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 Sunday July 11, 2004 20:30 by Indymedia Ireland Editorial Group - Indymedia Ireland
 This weblog for Other Media contains information on updated websites, new issues of journals and newspapers, videos available on the net etc. A similar page will be published each week. Use the comments to add a new link with a summary. Please add your information here. Include direct links if you have them, or details on where the print publication is available, if not.
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50A novella by Nicholson Baker named 'Checkpoint' is due to be published in late August to coincide with the opening of the Republican National Convention in New York.
We're in strange times when an advocate of peace uses a plot centring on extreme violence against a sitting president, as a stand against violence.
'Checkpoint' will retail at $18.
In the 1990's Clinton haters provided a lucrative domestic market for publishers in particular. There is a much bigger market for ant-Bush material as it is global. We should not forget that it is a significant money spinning industry.
http://www.finfacts.com/comment/comment16.htm
This video by Undercurrents documents the 1st June 2003 incident on Aubonne Bridge in Switzerland in which an affinity group of 17 activists blockaded a motorway to prevent delegates from reaching the G8 summit in Evian. Two climbers hung suspended as counterweights from one rope that crossed the motorway bridge over the aubonne valley. Others held banners and blockaded the traffic. Despite being informed about the nature of the action, police cut the rope causing one climber to plunge 20 metres, while the other was saved just in time by her friends.
The two climbers and a Swiss activist appeared in court on June 28th. No police officer involved in the incident has been disciplined.
download: (87 MEGS)
http://demandmedia.net/metagen?vurl=http://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/ngvision/disc39/ngv_en_ch_20030603_Aubonne_Bridge_Video.avi
The human body as a computer bus
IT SOUNDS like an April Fool's Day joke, but it isn't. Microsoft, that imperialist of the information-technology world, has actually succeeded in patenting the human body as a computer network. US Patent 6,754,472, issued to the company on June 22nd, is for a “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body”.
US Patent 6,754,472 has just been granted to Microsoft. At the moment, übergeeks who want to create a so-called personal area network (PAN) have to link their personal electronic devices—mobile phones, pagers, personal data assistants (PDAs) and so on—using infra-red or radio signals. What Microsoft is proposing is to use the skin's own conductive properties to transmit the data needed to create such a network. And the firm does not stop at people. A “wide variety of living animals”, it says, could be used to create computer buses, as they are known technically, in this manner.
Wellington - A bill making it an offence to recruit, use, finance or train mercenaries was passed by New Zealand's parliament on Thursday.
The Mercenary Activities (Prohibition) Bill also makes it an offence to take part in a war, or an act of violence, as a mercenary.
Justice Minister Phil Goff said in a statement all the offences would be punishable by up to 14 years imprisonment and New Zealanders could be prosecuted in New Zealand for acts committed overseas.
Read below
A War for Israel
Jeffrey Blankfort
http://www.leftcurve.org/LC28WebPages/WarForIsrael.html
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The Neocons' War
Relax, because now we're allowed to talk about the real reason for the Iraq war
June 2, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2727
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel Unleashed
The real reason for the biggest foreign policy blunder in American history ... .
July 5, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2933
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The Unmentionable Source Of Terrorism
by John Pilger; New Statesman ; March 19, 2004
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=5169§ionID=40
"In its current human rights report, the Foreign Office criticises Israel for its "worrying disregard for human rights" and "the impact that the continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians".
Yet the Blair government has secretly authorised the sale of vast quantities of arms and terror equipment to Israel. These include leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents. No matter that Israel has defied more United Nations resolutions than any other state since the founding of the world body."
----------------------------------------------------
Israeli interrogators 'in Iraq'
The US officer at the heart of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal says she has evidence that Israelis helped to interrogate Iraqis at another facility.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3863235.stm
---------------------------------------------------
Mosad stole my name
"Zev Barkan, who has fled New Zealand and escaped the justice faced yesterday by his two co-accused spies, lived within 300m of the man in whose name he applied for a passport to assume a New Zealand identity."
"Two men believed by senior Government figures to be Israeli secret service agents are behind bars after pleading guilty in the High Court at Auckland yesterday to a charge of trying to obtain a false New Zealand passport. "
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3576312&thesection=ne
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3576309&thesection=ne
Controversial film-maker Michael Moore has welcomed the appearance on the internet of pirated copies of his anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 and claimed he is happy for anybody to download it free of charge.
The activist, author and director told the Sunday Herald that, as long as pirated copies of his film were not being sold, he had no problem with it being downloaded.
“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that,” he said.
“I do well enough already and I made this film because I want the world, to change. The more people who see it the better, so I’m happy this is happening.”
"Our immediate task in battle fronts like Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere is to capture or kill the terrorists ... so we do not have to face them here at home," Bush told a cheering crowd outside the West Virginia Capitol. An enthusiastic audience estimated by state capitol police at 6,500 people waving American flags chanted, "Four more years."
Regarding Saddam, the deposed Iraqi president, Bush said: "Because we acted, the dictator, the brutal tyrant, is sitting in a prison cell."
Two Bush opponents, taken out of the crowd in restraints by police, said they were told they couldn't be there because they were wearing shirts that said they opposed the president.
Sifting through old classified materials in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds said, she made an alarming discovery: Intercepts relevant to the terrorist plot, including references to skyscrapers, had been overlooked because they were badly translated into English.
Edmonds, 34, who is fluent in Turkish and Farsi, said she quickly reported the mistake to an FBI superior. Five months later, after flagging what she said were several other security lapses in her division, she was fired. Now, after more than two years of investigations and congressional inquiries, Edmonds is at the center of an extraordinary storm over US classification rules that sheds new light on the secrecy imperative supported by members of the Bush administration.
In a rare maneuver, Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered that information about the Edmonds case be retroactively classified, even basic facts that have been posted on websites and discussed openly in meetings with members of Congress for two years. The Department of Justice also invoked the seldom-used ''state secrets" privilege to silence Edmonds in court. She has been blocked from testifying in a lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and was allowed to speak to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks only behind closed doors.
Walid Shoebat - a saint!
With people like Walid, there is some hope for the future in the Middle East
Truth leads to justice leads to peace
see www.shoebat.com
More than 100 striking civil servants in Derry are meeting to decide if they will return to work following the suspension of almost 30 colleagues.
More than 120 members of the public service union Nipsa staged a walk-out at Waterside House in the city on Monday. The union said they were protesting against the suspension of 28 people for refusing to carry out duties which, they said, were not their responsibility.
The staff walked out from the Department of Education Teachers' Pay and Pensions Branch. Chairperson of the branch, Seamus Gallagher, said staff were "disgusted" at what happened.
Full story at:
Man of peace - he is the way forward
to the editor - you are very narrow minded in censoring this - I would hope you let your audience make up their own mind
why does the truth cause so much controversy?
Walid is here and here to stay (unless he is knocked off by islamofacists)
http://www.rte.ie/rams/radio/latest/rte-thegerryryanshow.smil
link valid till tomorrow morning
interview starts 1.44
after that click on
http://www.rte.ie/rams/radio/latest/tue/rte-thegerryryanshow.smil
Foreign detainees are few in Iraq
By Peter Eisler and Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY
Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency.
Since last August, coalition forces have detained 17,700 people in Iraq who were considered to be enemy fighters or security risks, and about 400 were foreign nationals, according to figures supplied last week by the U.S. military command handling detention operations in Iraq. Most of those detainees were freed after a review board found they didn't pose significant threats. About 5,700 remain in custody, 90 of them non-Iraqis.
The numbers represent one of the most precise measurements to date of the composition of the insurgency and suggest that some Bush administration officials have overstated the role of foreign holy warriors, or jihadists, from other Arab states. The figures also suggest that Iraq isn't as big a magnet for foreign terrorists as some administration critics have asserted.
The U.S. government has spent 2 percent of an $18.4 billion aid package that Congress approved in October last year after the Bush administration called for a quick infusion of cash into Iraq to finance reconstruction, according to figures released Friday by the White House.
The U.S.-led occupation authorities were much quicker to channel Iraq's own money, expending or earmarking nearly all of $20 billion in a special development fund fed by the country's oil sales, a congressional investigator said.
Only $366 million of the $18.4 billion U.S. aid package had been spent as of June 22, the White House budget office told Congress in a report that offers the first detailed accounting of the massive reconstruction package.
Thus far, according to the report, nothing from the package has been spent on construction, health care, sanitation and water projects. More money has been spent on administration than all projects related to education, human rights, democracy and governance.
Of $3.2 billion earmarked for security and law enforcement, a key U.S. goal in Iraq, only $194 million has been spent. Another central objective of the aid program was to reduce the 30 percent unemployment rate, but money has been spent to hire only about 15,000 Iraqis, despite U.S. promises that 250,000 jobs would be created by now, U.S. officials familiar with the aid program said.
.
New issue.
Bad Subjects Slaveries Issue (69)
Euro-American social triumphalists prefer to overlook their own unended
histories of slavery. The Slaveries issue of Bad Subjects
(http://eserver.org/bs/69/) examines precisely those histories in the
rhetoric, philosophy, and historiography of slavery; the use of slavery as a
sexual, political, and critical metaphor; and creation of labor
neo-slaveries. The issue includes Omar Swartz on legal rationalizations of
slavery; Manual Yang on Eugene Genovese and slavery scholarship; Ben
Schiller on voice and authority in slave narratives; Tomasz Kitlinski and
Joe Lockard on sex slavery as a cultural map of eastern Europe; Lev
Lafayette on the Australian national work-for-the-dole scheme as
neo-slavery; Alison Hearn on Bales' 'disposable people' theory for analysing
reality television; Lanfranco Aceti on electronic slave-markets; and Joe
Lockard reviews Francis Bok's slave autobiography.
Police in Japan say they have arrested three former members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, for attempting to kill the country's police chief in 1995. Takaji Kunimatsu was shot and seriously wounded just 10 days after the sarin gas attack which killed 12 people on the Tokyo subway.
Aum Shinrikyo, a fanatical doomsday cult, was later held responsible. Former cult leader Shoko Asahara and 11 others have been sentenced to death for their roles in the subway attack.
The three cult members arrested on Wednesday have been named as Toshiyuki Kosugi, Tetsuya Uemura and Mitsuo Sunaoshi. Toshiyuki Kosugi was once a senior police officer himself. He initially confessed to shooting Mr Kunimatsu in 1996, but no charges were brought against him due to lack of evidence.
Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist, interviewed several of the survivors of the sarin attack, as well as ex- and continuing members of Aum Shinrikyo in his book Underground.
The Santa Cruz anarchists who rent basement space from the Resource Center for Nonviolence have been told to leave.
The reason?
A clash of philosophies, said Kyle Sirman, at the Anarchist Infoshop.
Incompatibility, said Bob Fitch, a Resource Center official.
The anarchists have "been unable to create a continuity of safe and welcoming atmosphere," said Fitch, who manages the property.
But Sirman said Fitch told the group there was too much traffic and not enough personal hygiene. Some of the complaints, Sirman quoted Fitch as saying, "had to do with us smelling."
IAWM People's Assembly Outcome
The secretary of the Irish Anti-War Movement, Sinead Ní Bhroin, has expressed confidence that the Irish government will withdraw refuelling facilities to the US military at Shannon Airport. Writing on the IAWM website, Ms Ní Bhroin said “We now have a lot of activity to action throughout the country and its amazing to have such a positive broad base of people to work with. All feels very exciting/positive/productive and I truly believe an end is in sight re the use of Shannon & Baldonnel by US military.” Ms Bhroin comments were written following the IAWM’s “People’s Assembly”.
Reporting on the Assembly – attended by approximately 70 people – Ms Orla Ní Chomhrai of the IAWM said, “Then Richard gave an introduction about the current situation in Iraq. Someone later proposed that this be e-mailed out and posted on the website and this suggestion was accepted. A few more decisions were: There would be a major drive to get the government to hold a referendum on neutrality by getting the petition together and getting thousands of people to sign it. That there would be an anti-war festival in Shannon in a few months time.”
Phonecalls to the Pentagon and Leinster House for a reaction to the IAWM’s programme of action and its confident prediction that US military refuelling is coming to an end met with no response.
'Ahead of the Curve, Ireland's Place in the Global Economy'
The Enterprise Strategy Group was appointed by the Tánaiste to prepare an enterprise strategy for growth and employment in Ireland up to the year 2015. The Group's report 'Ahead of the Curve, Ireland's Place in the Global Economy' presents an analysis of Ireland's recent and current enterprise performance, reviews international enterprise trends and perspectives and identifies important steps to underpin Ireland's successful transition to a new phase of enterprise development. The report is also available to download ...
http://www.forfas.ie/esg/index.html
-----
of course The Indo twists this into a call for an 'Army' of invaders....
-----
Wanted: army of migrants to keep the Tiger purring
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1211448&issue_id=11107
THOUSANDS of skilled immigrants will be needed over the next five years to help fill almost 400,000 jobs as the economy continues to prosper, a major new report predicts.
But to attract them Ireland will have to be seen as an attractive place to live and work, "with a welcoming attitude to immigrants and a diverse cultural life" it says.
Other countries will be pursuing the same immigrants as advanced economies depend more on knowledge and less on manufacturing, it warns.
Some of the video from Abu Ghraib we haven't seen yet is of children being tortured to put pressure on their parents
http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/000732.html
Europe's Installed Wind Capacity - end 2003
http://www.ewea.org/
Wind power expands 23% in Europe but still only a 3 Member State story: lower installation rate puts EU Renewables Directive targets at risk.
EU 15 = 28,440 MW
EU 25 = 28,542 MW
Other countries = 164 MW
Total Capacity = 28,706 MW
Download interesting map of wind energy in Europe...
http://www.ewea.org/documents/europe_windata_jan20041.pdf
WELLINGTON, July 5: Israel has offered no explanation for why two men, allegedly members of Israel's secret service agency Mossad, were in New Zealand, Prime Minister Helen Clark told reporters on Monday.
Two Israelis, Uriel Zoshe Kelman, 30, and Eli Cara, 40, pleaded guilty on Friday in Auckland's High Court to charges which included attempting to obtain a New Zealand passport and participating in an organized crime group to obtain a false passport.
Media reports quoting unnamed government officials alleged the men, arrested on March 23 after police covertly followed them when they were arranging to pick up a passport they had fraudulently applied for, were Israeli secret agents.
There was nothing especially unusual about the death of Patrick McCaffrey - nothing about the attack on 22 June that killed him and a colleague to make the incident stand out from the hundreds of others in which young men from across the US have died amid the chaos in Iraq over the past 16 months.
Except, that is, that Patrick's mother, Nadia, is adamant her son's death shall not have been worthless. Her insistence that people be made aware of the situation in Iraq and the continuing stream of Iraqi and American casualties, this week placed her on a fast-track collision path with an administration that would rather the public only saw certain images from President George Bush's so-called war on terror.
When her son's body was flown to Sacramento international airport, she allowed - but did not invite, she insists - the media to attend. "I'm just hurt that my son's life is gone and they should stop what they're doing," she told the reporters, banned by Mr Bush from covering the return of military coffins to US Air Force bases. She said she planned to set up a group for the mothers of dead soldiers opposed to the war. And in recent days, when it came time to remember Patrick publicly, Mrs McCaffrey again wanted to share with people stories about her wonderful son.
She wanted to tell everyone about his infectious smile and his humour, his kindness to strangers and his devotion to his family.
"My goal is to pass on Patrick's message, why and how he died," she told her hometown paper, the Tracy Press. "Try to talk about this and stop it. Enough war."
How Many Mistakes Can Newsweek's Michael Isikoff Make?
by Craig Unger
How many mistakes can Michael Isikoff make? In his zealous campaign to discredit Fahrenheit 9/11, Newsweek's star investigative reporter has already made at least seven errors, distortions and selective omissions of crucial information.
Let's take them one by one.....
http://www.houseofbush.com/
more on the Bush Family/Saudi Flight from the USA connection:
http://www.houseofbush.com/files.php
---
More Distortions From Michael Moore
Some of the main points in ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ really aren’t very fair at all
By Michael Isikoff
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/site/newsweek/
LA Times:
The Army's internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.
As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel -- not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images -- who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-statue3jul03,1,7327035.story?coll=la-home-headlines
found at (worth reading more)
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/archives/2004_07_04_dneiwert_archive.html#108906703402590294
Photo of how US Magazines reported the 'victory in Iraq (April 2003)
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/atrios/usnn.jpg
------
Past is prologue...
Why Were Government Propaganda Experts Working On News At CNN?
March 27, 2000
http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-psyops.html
CNN Responds to FAIR on PSYOPS in the Newsroom
http://www.fair.org/activism/psyops-response.html
The Military & CNN
by Alexander Cockburn
http://www.commondreams.org/views/032300-107.htm
Once upon a time, politics by other means took the form of war between state-sponsored armies. Then along came the creeping tide of international terror, whose practitioners play by different rules. Terrorists have little use for top-heavy chains of command, cumbersome procurement procedures, and pesky government oversight. They eschew conventional rules of engagement and international codes like the Geneva Conventions. Faced with such an agile enemy, beleaguered states are turning to a force that operates under a similar lack of constraints: private military contractors. Once the hired guns settle into the trenches, though, it can be hard to get them to leave.
The U.S. military is pulling small numbers of troops out of two U.N. peacekeeping operations in Kosovo and Africa because they are no longer exempt from prosecution in the International Criminal Court, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
A seven-member team will be removed from a U.N. mission assigned to keep peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia and two liaison officers will be removed from the world body's mission in Kosovo, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita told reporters.
"In these two particular cases it was determined ... that the risk was not appropriate to our forces. And so they were withdrawn," Di Rita said, adding all U.N. peacekeeping missions with a U.S. presence are under review.
Mark Kirk (Republican, 10th District - Illinois) admitted on the floor of Congress that he has been working for the Central Intelligence Agency at the same time he is serving in Congress. Lee Goodman, Kirk's Democratic opponent, called for Kirk's resignation from Congress. "The conflict of interest is blatant and appalling," said Goodman. "Congress has been struggling to investigate intelligence failures by the CIA and now it turns out Kirk is working for the CIA. No wonder Kirk voted not to investigate these failures after 9/11. He is working for the people who didn't want to be investigated. Any high-schooler who has studied the separation of powers in U.S. history class would recognize the problem."
Goodman pointed out that until this revelation, Kirk had concealed his CIA connection. "Up until now, all he said was that he was a Navy reservist who was spending some weekends at the Pentagon. Now it turns out he is working with the people who conduct covert operations. Is there any way an agent of the CIA can be expected to function as a legitimate representative of the people in his district? The CIA is an organization that depends on secrecy. Congress is supposed to operate under public scrutiny. The two just aren't compatible."
At 8:30pm last night, four military police jeeps entered the otherwise peaceful village of Biddu driving slowly and periodically stopping with no apparent purpose.
Villagers threw paint at the jeeps in protest. The army responded with rounds of live ammunition, rubber bullets, sound bombs and tear gas, breaking the windows of a number houses in the village. Tear gas canisters were fired at a car carrying women and children.
Forty-one year old Fayez Ahmad Shamasneh was treated for tear gas inhalation. Abed-Rabbo Mousa Abed-Rabbo sustained rubber bullet wounds in the head and stomach. Mohannad Fahmi Makhtoub was hit with two rubber bullets in the head and in the hand.
A Swedish national, Shora, who was the ISM co-ordinator when I was there, stood aside serving as an observer and was targeted by the military police and injured by a rubber bullet.
Norway protests child abuse in Iraq
Norwegian authorities reacted with shock and disgust Tuesday to a documentary on German TV that American soldiers allegedly have been holding children in prisons in Iraq, and abusing them as well. The Norwegians joined the Red Cross and Amnesty International in calling for an immediate end to the abuse, and release of the underage prisoners, some of whom are as young as 12 years.
Article from their International discussion bulletin
Below is an article written by Rory Hearne of the SWP in the 'discussion bulletin' of the International Socialist Tendency (The international group the SWP is affiliated to). The article is short but deals with the anti war mood, the elections, the rise of SF and the privitisation of CIE...
It is an interesting piece as it gives some insight into how the SWP are analysising the political situation.
The situation in Ireland both North and
South is one that reflects the changes on
the left across Europe and indeed globally.
Active support for the UK/US imperialist
war on terror, growing inequality,
worsening worker’s conditions and regressive
immigration controls are increasingly
opposed by a new radicalisation.
[Editor: Continued at link]
A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs [high-value targets] before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Saudi Arabia's intelligence agencies are so infiltrated by al-Qa'ida sympathisers that the kingdom's counter-terrorist campaign is failing and militant operations are spreading into neighbouring states, senior Arab and Western officials have warned.
The main Saudi intelligence organisation responsible for combating al-Qa'ida at the Interior Ministry is riddled with agents linked to the militants, the officials say.
"Their staff is 80 per cent sympathetic to al-Qa'ida," one senior Arab source said.
"All Saudi intelligence agencies are compromised. To fight al-Qa'ida they will need to start from scratch. I'm not hopeful the Saudis will win this one."
Nicole Rank, who was working for FEMA in West Virginia, and her husband, Jeff, were removed from the Capitol grounds in handcuffs shortly before Bush’s speech. The pair wore T-shirts with the message “Love America, Hate Bush.”
http://wvgazette.com/section/News/2004070734
found at
http://amsam.org
Ronald Kienhuis wanted to incite his Great Neck neighbors and passersby when he placed a sign in his front lawn about a week ago.
"BUSH MUST GO!" proclaimed the sign, which Kienhuis purchased recently at an upstate Ithaca bookstore. "Dump emperor George W," read the punch line he wrote underneath.
And incite others he did.
First, one neighbor told Kienhuis that someone complained about his sign to the Village of Great Neck. A code inspector showed up. Shortly after, a "notice of violation" arrived from the village ordering him to take the sign down - although the village backed out of its warning yesterday.
Someone also left Kienhuis an anonymous letter asking him to put the sign away. Finally, the sign disappeared over the Fourth of July weekend.
Kienhuis got some cardboard and a marker and made another sign. It's on his lawn again.
Journalist Seymour Hersh yesterday accused President Bush and Vice President Cheney of committing war crimes in their prosecution of the war on terror before he backed off the charge somewhat, saying he was not certain the two leaders were culpable as individuals.
"What we had was a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president - hold on - by this administration anyway. I can say that.I can't say...I can't state who did it.The only way to look at this is as war crimes. What happened, there are war crimes," Mr. Hersh said during a speech to the national conference of the American Civil Liberties Union
As he unleashed the most inflammatory charge, Mr. Hersh was cheered by the crowd.
"I'm not saying it's there yet. It's not there yet, but that's where it has to go. We have to stop looking at it as some kind of an academic debate about the Geneva Convention," Mr. Hersh said.
The veteran journalist, who exposed the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, said some of the most heinous actions by American soldiers had yet to be disclosed by the government. Mr. Hersh said the undisclosed evidence includes videos of young male prisoners being sodomized.
Mr. Hersh called top leaders at the White House and the Defense Department neo-conservative "cultists."
"It's not the Manson clan, but we really have been taken over," he said. Mr. Hersh singled out the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, for particular criticism,repeatedly comparing him to Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Two US soldiers pleading for asylum in Canada after walking out on their units over fierce objections to the Iraq war have appeared in a Toronto courtroom.
Jeremy Hinzman, 25, attended a technical pre-hearing at Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) in Toronto on Wednesday, supported by another fugitive American soldier Brandon Hughey.
[....]
Both men argue they face prosecution tantamount to persecution in the US because of their strong political beliefs and should therefore be granted haven in Canada.
To: Canadian Government
During the period of 1965-1973 more than 50,000 draft-age Americans made their way to Canada, refusing to participate in an immoral war. At the time, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said: "Those who make the conscientious judgment that they must not participate in this war... have my complete sympathy, and indeed our political approach has been to give them access to Canada. Canada should be a refuge from militarism."
Thirty years later, Canada is faced with the same moral choice – to give refuge to those who refuse to be accomplices in the US-led war on Iraq which many legal opinions have deemed illegal under international law.
There are currently at least two young people who have made their way to Canada in objection to the US government’s war on Iraq. Jeremy Hinzman was a soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division. He and his family arrived in Toronto in January 2004 and are currently seeking refugee status. Brandon Hughey, a 19-year-old American soldier, arrived in St. Catharines two months later and is also seeking refugee status.
more at....
Dementia may explain Stalin's behaviour
The course of history might have been very different if some of the world's past leaders and dictators had seen a psychiatrists, according to doctors. Consultant psychiatrist Dr George El-Nimr said World War II might not have happened if past US president Woodrow Wilson had bowed down to his dementia.
Stalin and Franklin D Roosevelt most probably had dementia too, he said. Dr El-Nimr and colleagues spoke at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' annual conference in Harrogate.
Arabic is one of those languages that are particularly hard to master in a classroom. There's a whole new alphabet to learn. A lot of the syllables seem the same to American ears. Unlike French or Spanish, there aren't a whole bunch of words in common with English. And there are a zillion dialects that sound a whole lot different from the Arabic taught in school.
The idea behind the new simulator is to give G.I.s a more realistic learning environment -- one in which they only have to learn the limited, "tactical" vocabulary they need to operate on the street.
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The game teaches nonverbal cues, too. "For example," the New York Times notes, "when [game protagonist] Sergeant Smith starts or finishes a conversation with an important person, he can cross his right hand over his heart and bow slightly, a common gesture of respect in the Arab world."
source: http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000997.html
Check out footage of the game here.
http://www.isi.edu/~jmoore/Mankin/MankinTLWeb.mov
Artist Steven Kurtz fears further charges on bioterrorism because of his group's writings
Steven Kurtz, the art professor indicted for fraud last week because he received bacteria from a scientist to use in a performance art exhibit about biotechnology, will be arraigned today (July 8) in federal court in Buffalo. He faces four counts of wire and mail fraud, each punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Robert Ferrell, the genetics professor who supplied him the bacteria, will not appear in court today, because he is recovering from surgery. He will be arraigned on the same counts later, on a date yet to be determined.
The indictments allege that the two professors defrauded Pitt because Ferrell used university funds to pay for the two kinds of bacteria he gave Kurtz, an associate professor of art at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York. They also defrauded the biological supply house where Ferrell bought the bacteria, the charges allege, because a materials transfer agreement required him to keep the materials in his own lab and to use them only for research. Each man's lawyer has told The Scientist that his client will plead not guilty.
go get it...
Contrary to U.S. government claims, the insurgency in Iraq is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not foreign fighters, and is far larger than previously thought, American military officials say.
The officials told The Associated Press the guerrillas can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000 and have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated.
That number is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at the insurgency's core.
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Such positions support the Bush administration's view that the insurgency is linked to the war on terror. A closer examination paints most insurgents as secular Iraqis angry at the presence of U.S. and other foreign troops.
"Too much U.S. analysis is fixated on terms like 'jihadist,' just as it almost mindlessly tries to tie everything to (Osama) bin Laden," Cordesman said. "Every public opinion poll in Iraq ... supports the nationalist character of what is happening."
Many guerrillas are motivated by Islam in the same way religion motivates American soldiers, who also tend to pray more when they're at war, the U.S. military official said.
He said he met Tuesday with four tribal sheiks from Ramadi who "made very clear" that they had no desire for an Islamic state, even though mosques are used as insurgent sanctuaries and funding centers.
"'We're not a bunch of Talibans,'" he paraphrased the sheiks as saying.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The World Court will say on Friday that Israel's West Bank barrier should be torn down as it is illegal and has imposed hardship on thousands of Palestinians, a leaked copy of its ruling showed.
As the president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague began a reading of the ruling that was expected to last two hours or more, his initial comments were in line with a text leaked to Reuters in Jerusalem earlier in the day.
A top adviser to President Yasser Arafat said Palestinians would seek U.N. sanctions against Israel: "As of today Israel should be viewed as an outlaw state," Nabil Abu Rdainah said.
Experts worry that synthetic biology may spawn biohackers
HANCOCK, N.H. — Design automation systems tailored to the task of genetic engineering could prove to be double-edged tools. While they represent a central thrust of the emerging synthetic biology movement, they also can lead to the accidental or deliberate creation of pathogenic biological components.
One expert in the field, Harvard University genetics professor George Church, compared the potential misuse of synthetic biological designs with the danger posed by nuclear weapons. But there is one important difference, in his view — it is much harder to build a fusion device than to genetically engineer a pathogen. And the complexity of biological processes also increases the danger of accidents.
First hand account of the incident here:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- In a grim milestone, the number of deaths in the American-led coalition in Iraq surpassed 1,000 this week.
The latest reported deaths include a U.S. soldier who died from wounds in fighting Thursday in Baghdad, an American soldier killed in a Samarra attack Wednesday and another who died in a nonbattle-related incident Thursday.
The deaths bring multinational fatalities -- both in combat and "nonhostile" situations -- to 1,002 since the start of the war in March 2003. U.S. military deaths now total 881.
The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 23 when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad,'" another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers around the wire..." Guards feared for their lives "the sky was black with rocks," the report saidand a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn't know whether they were using lethal or non-lethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns.
Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Battalion. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified.
Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn't make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt.
"As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.
Six young men from Lancaster City wearing only thong underwear were arrested along Old Philadelphia Pike when they attempted to recreate the infamous picture of Iraqi prisoners forced into a human pyramid at Abu Ghraib prison.
The protesters stripped down to their underwear and formed their improv in front of a greenhouse, near where the president was to speak, East Lampeter Township police said.
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The group, all friends, heard a cheer and swung into action about 20 minutes before the president arrived.
They were cited and released after the president’s campaign bus had left the Smoketown area. On his release, Egolf declared, “I’m not going to pay a dime. We didn’t break the law. How do you get arrested for expressing your feelings?”
Later, as the motorcade passed through Lancaster, Martin Andrews, 42, of 228 N. Reservoir St., made an obscene gesture and dropped his pants at the president’s convoy, Lancaster police said.
Police who had to leave their positions to deal with Andrews, arrested him for disorderly conduct. Police said Andrews ignored police commands while he was being arrested and officers had to spray him with a chemical agent. He was then additionally charged with resisting arrest.