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"Those who are willing to give up freedom for a little safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." Theodore Roosevelt
digg links, for the techie:
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| ...help re-open the Statue of Liberty |
| 12.28.03 (8:48 pm) [edit] |
http://www.statueofliberty.org/aboutframe.htm" title="http://www.statueofliberty.org/aboutframe.htm" target="_blank"http://www.statueofliberty.or...
Aside: We have goddamned billions to ship to overseas but we can't fix this? *Scratches head*
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| ...Resistance to occupation will grow |
| 12.20.03 (7:18 pm) [edit] |
by Sami Ramadani, The Guardian [UK]
December 15th, 2003
The joy was deep, but the pain, too, was overwhelming as I remembered relatives and friends who lost their lives opposing Saddam's tyranny or in his wars.
I remember my disappeared and dearest school friend, Hazim, whom I hugged goodbye in 1969 at the canteen of the college of medicine in Baghdad. I never saw him again. Although only 15, Hazim had the courage to distribute anti-Ba'athist leaflets at our school in Baghdad within months of the 1963 CIA-backed coup that brought the Ba'athists to power. I remember, too, my dear friend Ghassan, who died in a hospital in Canada after many years in exile. He didn't live to see the moment he had waited so long for.
But here it was, at last: Saddam's surrender in ignominy. However, this delightful moment - enjoyed by all the Iraqis I spoke to as the news of his capture was breaking - was soured by the fact that it was Iraq's newly appointed tyrant, Paul Bremer, doing the boasting: "Ladies and gentlemen... we got him!"
What will the Americans do with their captive? Is Saddam going to face a trial? Will the truth of his mass murders and crimes come out? Will the trial shed light on how the US backed him and supplied him with chemical weapons? Will it reveal how the US encouraged him to launch the war on Iran, causing the death of a million Iranians and Iraqis? Will the trial go into the alliances with and support for Saddam by so many of members and parties now in the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council? The dark clouds over Iraq haven't lifted yet.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by the US-led unjust and immoral war, and the death toll continues to rise as innocent people are being killed in US military raids, bombardments and Sharon-style collective punishment, and harmed by the depleted uranium shells used by the US-led forces. So at this moment of joy, other questions keep intruding: Who is going to try Bremer, Bush, Rumsfeld and Blair? Will Iraq ever be free?
One thing I do know: Saddam was not leading the resistance from his dirty little hole. This was acknowledged yesterday by an unlikely source - Sherif bin Ali, a relative of the last Iraqi king, Faisal II, and a strong supporter of the US-led invasion. "The truth must be spelt out," he said, "Saddam has nothing to do with the resistance. His cowardly surrender confirms what we have known all along... It is time to negotiate with the resistance. It is time to call on the resistance to declare a truce."
It has suited the US to blame Saddam for the resistance to the occupation and to use him as a pretext for the continued occupation. But Bin Ali is merely confirming what the CIA and US Congress sources have recently confirmed: that there are no less than 15 organisations involved in the resistance, which enjoys widespread support. A recent CIA report admitted that, "there are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists", and concluded that "the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
Saddam's surrender is likely to embolden the political forces in Iraq which, until now, feared that a call for the immediate end to the occupation might help Saddam return to power.
The largely peaceful resistance in Baghdad and the so-called Shia areas of Iraq will also attract greater attention. In the past two weeks, trade union leaders in Baghdad and the south have been arrested. The occupation authorities shamelessly used Saddam's 1987 law barring trade union activity within state institutions. But such opposition will be difficult to suppress. This week in Hilla, a so-called Shia city, a militant but peaceful mass insurrection succeeded in deposing Iskander Jawad Witwit, the US-appointed governor. The thousands who besieged the governor's office called for free elections to replace him.
Now that Saddam is no longer a bogeyman to scare the people with, trade union and other mass opposition is likely to increase, complementing and coalescing with the armed opposition.
One demand is now uniting nearly all Iraqis, from armed resisters to trade unionists to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Elections! And it is the one demand to which the US has refused to agree, because it has accurately assessed the likely result. That is also why it swiftly moved to stop elections of city mayors and why, a few weeks ago, it sacked the elected dean of Baghdad university after his outspoken criticisms of the occupation authorities.
Saddam's ignominious end is likely to weaken US-led efforts to divide the Iraqis along sectarian and national lines. In memory of all those who died resisting Saddam's tyranny, the peaceful and armed resistance is likely to intensify and attract greater support across the world, including that of the American people.
Sami Ramadani was a political refugee from Saddam's regime and is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0" title="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0" target="_blank"http://www.guardian.co.uk/Ira...,2763,1107236,00.html
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| Hinckley wins unsupervised visits |
| 12.18.03 (9:52 am) [edit] |
From Kelli Arena
and Terry Frieden
CNN
Thursday, December 18, 2003 Posted: 3:54 AM EST (0854 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The man who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 will be allowed to have limited, unsupervised visits with his parents, a judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman decided that John Hinckley Jr. can have six, one-day visits with his parents within a 50-mile radius of Washington, D.C., without an escort from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where he has been confined since the assassination attempt.
The judge denied Hinckley's request for overnight visits, or visits to his parents' home in Williamsburg, Virginia, which is outside the 50-mile limit.
The visits could begin after the holidays, but not sooner because Hinckley's parents must file an itinerary with the court two weeks in advance.
Reagan, who now suffers from Alzheimer's disease, was wounded when Hinckley shot him, his press secretary, James Brady, and two others outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981.
Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He said he shot the president to impress actress Jodie Foster, a student at Yale University at the time.
Former first lady Nancy Reagan said in a written statement she was disappointed by the judge's ruling.
"Although the judge limited Mr. Hinckley's travel to the Washington, D.C., area, we continue to fear for the safety of the general public," the statement said.
"Our thoughts are with all of Mr. Hinckley's victims today, especially Jim Brady and his family, as they must continue to live with the tragic consequences of the assassination attempt."
Brady's wife, Sarah, has also opposed Hinckley's release without hospital supervision.
In his decision, the judge added that if strict conditions are met and the initial six visits go well, Hinckley may eventually be allowed to have two overnight visits with his parents -- again within a 50-mile radius of Washington.
The court order requires Hinckley's parents to formally sign an agreement to assume supervisory responsibility for their son. The Hinckleys will also be required to maintain telephone contact with the hospital during the visits.
"If there are any signs of decompensation or deterioration in Mr. Hinckley's mental condition, no matter how slight, of danger to himself or others, or of elopement, Mr. Hinckley will immediately be returned to the hospital," the court said.
The judge wrote that Hinckley must also continue to take his psychotropic medication and must refuse to speak with the media.
"Should Mr. Hinckley fail to adhere to any of the conditions of release imposed on him by this order, this conditional release will be terminated immediately," Friedman's decision said.
Mark Corallo, the chief spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, called Wednesday's decision "unfortunate."
"We are disappointed in the court's decision to grant John Hinckley Jr. limited conditional release under the supervision of his parents," Corallo said. "It is unfortunate that the concerns of the Reagan and Brady families were not accorded more weight in this decision."
In hearings earlier this month, Justice Department lawyers fought Hinckley's attempts to win unescorted visits with his family, despite testimony from several psychiatrists, including some who were formerly the government's own experts, that he no longer represents a threat.
Prosecutors argued that Hinckley still engages in "deception" and represents a potential danger to the community.
Ken Duberstein, Reagan's former chief of staff, said on CNN's "Inside Politics" he disagrees with the judge's decision.
"The idea that John Hinckley, who tried to kill our beloved Ronald Reagan, walks free on the streets of Washington? Who knows what he might, what havoc he might wreak," he said with disgust.
"Of course, he can't be unsupervised. He needs more than adult supervision. He needs police supervision," Duberstein said.
The court ruling also specifically forbids Hinckley from any contact with Leslie DeVeau, a former patient at St. Elizabeth's with whom Hinckley once had a romantic relationship.
It also requires that Hinckley follow a detailed itinerary developed by the hospital and submitted under seal to the court two weeks before each outing.
Government officials said such a requirement would give the Secret Service time to make the necessary arrangements, if it chooses to do so, to monitor Hinckley's travels, presumably from a distance, officials said.
All of Hinckley's past outings in which he was under hospital supervision were monitored by the Secret Service.
The Secret Service said it is reviewing the ruling to decide if it will monitor from afar Hinckley's visits with his parents.
"We continue to review the judge's order," said Secret Service spokesman Tom Mazur. "The Secret Service does not discuss issues of protective intelligence, and will not do so in this matter."
Government sources said privately after recent hearings that they expected the Secret Service to keep an eye on Hinckley whatever the judge ruled, but even in private Wednesday officials would not say any such decision has been made.
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| ...Bush would back constitutional ban on same-sex marriage |
| 12.17.03 (4:50 am) [edit] |
Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Posted: 4:17 AM EST (0917 GMT)
Bush, criticizing the Massachusetts court, says it overstepped its bounds in overturning a ban on same-sex marriages.
------------------------- ------------------------- ----------------
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- While calling for tolerance, President Bush said Tuesday he would support a constitutional amendment, if one is needed, that defines marriage as being between a man and woman.
"If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that," Bush told ABC's Diane Sawyer.
The president -- in an apparent nod to some recognition of gay civil unions -- also said it would be the position of his administration that "whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they're allowed to make, so long as it's embraced by the state."
Overturning the state's ban on same-sex marriages, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in November cleared the way for lesbian and gay couples in the state to wed, ruling that government attorneys "failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason" to deny them the right.
The court gave state lawmakers six months to craft a way for gay couples to marry.
The president criticized the court, saying it had overstepped its bounds.
"It was a very activist court in making the decision it made," Bush said. "As you know, I'm a person who believes in judicial restraint, as opposed to judicial activism that takes the place of the Legislative Branch."
Bush said a constitutional amendment will be needed if "judicial rulings undermine the sanctity of marriage."
In October, Bush said administration lawyers were looking for some way to legally limit marriage to heterosexuals.
Asked by Sawyer if gays were sinners, Bush responded: "We're all sinners. We're all sinners."
"No distinction?" she queried.
"I think we're all sinners. One of my favorite Bible verses says, 'Why would I take a speck out of your eye when I have a log in my own?' And having said that, however, I do believe in the sanctity of marriage. But I don't see that as conflict with being a tolerant person or an understanding person."
Bush counts many conservative Christians and Christian groups among his supporters.
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| ...Squelching dissent in the name of security |
| 12.16.03 (5:23 pm) [edit] |
Boston Globe Monday, December 15, 2003
Squelching dissent in the name of security
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/349/oped/ Squelching_dissent_in_the _name_of_security" title="http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/349/oped/ Squelching_dissent_in_the _name_of_security" target="_blank"http://www.boston.com/dailygl...+.shtml
By David Cunningham
DESPITE THE FBI's denials, recent disclosures of intelligence efforts against lawful antiwar protesters are strong reminders of the bureau's intensive undercover operations of the 1960s and '70s. Those counterintelligence operations, known as COINTELPRO, sought to ''expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize'' the activities of targets that included communist organizations, civil rights groups, the Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Vietnam War protesters. While the current revelations are confined to the monitoring of perceived threats rather than active harassment, the broad sweep of the FBI's efforts should raise serious concerns over the bureau's motives and methods.
The New York Times has reported that these methods now include the use of ''firsthand observation, informants, and public sources like the Internet'' to gather ''extensive information on the tactics, training, and organization of antiwar demonstrators.'' Bureau officials were careful to emphasize that this effort is not designed to monitor the masses of law-abiding protesters, but instead to target anarchists and other ''extremist elements'' likely to plot and carry out violent acts. But clearly their net was cast more broadly, as the FBI's weekly bulletin to local law enforcement officials contained information about legal movement tactics such as online fund-raising, passive monitoring of police arrests, and activist ''training camps.''
The sheer scope of these efforts closely parallels the organizational logic of COINTELPRO. In my analysis of more than 6,000 pages of FBI memos related to the anti-Vietnam War movement, I found that agents initiated more than 450 actions against hundreds of groups and individuals between 1968 and 1971. These actions ranged from faked anonymous letters to planted evidence to falsified media stories to massive surreptitious infiltration by informants.
Agents' efforts were not designed to reduce criminal activities, nor were they discriminating in their reach. Curious sympathizers were frequently portrayed as insurgents within the FBI's files merely because they happened to attend a particular open meeting. These labels were created to feed an internal demand, as agents in the field conveniently ''found'' the national security threats that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had identified ahead of time.
The FBI feels it is well within its bounds to monitor the activities of law-abiding dissenters, even while acknowledging that it ''possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests.'' On the surface, such actions are far from COINTELPRO, which had moved beyond surveillance to expressly harass its targets. But, the lines between what the FBI refers to as ''intelligence-gathering' ' and more intrusive ''counterintelligence'' easily blur. The ACLU is quick to point out that even the suspicion of police surveillance at public demonstrations effectively deters many would-be participants.
This chilling effect is certainly a valid concern, as are the numerous anecdotal accounts of more active attempts by police to limit the expression of dissent at peaceful demonstrations. A more far-reaching danger, however, may be found in the volatile combination of a very real, though nebulous, threat and the wide latitude given to the FBI to proactively disarm it.
The Cold War specter of communism and the current-day concern with terrorism generate the same type of response: seeing all dissent as a product of the ''anti-American'' logic of its most extreme elements. Even as the majority of Americans supported our exit from Vietnam by the early 1970s, the FBI continued to characterize all protesters at massive demonstrations as potentially ''urging revolution'' and ''calling for the defeat of the United States in Vietnam.''
Similarly, recent demonstrations against global trade policies and the war in Iraq have included a remarkably broad cross-section of the population, though the potential for ''anarchists'' and ''terrorists'' to commit acts of violence and sabotage provides justification for the surveillance of all attendees at events even the FBI acknowledges are ''mostly peaceful.''
This broad-brush strategy, in which law-abiding individuals become suspect, has thus far provoked no unified outrage from congressional leaders. This is in sharp contrast to the mid-1970s, when Congress's reaction to the public exposure of COINTELPRO and related intelligence community abuses led to a number of significant reforms.
In 1976, Attorney General Edward Levi established clear guidelines for FBI agents, requiring that they investigate only specific criminal acts or conspiracies, rather than individuals' political views. Two years later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act instituted a rotating set of judges to oversee FBI agents' monitoring of suspected foreign terrorists.
Today, new guidelines by Attorney General John Ashcroft, in conjunction with the USA Patriot and Homeland Security Acts, have largely eradicated these reforms and provided FBI agents with unprecedented latitude when conducting investigations. Clearly, as Ashcroft argues, a lack of vigilance can have incredibly high costs. But civil liberties advocates are not calling for limits on the policing of illegal activities.
No special guideline from the attorney general's office is required for the FBI to monitor individuals suspected of committing criminal or terrorist acts, or even those conspiring to do so in the future. The slippery slope begins when the expression of First Amendment freedoms make large numbers of people potentially suspect and therefore appropriate subjects of intelligence-gathering efforts.
In 1976, Senator Philip Hart's heartfelt appeal during a congressional hearing into FBI abuses underscored the risks inherent in having uncritical faith in the bureau's mission. As the Michigan Democrat noted then: ''I have been told for years by, among others, some of my own family, that [FBI harassment of protesters] is exactly what the bureau was doing all of the time, and in my great wisdom and high office, I assured them that they were wrong -- it just wasn't true, it couldn't happen. They wouldn't do it. What has been described here is a series of illegal actions intended squarely to deny First Amendment rights to some Americans. That is what my children have told me was going on. I did not believe it. The trick now, as I see it, is for this committee to be able to figure out how to persuade the people of this country that indeed it did go on.''
Twenty-seven years ago, the committee did successfully convince the public, and also established clear oversight mechanisms for the intelligence community. Now, as the autonomy of the FBI has largely been restored, we can't excuse our own lack of vigilance by citing an unerring faith in the bureau's ability to self-regulate its actions.
This time, it shouldn't take our children's pleas to see the potential for constitutional abuse in current intelligence-community policies. David Cunningham, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Brandeis University, is the author of the forthcoming book ''There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence.''
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| ....Detained at the whim of the president |
| 12.14.03 (8:10 pm) [edit] |
Deborah Pearlstein IHT Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Guantánamo
NEW YORK The Bush administration has taken several important steps in recent days to resolve the legal status of some of the hundreds of people that the United States has detained without access to lawyers for the better part of two years.
Last weekend, the administration indicated that it would begin repatriating some of the 660 people detained without any judicial review at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A few days later, the Pentagon announced that it would begin making arrangements to allow Yasser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen, access to a lawyer after more than 20 months of incommunicado military detention.
These steps are welcome. But they should be understood as part of a broader strategy. The announcement on Guantánamo comes just weeks after the Supreme Court decided to review a lower court holding that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to evaluate the legality of the Guantánamo detentions. And the decision to allow Hamdi access to a lawyer was announced on the day final briefs were due to the Supreme Court, which is now deciding whether to take the case. It is difficult to see the timing as coincidental. For the past two years, the Bush administration - far more so than previous "wartime" executives - has been very effective at keeping the courts out of the business of checking executive power.
In the two years since the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration has established a set of extra-legal structures designed to bypass the federal judiciary. It has maintained that those detained by the United States outside U.S. borders - at Guantánamo and elsewhere - are beyond the jurisdictional reach of the U.S. courts altogether. Individuals subject to military commission proceedings - which two years after their announced creation have yet to begin - are to have their fate decided by military personnel who report only to the president.
In the "enemy combatant" cases involving U.S. citizens that have made their way into lower courts, the administration has balked at observing a federal court order requiring that it give its detainee-citizens access to counsel, and has consistently demanded of the courts something less than independent judicial review.
This refusal to be bound by established rules - to pursue ad hoc justice at best - is what makes the recent steps of small comfort. And while the military released 20 Guantánamo prisoners last week, those released were simultaneously replaced with the same number of new prisoners. It is unclear who the new arrivals are, where they were held before arriving at Guantánamo, and what will be their fate now that they are there. Likewise, it remains unclear how the administration determined which prisoners should be released, which must stay, and which - if any - will eventually be brought before military commissions for actual determinations of their status as prisoners of war, or their guilt or innocence of any particular offense.
What is more striking is that the Pentagon, in announcing that it would be making arrangements for Hamdi to have access to a lawyer "over the next few days," insisted that such access was only being granted "as a matter of discretion and military policy," not to comply with any requirement of domestic or international law. Indeed, the Pentagon maintains that its decision for Hamdi should not in any way "be treated as a precedent" to be used in any other such "combatant" case.
In any event, the decision to grant Hamdi access to counsel after nearly two years did not commit the administration to providing any more than that - for example, international law protections for the treatment of prisoners of war, or constitutional requirements that he be afforded notice of any charges against him and an opportunity to be heard by an independent court.
As made clear in the cases that the administration has cited in support of its sweeping claims of authority - including the use of military tribunals and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II - the Supreme Court has not always acted to enforce rights in favor of the individual against the executive asserting special "wartime" power. But the Supreme Court's involvement in those cases conveyed a critical message that even in times of greatest strain, executive power remained subject to the rule of law. The court's published opinions clarified the nature of the executive's claims of authority, and provided a basis against which to judge the executive's subsequent conduct.
In vigorous and public dissenting opinions, minority justices in those cases gave expression to the strong opposing arguments on the resolution of the legal questions presented. Perhaps most important, the Supreme Court's decisions provided Congress, legal scholars and the American public a means for understanding and, in the relative calm of postwar decision-making, for re-evaluating the political wisdom of the executive's conduct.
In 1971, Congress established that "no citizen" shall be "detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress." And in 1988, Congress awarded reparations to the remaining survivors and descendants of Japanese-American citizens interned by the military during World War II.
Despite the Bush administration's best efforts of late to convey the appearance of action, the Supreme Court - poised to hear the Guantánamo case, and now deciding whether to hear the case of Hamdi - should not be misled by atmospherics. At stake in the cases now at the court's doorstep is one of America's most basic ideals as a nation - that the rule of law is a matter of right, not a matter of grace.
The writer directs the U.S. Law and Security Program for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and is editor of "Assessing the New Normal," a book on liberty and security in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks.
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| ...Now Your Cellphone Can be Used to Track You Down |
| 12.14.03 (3:11 am) [edit] |
The Observer (UK): Big Brother Latest -
Big Brother latest: Now your phone can be used to track you down Global positioning satellites will soon be able to tell bosses exactly where every employee is. Could this spell the end for slackers?
Jamie Doward, social affairs editor
Sunday December 7, 2003 The Observer
Picture the scene. You are supposed to be attending a sales conference in Crewe when you are woken from your slumbers by the ring tone from your company-issue mobile phone. 'I'm there now,' you lie to your boss from the comfort of your hotel bed, safe in the knowledge that she will never know otherwise.
But, alas, your mobile phone uses a new technology which means your boss can pinpoint your exact location. You are soon picking up your P45 and handing back the phone.
It is the stuff of slackers' nightmares. But 'location-based tracking' - to use the mobile phone industry's terminology - is about to become reality.
Mobile-phone networks will soon be able to pinpoint the precise location of a handset owner to within 10 metres or less. From the middle of next year many phones will carry Global Satellite Positioning chips, while another new technology, known as 'Triangulation', can pinpoint a mobile-phone user's whereabouts by bouncing signals off three phone masts to establish an exact set of co-ordinates.
The concept has already been warmly embraced by a number of firms. 'It's popular with fleet and logistics firms who want to know where their lorries are,' said Julie Ramage of mobile-phone consultancy Analysys.
But the move has sparked huge controversy among civil liberty groups who fear that mobile-phone companies will be able to play Big Brother.
'It's a very worrying development. The scope for the misuse of this technology is enormous,' said Barry Hugill, spokesman for the civil rights group Liberty.
At the heart of the issue is who should be allowed to track a mobile phone. 'If you have a mobile phone, your network operator must know where you are in order to provide a service. The issue is whether they make that information available to third parties,' Ramage said. 'That information cannot just be used by anybody. People have to sign up to have the information shared.'
Some experts are worried that firms might make it a condition of an employee's job specification that they give their consent for their phone to be tracked.
'It's a complex area,' said Hugill. 'If your company issues you with a mobile phone, providing they tell you it can track you it's probably within the law. If your company does it covertly, then our view is that this would be illegal.'
And not everyone is convinced that this 'opt-in' system is foolproof. There have been suggestions that the software has already been hacked into by university students in Scotland who then tracked mobile-phone users across the UK.
Hugill said: 'We all know that information gets passed on and ends up in the wrong hands.'
There is further concern that mobile-phone users may respond to spam messages sent to their handsets without really knowing what they are signing up to. Children's charities have also expressed alarm that paedophiles might be able to exploit such a system.
Some pro-privacy campaigners go as far as to argue that the technology is part of a wider, more sinister trend to surveillance.
Simon Davies, director of campaign group Privacy International, said that a recent change in the law has meant mobile-phone networks must store a user's data for a year in case the police or the security services need to access it. 'There is a trend in Britain towards absolute identification, to a system of perfect tracking which eliminates the anonymity of movement,' he said.
So worried are the mobile-phone firms at a possible backlash that they have drawn up an industry code of practice designed to see off the threat of legislation regulating the issue.
It is also something which concerns the European Commission. This week the UK will adopt the EC's Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive which decrees that a mobile-phone user can be tracked only if he or she explicitly gives consent.
Even those in favour of tracking acknowledge the issue needs to be handled sensitively. 'With any new technology, much depends on how you sell it,' said Emma Hardcastle, managing director of mapminder.co.uk, which recently launched an online service that allows people to track an individual's mobile phone.
'In the next couple of years there will be huge change in this area. We need to make sure it doesn't invade anyone's privacy.'
Since Hardcastle's company launched the service a month ago it has received hundreds of registrations. 'Most of it is coming from companies, but not all. We had one person who wanted to be able to track his mother who has Alzheimers,' Hardcastle said.
A similar service - mapAmobile - offered by the Carphone Warehouse retail chain has also reported brisk interest.
'We were targeting the service at children,' said a spokeswoman for the retailer. 'It's a good way for parents to keep track of their kids rather than phoning them constantly to find out where they are. But we've also had some interest from taxi companies.'
The mobile-phone networks believe the location-based tracking services - which will allow firms to target specific customers when they enter designated loca tions - will become a major marketing weapon in the future.
Edward Brewster, spokesman for the mobile-phone company 3, which this month launches a tracking service incorporating satellite positioning technology, said: 'We already offer some location- based services, but now you will be able to be guided to everything from restaurants to the nearest cash machine via your mobile phone. This is going to offer the customer a whole new experience.'
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| ...enuff said |
| 12.11.03 (5:29 pm) [edit] |
LMAO :lol:
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| ...Summary of Human Rights Record of the US in 2002 |
| 12.10.03 (4:20 pm) [edit] |
People's Daily [CN]
April 04, 2003
The Information Office of China's State Council published an article titled "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2002" Thursday in response to the US State Department's " Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2002".
The Information Office of the State Council on Thursday released a report entitled The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2002. Following is a summary of the document:
The U.S. State Department released the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2002 on March 31, when the United States is facing condemnation from people of various countries in the world for unilaterally launching a war against Iraq.
With the United States pretending to be "the world's judge of human rights," the reports once again assessed the human rights situations in over 190 countries and regions in the world.
The reports carry distorted pictures and accusations of human rights conditions in China and other countries, but they mention not even a word of the human rights problems in the United States itself.
Therefore, it is necessary to make known to the world the human rights violations in the United States in 2002.
I. Ineffective Protection of Life and Security of Person
In American society, excessive violence has resulted in ineffective protection of life and security of the person.
According to a report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Oct. 28, 2002, the United States recorded 11.8 million crime offenses in 2001, a 2.1 percent increase over 2000.
The offenses included four violent crimes (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), and three property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft). Firearms were involved in 26.2 percent of violent crime cases, and murder cases increased by 2.5 percent.
There was an offense in every 2.7 seconds, and there were 44 murders, 248 rapes and 26 hate crimes each day. Among the crime offences were 15,980 murders and 90,491 forcible rapes.
Crime in many major American cities went up in 2002. In Washington D.C., drug abuse, gang violence and prostitution ran rampant, and crime went up by 36 percent from 2001; in Boston the crime rates increased by 67 percent, and in Los Angeles, by 27 percent.
The murder rate in the United States was five to seven times higher than most industrial nations.
During January-November 2002, New York City reported 489 murder cases; Chicago registered 485 homicide cases, in which 515 people were killed; and Detroit reported 346 murders.
During the same period Los Angeles reported 595 murder cases with 614 people killed, up 11.3 percent and 20.5 percent compared to the same period in 2001 and 2000, respectively (Los Angeles, Nov. 21, 2002, AFP).
The Constitution of the United States provides that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and the constitutions of 44 states in the nation include provisions safeguarding citizens' right to possess guns.
In the United States, guns owned by private individuals exceed 200 million, averaging nearly one for every citizen. In 2002, the numbers of gun buyers across the United States went up by 13 percent to twice over previous years, and the number of rifle owners increased even faster.
The National Rifle Association of the United States has over 2.8 million members. Excessive gun ownership has led to frequent shootings, and victims of firearms-related crime number more than 30,000 a year.
On March 26, a retired sheriff's deputy in Merced County, California, shot and killed his 5-year-old daughter and his three stepchildren while his estranged wife was out for a walk, then committed suicide with the body of one of the youngsters in his arms.
On May 30, a gunman opened fire inside a grocery store at a Top Valu Market near the downtown marina in Long Beach, California, killing a woman and a 7-year-old girl and wounding four others before he was fatally shot by police (Long Beach, California, May 31, 2002, AFP).
From October 2 to October 22, serial gun shooting cases occurred in Washington D.C. and neighboring Maryland and Virginia states, in which ten people were killed and three others were seriously wounded.
The number of gun shootings went up by 40 percent in Los Angeles in 2002 over 2001. Between the evening of November 19 and the early morning of November 20, five separate cases of gun shooting took place in downtown Los Angeles, leaving two people dead and seven others wounded.
Crime rates among juveniles in the United States have remained high, with youngsters accounting for 20 percent of violent crime.
Drug abuse among youngsters has kept increasing. Drug abuse among tenth-grade high school students in the United States went up from 11.6 percent in 1991 to 22.7 percent in 2001, and 34.4 percent of senior high school students in New York City have at least taken marijuana once.
In 2001, there were 638,000 narcotics-related cases, and drug abuse accounted for 25 percent of violent crime in the United States.
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, crime in schools decreased as most schools have installed metal detectors and videocameras, but it was reported that 6 percent of the students still carried guns to school.
Violence in schools such as bullying rose by 12 percent, and at least 10,000 students in the United States choose to stay at home once in a month for fear of being bullied ("School Crime Decreasing, US Says, But Students Still Fear Bullying, Reports Show", Dec. 10, 2002, Sun).
Violence in nursing homes for the aged in the United States is worrisome. In March 2002, a report submitted to the U.S. Congress said that inmates in some of such homes had suffered splash of cold water, battery and sexual assault.
However, such acts had never been regarded as crime, and most of them had not been prosecuted. Statistics show that there are 17,000 homes for the aged and similar institutions in the United States, housing 1.6 million aged Americans.
Violations of law have been found in about 26 percent of them, and two percent of which have caused physical injuries.
II. Serious Human Rights Violation by Law Enforcement Officials
The rights of ordinary Americans have met with challenge after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The anti-terrorism law USA Patriot Act, which took effect on October 26, 2001, provides law enforcement agencies with greater powers for investigation, including wiretapping of phone calls and Internet E-mail communications by suspect terrorists.
A Federal Court of Appeals on November 18 ruled that the Department of Justice asking for expanding its investigative powers is constitutional, and therefore should not be restricted. It aroused great concern among the American public that the DOJ would encroach upon their right of privacy in its work.
Commenting on the court ruling, U.S. House Judiciary Committee Representative John Conyers said in a statement the same day, "Piece by piece, this Administration is dismantling the basic rights afforded to every American under the Constitution." Some civil rights and electronic information organizations worried that there would have no effective protection of civil rights after the ruling.
Police brutality is a chronic malady in American society. On July 6, 2002, a bystander videotaped a scene in which several white police officers at Inglewood, Los Angeles, slammed the head of a handcuffed 16-year-old black, named Donovan Jackson, on a squad car and punched him in his eyes, neck and hands. Afterwards, one police officer involved was ordered a paid leave. In contrast, the man who filmed the videotape was detained on July 10.
In another incident, on July 8, Oklahoma City police officers repeatedly beat a black suspect on the ground with their batons. The suspect was pepper-sprayed twice. On September 16, police in Boston shot at a suspect car hijacker in the downtown area and wounded him seriously. The incident led to a mass demonstration against police brutality.
Indiscriminate arrests are another serious problem in the United States. According to an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), prosecutors declined to bring charges in 15,798 arrests in 2001, or 26 percent of the 60,412 cases they reviewed that year, the vast majority brought by Baltimore police.
In 2002 the number of monthly arrests increased by 15 percent over the previous year to 7,832. Prosecutors declined to charge in24 percent of the cases. Two-thirds of the cases they dropped were dropped on the day of arrest because they could not be proved in court (May 9, 2002, Sun).
Within half a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI detained for security reasons more than 1,200 non-US nationals, mainly men from Muslim or Middle Eastern countries (Washington, Dec.10, 2002, EFE). Most of them were detained for overstaying their visas, and according to rules the detention should last for no more than 48 hours. However, many were actually held in custody for a month or more, or even up to 50 days.
While in custody, they were deprived of their basic rights -- making phone calls, access to a lawyer, family visits, being informed of the reasons for the detention, or challenging the lawfulness of the detention.
They were let out for exercise and air less than an hour a day. Many were handcuffed, and some were even bundled. Those falling ill could not get timely medical treatment.
In many cases torture was used to extract confessions, and unjust charges were often reported in the United States. According to a Reuters report on February 11, 2002, U.S. authorities confirmed that over 200 inmates had been wrongly convicted since 1973; among them 99 inmates on death row had been proved innocent, but most of them had not got compensations (Washington, Feb.11, 2002, Reuters).
Ray Krone walked out an Arizona courtroom a free man in April 2002 after spending 10 years and three months in prison, with more than two years in the death cell (USA Today, June 18, 2002). Yet, he could hardly obtain any compensation from the state government in accordance with state laws.
A black man in Detroit, named Eddie Joe Lloyd, served a term of 17 years, three months and five days in jail on a charge of raping and murdering a teenage girl before he was freed in August 2002 (New York Times, Aug. 27, 2002).
The wrong verdicts are closely related to confessions from innocent people extracted by police. According to an ABC (American Broadcasting Company) news report on March 15, 2002, every year thousands of criminals are convicted on the basis of confessions obtained from police interrogations.
Also according to the ABC news report, in 1993, Gary Gauger, a man in Illinois, was forced to confess he had killed his parents, a crime he did not commit, when he broke down after 21 hours of police interrogation. He was then sentenced to death for double murder. Two years later, the real killers confessed to the crime in an unrelated federal investigation. Gauger was freed in 1996, after spending three years behind bars.
The United States is one of the few countries to impose capital punishment on child offenders and mentally ill people in the world. Twenty-three U.S. states permit the execution of child offenders (under 18 at the time of the crime). Two thirds of the executions of child offenders over the past decade worldwide were carried out in the United States.
Since 1985, 18 child offenders had been executed, half of them in Texas State (May 9, 2002, EFE). The executions in 2002 also included three child offenders and one mentally ill man. There were 80 child offenders on death row, and the figure in the case of the mentally retarded was estimated to be around 200 to 300. (The Amnesty International)
Prisons in the United States are jam-packed with inmates. According to a report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics under the Department of Justice released on August 25, 2002, the adult U.S. correctional population reached a record of almost 6.6 million at the end of 2001, or fourfold of the 1980 figure. About 3.1 percent of the nation's adult population, or 1 in every 32 adult residents, were on probation or parole or were held in a prison or jail. Roughly two million Americans are currently behind bars.
In a report titled "A stigma that never fades", the British business magazine Economist said that America is "the world's most aggressive jailer", and "when local jails are included in the American tally, the United States locks up nearly 700 people per 100,000". (The Economist, August 10, 2002)
Poor management of prisons leads to lack of protection of inmates' legitimate rights. Extortion, abuse, violence and sexual assault are serious in prisons of the United States.
An Amnesty International report released on May 14, 2002 said inmate Frank Valdes at the Florida State Prison was beaten to death by guards in July 1999. Autopsy reports proved massive injuries, including 22 broken ribs and a fractured sternum, nose and jaw, and there were boot marks on his face, neck, abdomen and back.
The three guards involved were charged of second-degree murder in 1999. But the Florida State prosecutors decided in February 2002 to drop the charges.
According to reports of U.S. human rights organizations, brutalities targeted at inmates number about 100,000 a year in American prisons. A former chief law officer of Virginia State estimated the number of such brutalities to be at least 250,000 oras many as 600,000 a year.
Sexual assaults between male inmates are prominent in the prisons. Most of such assaults are coupled with the use of force, causing spread of HIV virus and physical and mental injuries on victims. The prison and judicial departments remain indifferent towards such complaints and take no punishment measures.
The Sun newspaper reported on August 31, 2002, the Baltimore City Detention Center has a poorly run system of health care and suicide prevention. In some cases, the problems resulted in jail suicides, heart attack deaths and fatal asthma spasms that federal authorities deemed preventable if the inmates had been properly treated.
In another case, a fire killed eight inmates locked in cells in Mitchell County jail in North Carolina and injured 13 others. The prison authority blamed lack of water sprinklers for the tragedy.
III. Money-driven Democracy
Boasting itself to be the "model of democracy", the United States has been trying hard to sell to the world its mode of democracy.
In fact, American "democracy" has always been democracy of the rich, a small number of the population. Just as an article in the International Herald Tribute of the January 24, 2002 issue says, "The American problem is domination of politics by money."
The dominant role of money in American politics has been very obvious, and elections have in fact been turned into races of money.
During the midterm elections in 2002, spending on campaigning TV advertising amounted to 900 million US dollars, surpassing that for the presidential election in 2000.
According to an analysis made by the Associated Press based of data from the Federal Election Commission, in the 2002 midterm elections 95 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives and 75 percent of the seats in the Senate went to candidates who had spent the most in campaigning.
In a report filed on August 30, 2002, AP said President George W. Bush, in order to win control of the House and the Senate, cashed in on his cachet to raise donations for midterm elections of his Republicans, and collected 110 million US dollars for three GOP candidates in Oklahoma and Arkansas, setting records in campaign cash raising ("Bush raises nearly $110 million for Republicans, setting record", Aug. 30, 2002, Sun).
Election of judges in the United States is also like a race of money. In the year of 2000, judge candidates in only two states bought TV advertising, whereas during the midterm elections in 2002, chief justice candidates in nine states bought TV commercials.
"Money politics" has made more and more American people lose interest in political participation.
Statistics show the United States has experienced declining voter turnout in presidential election years for about four decades.
Measured against the voting age population, turnout in presidential election years fell from its high of 62.8 percent in 1960 to an estimated 51.2 percent in 2000.
In contrast, 60 percent of eligible voters shunned the midterm elections in 2002, leaving the voter turnout at 40 percent.
A survey of minority voters in three cities of California showed almost all the surveyed were fed up with the fact that money can buy over politics and were not interested in political participation.
Asian American voters reckon money had too much influence over politics, which is unfair; African Americans and Hispanics felt being shut out of the door of politics and had become its victims.
The United States has been flaunting its "freedom of the press," but it met with criticism from many sides in 2002 in this respect.
In an annual report published on Feb. 21, 2002, the International Press Institute accused the United States of violating freedom of the press and said it is the most astonishing event of 2001 that the way the Bush administration treated the work of the media during the Afghan war and the practices of the Bush administration attempting to suppress freedom of speech by independent media (Vienna, Feb. 21, 2002, AFP).
Two senior journalists with the Washington Post wrote in their book entitled "The News About The News: American Journalism In Peril" that practices of pursuing profits have destroyed the sense of mission of the journalistic community of the United States, and believed an overwhelming majority of media owners and publishing businessmen forced newspaper editors and TV news executives to concentrate on profits as opposed to quality of coverage (New York, March 29, 2002, AP).
In its annual report published on May 2, 2002, Reporters Without Borders exposed since September 11 attacks, the United States has exerted pressure on the journalistic community in the war against terrorism, which has restricted freedom of the press (Paris, May 2, 2002, EFE).
On August 6, 2002, a major news organ in the United States published a survey showing the public wanting the media to "shut up".
The survey found among the respondents, 69 percent believe the media is biased, and over two thirds of them read news reports with disbelief.
IV. Poverty, Hunger and Homelessness
The United States is the only superpower in the world, however, the poor, hungry and homeless have formed a "Third World" in this most developed nation, owing to the widening gap in wealth between the rich and the poor and social injustice.
In the last two years, a series of scandals of major corporate fraud were exposed in the United States, resulting in a credibility crisis and financial losses, which has deprived ordinary Americans of a sense of economic security due to the serious losses they suffered. The Labor Department of the United States reported on January 10, 2003 that between 2001 and 2002, the United States lost 1.6 million jobs. In December 2002, the country's unemployment rate was six percent; the number of jobless people stood at 8.6 million; and employers slashed payrolls by 101,000 workers (Jan. 11, 2003, Sun).
In the United States, 60 percent of households own stock shares. As corporate fraud scandals brought down the stock market, its capitalization was slashed by 2.5 trillion US dollars, with the employees of the affected big firms and their shareholders suffering great losses. Since energy giant Enron filed for bankruptcy protection, its stock price plunged from 85 US dollars a share to less than one US dollar a share. Millions of Enron stockholders have suffered enormous losses. A large number of Enron employees lost all their pension funds, while teachers, firefighters and some government workers lost one billion US dollars in pensions.
WorldCom's filing for bankruptcy also plunged its stock share price to a few cents from 62 US dollars; 17,000 of its employees became jobless, while investors had their interests severely damaged (June 26, 2003, Sun).
The gap in wealth between rich and poor has become even wider. The U.S. Federal Reserve reported on January 22, 2003 that between1992 and 1998, the gap in wealth between the 10 percent of families with the highest incomes and the 20 percent of families with the lowest incomes increased by 9 percent, but between 1998 and 2001, the gap jumped by 70 percent.
The Washington Post reported on September 24, 2002 that the top20 percent residents with highest income in the United States accounted for 50 percent of the total income of the country, while the share of the richest 5 percent (with an annual income of 150,000 US dollars and above) in the national total went up from 22.1 percent in 2000 to 22.4 percent in 2001.
Poverty and hunger have kept increasing. According to the Census Bureau of the United States, in 2001, another 1.3 million people fell below the poverty line; in 2002, the poor population continued growing.
According to the American organization Bread for the World,, 33million Americans lived in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger in 2002. The newspaper USA Today reported that the nation's estimated 3 million homeless had harder times in 2002,as authorities reduced assistance to them and tough laws were passed against them (USA Today, Dec. 27, 2002).
A survey report published by the U.S. Conference of Mayors indicates that the year 2002 witnessed an average of 19 percent increase in requests for emergency food assistance in 25 large cities in the country, and also an average of 19 percent increase in requests for emergency shelter assistance in 18 major cities, the steepest rise in a decade.
And all the cities in the survey expect that requests for both emergency food assistance and shelter assistance would increase again in 2003. Boston Mayor and President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Thomas M. Menino commented, "The world's richest and most powerful nation must find a way to meet the basic needs of all its residents."
The Associate Press reported on November 3, 2002 that 777,000 people in Los Angeles, or 33 percent of its population, were food insecure and could not always afford to put food on the table. By July 2002, homelessness in New York grew by 66 percent compared with four years ago (Aug. 20, 2002, AP). In 2002, Los Angeles County alone had 84,000 homeless people, and every night, 43 percent of 9,000-15,000 vagrants could not find shelters and had to sleep on downtown sidewalks.
According to statistics by relevant American organizations, the current homelessness situation in the United States has become nearly as severe as at the end of World War II. Most vulnerable to poverty and hunger are pregnant women, the aged, people without ID, and single-parent families. The report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors indicates that among those requesting for emergency food assistance, 48 percent were members of families with children; 38 percent of the adults requesting such assistance were employed; of the homeless, 39 percent were from families with children, 22 percent were employed, and 73 percent were from single-parent families.
V. Women and Children are in Worrisome Situation
Discrimination against women is common in the United States. USA Today reported on January 6, 2003 that women hold merely 14 percent of seats in Congress. According to a survey report released by researchers at Rutgers university, discrimination against ethnic minorities was found in one third of business firms in the United States, and discrimination against women was reported in one fourth of 200,000 firms. In hospitals, shops, restaurants and bars, women of African, Latin American and Asian descent made up 70 percent of those who have been hurt.
American women are likely to become victims of crimes and violence. A study report published by the Harvard School of Public Health on April 17, 2002 said that American females are at the highest risk of murder, and the US female homicide victimization rate is 5 times that of all the other high income countries combined. The United States accounts for 70 percent of all female homicides in the 25 high income countries, and 4,400 American females are murdered each year, with about half by firearms.
American women are also likely to become victims of sexual assaults. In 2002, several scandals of sexual assaults on women byclergies were exposed. According to reports, over the past five years, in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas, and Wisconsin, a number of faith healing-related sexual assaults were exposed, with some faith healers found to have raped women during the therapy.
Police and public prosecutors believe that hundreds of women in Los Angeles and other places were sexually abused when they sought help from faith healers (March 13, 2002, L.A. Times). Agence France Presse (AFP) reported that a survey conducted by researchers at St. Louis University in 1996 but kept under wraps after completion shows that about 40 percent of American Catholic nuns (nearly 35,000) have been sexually abused, often at the hands of a priest or another nun. (Jan. 5, 2003, Washington, AFP).
American children often fall victim to domestic violence, social crimes, their parents' divorces, and abandonment. Accordingto a study published by researchers at Harvard University in 2002,in American states and regions with high gun ownership, children have more chances to be murdered, to commit suicide or to meet accidental death. Between 1988 and 1997, a total of 6,817 children,aged 5-14, were shot to death in the 50 states of the United States (Boston, Feb. 28, 2002, Reuters).
Young girls missing and the kidnapping of children are frequent.Statistics show that in the United States, 58,000 children were kidnapped by people other than their families each year, and 40 percent of them were slain in the end. Another 200,000 children were kidnapped by their family members, mostly for the right of custody (Washington, Aug. 6, 2002, Xinhua News Agency).
In 2002, a series of scandals of sexual assaults on children by Catholic clergies were exposed. An article titled "Sins of the Fathers" published by the Newsweek magazine on March 4, 2002 reported that the child-sexual-abuse settlements may have cost the American church one billion U.S. dollars during the 1986-1996 period. Some 80 priests have been accused of sexually abusing children, with one said to have assaulted more than 100 children over the past 40 years.
The Sun newspaper reported on April 29, 2002 that there were 46,000 priests in the United States, and in the past 18 years at least 1,500 had been charged (Sun, Apr. 29, 2002). According to the newspaper Christian Science Monitor, the targets of sex-related crimes committed by American clergies were mostly children, and since 1985 over 70 clergies and priests were imprisoned for molestation of children (Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 2002).
Many children have encountered serious difficulties in their life, medical treatment and education, and many of them have not received parental love and care. According to a report published by the Public Policy Institute of California in November 2002, 20 percent of Californian children aged under 5 years live in poverty,compared with the national average of 15 percent. The New York Times reported last July that the proportion of American children who grow up in parentless families is increasing, from the previous 7.5 percent to the present 16.1 percent.
The non-governmental Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children says in its 2002 report that nearly 5,000 children were detained every year by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service for entering the United States illegally. Their average age is 15 years, with the youngest only one and a half years.
Most of these children did not have other criminal records except illegal entry. However, over 30 percent of these children were commingled with young offenders, handcuffed and shackled, sent to prisons or detained in warehouses with very poor safety conditions.
VI. Deep-rooted Racial Discrimination
Racial discrimination is deep-rooted in the United States. Senate Republican leader Trent Lott had repeatedly made remarks supporting racial segregation during his political life. He had tried by every means to prevent the Congress from passing a bill on establishing the birthday of Martin Luther King, a murdered civil rights leader of the blacks, as a national holiday.
On December 5, 2002, when attending a 100th birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, who ran for the presidency in 1948 as a segregationist candidate, Lott said that the United States would be better off if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency that year. Lott's remarks triggered strong reaction of the Congressional Black Caucus.
In the end, Lott quitted [sic] his post as Senate Republican leader under the pressure of public opinion ("Black Caucus unforgiving after Lott's apology" by William M. Welch, Dec. 11 2002, USA Today).
For more than 100 years between 1862 and 1965, the United States had enforced a law restricting immigrants from Asia and forbidding marriage between immigrants of Asian descent and white people. Many states nullified the law in the 1940s-1960s, but it is still in effect in the states of New Mexico and Florida.
Racial discrimination is serious in law enforcement. According to a study by the Justice Policy Institute of the United States, blacks constitute only 12.9 percent of America's total population, but black prisoners account for 46 percent of the total in jail in the nation; approximately one in every five blacks is jailed for some time during his or her life.
The number of blacks in jail is greater than that of blacks at college. In 2000, about 800,000 blacks were in jail, compared with only 600,000 blacks registered in institutions of higher learning. Among the new inmates put in prison since 1980, people of African and Latin American descent have accounted for 70 percent.
The Sun newspaper reported on Jan. 8, 2003 that defendants who kill white people are significantly more likely to be charged with capital murder and sentenced to death than are killers of non-whites, and a black offender accused of killing a white victim is most likely to be put on death row.
The paper quoted a study as saying that the probability that someone accused of killing a white person will be charged with capital murder is 1.6 times higher than the probability for a black-victim homicide. Blacks who kill whites are two and one-halftimes more likely to be sentenced to death than are whites who kill whites, and three and one-half times more likely than are blacks who kill blacks. Though a majority of Maryland's homicide victims were black, of the 12 inmates on Maryland's death row awaiting execution, eight were black, and all were convicted of killing white people.
Minorities are among the poorest groups in the United States. A Federal Reserve report issued on January 22, 2003 said that the gap in wealth between American whites and ethnic minorities widened by 21 percent between 1998 and 2001. The US Census Bureau reported in its 2002 annual report on income and poverty that in 2001, the poverty rate in the United States rose to 11.7 percent; the poverty rate was 22.7 percent among African Americans, and 21.4 percent among Hispanics, both nearly double the rate for other ethnic groups.
African American and Hispanic homeowners paid higher interest rates for housing loans than white people did. In the metropolitan area of Washington D.C., among households that made at least 120 percent of the typical income in the area, 32 percent of blacks held high-interest loans while only 11 percent of whites did; among households that made 80 percent or less of the typical income, 56 percent of blacks had high-interest loans and 25 percent of whites did.
Minorities also suffer from unfair treatment in schooling. Racial segregation in public schools has got even worse than decades ago. Only four of all 185 school districts across the United States witnessed increase in black-white exposure (exposure of black students to white students) between 1986 and 2000. The 24school districts with the worst racial segregation were found in Texas and Georgia states.
The newspaper Christian Science Monitor reported on Jan. 21, 2003 that in the state of Georgia 32 percent of white elementary school teachers left their posts at predominantly black schools in2001. The situation was the same in Texas, California and North Carolina. Lots of classes had to be taught by substitute teachers who didn't have degrees and weren't licensed to teach, and "black students aren't getting an equal shot at good schooling".
Among the third graders in elementary schools in California, 70percent of white children met the required educational attainment standard, compared with 37 percent of black children and 27 percent of Hispanic children. The enrollment rate of minority students in schools of higher learning was declining.
A 2002 report by researchers of Harvard University pointed out that America's pervasive legacy of slavery, racism, and substandard, segregated health care for many of the nation's minorities has left a deep chasm between the health status of most minorities and whites. Blacks have enjoyed much poorer medical treatment than whites ever since they came to America from Africa.
African Americans have much higher rates of heart diseases, diabetes, AIDS and some cancers. Blacks have a cancer death rate about 35 percent higher than that of whites, the AIDS cases among black women and children are 75 percent higher than among white people, and African-American children also have much higher rates of asthma and juvenile diabetes than white children. There is a life expectancy gap of about seven years between whites and African Americans. ("Blacks suffer most from managed care, by Julianne Malveaux, Nov. 29, 2002, USA Today).
Racial discrimination has been on the rise in the United States since the September 11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. authorities have intensified restrictions on new immigrants and slowed down its procedure for approving entry of immigrants. Tougher regulations have been adopted, requiring new immigrants to register their residences at Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offices, or otherwise face imprisonment, fines or even deportation. In August 2002, in airport safety inspections the FBI arrested a large number of immigrant airport workers, mostly Latinos.
Discrimination against Muslims and Arabs is the most serious. According to statistics from the Islamic Society of North America,48 percent of Muslims living in the Unites States said their lives have changed for the worse since Sept. 11. By the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, approximately 60 percent of Muslims had experienced in person or witnessed acts of discrimination against Muslims including public harassment, physical assault and property damage. There had been nearly 2,000 vicious criminal cases against Muslims, including 11 murders and 56 death threats.
In Los Angeles, assaults on Islamic institutions rose by 16 times from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001. In Toledo City, Ohio, more than 10,000 residents of Arab descent were monitored and wiretapped by judicial departments after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and they were not allowed to talk to lawyers. Moreover, judicial departments can have house search [sic] at any time.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service announced in August 2002 that males from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan are to be fingerprinted on entering the United States. In November the same year, a new federal regulation added another 13 countries including Afghanistan to the list. Males from these 18 countries, who are 16 years and older and on temporary visas to the United States are subject to "special registration", to report to relevant departments and be fingerprinted and photographed before the designated deadline.
On December 16, 2002, more than 1,000 Muslims from Iran, Iraq and other Middle East nations went to the immigration offices in California for the "special registration" procedures. However, most of them were detained by immigration officers right away, under accusations of holding invalid visas, overstaying their visas or other wrongdoing. The U.S. Department of Justice later admitted that about 500 immigrants of Mideast descent were arrested.
While statistics from local Islamic institutions showed that at least 700 people were arrested, some even put it at about 1,000. News reports said that as the immigration detention center was overcrowded, some of the detainees were moved to prison. The detainees complained that they were stripped, searched, and given prison suits after their clothes were taken away. Many people were locked in one cell, with no bed or quilt, and had to sleep on the icy cement floor.
VII. Blunt Violations of Human Rights in Other Countries
The United States is following unilateralism in international affairs and has frequently committed blunt violations of human rights in other countries.
Regardless of the strong call for no war from the international community, the United States, together with a few other countries, launched a war against Iraq on March 20, 2003. The war, which has openly violated the purpose and principles of the UN Charter, has caused casualties of innocent Iraqi civilians and serious humanitarian disasters.
During its air attacks against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2002, the U.S. troops dropped nearly a quarter-million cluster bomblets and raided a number of non-military targets, causing heavy civilian casualties. The Time newsweekly disclosed civilians killed in the Afghan war had exceeded 3,000.
The cluster bombs also left an estimated 12,400 explosive duds that continue to take civilian lives to this day (Fatally Flawed: Cluster Bombs and Their Use By the United States in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch, Dec. 18, 2002). In 2001 the U.S. bombing of Mudoh village reduced the local population to 100 from 250 and leveled all buildings in the village to the ground. A similar attack on Kakrakai village in central Afghanistan on July 1, 2002 left at least 54 civilians dead and more than 100 others injured (Newsweek, July 22, 2002).
The rights and interests of prisoners of war (POWs) were also violated. According to CNN (Cable News Network), a total of 12,000Taliban fighters were reported to have been captured since the U.S.launched its military action in Afghanistan, but only 3,500 to 4,000 of them survived. It was found that these POWs were locked into unventilated steel shipping containers after their capture, and many of them died of sweltering heat, suffocation or extreme thirst en route to the prison. Numerous mass graves in which the bodies of the dead POWs were dumped have been found in Afghanistan.
There are also evidence of U.S. troops' involvement in the shipping of the POWs. In November 2001, some 1,000 Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters who had surrendered in the northern Afghan city of Konduz died on their way to the prison after they were packed tightly into unventilated container trucks (Washington, Aug. 18, 2002, AFP).
According to media reports, in 2002 the United States was holding more than 600 detainees from 42 countries, mostly captured during the Afghan war, in its military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. However, the detainees were denied "prisoner of war" status by the U.S. government and therefore faced uncertainty of their futures.
It was unclear for how long they would remain in custody or what kind of treatment they would receive. These detainees were allegedly confined for 24 hours a day to small cells and were not allowed to meet their families or lawyers. Former Al-Qaeda members were also subject to torture or other forms of maltreatment.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops are stationed overseas, and such troops have committed crimes and human rights abuses wherever they stay. Each year U.S. troops stationed in the Republic of Korea (ROK) are caught responsible for more than 400 traffic accidents, but only less than 10 cases would go for trial in ROK courts.
On June 13, 2002, two U.S. soldiers driving an armored vehicle crushed two 14-year-old South Korean girls to death, but both offenders were acquitted by a U.S. military tribunal in November. On Sept. 2, three other U.S. soldiers in Kyonggi-do, ROK, started a tussle on a road, and they deliberately smashed a taxi car parked on the roadside and beat up its Korean driver.
Earlier reports said six American soldiers stationed in the ROK were charged with sexual harassment, assault and scuffle after drinking.
The U.S. troops in Okinawa, Japan has [sic] long been notorious for its constant involvement in criminal cases such as arson and rape. Investigation shows that after World War II U.S. soldiers have committed more than 300 sex crimes in Okinawa, with over 130 rape cases reported since 1972.
In the wee hours of Jan. 7, 2002, Frederick Thompson, a U.S. Navy marine stationed in Okinawa, was arrested by local police on charges of trespassing on private property after he broke into the apartment of a 24-year-old woman. On Dec. 3 the same year, the police department of Okinawa prefecture issued an arrest warrant against Major Michael Brown of the U.S. Marine Corps, who was accused of attempted rape and damaging of private articles, but the U.S. side refused to hand him over to the police department. (Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 15, 2002)
According to a news report in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo of April 1, 2002, there are more than 52,000 illegitimate children inthe Philippines fathered by U.S. marines stationed in this Southeast Asian country before 1991. Recently tens of Filipino teenage girls, some of them not yet 13, were sent to Mindanao in southern Philippines, to entertain U.S. marines stationed there.
VIII. Double Standards in International Field of Human Rights
The United States, taking a negative attitude toward the international human rights conventions, is one of the only two countries in the world that have not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. To date, it hasn't ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which have got ratification from or accession of most countries in the world.
In 2002, the United States shrank remarkably from its previous stance on international human rights affairs. It used to ask for the removal of any text in UN draft resolutions that involved human rights conventions which all countries were expected to observe or the U.S. government had not yet ratified, on the pretext of the U.S. being not a state party to these conventions. When its request was rejected, the United States would ask for a separate voting on the text, or even cast the only dissenting vote.In July 2002, the United States withdrew a 34-million-dollar contribution it had promised to the United Nations Population Fund(UNFPA), forcing the UNFPA to cancel its projects of assistance to women in countries like Burundi, Algeria, Haiti and India.
The United States has been releasing annually Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, censuring other countries for their human rights situations, but it has turned a blind eye to serious violations of human rights on its own soil. This double standard on human rights issues cannot but meet with strong rejection and opposition worldwide, leaving the United States more and more isolated in the international community.
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| ...The revolution will come |
| 12.09.03 (2:48 pm) [edit] |
by Lily Galili, Ha'aretz [IL]
June 1, 2003
Dr. Boris Dubson says that Francis Fukuyama was wrong when he announced "the end of history." Dubson refuses to accept the argument that what is now happening in the United States, Europe and Israel is the optimal situation that the human race can achieve. He actually believes there is a world order that is better than capitalism. He is even certain that communism will return. Dubson is careful to note that what he is saying is not wishful thinking, but the reflection of scientific analysis.
This statement is not surprising in and of itself. Dubson is not the only one who thinks that way. But it is surprising that Dubson, 64, is an immigrant from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) who arrived in Israel exactly 10 years ago. Immigrants are thought of not only as right-wing, but also as traumatized by communism to the point that even the mere mention of the term "socialism" makes them queasy.
"Not all of us are capitalists," says Dubson, refuting the generalization. "True, most immigrants do feel that way, but there are a few who think just as I do. I know them. The problem is they prefer not to talk. Fear is instilled in the Soviet character. They're afraid that it might disrupt things at their job or socially if people think they have a communist or even a socialist world view."
Dubson is not afraid to express his opinion, or even to support Hadash, without being a member of the party. His reputation as an internationally known researcher of society and economics and an author when he was still in Moscow of books that have been translated into numerous languages enables him to speak freely. He is also used to being a dissident, going back to his days in Russia.
It is not that he is unaware of the failures of the communist system. The opposite is true. In his youth, he lived with his family near the lagers (forced labor camps) of Koloma and saw everything with his own eyes. Now he lives in Be'er Sheva and is writing a 400-page book on the social gaps and social policy in Israel. When he looks at the reality, he has no doubt that communism will return, though perhaps not exactly to the previous starting point.
"I can't say that tomorrow there'll be a revolution in Russia, Israel or Europe, but it will come. Perhaps in another 10 or 20 years. I can't say that I yearn for a revolution; after all as Marx wrote, a revolution is not angels in white with songs, but people with stones and blood. But, as a scientist, I'm looking into the options for the development of society in Israel and Russia. Marx's theory may not be appropriate at the moment, but a large part of the things he wrote apply today as well."
Upon arriving in Israel, he first approached Meretz, occasionally going to the party's local branch. He cut his contact with Meretz after it supported the American bombing of Belgrade in 1998. Someone told him about a Hadash branch, and Dubson went to check out what was going on there. "Unfortunately, I found a party that was primarily an Arab party with very few Jews. These are simply two different societies and that creates a problem. Arabs in Israel are living in an industrial society, while Jews are in a society that is in the post-industrial stage. They each have different problems and different slogans and this impedes cooperation, beyond the political and nationalist differences."
However, he will once again vote for Hadash, a fact that he does not talk much about with his Russian relatives, all of which are ardent right-wingers. He is convinced he is right and that if the social policy whose goal is to destroy the welfare state continues in Israel, there is a real chance of a revolution.
The very living proof of his thesis could be seen this week in the village of Ar'ara in the Wadi Ara region. Two young Jews were being hosted in the home of Wajib and Aisha Sidawi after being summoned to the area to attempt to prevent the razing of the home of Munas Washahi in the nearby village of Ara.
This meeting would not have been of particular interest even in these times, had it not been for the fact that the two visitors are young immigrants from the CIS. Despite the unusual nature of this meeting in the political and social experience of the immigrant community, it was apparent that Sergei Gornostayev, 30 and Yana Zipperman, 21, felt very much at home. Joint activities in the left-wing organization Ta'ayush, the Arab Jewish Partnership, support for Hadash and a communist worldview embrace them with a bond of solidarity.
"We're trying to create an alternative society," says Wajib Sidawi, 45, who studied in Bulgaria. At the time, he was almost killed by the Iraqi Ba'ath party, whose members chased after him at a rally shouting "Zionist." His library at home has philosophy books in Arabic alongside Hebrew language books on biblical style and Lenin's writings in Russian.
No pose
All those at the meeting vigorously reject the suggestion that the connection between them is a posed one that allows the Arabs to boast of their two Russian friends and the young Jewish revolutionaries to glory in their friendship with Arabs. "With us, it's real," they say. "I think that the young people in Hadash really want this connection," says Zipperman. "It's not folklore," insists Gornostayev: "It's a genuine ideological infrastructure. We're not two token Russians for them. It's just a coincidence that Jana and I came from there and speak the same language."
From the Jewish Agency's perspective, Zipperman, a psychology student, is a total failure. Six years ago, she came to Israel on the Jewish Agency's Na'aleh program, which brings youths from the CIS here without their parents and already she is flitting around an Arab home in Wadi Ara as if she were born there.
Zipperman's great, great grandparents were among those who brought about the Russian Revolution and were very close to Lenin. They, she relates, were also among the first to be destroyed by the workers' class. "Because of that, I don't like revolutions," says Zipperman. "That's also why it's impossible to talk to the Russians in Israel in Marxist terms, because for them it means a dictatorship of the proletariat." Her grandparents then became Soviet-style bourgeoisie, factory managers from the upper class of the proletarian dictatorship, she says. In Kiev, her birthplace, she rejected communism and was even the first to drop out of its youth movement. Now she describes herself as a "neo-Marxist."
Her six years in Israel have also transformed her from a Zionist active in the Jewish Agency in Kiev into a "post-Zionist." "I came out of Zionism to the national home of the Jewish people," she relates. "What they didn't tell me and maybe I didn't want to know, is that there's also a nation here that we are pushing into the abyss."
Zipperman started her political involvement in Israel with Meretz. "I thought that's where the left ended," she says. "I came to Hadash gradually. My arrival in the radical left went through Ta'ayush.
Her social circle today is comprised of friends from the various stages of her absorption including both Jews and Arabs. It includes women from the Women's Coalition for Peace, young members of Hadash and Ta'ayush activists as well as some fellow immigrants with whom she shares an apartment and who do not agree with a single thing that she does or says. "Sometimes they think I've gone crazy," she laughs.
Her three roommates in a Haifa student apartment are immigrants from the CIS. Some time ago, after a heated political discussion in the apartment, they raised an Israeli flag in the living room. "They're really sweet," she insists, "but they haven't done a thing in this country since their arrival here, and then they try and lecture me about patriotism."
Gornostayev, now studying for a master's degree in anthropology, immigrated to Israel 12 years ago and actually describes himself as a proletariat. He is temporarily unemployed and spends his nights in the company of Arab fishermen from Acre, the subject of his thesis on "the economy of Acre fishermen." "The Marxist approach speaks to me," he says. Until immigrating to Israel, he was totally apolitical, put off by the politics he had seen while he was growing up during the days of perestroika in the former Soviet Union. "After a year in Israel, I was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces," he says cynically. "There in the Golani brigade, while serving in the territories, I experienced culture shock. It was definitely culture shock that preceded the political response."
This response led him to Hadash - a very unusual choice among the immigrant community. "Russian speakers are a very small part of my social network," says Gornostayev, "relatives and maybe two or three friends. The people I'm in constant contact with are from the university, Ta'ayush and from Acre. Really, my social circle consists mainly of Arabs. That's how it worked out. We are connected by our shared class status. It's one of the wonders of the post-modern world that a person can have a master's degree and still be a proletarian." In between, he also managed to be a conscientious objector and refused to serve in the territories as an active member of Ta'ayush, "a movement where Jews and Arabs really do do things together and not under the guise of duki [a mocking, shortened version of the Hebrew word for coexistence]."
His connection to the proletariat was deepened by the train rides to Be'er Sheva where he did reserve duty. On those trips, he met people with jackets, laptop computers and cellular phones, which they used on the train. "I felt as if I didn't belong with them and also as if I didn't want to belong. On the other hand, my identification with the Palestinian citizens of Israel is both political and class-related. I imagine it sounds shocking, because I still live better than most of that sector, even though I'm unemployed."
The ideological confusion is heightened by the fact that Gornostayev, a Jew according to halakha (Jewish religious law), has actually had a hard time identifying himself as a Jew since his arrival in Israel. "I have trouble with the political, partisan connotations that this definition has in Israel," he explains, "I prefer to talk about civilian identity. In that respect, I see myself as totally Israeli and that's the identity out of which I operate in the public domain."
Gornostayev attempted to instill his political beliefs in his parents. He was partially successful with his mother in the 1999 elections after he tried a completely non-ideological method of persuasion; "If anyway you don't care whom you vote for, do me a favor and vote Hadash," he told her. His mother almost agreed, but in the end voted for Natan Sharansky.
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| ...Protesters Rally for Human Rights in York, PA |
| 12.08.03 (5:58 pm) [edit] |
by William Hughes, News From Babylon [US]
December 6th, 2003
Despite freezing temperature, plus snowy and slushy conditions on the ground, about 50 stouthearted protesters rallied at the York County, PA prison and also at a distribution plant owned by the Caterpillar Corporation. The Convergence for Human Rights sponsored the event, which was held on Sat., Dec. 6, 2003, and endorsed by over 66 groups (www.october18.org).
“We are out here protesting the government’s treatment of immigrants, the USA Patriot Act and the erosion of our rights since 9/11,” said Keith Dobson of York, PA. He continued, “We are also here to protest Caterpillar profiting from people’s misery by selling its bulldozers to Israel, which it uses to destroy Palestinians’ homes and for collective punishment, too, that is a violation of both the Geneva Convention and human rights.”
Beth Zovko, a student at York College, who hails from Pittsburgh, PA, was one of the activists that marched in the cold from York Co. Prison to the Caterpillar plant, which was situated a few miles away. “I’m here today to spell out my sense of indignation at the injustice that is going on right now in my country. I think that it is appalling that our civil rights are being thrown away.”
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Both the prison, which holds hundreds of immigrant detainees under suspect legal authority, for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (BICE), and the Caterpillar plant, are located just outside of York, a town of 41,000. The Caterpillar plant’s reputation has been sullied by the fact that it distributes parts, which are used to manufacture armored bulldozers that have ended up being utilized by the Israelis Occupation Forces (IOF) to oppress the indigenous Palestinian people (See for details, Ronald L. Bleier's “Israeli Terror,” 07/03, “The Link,” ameu.org.)
Another young protester, who didn’t want me to use his name, said, “I came up here to York, just to let the world know how much I care about Rachel Corrie. What the Israelis did to her was a terrible crime.” Corrie was a 23-years old peace and justice activist from Olympia, WA. She was killed on March 16, 2003, at the Rafah refugee camp, in Occupied Gaza, by an Israeli driving a bulldozer that was made by Caterpillar. It is clear from the photos taken at the crime scene, that the driver deliberately ran over her, not once, but twice!
Since 9/11, BICE has been warehousing political asylum seekers in facilities, like York County Prison. BICE comes under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Justice Dept., which is headed by Attorney General John Ashcroft. BICE has refused, in violation of international law, to release the names of all of its detainees, many of whom are of Arab descent.
Farouk Abdel-Muhti, age 55, is one of the victims of BICE. He has not been charged with any criminal offense. A native of Ramallah, in Occupied Palestine, he was arrested in April, 2002, and held for deportation only after he became a producer on a popular WBAI’s Radio show, in NYC. His program championed the nationalist cause of the Palestinians (wbai.org). Abdel-Muhti, despite suffering from high blood pressure, was held in solitary confinement at the York Co. facility. On Oct. 30, 2003, he was shifted to the Bergen Co. jail, at Hackensack, NJ. A Habeas Corpus proceeding, which is challenging the legality of his imprisonment, is pending in federal court.
Robert F. Merrill, of York, is one of Abdel-Muhti’s most vocal supporters. He said, “I just don’t appreciate detention without fairness, justice and good solid evidence.” Merrill has also written two songs advocating the cause of freedom for the wrongly jailed Abdel-Muhti.
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The authority of the Feds to deport an immigrant, even without a public trial and based on secret evidence, predates the “USA Patriot Act.” It was Sen. Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter (R-PA) and then House member, now Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who pushed that Star Chamber-like device back in the late 90s. The “Homeland Security Law,” passed in 2002, greatly enhanced the Bush-Cheney-Ashcroft Gang’s power to terrorized the immigrant community. Sadly, it was endorsed by pseudo liberals, like: Sen. Joseph “The Chicken Hawk” Lieberman (D-CT), Rep. Tom “Sharon Clone” Lantos (D-CA) and Sen. Barbara “Babs” Mikulski (D-MD).
Steve Baker, also from York, and a protester, underscored, “I don’t imagine that everyone would feel this as an important issue. I think it’s because they don’t happen to be sitting in jail, with no trial date, no bail and no attorney. If they could put themselves in ‘that’ position, then they could begin to understand the importance of us being here today.”
York’s roots date to colonial days. During the American Revolution, it even served as the capital from 1777-78, after the British military forces had taken Philadelphia and the embattled Contintental Congress was forced to flee that city. York is located 15 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and 30 miles east of Gettysburg, where one of the most historic and lethal battles of the Civil War was fought in the summer of 1863. Many of today’s protesters were from York County, which has a population of 381,000. York is also 50 miles directly north from Baltimore, Maryland.
There was a extremely heavy police presence at both the prison and the Caterpillar plant sites, which seemed all out of proportion to the modest number of protesters. I noticed police vehicles from the York Co. Sheriff, Southwestern Region, Springettsbury Township and the PA State Police. In addition, officials from at least one federal agency were on the grounds, and on the roof tops, of the York Co. Prison, which is a sprawling complex that also houses female inmates.
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Finally, John K. Stoner, of Akron, PA, who is active with the “Every Church a Peace Church” organization, blasted the indifference of the main stream American churches to the present serious civil and human rights situation in this country. He said,” The Christian community has betrayed Jesus who it claims to follow. Jesus was about nonviolent struggle for justice. When the Church aligns itself with imperial power, coercive power and homicidal violence, it leaves Jesus far behind. This is what President George W. Bush is doing, and what we need is for the Church to take up the passion for justice and social change that Jesus was all about.”
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| ...'We're air force pilots, not mafia. We don't take revenge' |
| 12.08.03 (2:11 am) [edit] |
by Chris McGreal, The Guardian [UK]
December 3rd, 2003
For two months, a rebel group of Israeli Black Hawk helicopter and F-16 fighter pilots has been denounced as traitors for saying they will no longer bomb Palestinian cities.
Until now they have maintained a resolute silence on their motives, preferring to limit their criticism of Ariel Sharon's war to a letter signed by 27 reserve and active duty pilots refusing to carry out what they described as illegal orders, and denouncing the occupation as eating at the moral fabric of Israel.
Now, having been thrown out of the air force, they are talking publicly about what brought members of the most revered branch of the Israeli military to make an unprecedented challenge to the handling of the conflict with the Palestinians.
"I served more than seven years as a pilot," said Captain Alon R, who, like all the younger pilots, hopes to return to combat flying and so declines to use his full name in order to retain his security clearance. "In the beginning, we were pilots who believed our country would do all it could to achieve peace. We believed in the purity of our arms and that we did all we could to prevent unnecessary loss of life.
"Somewhere in the last few years it became harder and harder to believe that is the case."
The line was crossed for most of the pilots with the dropping of the one-tonne bomb last year on the home of a Hamas military leader, Salah Shehade, killing him and 14 of his family, mostly children.
One captain described the bombing as deliberate killing, murder even. Another called it state terrorism, though some colleagues swiftly stomped on that interpretation. But they all agreed that the attack sowed the doubts that resulted a year later in the letter that sent shockwaves through the Israeli military.
"The Shehade incident was a red light for us, a final warning," said Capt Alon R. "With Shehade I began to re-evaluate my beliefs. We killed 14 innocent people, nine of them children. After my commander gave an interview in which he said he sleeps well at night and his men can do the same. Well, I can't. We refused to see it as an innocent mistake."
Capt Assaf L, who served as a pilot for 15 years until sacked for signing the letter, had similar doubts.
"You don't have to be a genius to know that the destruction from a one-tonne bomb is massive, so someone up there made a decision to drop it knowing it would destroy buildings," he said. "Someone took the decision to kill innocent people. This is us being terrorists. This is vengeance."
Lieutenant-Colonel Avner Raanan is among the most respected pilots to have signed the letter. He served for 27 years and was awarded one of Israel's highest military decorations in 1994. "If you look at the past three years, you see that, if we had a suicide bombing, the Israeli air force made a big operation in which civilians were killed, and that looks to innocent eyes like revenge," he said.
"You hear it in the streets of Israel; people want revenge. But we should not behave like that. We are not a mafia."
More than 30 pilots have now endorsed the letter refusing to fly bombing raids on Palestinian cities, although four retracted, one an El Al pilot threatened with dismissal, and another a reserve pilot who lost his civilian job.
At its core, the letter questions the legality of the "targeted assassinations" that have claimed the lives of more civilian bystanders than their Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade targets. In October, 14 civilians were killed when the air force fired missiles at a car in Gaza's Nuseirat refugee camp.
"Is it legitimate to take F-15's and helicopters designed to destroy enemy tanks, and use them against cars and houses in one of the most heavily populated places in the world?" Capt Alon R asked.
"Because of the terrorism, we have become blinded by the blood on our own faces. We cannot see that on the other side, beside the terrorists, is a whole nation of innocent people. It's important that we recognise that, and that, as military people, we say that."
The pilots' stand shook Israeli society. There is no shortage of critics of the prime minister's militarist tactics but those of the peace camp are widely viewed as pacifists and marginal. Doubts raised by the army chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, and four former heads of the Shin Bet intelligence service alarmed many Israelis, but the criticisms were focused solely on whether Mr Sharon's tactics were fuelling terrorism.
The pilots straddle both issues, raising moral and legal questions on the conduct of the war and challenging the government's claim its strategy is about defending Israel.
"Our government's policy is to maintain fear in the public," Capt Assaf L said. "We're not weak. It's not 1967 or 1973, with the Syrian army on the border waiting to attack us. This is maintaining a war to maintain the occupation.
"We've the strongest nation in the Middle East. The terrorists are bastards, but we must fight to not become terrorists ourselves."
Many who poured scorn on the pilots accused them of wading into politics for going beyond questions about the legality of their orders and challenging the occupation. "We cannot separate the two," Capt Jonathon S said. "We are not pacifists. We don't think we should sit back and let suicide bombers attack us. But all this is a direct result of our being in the [occupied] territories.
"Our fight to keep the settlements and suppress the Palestinian people is killing us. It is killing our right to live safely in the country of Israel. A very small group of radical Israelis is leading the sane majority to catastrophe."
Col Raanan scoffs at the accusation that the pilots have denigrated their uniforms by wading into political issues.
"The air force commander spoke in favour of the [Jewish] settlements while sitting in uniform next to Sharon at a Likud party convention," he said. "That is political. This country has a defence minister who, as army chief of staff, was the most political ever. It is hypocritical to say lower ranking officers cannot express an opinion. What they mean is, we can be political so long as we agree with the government. Well that's not democracy."
The pilots say they have received more than 500 letters of support, including one from a Holocaust survivor, and numerous calls from fellow pilots. Several leftwing former cabinet ministers praised the pilots' stand, saying it proved the armed forces were moral.
Concern in the air force prompted its commander, Major-General Dan Halutz, to meet groups of pilots to tell them that "targeted assassinations" were not a war crime.
"Halutz said we were traitors," Capt Assaf L said. "In our eyes, what we did is a very Zionist act. We did it to save Israel."
· Colin Powell said yesterday he had the right to talk to anyone with ideas for peace, dismissing Israeli criticism that it would be a mistake for him to meet the authors of the unofficial Geneva accord. "I am the American secretary of state. I have an obligation to listen to individuals who have interesting ideas," he said.
Although he did not say he would meet the accord's Israeli and Palestinian authors, US officials have said such a gathering could take place this week in Washington.
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| ...CBS 11 Investigates Poison Gas Plot |
| 12.04.03 (1:59 pm) [edit] |
By Robert Riggs, CBS 11 TV [US]
Nov 26th, 2003
With Investigative Producer Todd Bensman
Federal authorities this year mounted one of the most extensive investigations of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing, CBS 11 has learned.
Three people linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups are in custody. At least one weapon of mass destruction - a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud - has been seized in the Tyler area.
Investigators have seized at least 100 other bombs, bomb components, machine guns, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and chemical agents. But the government also found some chilling personal documents indicating that unknown co-conspirators may still be free to carry out what appeared to be an advanced plot. And, authorities familiar with the case say more potentially deadly cyanide bombs may be in circulation.
Since arresting the three people in May, federal agents have served hundreds of subpoenas across the country in a domestic terror investigation that made it onto President Bush’s daily intelligence briefings and set off national security alarms among the country’s most senior counter-terror officials.
William J. Krar, originally from New Hampshire, last week pleaded guilty in Tyler federal court to possession of a chemical weapon near the East Texas town of Noonday. He faces up to ten years in prison. His common-law wife, Judith Bruey, pleaded guilty to lesser weapons charges and faces up to five years in prison.
Also arrested this past Spring was Newark, New Jersey resident Edward Feltus. The New Jersey Militia member has pleaded guilty to attempting to purchase fake United Nations and Department of Defense identity cards from Krar.
All three have steadfastly maintained their silence, even though talking could reduce their prison sentences, and the investigation has stalled for now. Evidence seized and the fact that none of the defendants will talk has given rise to speculation that unknown conspirators may be still be involved in a broader plot to use Krar’s home-built chemical weapons, government officials say.
“One would certainly have to question why an individual would feel compelled to stockpile sodium cyanide, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, acetic acid, unless they had some bad intent,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Wes Rivers, who is prosecuting the case. “They certainly had the capacity to be extremely dangerous.”
Terrorism investigators suspect that Krar, who has paid no federal income taxes since 1988, made his living as a traveling arms salesman who pedaled illicit bomb components and other weapons to violent underground anti-government groups across the country.
Sources familiar with the investigation say authorities especially fear that Krar may have manufactured more than one sodium cyanide bomb and sold them. After a traffic stop earlier this year while Krar was traveling through Tennessee, state troopers seized sodium cyanide among other weapons, one government source confirmed.
During the same stop, troopers found notes in Krar’s car.
One of the notes titled “Trip” recommends, “You will need cash, pre-charged phone card, spare gas can and all planning in place.”
Another note titled “Procedure” appears to represent instructions for carrying out some kind of covert operation. It lists code words for cities where meetings can take place at motels. Other codes appear to be warnings about how close police might be to catching the plotters. “Lots of light storms are predicted,” for instance, means “Move fast before they look any harder. We have a limited window remaining.”
The same note goes on to recommend ways to divert pursuers and suggests, “We want all looking in the wrong direction.”
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, counter-terrorism agencies have been consumed by national efforts to ferret out U.S.-based foreign terrorist cells whose members hail from the Middle East. Federal investigators were not looking for white supremacist groups when they stumbled across Krar by accident.
He drew the FBI’s attention when he sent a package of counterfeit ID’s for the United Nations and Defense Intelligence Agency to Feltus’ New Jersey home earlier this year. The package was mistakenly delivered to a Staten Island man, who opened it and called police.
A note found inside and signed by Krar stated, “Hope this package gets to you O.K. We would hate to have this fall into the wrong hands.”
The discovery led to surveillance operations in and around Tyler, and then search warrants that turned up the Sodium cyanide bomb and other illegal weapons at locations controlled by Krar.
Little is known about Krar and Bruey.
Two years ago, the couple quietly set up business as a gun parts manufacturer at a remote storage locker in Noonday, Texas. Krar apparently has similarly operated his businesses under the radar for years in other states before coming to Texas. As he did in Tyler, Krar rented local post office boxes and storage units.
In one affidavit for a search warrant, an FBI agent noted that Krar was “actively involved in the militia movement…a good source of covert weaponry for white supremacist and anti-government militia groups in New Hampshire.”
Until now, the little town just south of Tyler was best known locally for the sweet onions grown there.
Teresa Staples, who owns the storage facility, said Krar pretended to buy and sell army surplus goods at flea markets. Only later, when FBI agents swarmed the place, did she learn that the surplus goods hid dangerous chemicals and weapons.
“Why did they pick such a small storage facility? Why did they pick this town, because I know they’re from up north,” she said. “How did they find us?”
This was not the first time that Krar has drawn the attention of federal investigators. In 1995, the ATF investigated Krar and another man on weapons charges. The other suspect told authorities at the time that he and Krar shared an abiding hatred of the federal government and had been planning to bomb government facilities, court records show. But the suspect later recanted the story about plotting terror attacks with Krar. Krar denied the allegation and was not arrested, according to records.
According to a more recent FBI affidavit, on the day of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Krar raised suspicion at a New Hampshire storage unit he was renting. An employee called the FBI that day and reported that Krar was “wicked anti-American.”
While authorities work for a new break in the case, some counter-terrorism experts question whether the government might be overlooking dangers closer to home while fighting the War on Terror in the Middle East.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors domestic hate groups, says the number of openly violent groups dropped from more than 1,000 to about 100 after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing because of negative public sentiment. Groups that call East Texas home include the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity.
In 1997, the Dallas FBI broke up a terror plot by members of the Ku Klux Klan to blow up a Wise County power plant.
Former Dallas FBI Special Agent in Charge Danny Coulson was involved in the nation’s first stand-offs with domestic anti-government groups and mounted some of the first intensive domestic terror investigations. He cautioned that authorities should take care not to forget about domestic groups while concentrating on foreign ones.
“It’s scary when you look at their capabilities,” he said. “Look at the vulnerabilities of our society. We don’t have to concern ourselves only with foreign terrorists, but we need to concern ourselves with domestic terrorists too. And these guys are very dangerous.”
http://cbs11tv.com/investigations/local_ story_330180036.html" title="http://cbs11tv.com/investigations/local_ story_330180036.html" target="_blank"http://cbs11tv.com/investigat...
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| ...FBI moves to bring online calls under scanner |
| 12.03.03 (4:58 pm) [edit] |
by Jube Shiver, Jr. The Indian Express [IN]
December 2nd, 2003
WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 2: Worried that terrorists and criminals can communicate without being caught, the FBI wants to tap into online phone calls. As federal regulators on Monday debated how — or whether — to regulate the fast-growing technology of Internet phone service, the FBI and Justice Department sought to ensure that law enforcement has the same ability to eavesdrop as it does on virtually every other form of communication.
Exempting Internet telephony from the wiretap provisions of federal law would, ‘‘jeopardise the ability of federal, state and local governments to protect public and national security against domestic and foreign threats,’’ Patrick W. Kelley, the FBI’s deputy general counsel and Justice Department Attorney General John G. Malcolm wrote in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission.
The technology of so-called voice-over-Internet protocol chops calls into digital packets and sends them over the Internet like e-mail only to be reassembled at their destination as speech. The FBI and Justice Department want FCC to classify Internet telephony as a traditional telecommunications service, which would subject it to federal laws requiring carriers ‘‘to develop intercept solutions for lawful electronic surveillance.’’
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 established a process that allows the FCC to order standards to facilitate wiretapping. Civil liberty experts draw the line at the current effort, saying it gives law enforcement too much control over how computer networks are built.
They fear it could also lead to efforts to outlaw powerful data encryption if Internet telephony users begin encrypting calls. ‘‘This represents a great threat to privacy and free speech,’’ said Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. (LAT-WP)
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=36468" title="http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=36468" target="_blank"http://www.indianexpress.com/...
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| ...New surveillance guidelines fuel debate in California |
| 12.02.03 (4:42 pm) [edit] |
by Bobby Caina Calvan, Boston Globe [US]
November 30th, 2003
SACRAMENTO -- Federal authorities may now have broad powers under the USA Patriot Act to monitor the public in its fight against terrorism, but guidelines distributed last month by the California attorney general's office contradict the surveillance methods used by federal agencies -- and advise local police to observe stricter state limits when it comes to spying on the public.
"Put bluntly, it is a mistake of constitutional dimension to gather information for a criminal intelligence file where there is no reasonable suspicion" of criminal activity, the guidelines state.
The guidelines, entitled "Criminal Intelligence Systems: A California Perspective," were prompted by concerns over law enforcement responses to antiwar protests.
In Fresno, a sheriff's deputy serving on an antiterrorist detail posed as a peace activist -- a fact unknown until after his death, when a photo accompanying his obituary caught the attention of Peace Fresno, the antiwar group he had joined.
"For six months, he participated in our meetings and events. He used a false name, lied about his occupation, and pretended to be sympathetic to our views. We gave him our trust," the group said during an Oct. 5 press conference at the steps of the sheriff's department.
In San Francisco, police apologized for videotaping antiwar protesters without first getting the required clearance from the upper brass.
In Oakland, police were tipped in April by the California Antiterrorism Information Center of antiwar activities, which spawned some of the most violent clashes between protesters and police in the early weeks of the Iraq war.
The events in Oakland prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to urge state Attorney General Bill Lockyer to issue the guidelines. The ACLU contends that the information center, run jointly by the state and federal government to share homeland security intelligence, was misused for the possible purpose of quashing political dissent.
The 134-page document was distributed with little fanfare to every police department and sheriff's office. It is hardly a concise list of dos and don'ts, but rather a lawyerly analysis of some of the existing laws governing privacy, free expression, and intelligence gathering by law enforcement.
The guidelines say that proper "boundaries" and oversight "are critical to maintaining the appropriate balance between public safety and fundamental rights such as free speech, assembly, and privacy."
Activists and civil libertarians applauded release of the guidelines.
"We're pleased the attorney general has drafted this document. The attorney general is making it very clear that local law enforcement can't be spying on people" without adequate reason, said Francisco Lobaco, the legislative director of the ACLU in California. "The Constitution gives us the right to protest, to assemble without fear that government is going to be watching our every move."
The guidelines are meant to be a "guiding light" for local authorities, said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Lockyer.
"It made a lot of sense to us to put out some guidelines," Barankin said.
"The Patriot Act has given many people out there [reasons] to express concern about what law enforcement is doing," Barankin said.
The Patriot Act was enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and gave federal law enforcement broad powers to monitor public activity, and gave federal authorities latitude in obtaining financial records, travel itineraries, and library records -- among a host of other information -- without a person's consent. Critics say the act is an assault on civil liberties, and there is continuing debate in Congress over whether to narrow or expand its provisions.
The state guidelines will not change the way the federal government conducts its business and cannot force local law enforcement agencies to do so either, said Barankin.
The Fresno Sheriff's Department says it has no plans to change its policies, and was unapologetic over the Peace Fresno incident.
The department is aware of Lockyer's guidelines, "but the attorney general's document does not dictate how we will operate," said Lieutenant Marty Rivera. "We feel we are following those guidelines."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/ 2003/11" title="http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/ 2003/11" target="_blank"http://www.boston.com/news/na...
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| ...Raid On Arab TV Network Hardly A Democratic Move |
| 12.01.03 (5:18 pm) [edit] |
by Helen Thomas, Hearst Newspapers [US]
November 26th, 2003
Dictators Should Be Only Ones Shutting Down Media Broadcasts
WASHINGTON -- The raid by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi officials on an Arab television network bureau in Baghdad and the ban on its broadcasts hardly fits my idea of how to spread democracy in the Middle East.
Isn't that the first thing dictators do -- shut down broadcast outlets and newspapers? For those in power, tolerating a free press is difficult, even in a democracy.
As a foreign occupier in Iraq, we are proving that it is intolerable.
The terrible irony here is that we pride ourselves on offering a model to the rest of the world on how to design -- and live by -- our constitutional freedoms.
Journalists around the globe have been taught to emulate our approach to newsgathering, hopefully in an atmosphere free of government restraints.
At the same time, we're snuffing out news outlets we don't like.
On Monday, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi government raided the Baghdad bureau of the Al-Arabiya TV network.
The network's crime was to broadcast an audiotape from Saddam Hussein complaining about Iraqis who were cooperating with the U.S. occupation force and calling for resistance. The tape had been sent to Al-Arabiya's headquarters in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.
The network, which has interviewed Secretary of State Colin Powell in the past, is one of the largest TV outlets in the Arab world.
Any tape portraying Saddam's views on life fits the definition of news, if for no other reason than it is evidence that he is still alive and able to secretly communicate from wherever he was hiding.
Al-Arabiya and its competitor, the Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel, have a wide following throughout the Middle East. Al-Jazeera caused Washington much discomfort in the lead-up to the war by broadcasting statements from Saddam.
The White House strongly offered "advice" to U.S. TV outlets to shun those tapes but the American networks generally ignored the unhelpful hints.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has accused both Arab stations of being hostile by covering news of the guerrilla attacks on American forces.
Al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau was hit by a U.S. missile on April 8, killing a reporter-cameraman. The network also has complained of an attack on its marked vehicle April 7.
On Nov. 13, 2001, during the U.S. war on Afghanistan an American missile went "awry," according to the Pentagon, and destroyed the Al-Jazeera bureau in Kabul.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the move against Al-Arabiya, noting that "statements from Saddam Hussein and the former Iraqi regime are inherently newsworthy and news organizations have a right to cover them."
Rumsfeld grouses that the two stations were violently against the American coalition. He hopes to counter their influence when a U.S.-controlled TV satellite channel begins broadcasts next month.
Then will the Iraqis and the Arab world be guaranteed the truth?
In a brilliant speech earlier this month before the National Conference on Media Reform, broadcaster and former newspaper editor Bill Moyers warned that American media conglomerates may find common cause "with an imperial state."
But Moyers said "the greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it."
Against that statement of values, the recent performance by American journalists does not measure well.
White House and Pentagon reporters initially pulled their punches in reporting on the Iraqi war. Some media outlets admittedly did not want to rock the boat by showing grisly photos or videotape that could be disturbing to Americans.
As a result, many Americans tuned in on foreign news channels to get the full picture of the war.
Even now, with the administration's pro-war arguments reduced to a pile of confetti, many news outlets have failed to demand accountability from the Bush administration for what appears to be systematic dishonesty in trying to justify the U.S. attack.
This failure and the U.S.-led suppression of newsgathering in Iraq show that the historic American model for a free and independent press needs courageous bolstering.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthomas/2667834/d etail.html" title="http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthomas/2667834/d etail.html" target="_blank"http://www.thebostonchannel.c...
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QUOTE:
Stupidity has a bad habit of getting its way. --"The Day After"
QUOTE: Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
– A pirate, from St. Augustine's "City of God"
QUOTE: War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.
– General Omar Bradley
I hope....that mankind will at length, as they call themselves responsible creatures, have the reason and sense enough to settle their differences without cutting throats...
– Benjamin Franklin
"There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly."-- Klaatu, The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951.
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