly wiped out life on Earth.
But that's not all the bad news. It appears that a smaller
temperature rise released lots of methane that was frozen under the
Arctic seas, and that this caused the temperature to rise even
further.
Nobody knows how far away we are from a repeat. One more degree?
Two? Three?
Global warming is causing drought in Africa. All the recently
agreed increase in aid to Africa may be eaten up by compensating
for the harm that the rest of the world is doing to Africa.
Public opposition
convinced some Republicans not to support
the severe cuts in social programs that the neocons desire
for ideological reasons.
Bush seems to have let the "road map" die, while Israel embarks on
renewed annexation and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.
At least 21 prisoners of the US were killed,
autopsies show.
A prisoner of the Bush administration wrote a clever message, giving
support to his captors in exaggerated terms, to tell us that he is not
allowed to speak freely and we should not believe what he says.
There are accusations that the vote on the Iraqi constitution was
rigged. That's no surprise--what else would Bush do in an election?
The Bush regime continues to press for war with Syria. This despite
the fact that Syria has cooperated with the Bush regime against Al
Qa'ida. (The US has delivered people to Syria to be tortured.)
Iran says that the UK was behind recent terrorist bombings.
There isn't enough detail here to judge the claim. I don't know if
the Foreign Minister of Iran would lie about such things. I am sure
that the Prime Minister of the UK would.
Using disasters--natural or otherwise--
to militarize the US.
Bush has a long history of trying to give the military more power over
civilians in the US. The indication that they are excuses rather than
reasons is that they change from time to time.
Scott Ritter warns that a fake terror attack could be
the Bush administration's next tactic.
Of course, there are
plenty of reasons to think
they did this already.
Did Saddam Hussein use poison gas against Kurdish Iraqis?
U.S. News/Harvard/BP
Ban Reporters from First Amendment Room.
The policy of using tax breaks to encourage business investment are
unwise, as well as unjust.
Protestors against US army recruiters in US colleges have been beaten up by
police, and threatened with arrest for "trespassing" if they set
foot in the schools where they study. Campaigns to defend them are
still under way.
I wonder where the idea of threatening them with "trespassing"
came from. It's not the sort of thing that police would do
spontaneously; someone must have ordered them to do it.
Who was it?
A court in Spain has indicted Bush forces officers for the murder of a
Spanish journalist in Iraq.
The Bush forces have a pattern of attacking journalists, but this is
something that the mainstream US media don't dare mention.
The Iraqi "government" took a poll, and found that 80% of Iraqis want
the invading troops out--and 45% support
fighting to drive them out. (I am surprised it isn't more.)
Independent journalist Dahr Jamail provides a picture of what Iraq is
like under the Bush forces' occupation.
An obvious gap in the investigation of Hariri's killing could be a
sign of a rush to
pin the blame on Syria.
I would not put such an assassination past the government of Syria--or
the government of the US. This gap ought to be filled, with
investigation.
The CIA is whitewashing its employees for acts of torture, some of which
were fatal to
the prisoners being tortured.
In effect, the CIA has told its staff, "Kill anyone, we don't care."
Israeli settlers are continuing their
campaigns of sabotage against Palestinians.
This is standard practice for settlers; they try all sorts of
violence, up to and including murder, to drive out the Palestinians
that live near them.
Another silly scandal erupts over burning the corpses of Taliban
fighters.
Cremation does not hurt the dead--they can't feel it. What about the
living? They have merely been insulted. We should not exaggerate the
wrong of insulting anyone. However, mere insults that don't make a
thoughtful point are foolish. There are many things to condemn about
Islam. When we insult Islam, let's do it so as to make a point, not
merely to infuriate Muslims.
Above all, let's not let this distract us from the killing and torture
of living people that the Bush regime regularly practices.
Jonathan Magbie, crippled by a drunk driver as a child, used medical
marijuana. Ostensibly his sentence was 10 days in the Washington
DC jail, for possession of one joint. In fact, his sentence was death.
Wal Mart, facing consumer pressure, says it
will impose more rules
on its manufacturers about environmental protection and equal opportunity.
However, what it says it will do is not enough to imply it will no
longer abuse its workers.
When an astrologer in India predicted his own death, he attracted a
lot of media attention. This provided a great opportunity for
Rationalists International to
debunk astrology before a large
audience. Let's pity the poor astrologer--for not dying.
Bush wants to use the WTO to prohibit labels on products about their
energy efficiency. This is in the name of "competition".
This proposal clearly shows what kind of competition the WTO is in
favor of: at the expense of transparency, the environment, and
everything else that matters. The WTO gives business too much power,
and it must be abolished.
The practice of going to an international agency to effect changes in
domestic law is known as "policy laundering". I suggest that the US
executive branch should be forbidden to advocate any treaty provisions
that would require changes in US law if the treaty were signed, unless
it has the prior specific authorization of Congress, which could be
given only in a separate motion, not as part of any larger bill.
The Canadian spy chief said, in a conference, that the war in Iraq
makes the world a more dangerous place.
Another speaker said, "We have
lost the moral high ground to the wrong
people, and we need to get it back." The first step is to stop doing
things that are very very wrong.
Robert Fisk: Iraq has
descended into anarchy, with insurgents
controlling areas half a mile from the Green Zone.
The government of Taiwan will ignore the anti-flu drug patent on moral
grounds.
I just wish they wouldn't verbally kowtow to the patent holder
while they're about it.
New satelite measurements show that
Amazon rainforest destruction is
happening twice as fast as previously thought.
Another article explains that pulling down one tree in a rain forest
tends to damage surrounding trees, due to the vines that connect them;
pulling down a few percent of the trees in an area tends to make it
dry up and makes it vulnerable to subsequent fires.
Large areas of permafrost in Alaska now have a temperature of -1C.
When they melt, they will release methane into the atmosphere, giving
a big jolt to global temperatures.
Multinational companies
continue trying to privatize water supplies.
When they do this, they usually raise the rates by several times
and cut off poor people from water supply.
The people in charge of FEMA received timely information
about the broken levee in New Orleans, and
ignored it.
Bad as the Bush regime's response to the flooding was, we should not
let it distract us from things that were even worse:
Cutting funds to repair the levee in order to commit war crimes
in Iraq.
Not helping poor people to evacuate the city.
The Japanese Prime Minister continues worshiping at the Yasakuni
shrine, symbol
of Japanese aggression and atrocities in World War II.
Congressional Republicans continue using the hurricane damage
as an excuse to screw
most Americans, but some moderate Republicans won't support it, and
they have had to delay the vote.
When they talk about "disciplined spending", that is total bullshit.
Clinton left the US government a surplus; it was Bush who sent the US
into deficit.
The Israeli Army is testing new not-usually-lethal weapons
against the
nonviolent protestors in Bil'in.
Saddam's trial does not
follow international standards for fair trials. Meanwhile,
witnesses are scared to testify against him.
Uri Avnery: War is
a State of Mind
Greenpeace says China's economic growth is
causing environmental disaster all around the world. Projections
of China's future growth lead to unustainable consumption which would
require drastic changes in the economic system.
Of course, this just could mean that something else will happen to
derail China from growing that far.
While oil companies like to pretend that global warming is uncertain,
other companies are rushing to invest in the Arctic Ocean, becoming
accessible
as the ice melts.
These companies, as well as the oil companies, will try to prevent
any solution to the problem of global warming, and to keep the Earth
on the road to catastrophe.
How Israel persecutes
Palestinian shepherds (it starts with stealing their sheep).
The British troops in the Bush forces are cracking; some
are
supporting public pressure to pull them out of Iraq.
A UK airman has refused the order to go back to Iraq, saying that it
is an illegal order. He faces a trial, since the Bliar regime does
not want to admit that
the order was illegal.
As Saddam Hussein goes on trial for various massacres he ordered,
Human Rights Watch is concerned that the trial
will not be fair. His crimes appear to be enormous, but he
deserves a fair trial, and only a fair trial can properly establish
his guilt. Meanwhile, everyone in Iraq must be wondering when their
new dictator will go on trial.
The Bush regime has a systematic
pattern of announcing "terror alerts" when it will help their
image in the media. Here the pattern is laid out with 13 examples.
The New York
subway bomb threat hoax has been attributed to an Iraqi
"informant". But we don't know whether he was tortured--or whether
he sought to give the Bush forces what they wanted, much like those
who produced the so-called "intelligence" proving that Saddam
Hussein had bought uranium ore.
Iraq's constitution has
probably been approved, but since it was not
established under free and democratic circumstances, this is not
enough to make it legitimate.
The Iraqi Constitution, written under the Bush regime, follows Islam
in
denying women equal rights.
It may be that most Iraqis are thinking about the constitution in
terms other than human rights. It is also possible that most of them
now support Islamic law. Bush has given Islamists a great
opportunity, because they gain prestige from standing up to him, and
the general insecurity enables them to intimidate people who disagree
with them. They might look bad for that, if Bush were not there to
make them look good by contrast.
However, laws that trample human rights cannot be legitimized by any
circumstances. Human rights and democracy together are needed; one
without the other makes no sense. But Bush seems to have created a
situation in Iraq where the one prevents the other. So much for the
phony goal of implanting "freedom and democracy".
US government torture is not limited to Iraq and Guantanamo. The US
does not hesitate to torture people who use marijuana to relieve their
pain. Steven Tuck, who grew marijuana to cope with the pain from a
parachuet injury in the Army, was arrested in a hospital, then
subjected to denial of his prescription painkiller, morphine, as well
as to the pain of withdrawal from that morphine. Not to mention
denial of the marijuana.
This cruel punishment comes before his
trial.
When I imagine being in his situation, threatened with prison for
trying to relieve permanent pain, prison which would include torture
through the infliction of that very pain, I think of suicide as the
way to escape from torture while achieving something useful for
others. I imagine taking cyanide in the court immediately after
hearing the verdict, if convicted.
Is Bush planning to attack Iran to distract the public from Iraq?
A profile of Bunnatine Greenhouse, who tried to uphold the rules
designed to prevent corruption in government contracts, and was
removed from her job as part of Bush's War on Integrity.
A former Greenpeace leader says that the group has degenerated
into
corporate careerism.
Article: Why can't the left face the Stolen Elections of 2004 & 2008?
As part of the War on the Environment, Bush now plans
to relax air quality rules and allow coal-burning plants
to increase their emission of poisons.
A letter on the Animal Rights movement.
A Colombian congress member and union leaders are getting death
threats from paramilitaries supported by the Colombian government and
its masters in the US.
The treaty between the US and Colombia, "Plan Colombia", was published
only in English so that the public in Colombia would not notice
how the US gives Colombia step-by-step orders for what to do.
In response to Bennett's idea of aborting all babies of Blacks,
one
commentator suggests aborting all babies of neo-cons to cut down
on white-collar crime.
Soon many of those "neo-cons" will be just plain "cons".
Another suggestion to reduce white-collar crime--aborting all white
male babies likely to go to Harvard Business School.
Bush: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in
a country under
foreign military occupation".
As the police who viciously attacked sleeping protestors in Genoa go
on trial, Il Ducino is pushing
a law that would get them off the
hook.
This article does not mention that a bunch of armed "Black Block
anarchists" were seen in a police station, suggesting that the
violence attributed to the Black Block was a police provocation.
Uri Avnery's views on
Iraq.
The EFF has cracked the code which Xerox color printers use to label every document with
when it was printed and on which printer.
This code will be perfect for the US and other governments to track
down "subversives" who say things that the government wants to
suppress. I'm sure it is also useful for detecting amateur
counterfeit money, but there are other ways to do that.
So if you are printing anything for political reasons, buy a printer
with cash in another city and don't give your name. Before they make
that illegal!
The US Green Party warns that Bush plans to treat disaster
areas like Iraq.
Q: How did Bush use religion to make himself the "teflon president"?
A: He practiced no-stick (gnostic) Christianity.
(Pun invented by Richard Stallman.)
The Bushmen are starting to admit that the resistance in Iraq
is
not going to disappear any time soon.
Halliburton employs
foreign workers in sweatshop conditions in Iraq.
With all the millions they squander, you'd think they could at least
pay their employees a good wage. But that would cut into the millions
left for crooks like Cheney.
Ski areas in the Alps and the Rockies are trying to forget that global
warming is
making their snow disappear. One town in Switzerland
covered its glacier to protect it from the summer heat.
An unusual drought in the Amazon rainforest, perhaps due to global
warming, poses the threat of contributing to more
global warming.
This is not the only form of positive feedback that global warming
has encountered, and it suggests that a bigger disaster than
currently forecast will soon be upon us.
Israel divides Palestinians into those "resident in Gaza" and
those "resident in the West Bank", and doesn't allow them to visit,
and refuses to recognize that they have moved. Palestinians
who are caught living in the wrong half of Palestine face being
arrested and separated from their families.
The annexation wall has turned Palestinian villages surrounded by
"Greater Jerusalem" into prisons; their inhabitants are forbidden to
leave.
Israeli troops were caught disguised as Arabs, urging Palestinian youths
to throw stones at other Israeli troops.
Where I saw that link, in the "Other Israel" newsletter, it also said:
The report of Haaretz English does not contain all of the Hebrew
version. In the Hebrew version the soldiers didn't disperse the fake
demonstrators but pretend to arrest them and removed them from the
scene (rather than "disperse them".) The Hebrew also refers to the
tear gas and the salt bullets used by the IDF. The Hebrew also says:
"A few months ago the same unit operated in a demonstration in
Bili'in. On that occasion a military judge determined that the Prison
Service [to which the Masada unit belongs -- translator] has no
authority to operate in the [Occupied] Territories. It is unclear
whether a special permit for their operation was obtained on this
occasion."
The Blair regime arrested protestors for No2ID
before they
could even begin their peaceful protest.
Blair's
complete hostility towards the idea of the rights of the
accused, towards the idea of any human rights that limit government
power, can be seen in this recent speech. Search for "In turn however I
believe".
Not content with killing Colombians through the work of
state-sponsored paramilitaries, Bush also fights against abortion
rights there.
Robert Fisk has doubts that a Syrian general who excercised Syrian
power in Lebanon really committed suicide, as the official story
claims.
In Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, government aid to the survivors of the
earthquake is
effectively nonexistent, and it is blocked partly
because Pakistan invested little in infrastructure in previous years.
How much like Bush!
The editor of a womens' rights magazine in Afghanistan has been
charged with blasphemy--because he published an article criticizing
the
barbarous penalties of Islamic law. He faces the death penalty.
Islamic law is vicious and cruel, and illustrate the evil side of
religion--also visible in other religions.
The Bush forces accuse Iran of providing explosives training
to the Iraqi resistance.
If Iran is indeed doing this, it is only turnabout. Look at all the
countries that provide aid and training to the Bush forces.
Democrats ask for an outside investigation of whether a federal
prosecutor was demoted to stop him from investigating a
Bush crony.
Three New Orleans police were arrested after they were
caught on film
beating up a black man. One of them attacked the film crew, too. Two
federal agents joined in the attack.
Meanwhile, it seems that the biggest looters during the hurricane were
police who stole 200 new cars. This is nothing compared to the
looting that Halliburton is doing now, of course. Of course, the US
mass media focus on demonizing the poor people who stole food and
water to save their families' lives.
A study by the United Nations University says that in a few years
there will be 50 million people fleeing from environmental disasters.
In a Jail in Cuba Beat the Heart of a Poet.
What Morocco did to those who
failed to cross the Spanish border was harrowing.
Morocco was quick to deal with the Africans who tried storming the
Spanish border:
it dumped them in the Sahara desert with no food or
water. Because of this, Spain cannot expel illegal immigrants to
Morocco.
Another man-made "natural" disaster--caused by
deforestation of El Salvador.
Some former chief judges in the UK condemned Blair's plans for
internment of suspects and penalizing opinions.
Bush is working on plans to imprison millions of Americans
in internment camps--like what the US did to Japanese-Americans
in World War II, but on a bigger scale.
The Slow Drowning of New Orleans.
New Orleans should be rebuilt--but moved to high ground!
Al Jazeera is launching an English-language TV service.
The people supported by the dishonest corporate US media
are already accusing Al Jazeera of their brand of dishonesty.
First Intelligent Design, then Intelligent Falling--now,
Intelligent
Delivery (of babies) will be taught in schools, as an alternative to
secular and materialistic theories of human reproduction.
The Bush regime seems to have canceled a plan to protect and clean up
the Great Lakes.
As Bush directs the EPA and other agencies to stop protecting the
environment and human health, states are suing the federal government
to block Bush.
Uri Avnery: Why Israel should negotiate a permanent peace with the
Palestinians now--while Israel is strong, and most Palestinians want
peace.
Bush is using bird flu as an excuse to
ask for more power for the army
to intervene in civilian affairs.
It is absurd to propose quarantining a region of the US to stop a
disease like the flu. But especially so with bird fly. Quarantine
would be entirely ineffective against bird flu as long as it can still
infect birds. It is being spread by wild birds, which are notorious
for their refusal to obey police or even soldiers.
An EU court ruled that decisions of the UN Security Council override
all ordinary human rights, including the right to a trial before
punishment.
There are reports that Iran is supporting the Iraqi
resistance.
These reports come from the Bush forces, so they might be
fabricated. They might also be true--and why shouldn't Iran
help the Iraqis overthrow the conquerors of their country?
China is exporting cosmetics made from prisoners who were executed.
The US and the UK don't go this far. But they do have large armies of
prisoners "employed" for a pittance to make products that go on sale
to the general public. For a government inclined to support business
rather than citizens, prison slave labor has two benefits: it
facilitates keeping large numbers of people in prison, and it keeps
wages down even outside the prison.
Bush says that "God told him" to invade Iraq.
However, the one whose voice he heard need not have been a real
deity.
He also says that Islamic fundamentalists are evil because they are
trying to subjugate nations to theocratic rule. That could be a
description of his own
supporters.
Rep. De Lay faces two more
criminal charges.
The hunger strike in Guantanamo is still going strong, and the Bush
regime is force-feeding 21 prisoners through tubes in their noses.
The diaries of a Vietnamese doctor who
died protecting her patients
from the invading US Army--published decades later, by the military
intelligence officer who collected them after her death.
The Supreme Court of Israel has prohibited the army's practice
of taking Palestinian civilians hostage and using them as "human shields".
A Philippine union leader, in the union on strike against Nestle, was
assassinated--apparently with police involvement.
It is part of a
pattern of violence against unions there.
The Republicans are trying to destroy the Endangered Species Act
to "protect" profits of business.
This is part of the general short-term outlook of business. Business
will risk causing an irreparable loss for everyone, to get more money
in the short term.
The US Senate voted to prohibit torture--over
the objections of Bush
and Cheney. Their moral depravity is too much even for most
Republicans.
Senator Frist's
record of corruption.
The former murderous dictator of Chad
faces extradition for trial in
Belgium. If not for US pressure, other dictators might face this too.
I think people in Europe should push for Belgium to defy Bush and
reinstate its law of universal jurisdiction for mass-murderers, so
that someday Bush may face justice there.
The Pentagon does a sloppy job of testing soldiers for contamination
with DU (Deadly Uranium), so some states are offering National Guard
troops a better test.
Drug-resistant E Coli has spread around the UK. It will surely spread
around the world.
A major part of the cause of this problem was
the practice of feeding
antibiotics to cattle. It's a typical instance of how business
endangers people's lives for short-term profit.
Tigers may be wiped out
if China abolishes its trade ban on tiger parts.
Kuchma, the former president of Ukraine, ordered the murder of a
journalist. An ex-minister who was going to testify about this was
found shot--supposedly suicide, but one is entitled to doubt it.
The people who overturned Kuchma last year have fallen into feuding,
and seem to be just as corrupt as their predecessors, whom they are
also pardoning.
If Hamas wins the Palestinian elections, it would impose its
fundamentalist rules on everyone. It is the Palestinian equivalent of
the theocratic Christians that support Bush.
The religious nuts who don't believe in evolution
have proposed a "scientific" alternative, "intelligent design".
Now there's an "intelligent"
alternative to the theory of gravitation:
"intelligent falling".
There is No God (
And You Know It).
A Labor party member who shouted "nonsense" when leaders defended
the occupation of Iraq was physically ejected--then they
accused him of
terrorism to stop him coming back in.
Warming land and sea, and melting ice, are rapidly driving many
familiar species towards
extinction--as well as thousands of
unfamiliar ones. Scientists project that arond 40% of species of life
will die out in 45 years due to human activity.
The European Union, obedient to the media companies,
is planning
its own version of the infamous US "broadcast flag".
The GAO says Bush's payments for journalism were illegal partisan
political use of government funds.
A secret, leaked US government inquiry found that the
Iraq war
directly contributed to the disaster in New Orleans.
More Bush forces troops reveal torturing prisoners.
And a captain who tried to stop it found that his superiors
were more interested in preventing it from coming out.
Attacking human rights for the sake of copyright, the Motion Picture
Association (of India) got a search warrant that covers the entire
city of New Delhi. This is to stamp out sale of what they call
"pirate" copies.
I'm not against having a copyright system covering commercial copying
of movies. However, these same companies want to oppress individuals,
too. Meanwhile, to grant such broad search warrants defeats the whole
point of search warrants, which is that the police can't just go
anywhere and look at anything. When governments trample human rights
for the sake of business, that is the road to fascism.
Local authorities along with the US government played a role in
preventing the Red Cross from providing aid in New Orleans just after
the hurricane.
Others who ignored the police drove in and out of the city safely.
Surely there was no reason to keep the Red Cross out.
India's Supreme Court has ruled that
projects that involve
cutting down a forest have to pay the full environmental cost
of the loss of that forest.
Italian prosecutors continue their pressure on CIA kidnappers.
William Bennett was criticized for appearing to suggest
aborting every Black baby as a way to reduce the crime rate.
He says he presented it as an example of an unacceptable
solution.
I don't know what he actually said, but aborting unwanted babies, of
any race, is a great way to reduce both crime and many other kinds of
suffering.
This 2002 article, from the LA Times, reports that Rumsfeld was
considering a proposal to create an organization to provoke "enemies"
into attacking the US, which would provide an excuse to destroy them.
(I put "enemies" in quotation marks, because they might not be real
enemies until thus provoked.)
And
perhaps this is what we are seeing in Iraq.
Tali Fahima, a young Israeli woman, faces absurd criminal charges for
helping in day-care for Palestinian children in a refugee camp.
The UK is going to ban sale of junk food in schools.
I think it is a good idea--why should schools train
or encourage children to eat badly?
"We have been lied to about the war.
I dared to speak the truth."
Cheney's
chief of staff identified Valerie Plame to Judith Miller.
Republican leader Tom DeLay was indicted for conspiracy to violate
campaign finance laws. As a result, he had to step down from his
leadership post.
The sad thing is that most Democrats in Congress are not much better.
They all have to suck up to business--and unless we put an end to that,
we will not have democracy.
The EU has imposed limited sanctions against Uzbekistan. This
won't be enough to change things by itself, but it is a start.
Some Bush forces troops express their hatred for all Iraqis along with
gruesome pictures of dead Iraqis.
To make a big fuss about these photos is foolish; they don't hurt
anyone. If you find them disgusting, don't look at them. (I don't
expect to look at them.) But the attitude expressed, an attitude of
"kill all Iraqis", is immensely important. It shows why the idea that
the Bush forces would give Iraqis freedom and democracy is absurd.
Reuters has complained to the Bush regime about its interference with
journalism in Iraq.
The Bush forces have killed several journalists, and often lied about
the circumstances. I think the first instance was when a tank shelled
the office of Al Jazeera in Baghdad, in a hotel filled with foreign
journalists. The Bush forces then said the tank was returning fire
for shots from the hotel--but recordings made by other journalists
proved this was a lie.
Only one Iraqi brigade in the Bush forces is capable of attacking on
its own. The rest are full of patriotic Iraqis.
Bush has greatly expanded the use of political appointees
in US agencies--part of his War on Integrity.
The Bush regime seems to be
stepping up production of biological
weapons of mass destruction. We need some UN weapons inspectors!
An FCC statement claims that the police have veto power over what
software Americans can run on their computers.
In the warming Arctic,
the disappearance of sea ice has begun to remove
ice that has been stable for years.
Police in Nashville
beat a man to death. He had been expelled from a concert for "acting
strangely", but he was not violent.
Greenpeace has
proposed a plan for moving Europe to renewable energy sources
which would eliminate 80% of CO2 emissions by 2050, without nuclear
power.
In the UK, people with "severe learning disabilities" are forbidden to
have sweethearts. Just kissing them, even if they request it, is a
crime that can lead to a sentence of life imprisonment.
It's not quite as bad as Iran, but it is heading that way.
I'm told that the Neue Zürcher Zeitung published a story saying there
were some sort of minerals to be mined in the area that the (real)
Bushmen are being forced to leave.
More info about clearing out Bushmen for diamond mining can
be found in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalahari.
Blair
plans to attack freedom of the press, imprison suspects for three
months, and criminalize certain opinions about selected historic events.
The Blair strategy is clear: ask for outrageous restrictions, compromise,
and get part of them. Then, when there's another excuse (for there always
will be one), demand even more. It adds up to a steady campaign against
human rights.
Violence in New Orleans during the hurricane was greatly
exaggerated.
This exaggeration may have killed people, if it was the motive for
stopping the Red Cross from delivering supplies, or stopping refugees
from walking out.
500 Africans
stormed the Spanish border fences with ladders in their
desperation to get to Europe.
As poverty increases in Africa and people there lose hope, these
hundreds may become thousands, and ultimately millions fleeing rising
seas.
Abolishing school fees in Burundi led to a jump in
enrollment.
But why did Burundi have school fees? Probably because the World
Bank and IMF imposed them, as they did in other African countries.
The FBI
assassinated a Puerto Rican Independence leader.
Arresting him for bank robbery would have been appropriate. Keeping
doctors away while he bled to death was simply murder. Telling lies
to make it look justified is typical of police. If you are on a jury,
don't assume that police witnesses are more likely to tell the truth
than the defendant!
I have never supported the goal of independence for Puerto Rico.
Puerto Ricans have had multiple chances to vote on independence, and
they always voted to preserve the status quo. Those Puerto Ricans who
would prefer independence are free to try to convince the rest, but I
never saw reason to take a side in the matter.
Now, however, I might support the campaign, simply to help some people
escape from the rule of the Bush regime.
The Kurds
falsified the election in a mostly-Sunni part of Iraq last
January, and they may do so again so as to fake "approval" of the
proposed Constitution.
The true story of how multinational drug companies
took liberties with African lives.
In South Africa, the head of the labor movement has denounced
President Mbeki and his ministers for misleading the public about
AIDS.
5 million people there have HIV, and only 60,000 of them are getting
treatment. The irrationality of Mbeki and his ministers is part of
the reason, but here's another, not mentioned here: the US and the WTO
are doing all they can to prop up drug company profits, even if it
means millions die.
In South Africa, the head of the labor movement has denounced
President Mbeki and his ministers for
misleading the public about AIDS.
5 million people there have HIV, and only 60,000 of them are getting
treatment. The irrationality of Mbeki and his ministers is part of
the reason, but here's another, not mentioned here: the US and the WTO
are doing all they can to prop up drug company profits, even if it
means millions die.
A gay Iranian, now seeking asylum,
describes how he was tortured in
Iran for being gay.
Students in Cali, Colombia, supported protests by people whose water
has been cut off. In response, the police paramilitaries
attacked the student protestors--and
shot and killed a student.
Al Sadr is now fighting the Bush forces openly in Baghdad.
And the electricity in Baghdad
still does not work.
Of course, the Bush forces say they are working on it,
and things will be better any day now. The same thing
they have said all along.
Bush has already corrupted the National Park system. Now there's
a Republican plan to sell off some national parks and commercialize
the rest.
The same bill would weaken pollution controls on oil refineries,
using the temporary damaged states of some refineries as an excuse
to create a permanent health danger.
Uzbekistan has begun show trials against protestors
whose testimony appears to have been written for them.
At the same time it claims the protestors were radical Islamists,
it also says that Western media stirred up the protests.
The combination is absurd.
Interviews with members of Iraq Veterans Against the War
at a peace demonstration.
Republicans propose about a trillion dollars in cuts
to "compensate" for the $200 billion cost of rebuilding.
Here's a complete list of the Republicans' planned cuts.
Some of these cuts might be good to make, but some are harmful, to the
nation and to the poor. None of them would not be necessary if not
for the Bush largesse to the the rich.
This progressive group suggests an alternative way to bring the budget
into balance.
Senator Frist abused his "blind trust" by obtaining information
about what stocks it owns.
Frist disregards the facts and claims
that the abuses did not occur.
In Baghdad, a few months ago, people were saying that a man was
arrested by the Bush forces,
after he said he had seen them plant a
bomb in the street, or at least notice it and not remove it.
This also talks about the effects of the Bush regime policy to play on
Islam to humiliate prisoners. As an Atheist, who believes in
toleration of religion but sees little good in most religions, I don't
feel great personal sympathy for people who are offended by this. But
it seems that the policy's result is to build support for the
resistance.
Bliar reversed course on climate change,
giving his support to Bush.
(This was the one major issue on which Bliar did not publicly support
Bush already.) Bush must have pulled on his leash.
It is further proof that Bliar's claim to be quietly influencing Bush
is fabricated.
An Iraqi cleric says al-Zarqawi died long ago--and that the supposed
messages from him are fakes.
There are reports that
Iraqi civilians found that the Bush forces had
planted bombs in their cars.
These could be false reports. The stories of bombs planted by the
Bush forces do not give the names of the people, and I don't know who
the writer is. People do fake their deaths, and Zarqawi might have
done so; but it doesn't stand to reason that he would fake his death
and then continue making press releases.
If this is true, it adds up to a scheme by the Bush forces to incite
civil war between the Iraqi Shi'ites and Sunnis. And that makes it
plausible, because so much else they are doing would seem to be
headed in that direction too.
The government of Botswana arrested all the leaders of
the First People of the Kalahari, which is resisting forced
relocation. It has banned journalists and harrassed human
rights investigators.
I don't know the background of the issue, and I would like to know of
the reasons for the relocation. The area is labeled as a game
reserve; perhaps this is being done to protect endangered species from
extinction. Or maybe not. But even if there is a good reason to turn
the area into a park and make people move out, it can be done without
trampling basic human rights.
Demand for palm oil is
pushing the extinction of orangutans through the destruction
of rainforests in Sumatra and Borneo.
Putting it all
together on Bush, hurricanes, and global warming.
Will Bush now have to admit that his burn-it-all-now oil policies have
caused disaster?
I doubt it. I think he will continue lying and denying till the end.
The FBI keeps trying to push for more
power to collect information secretly without search warrants.
In the House of Representatives it got most of what it wanted.
Thai Muslims found
undercover soldiers near the site of a killing, and tied them
up, accusing them of being part of the government's death squads.
Then some masked men killed the soldiers.
Writer Sharon Olds
rejected an invitation to the National Book
Festival because it would have meant "breaking bread" with Laura Bush.
Bliar announced a plan to remove the UK's troops from the Bush forces
in Iraq--based on the unlikely assumption that resistance activity
will quiet down next year.
In other words, this is more of the pretense that the Bush forces are
winning. If that does not happen, I wonder if Bliar will simply lie
and say it did happen. Well, that would be better than not
withdrawing the troops.
The Center for Strategic International Studies disputes the Bush claim
that the resistance in Iraq consists of foreigners. They say foreigners
make up about 4 to 10 percent. Which means at least 90% are Iraqis.
The foreigners trying to impose their will on Iraq are those in the
Bush forces.
When Bush speaks of Iraqi forces, he means the Kurds and some Shi'ites
that he uses to fight the Sunnis.
The Bush regime
banned Robert Fisk from visiting the US to give
speeches. This is not a new practice; the US government has banned
foreigners for decades from giving speeches to express views it does
not like.
In the 80s, noted author Farley Mowat was banned from doing a book
tour in the US, which was great for sales of his book. He demanded a
formal apology, and wrote a book about it. ISTR that Bertrand Russell
was once thus barred.
Bush is using Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to abolish
laws that protect working people from abuse by business.
Former General Janis Karpinski says the torture at Abu Ghraib prison
was ordered by higher-ups who have been shielded.
US troops practiced torture in Afghanistan too, and there too,
the footsoldiers are being prosecuted while the people who gave
the orders are being let alone.
A British citizen was convicted of the crime of "possessing items of
use to terrorists".
Assuming the description of those items is accurate (which may or may
not be the case), I would say they provide a basis to suspect that he
might have been planning some sort of violence (which might or might
not be terrorism, depending on details). His explanations could have
been lies.
However, what provides enough basis for suspicion is not enough
grounds to conclude someone is guilty. When laws are twisted so that
presenting a basis for suspicion is defined as a crime, that is merely
a disguise for disregarding the right to a fair trial. A trial which
only proves there was grounds to suspect you is a meaningless trial,
and governments which possess this arbitrary power are more dangerous
than any non-state-supported terrorist.
What an honest and legitimate government would do was start watching
him carefully. Specific grounds for suspicion are enough basis to do
that, and if he had later begun to plan an actual act of violence,
they would probably have been able to stop it. And then they could
convict him and his accomplices of a real crime in a fair trial.
Some brave and humane Israeli soldiers talk about how their commanders
gave
orders to shoot unarmed Palestian civilians--often purely
arbitrarily.
After a half-hearted investigation, the Israeli police decided not to
prosecute the policemen that killed 13 unarmed Arab protestors.
However, some of the judges on a panel which also studied the events
disagreed with this conclusion.
Prisoners in a New Orleans jail were left locked in cells for days
without food or water to drink, as sea water rose around them. Some
500 are missing--whether escaped or drowned, nobody knows.
A report says that a supposed
passenger on one of the planes hijacked on 9/11 was arrested,
alive, in Europe.
I am not sure whether to believe this. I am skeptical of claims that
something other than a jetliner hit the Pentagon. I am also puzzled
by why, if Ms Olsen was part of the 9/11 conspiracy, US agents would
participate in arresting her now. Wouldn't they either help her get
away, or kill her, so as to maintain the secret?
But this report might be true, and if it is, it's important.
People have notice a couple of other discrepancies in this story:
there is no Austrian-Polish border, and the Lira is obsolete, having
been replaced by the Euro. (I don't know what "international Lira"
would mean; I took that to be an unclear reference to some sort of
financial instrument I don't know about.) Another message claims
it was really the Polish-German border. Is there still a border
control at that border? I don't remember.
It could be that the writer was careless simply got these details
wrong. But it does reduce the credibility of the story.
China admits that some personnel imposes forced sterilizations and
abortions, but says this is not
official policy.
I support China's one-child policy; I do not believe that people have
an unquestionable right to have as many children as they wish. To
have a child, presuming that we won't just let it starve, means
imposing a substantial added burden on the world's future, and each
extra child imposes a bigger burden that an extra house or car. We
don't guarantee everyone the right to as many houses or cars as he or
she might desire, and we cannot do this with children either.
After the Bush forces knocked down a jail to release two soldiers
arrested by the Iraqi government, Iraqis see confirmation that their
government is a puppet.
Democracy Now!
Interview with Hugo Chavez.
In Basra, Bush forces soldiers masquerading as Arabs shot an
Iraqi policeman and were arrested. The Bush forces sent tanks to knock
down the walls of the jail, and 150 prisoners ran away.
The city then rioted.
The Bliar regime says the rioting was actually prepared by Al
Sadr's militia.
It might be true, but if true, it does not make the situation
any better.
North Korea tentatively agreed to drop its nuclear weapons program.
Then a day later it changed the conditions, which may break the deal.
The Bliar regime censored publication of an official's diary, not for
the sake of the national interest, but
only because what he intended
to say made Bliar look bad.
Hurricane Rita may or may not clober the same areas hit by Hurricane
Katrina. But if it doesn't, another storm will, and another, and
another. These low-lying coastal areas will become increasingly
vulnerable in future decades, as sea levels rise and storms become
more powerful. A rise of two feet could happen in this century.
We should take the hint from these hurricanes, and cut our losses, by
not building any more in those areas. When something is destroyed,
replace it further inland.
A day at the polls,
Afghanistan-style. Some Afghans are so eager to
vote that they will walk for hours. But women cannot make the long
trek, so they cannot vote. And some of the candidates expected to win
are warlords.
Thousands of people in the UK face forced "treatment" for mental illness,
and the legal protections against this are (as always under Blair)
inadequate.
The newest form of nonviolent protest in Bil'in:
a recital by
an Israeli pianist--on a truck.
For a man who predicted a Soviet-style collapse of the US,
the events of New Orleans are confirmation.
What I have seen over and over is a government that fusses about
obedience to regulations--various different kinds of
regulations--while ignoring the fact that people are dying. Whether
it is blocking foreign rescuers because it can't decide what visa to
give them, or burning food with British meat because of a remote
chance of BSE (just like US meat), or not letting the Red Cross bring
supplies to refugees because "it's too dangerous to let anyone in",
the pattern is the same.
Publicly, some oil companies pretend there is no global warming,
but privately, they
study reports on how climate change will affect their own
operations.
Only 7% of Brazil's Atlantic Forest is left. Lula has yet to sign
a weak law to
begin to protect it.
The Bush-puppet Iraqi Ministry of Defense was
swindled of a billion dollars, which were supposed to be spent to
buy arms.
The contracting was done in such a fishy way that any honest
procurement official would smell a rat. But Bush won't stand for
honest procurement officials, as the example of Bunnatine Greenhouse
shows--so events like this are no surprise.
NATO standard rations sent by the UK to feed Hurricane refugees
are
to be burned--because of
exaggerated concern for BSE. This makes no sense, because it is
already too late to keep BSE out of the US.
According to an article I read in Spanish, 120 peasants have occupied
the Ministry of Energy in Ecuador, demanding an end to the power of
the oil companies and no trade treaty with the US.
Dubya's War on Integrity continues as the EPA makes rules for
pesticide testing--full of loopholes
that take advantage of the weak
and poor.
And to the Fish and Wildlife Service, where his nominee
has already prosecuted this war in one part of the country.
Ending the prohibition of marijuana
would save the US some 7 billion
dollars a year. Taxing it like the more dangerous tobacco would
bring in some 6 billion in revenue
Marijuana use among teenagers has decreased greatly since
the 1990s, and this includes the states that have passed
laws liberalizing marijuana use.
Journalists under Attack in Louisiana and Iraq.
Details of
killings of journalists by the Bush forces.
President Chavez of Venezuela says that he has a copy of a
secret
US invasion plan.
"Loyalists" in Ulster have resumed
the violence which the IRA has ended.
Cluster bombs are on
sale at a giant arms dealers' convention in the UK, contrary to
the event's stated policy. And when told the policy is being
ignored, the even organizers try to excuse the violators.
Global warming has passed
a tipping point--as the arctic ice melts, it warms the arctic
more. This may be irreversible, and could lead to disaster for the
whole world.
The Bush forces attacked the Iraqi town of Tel Afar
using Kurdish "Iraqi" troops.
An Iraqi journalist's remotex
report on the attack.
Human Rights Watch reports that the Uzbek government is torturing the
witnesses to its massacre of protestors to make them admit to being
radical islamists--which they are not.
Bush denies aid to countries that won't buy expensive US anti-AIDS
medicine. Meanwhile, the WTO is cutting off the supply of cheap AIDS
medicine from India. This makes the WTO a mass murderer.
I think Malawi (or various other countries) could legitimately arrest
the WTO's leaders in any country where they can be found, and put them
on trial for murder. Along with Bush, of course.
Blair plans to deport a Zimbabwean to certain death. If Mugabe
doesn't kill him (he was driven out by threats), AIDS will.
A lawsuit in Washington State, to investigate apparent manipulation of
the last election, calls for the court to reject the
trade secrecy of voting machines because the conduct of elections
cannot be secret.
"I don't want to kill anyone else--just me." The irrational and
unjust "control orders" in the UK, permanent denial of basic human
rights without a trial, drove one man to
attempt suicide already.
The Blair regime says hundreds of people
will be treated this way, and that it extends to citizens as well as
foreigners. The foreigners at least theoretically have another country
they could go to, though some of them face torture if they return
"home". The British citizens have nowhere to go unless granted
political asylum.
The historic and touristic parts of New Orleans were not flooded, and
some people fear that they will be operated as a kind of
theme park.
That's not really feasible, since the thousands of people who work
there would need places to live, too; they would form a substantial
city, meaning that much of the city would have to be rebuilt. But it
could be rebuilt on high ground, so as not to ask for a repeat
of the disaster a short time from now.
An Israeli general who retaliated for an attack by
bulldozing the
homes of civilians was going to be arrested in England and tried for
war crimes. But he was tipped off somehow and left in a hurry.
My understanding is that retaliating against innocent civilians
violates the treaties for the conduct of occupying armies.
Muslims are
bringing the brutality of "honor killings" to Germany.
I wonder if some of the nonviolent forms of sexual humilliation
practiced in Abu Ghraib on people never charged with a crime could be
effective as punishments for convicted murderers. Maybe these macho
men would hesitate to murder their sisters if they knew it would mean
being paraded publicly in handcuffs wearing women's underwear.
A few years ago, one of the leaders of the BBC had the idea of
releasing its archives of taxpayer-funded radio and TV programs for
the public to use in freedom.
In bringing this plan to reality,
it has been twisted and gutted.
With the help and support of Creative Commons, the BBC has restricted
the use of these works to the UK--converting a potential triumph for
the Free Culture Movement into a setback.
It is a shame that Creative Commons lends its help and its name to
such restrictive licenses. Works limited to one country are not part
of humanity's commons. Neither are the works released under Creative
Commons' "Developing Countries" licenses, which give no freedom
whatsoever to anyone in developed countries. These practices, these
licenses, are the reason why I and others have withdrawn our support
for Creative Commons.
Shell in Ireland wants to try a possibly-dangerous new scheme for
transporting natural gas onshore--and hired phony "independent"
consultants to study the plan.
Conseratives are trying to blame environmentalists for the flooding
of New Orleans; as usual, they do this based on distorting the facts.
Some real democracy in Afghanistan: a candidate for MP gains strength
by criticizing some (but not all) NGOs as corrupt, wasting foreign
donors' money and not helping the country.
It appears President Karzai protexts the corrupt NGOs.
A new treaty may protect the great apes from extinction, if it works.
Bush is covering up the extent of poisoning in New Orleans.
Blair threatened to use anti-terror laws
against nonviolent protestors
criticizing high gas prices, thus demonstrating once again that the
names of these laws are lies. They are anti-democracy laws.
I do not sympathize with these protestors, because rising oil prices
are just as inevitable, as a consequence of the world's oil
consumption, as rising seas. If protestors block access to gas
stations or refineries, it would be proper to arrest them--but
accusing them of "terrorism" is lying.
Meanwhile, the Blair regime practices
explicit racial profiling in
searching people of Asian decent as potential "terrorists".
After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go
The US has plans to use nuclear weapons
preemptively to destroy other
countries' nuclear or biological weapons. This is a response to
nuclear proliferation which Bush has encouraged by his visible
willingness to attack countries if they don't have nuclear weapons.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, whose renewal was blocked by
Bush, called on the authorized nuclear powers to move towards
disarmament, but that movement stopped in the 90s--leading the other
countries to conclude it is unfair.
Increased price of hydrocarbons is pushing many poor people to
burn
wood for cooking. That will work until they cut down all the trees.
One way or another, Earth has too many human beings. The resulting
strains can manifest in different ways, but it is very hard to avoid
them.
In the Andes, people build solar cookers that don't need fuel.
I wonder if these would work in the context of the Philippines.
The Netherlands is starting a system of universal surveillance
of all citizens--starting with those to be born after now.
The privacy protections that they speak of could easily be swept away
later. Systems like this are more dangerous than beneficial.
Coca Cola brought criminal charges against the leaders of the union of
its employees in Colombia--for criticizing Coca Cola.
That's what happens when the state becomes the arm of the rich against
the poor. The Bush-supported government of Colombia is the biggest
terrorist in the country.
Coca Cola Company has been murdering union organizers in Colombia for
many years. Meanwhile, in India it has dried up the wells for lots of
poor people--and had thugs beat them up when they protested. And
that's not all. See
www.killercoke.org, and boycott
Coca Cola Company.
The European Parliament is pushing research to move towards hydrogen
fuel, as well as to increase public transportation, as an intelligent
response to high oil prices.
Wal-Mart has been
sued on behalf of foreign sweatshop workers
that produce the goods they sell.
9-11, Iraq, New Orleans, America:
See A Pattern Here?
FEMA accused of misusing trained disaster workers as public-relations
workers.
The Bush regime has given the job of burying the bodies from New Orleans
to a company
already known for discarding corpses--and tied to Bush.
Has it been given the mission of making corpses disappear, so as to
"lower the death toll" and make Bush look good?
A UN report points out how parts of the US population are living in
poverty normally associated with third-world countries. Infant
mortality has been rising ever since Bush took office.
This article says, "Lack of leadership led to disaster in New
Orleans".
But that's not true--or rather, it fails to recognize the depths of
the problem. Before the storm, the US government neglected the
levees, incapacitated FEMA, failed to clean up poisons in the ground,
and encouraged global warming. But these were not random neglect;
they were instances of a general policy, applied across the board: to
cut taxes on business and its owners, and cater to them in other ways,
while neglecting public needs.
Thus, the destruction of New Orleans can be traced to the replacement
of democracy with corporatocracy.
Bush said he "takes responsibility" for the bad response to
Hurricane Katrina.
That's clever misdirection, because he doesn't have much of the
responsibility for what was done, or not done, *after* the storm
(unless the story about destroying the levee with explosives is true).
Thus, taking responsibility for those screw-ups makes him look mature
and statesmanlike. But limiting this to the "response" excludes the
big things they did wrong before the storm, which really are
his personal doing.
FEMA director Brown has resigned, as expected, trying to take the
blame with him and away from Bush.
Democrats are calling for a congressional probe of the New Orleans
disaster modeled on the 9/11 Commission.
That is the wrong model if we want a real investigation. Let's not
forget that the 9/11 Commission failed to investigate many suspicious
aspects of the issue--for instance, anything that pointed a finger at
the Bush regime. It was very limited in its power to get testimony
from anyone in the administration. Most of the people in it were
inclined to turn a blind eye towards Bush, and the few who weren't so
inclined were neutralized.
By all means, let's have a real investigation of what happened after
the storm--but we already know the biggest things that the Bush regime
and Republicans did wrong, the ones that happened long before the
storm. The investigation must not become a distraction.
The UN is considering various reforms and projects to address various world
problems, but it seems that most of them will be blocked by disagreement
between states.
Thousands who survived in New Orleans
plan to resist being forced to
leave their pets to die. And why should they trust the police now?
Toxic industrial wastes dumped in New Orleans, and not cleaned up
because governments wanted to lower taxes, are now in the water, and
as it is pumped out, it will contaminate the entire region.
The
result may be a disaster far bigger than what nature alone would have
produced.
People may have thought they could ignore the danger of these wastes,
because the danger they posed appeared remote. It depended on an
unlikely combination of circumstances. But the various harms we are
inflicting on our world are converging, making such combinations more
likely. We have to continue cleaning up these wastes.
Uri Avnery: on
what killed Arafat & the nonviolent protest at Bil'in.
Bush forces soldiers are on trial in the UK for beating an unarmed Iraqi
to death.
The stress of war leads men to do this, when they think of the
civilians as the enemy. In civilized countries (not as numerous now
as 10 years ago), the authorities prosecute when they can make a clear
case. But that is not enough to prevent such acts, which appear to be
commonplace in Iraq. The way to prevent them is--don't start an
unnecessary and unjustified war!
As part of his campaign to increase oil consumption,
Bush ordered the DOE to stop setting standards for fuel efficiency
of appliances. Now several states are suing.
Greenpeace accused the IAEA of trying to
understate the number of people who have died, or will die, from
the Chernobyl accident.
Bliar is trying to
spread his campaign against human rights all across Europe. He
makes the usual claims that this is "necessary for safety"--without
any attempt to prove it.
Private insurance companies
have pulled out of Florida because of frequent hurricanes. In
many areas of the US, insurance companies face a big increase in
weather-related losses, due to global warming (combined with
people's prediliction to live in vulnerable places).
500 settlers in Hebron have expelled
25,000 Palestinians, over 2/3 of the population, through years
of harassment. The police and troops look on and let it happen.
When international visitors try to monitor this,
they are arrested.
However, Israeli and Palestinian protestors
managed to overcome intense army opposition to hold their
regular nonviolent protest.
There is a report, attributed to an anonymous Army diver, of finding
explosives in debris from the levee that broke and flooded New Orleans.
I would not put it past Bush to do such a thing. On the other hand, I
can't see any possible motive for sabotaging the city; all he has got
is trouble. And the anonymous report is not very credible--why
doesn't this diver step forward and speak up? So I think this report
is more likely not true. But it might be true.
A US appeals court supported Bush's dictatorial power to hold people
in prison forever without trial.
The story calls it the end of "rule of law". It is not quite the end,
since there is a chance that the Supreme Court could reject this
position. However, I would guess that Bush has already ascertained
that Roberts will support him.
By the standards that we Americans learned in school, the Bush regime
is no more legitimate than that of Saddam Hussein.
Democrats are starting to call for a major program to rebuild New
Orleans. The city is unique, and should be rebuilt--but not below sea
level. That would be sheer stupidity.
The easiest way to build anew without inviting another similar
disaster is to move the city inland to higher ground. Another way is
to dump 40 feet of dirt on the flooded areas of New Orleans, and build
a new city above sea level there.
The survivors of New Orleans are still well-off compared with many in
parts of
the third world.
Blackwater mercenaries are
on the prowl in New Orleans.
The Bush regime is interfering with journalism in New Orleans.
Part of his cover-up campaign, to hide his responsibility
both before and after the hurricane, is to hide the dead
bodies from public view.
When police attacked a photographer who had taken pictures of
them beating up someone they had just arrested, this was probably
not a Bush policy--it was just typical police dishonesty.
I think that reporter should file a complaint.
Two Navy helicopter who took a side trip to rescue stranded people off
the roofs of New Orleans were lectured that their supply missions
were more important. That was at a time when very few rescue missions
were being done.
200 prisoners in Guantanamo are on hunger strike.
Bush does not acknowledge the Federal government's wrongs in New
Orleans (which began long before Hurricane Katrina--see previous
notes). He is trying to pretend that he did a good job, and is trying
to put blame on Democrats. In other words, the Bushmen don't care
what happens to New Orleans, only how it affects their image.
They surely expect that much of the corporate media will back them up
in trying to evade responsibility.
Fighting between Iraqi ethnic groups
is heating up, and the police
often kill on behalf of these groups.
The Bush policy of using Shi'ite and Kurdish troops to occupy Sunni
areas is contributing to the problem. Are the Bushmen utterly blind,
or are they intentionally setting off a civil war? I wonder if their
aim is to incite the Shi'ites and Kurds to massacre most of the
Sunnis.
A small group of countries are trying to block UN
moves to protect human rights and reduce poverty.
The Egyption election was
rigged in many ways. This led to protests, despite a ban on
protests.
Al Qaida took
credit for the London bombings and described them as a response to
the occupation of Iraq.
Why couldn't poor people without cars evacuate from New Orleans?
Because police wouldn't allow them to walk out to safety. Poor
people, tourists, convention attendees, anyone without a car, was
trapped. Refugees were repeatedly lied to, threatened, and forced
back by police, who even confiscated their food and water.
When they camped in a visible place to wait, this embarrassed the
police, who lied to them and threatened them with guns. They forced
honest people to split up into small groups, which were vulnerable to
criminal gangs. All in all, they acted like they considered the
people an occupied populace.
I wonder if any of these police can be identified, named, and shamed.
Another page provides commentary, with links to various corroborating
material.
It seems to be a bit distracted about whether Socialists can be
trusted. I would trust a Socialist over a Bushman any day of the
week. Note in particular how right-wing propagandists on TV revealed
the depths of their contempt for the lives of the poor and weak--and
their willingness to hide the truth to serve their agenda.
Testimony from ex-soldiers, collected by an NGO, has forced the
Israeli Army to
investigate unjustified shootings of civilians.
The army appears to have done nothing to give soldiers any possible
response to stone-throwing except shooting lethal ammunition, and in
some cases the officers directly encouraged shooting civilians. To
their credit, many soldiers are unhappy about this. Bravo to them!
The top 10 censored news stories of the past year.
France is evicting poor immigrants from housing deemed "unsafe"--without
providing anywhere else for them to go.
The Montreal Protocol that banned ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbon
gases is working; the ozone layer is slowly starting to rebuild.
This treaty illustrates how rational beings respond to the recognition
that they are destroying their world. It makes a sharp contrast with
the denial response that we see to so many other world problems,
including global warming, overfishing, destruction of rainforests,
depletion of aquifers, etc.
The US government is allowing Worldcom/MCI to
get away with fraud--and
apparently also to merge with a major competitor, Verizon.
If companies such as Worldcom/MCI can get away with fraud because they
are "too big to be allowed fail", it stands to reason that, for the
sake of not allowing fraud to pay, companies should not be allowed to
get so big. Which means that this merger is the exact opposite of
what is needed. Permitting this merger is the act of a government
that is trying to transform itself into the flunky of business.
Yahoo
willingly gave China the contact info to find a journalist who
has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. Yahoo also censors its
information to please the Chinese government.
Many poor people could not leave New Orleans because the state did not
help them leave. However, some poor fools were led astray
by religion.
People were
told to go to the Superdome, but they have no food, no water there.
And before they could get in, people had to stand in line for 4-5 hours
in the rain because everybody was being searched one by one at the
entrance. And then it got worse...
The racism of the New Orleans non-evacuation developed out of the
racism of the city and its police. Refugee camps were run more like
prisons than aid
stations; people were sent away without being able to find out
where they are being sent to, and people bringing food were turned away
"unless you have enough for everyone".
Egypt is holding a contested presidential election,
and opinion polls say the challenger has a chance to win--but
there's
no check on how Mubarak will count the votes.
Slaves in the US were treated as persons when they were accused of crimes,
but not when their human rights were concerned. Today, for corporations,
it's just the reverse: they are treated as persons in regard to their
supposed rights, but not when it comes time to punish them.
Cold water coral reefs, often deep under water, are just being
explored--but they are being destroyed by trawlers faster than
scientists can explore them.
Another article mentioned that coral reefs are breeding grounds for
many kinds of fish. By destroying these reefs in their haste to catch
fish, the fishing businesses are destroying their own future (and
ours). Like many businesses today (think of Bush and co), they are
too focused on the short term to care.
Venezuela is providing humanitarian aid to the US.
Cuba offered to send 1000 doctors, but the offer
was rejected.
US laws designed to end overfishing have not worked, because
they have not been enforced. Overfishing is increasing, and
important fishstocks such as cod continue to decline.
Giving local people control over
local ecosystem management can help
them become better off through managing the resources carefully.
However, this has to be accompanied by a stable population, if the
benefits are to last.
Global warming threatens to dry up the Ganges river and leave much of India
with no water.
The increase in oil prices has caused a 10%
decrease in gasoline
use in Belgium and Germany. It might cause an even bigger decrease
in the US.
When high oil prices reduce CO2 emissions, that is a very good result.
However, the article is mistaken in its optimism, and in its
conclusion that treaties to reduce greenhouse gases are unnecessary.
High gasoline prices can reduce consumption, which reduces emissions.
But it can also encourage production of gasoline from other fossil
fuel sources. That would reduce the economic effect of declining oil
extraction, but it won't reduce global warming.
The floodwaters covering New Orleans are
full of toxic waste,
and pumping them out is going to poison some other place.
The Israeli Army demolished the Palestinian village of Hirbat Tana,
and now claims the area is "uninhabited" while the inhabitants try to
rebuild their homes.
People from Rabbis for Human Rights tried to
help them rebuild, and were arrested.
Famous scientists criticized the Bush regime prediliction to ignore
science.
A list of signatories:
The Israeli Army kills Palestinians who are passing by,
or assassinates them while they hide in cupboards,
then calls them "terrorists" and
boasts about it.
This reminds me of various other governments that preferred
or prefer to lie rather than admit a mistake.
In Venezuela, Chavez's supporters are
not surprised by assassination
threats from up north. The rich there, who know nothing about how the
poor people live, want all the oil wealth for themselves.
Large studies show homeopathy is
no better than a placebo. In other
words, the homeopathic "remedies" are entirely worthless. Like any other
worthless medicine, when taken by people who believe they work, a certain
fraction do recover--but anything else would work as well.
New Orleans and the Death of the Common Good.
This answers the question I posed a few days ago. The poor stayed
behind because the state did not give them what it took to leave--and
now the corporate media are trying to pretend that their own
foolishness was the reason.
Bush wants to open the national parks to abuses that could destroy them.
Under the Bush standard, activities would be allowed in national parks
unless one can "prove" they would cause irreparable damage. Often
there can't be conclusive proof that a certain activity would cause
irreparable damage until it has already done so. But even then, Bush
appointees might refuse to recognize the proof, as they have done with
global warming; none so blind as he who will not see.
In effect, this would be an all-purpose excuse to trash the national
parks. That's the neoliberal attitude towards national assets: strip
them.
Uri Avnery:
If Likud splits over the withdrawal from Gaza, as it is on
the verge of doing, this could open the way to a political rearrangement
that Israel needs.
Israeli troops
attacked a nonviolent protest in Bil'in.
The last time New Orleans was flooded,
Huey Long built a populist
movement based on the anger people felt at the government's failure to
help them.
It is ironic that nowadays the World Bank, etc., pressure countries to
make children pay for their own textbooks again. This is part of
"structural adjustment", a campaign to hurt the poor.
The latest move in Bush's War on Integrity:
blocking publication of statistics on Driving While Black.
Bush doesn't feel a need to see Cindy Sheehan, because his agents have
been
spying on her group's activities for months.
On Thursday, New Orleans Mayor Nagin said that the US government was
failing to provide substantial help to the people caught in the
city.
It doesn't surprise me that the Bush administration officials
congratulate themselves for doing a good job. That's standard Bush
policy: don't solve problems, deny them.
One reason FEMA is ineffective is that Bush has
been sabotaging it ever since he captured the White House.
Orhan Pamuk, a famous Turkish novelist, faces charges of "insulting
national character" for talking about the genocide of the
Armenians.
If Turks support this law, they will insult the national character of
Turkey worse than anyone else could do it.
10% of the world's coral reefs became unhealthy in the past
two years. Only 70% are still healthy.
I wonder whether coral reefs can keep up with rising sea levels. I
suspect that the way coral species survive a rise is by seeding new
colonies in newly submerged land. That may be especially difficuly
when they are so unhealthy to begin with.
Lula has failed to end the illegal cutting of the Amazon forest
because he isn't trying
hard enough.
The US government is canceling half the land set aside to protect an
endangered species in California, but builders are not satisfied--they want the rest.
The claim that this protected land interferes with affordable housing
is absurd, because single-family homes on big lots in semi-rural areas
are not affordable--not for poor people. They also need public
transit.
The Bush regime delivered New Orleans to unnatural disaster--by
cutting the funds for restoring protective wetlands and
maintaining the levees.
It also helped produce
hurricane Katrina, by encouraging global warming for 5 years.
I've read that it was mainly poor people who could not evacuate from
New Orleans and are now dying there. Why couldn't poor people
evacuate? Did the state not offer them transportation? Did it not
offer them a place to go? Either one should be a scandal. If you
come across a report on this, please send me the text and a publicly
accessible URL I can link to. [The answers are yes and yes; see other
following notes.]
A US appeals court sustained the use of the DMCA to forbid
development of interoperating software.
I link to this EFF statement reluctantly, because it implicitly
endorses the thinking that gave us the DMCA, by harping on
"legitimately purchased products" as if that made a difference. The
phrase is clearly meant to refer to "authorized copies", which it
makes the implicit assertion that authorized copies are legitimate and
that unauthorized copies are not.
Once you accept that assumption, you will find it hard to fight
against things like the DMCA or Treacherous Computing, whose intention
is is to prevent these supposedly "illegetimate" copies, because you
can only argue about side issues such as "add-on innovation".
Some two million women and children are
enslaved every year.
Mugabe is moving Zimbabwe
further into tyranny.
The great apes are
all facing extinction due to human destruction of their habitat.
Human overpopulation and unchecked business are responsible.
A former Scottish police chief says that Lockerbie evidence was planted
to frame Libyans for a
crime they did not commit.
In Argentina, old growth forests are being cut down
rapidly to grow soybeans for just a few years. Greenpeace is
blocking the bulldozers.
In Turkey, Greenpeace is protesting
a coal-fired power plant that was built while wind power goes to
waste.
Denmark says it will bar
CIA flights carrying prisoners for torture.
Food aid to Africa is
often mismanaged, and this could be impeding Africa's development.
Beslan mothers
blame Putin for deaths.
A strategic alliance between Russia and China is a natural
response to US hegemonism.
As Orwell would have put it, Eastasia and Eurasia are temporarily
allied against Oceania.
Cell phone radio waves seem to be
driving away or killing sparrows.
There are reports that the two youths executed in Iran were convicted
of raping a
boy, not of consensual sex. But others say this conviction may have
been false.
Rape should be punished, but not with execution.
A Russian human rights monitoring group says that Russia's prisons
today are
gratuitously cruel, comparable to the Soviet gulag or Abu Ghraib.
Merck donated
lots of money to arthritis charities, in effect buying their support
as marketing agents for Vioxx.
I think that pharma companies should be forbidden to give anything to
doctors, hospitals, clinics, charities, or anyone; instead, they
should pay a special tax which will be divided among those worthy
recipients at the discretion of an independent board.
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