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A NYC firefighter says he helped the FBI find three "black boxes" from the crashed airliners--boxes that the FBI says were never found.
I would trust his word more than the FBI's word.
There is no doubt that FBI officials will lie when ordered to.
Israel and the Palestinian olive harvest.
Brutal Trap of Nepal's Civil War.
12 ways Bush is trying to steal the vote in Ohio.
Michael Moore criticized repressive copyright laws, saying he believes it is legitimate to share videos nomcommercially, including his own Fahrenheit 9/11.
Bush whitewashes the crimes of the dictatorship of Uzbekistan, to avoid the embarrassment of being seen to support a dictator.
When the US government wants to destabilize a country, it says that government doesn't respect human rights. When it wants to support a dictatorship, it denies the dictator's crimes. They are both lies, and they reflect a propensity to lie which can be compared with the Soviet Union.
Kerry did this too in his "lesson for Latin-American democracy". I wish I could believe he would be more honest if elected.
A nonviolent political activist in the UK faces losing her home--as if being gravely injured by a policeman wasn't enough punishment for participating in democracy.
Julian Bond, head of the NAACP, speaks about voter suppression, in the past and today.
The NAACP is being investigated by the IRS for posting a speech criticizing Bush policies.
Perhaps the NAACP should not have done this. However, ISTR that there have been many churches which campaigned heavily for Republican candidates, and the IRS has not been very eager to make them stop. Bush wouldn't be the first Republican president to politicize the IRS.
Terror Alerts vs. Bush's poll numbers.
An election report from Florida, where early voting is already set up to be unfair.
Halliburton has a long series of corrupt deals with the Cheney regime.
The Health Care Crisis in America--Clinton's historic surrender made it worse.
Arguing that the "bin Laden video" is a fraud; that is, propaganda from the Bush regime.
That a communication from bin Laden would help Bush does not, in my view, prove it is fake or that he made a mistake. Bush helps bin Laden gain support, just as bin Laden helps Bush gain support; I don't know whether Bush is smart enough to see this, but bin Laden surely is.
However, some of the text as reported so far seems to be designed for US domestic consumption. It makes no sense that bin Laden would say such things.
There is a lot of talk about al-Zarqawi, but no evidence
connecting him to any of the things he is supposed to have done,
or even showing that he is still alive.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The UN condemns US policies of
mistreating prisoners.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The US Army disregarded regulations and its own officials to give
Halliburton a big contract extension. Now the FBI is
investigating what happened.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
It may be hard to tie this corruption directly to Cheney, but he is surely responsible for it.
100 prominent Americans and 40 relatives of 9/11 victims
now call for a thorough investigation of how the attacks took
place.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Bush is trying to help overseas military personnel vote, while not helping civilians.
He thinks the military personnel will vote for him, but they may not. He has a pattern of treating them very badly.
This soldier reports that most of the troops he knows want
Bush out.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
My absentee ballot has not come, so it appears I can't vote this year. This web site will be my only contribution to the election.
Support the Simultaneous Policy.
I disagree with their pessimism about the prospects for one country to resist corporate pressure. As Venezuela shows, sometimes countries can do this; they only need leaders with spine. However, it can't do any harm to push for simultaneous adoption of globally beneficial policies in parallel with local adoption.
Computerized voting systems in Florida lose
votes of Blacks but not those of Whites. This is due to
differences in equipment and training in places where mainly Whites
live and places where mainly Blacks live.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
How
the explosives in Iraq were looted
after the invasion.
[References updated on 2018-05-06 because the old links were broken.]
Iraq is full of arms caches, and Bush only has enough troops to guard a few of them.
As a result, there is no practical way of preventing the resistance from getting as much explosives as it can possibly use.
The
resistance is gaining even now in some areas of Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
It is not surprising that resistance is tied in sometimes with criminals. Plenty of Iraqis would like a government to control criminals, but no government could do so if it is perceived as a stooge of an occupying colonizing foreign power.
The CIA secretly moved prisoners
out of Iraq, which violates the Geneva Conventions.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
As usual, Bush negates US commitments to human rights by reinterpreting them in a way that is vacuous. When Bush says that he upholds the Geneva Conventions, it is a meaningless statement.
The Bush forces have allowed looting in
Iraq--of ministries, of museums, of archeological sites...and also of
explosives useful for terrorists.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
When Bush found out, he first tried to keep it secret.
Yes Bush Can changes its mind and opposes
Bush.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
(I think this is related to our friends the Yes Men.)
Papers presented in court in the UK show that Bush planned the date for
invading Iraq 5 months in advance, when there was still a debate about
whether the UN weapons inspectors were finishing the job, and an
attempt to get support from other countries, and when the public
was told that the attack was waiting for this.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
100,000 Iraqis have been
killed by the Bush's war.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This autumn, Israelis are again helping Palestinians harvest olives.
But the annexation wall has prevented many of them from tending their
trees, so
they have few olives to harvest.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
A number of prominent Republican women are publicly opposing Bush.
Public Citizen reports that Bush has paid little or no attention to real security vulnerabilities involving dangerous chemicals and nuclear power plants.
I think the reason is that the goal of Bush security measures is to look tough while eliminate human rights. He will spend millions to do that; but security measures that would prevent threats without trampling freedom are of no interest to him.
On the other hand, maybe Bush knows there is no plan to attack these vulnerable spots, so protecting them would be a waste of money. I can imagine various ways that might be true.
Most Bush supporters
still believe discredited Bush lies about
Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This show why Bush continues to follow the big lie strategy: because he does not get punished for lying. With the help of the supportive mass media, he can drown out the truth.
In the US, voting computers are already failing in early voting. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying dirty tricks to stop people from voting and to prevent recounts, often using absurd interpretations of election laws.
There remains the danger that the Supreme Court will use this as an excuse to select its own candidate.
Arguing that what is happening in the Sudan is real genocide.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Sgt Frederick has been sentenced to 8 years in prison for abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
Since he blew the whistle on this widespread practice, I think he should get a lesser sentence--in exchange for helping to convict the higher-ups who asked the soldiers to do this. If the Army fails to prosecute anyone higher up, it will mean Frederick is a scapegoat for them.
Long before Bush invaded Iraq,
his men were planning how to
rewrite all its laws and steal all its assets.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Large US bases have been established in many countries near
Afghanistan,
under secret agreements.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
One of these countries is Uzbekistan, whose practices of tyranny and torture were critized by the UK ambassador (who was recently removed for doing so). Why doesn't Bush want to oust this dictator?
Greg Palast, who broke the story on how Bush blocked some 50,000 Florida voters from voting, now reports on additional voter-suppression practices.
It is clear that the Republican Party hired people to brainstorm every possible way they could block Democrats from voting. By my book, this makes them the enemies of Democracy.
First Amendment Does Not Exist
The First Amendment to the American Constitution cannot be found.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Boston's Killer Cops
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
There are times when police need to use force. And usually-nonlethan weapons such as pepper spray will sometimes kill people even when not deliberately aimed at someone's eyes. But the bigger danger is that police will shoot pepper spray or live bullets when there was no reason to do so. Police have a constant tendency to do this, so the job of public officials is to hold them firmly and constantly in check.
We can't afford to have mayors that are soft on police.
The Israeli officer
who callously murdered a Palestinian child has
been excused for this by the Israeli government. They ruled he had
real grounds to suspect she was a threat. How can a wounded girl
lying on the ground be a threat to anyone? The Israeli army has
contempt for truth.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
You could hardly have a clearer example of wanton and unjustified murder than this. But it is not unique. It is part of a systematic and clear pattern.
Comparison of media reports shows conflicts in the reports
about who perished in flight AA 11 on September 11.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
A real investigation has to include reporting the complete passenger list.
The Israeli High Court made a judgment that merely being Palestinian is grounds for suspicion
that someone is a terrorist, and that their rights can be taken away on
these grounds alone.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This makes a mockery of the concept of rights. It shows how Israel has established a system of apartheid (as many have already said) in which Palestinians have no rights.
Paid Republican political activists systematically tricked students into
registering as Republican.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This in itself has no direct effect on election results, but it is a sign of the systematic dishonesty of the religious fanatics that now make up much of the Republican Party. They have convinced themselves that they cannot be wrong, and that any form of lying or violence is justified as long as it serves their cause.
I predict that they won't feel the slightest bit of guilt, they will just support one lie with another.
William Rodriguez saved hundreds of lives in the World Trade Center
after the attacks. Now he has sued Bush and others
accusing them of complicity in the attacks.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The Bush regime has
increased its harrassment of political opposition this month.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
1/3 of all species of amphibians are endangered, mostly because of pollution caused by
humans.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Global warming is now one of the principal threats to
the world's poor.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Masked Haitian Police Shoot Children While Arresting Priest
These police work for the gangsters that Bush put in
charge in Haiti.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The making of the terror myth: a BBC TV program dares to question the basic assumptions about Islamic terrorism and Al Qa'ida.
Is Bush
planning a sudden attack on Iran as a way to manipulate the
election?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This report might be just a rumor, but I would not put it past Dubya to start another war for purposes such as this. I've been expecting Dubya to do something drastic to manipulate the election, and why not this? But if people place enough heat on this plan, it may dissuade them.
Official statements about fighter interception on September 11
conflict with each other, are incomplete, contradict known facts, and
contain clues suggesting
fabrication.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
In Israel the religious
fanatics are preparing for civil war if the state tries to rein in
their attacks on Palestinians.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The conflict between the religious fanatics and secular Jews in Israel has existed for a long time, but in the past it was mostly carried out peacefully, demographically. I used to joke about looking for a homeland for non-fanatic Jews, once the religious fanatics take over Israel and impose their way of life there. I didn't expect it to turn into violence.
I have a speculation. Perhaps the talk about civil war is being spread by the fanatics themselves as a form of intimidation: "Allow us to attack and conquer in your name, or else we'll shoot you too." This is the way fanatics in Japan forced their country into a war of aggression--they assassinated several civilian leaders until the rest were too scared to oppose them.
"Support Our Mercenaries"--how's that for a bumper sticker?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The reason I refer to the "Bush forces" in Iraq is to resist the attempt to manipulate Americans through our patriotism into supporting an immoral war of aggression. Some of the people in the Bush forces are American, and some of them are in the US Army, but they're not "our troops". They are Bush's troops and Bush's alone.
In the book 1984, past news reports were altered to fit the lie of the day. In today's US, the media simply disregard them to print official false history instead. They know they wil rarely pay a penalty for repeating official lies, even if those lies are caught out.
The Islamic fanatic Abu Hamza has been charged with incitement to murder non-Muslims. He was also charged with possessing a book with information "likely to be useful for terrorism".
To make it a crime to possess such a book is an act of tyranny, since it criminalizes a wide range of public information--and offers an easy excuse to arrest almost anyone. Don't you have some information that could be "useful to a person preparing" some kind of terrorism? A map of your town, for instance?
Abu Hamza may deserve to be imprisoned, but laws like this one are more dangerous than he is.
A US-government-supported Arabic propaganda station applies the
propaganda methods pioneered by Faux News and the New York Times.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
An Israeli army captain is under investigation for
shooting his whole
magazine into the body of a Palestinian child.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This is surely just one instance of a widespread practice which usually goes unpunished. The authorities only take notice when compelled to do so.
The spirit of bullying, against anyone who departs from the usual
patterns, breaks out in
surprising places.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
A gene that promotes male homosexuality survives through evolution
because it also leads females to have more children.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Various civilian prison guards sent to run prisons in Iraq were
associated with
acts of torture extending as far as murder. The Iraqi
police torture Iraqis too--and the Bush forces officials cover up for
them.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The US is pushing the UN to ban therapeutic cloning.
But it is running into opposition.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I don't think a treaty to ban reproductive cloning is right either. Present-day cloning technology is flawed, and the individuals that result tend to have defects. Using this on humans would be wrong. But if the technology improves in 20 years, why should it be forbidden? Meanwhile, in the mean time there is no problem that needs to be solved.
Once people realize that a cloned human is less similar to the original human than two identical twins are similar to each other, most of the motivation for wanting to clone anyone will disappear anyway.
A leaked email shows that the Republicans in Florida have continued trying to disenfranchize Democratic voters.
A Russian journalist in Belarus, who criticized the president for
election fraud, was
attacked on the street, then arrested and blamed
for the attack.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Blaming the victim for being attacked is a commonly-used technique for suppressing unwanted views. However, in the US, journalists aren't usually attacked or arrested, other than by police when they are covering a protest. Instead, they just know their jobs don't allow publishing certain sorts of things.
Sinclair Broadcasting Company's history of
political bias and smear.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Bush told a supporter there would be
no casualties in the war in Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I can believe Bush believed this. Not only because he and his coterie believed there would be no opposition, but because he thought "god" would make sure of it.
Afghanistan is making
little progress.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The CIA is hiding a report
that details US government shortcomings in
preventing the 9/11 attacks, in an apparent attempt to shield Bush
from blame.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
More dishonest Republican voter registration practices: a company hired by the RNC claimed to be nonpartisan in order to get permission to set up tables, then acted in a partisan way.
How military recruiters prey on students.
Peer pressure is no longer the most dangerous pressure that
they face.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Organizing parents to resist teach their children to resist this could be both useful now, and a good start towards resisting the draft if Bush or Kerry reintroduces it.
Witnesses report on Republican dirty tricks, such as throwing away
voter registration forms for potential Democratic voters.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
A rich businessman was convicted of murder in a trial where his defense was conducted inadequately.
If even rich people get ridiculous trials, imagine what happens to everyone else.
Bush versus the "reality-based community".
The article is far too
gentle with this liar, but it explains some Bush's appeal to his
fellow religious fanatics.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Greenpeace is protesting the shipment of plutonium to be mixed with
uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Election workers in part of California
are being told not to
offer voters the option of voting on paper.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The Republican leaders in Congress exerted all their political muscle to defeat a bill that would repeal one small part of the USA PAT RIOT act, the part that authorizes the FBI to spy on records of what you read.
Their opposition to this demonstrates that their agenda includes complete, totalitarian surveillance. Unfortunately, many Democrats support it too in all the other areas of life.
A former British diplomant, who resigned recently, says that the Prime
Minister's office "did not tell the whole truth" about Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The seizure of Indymedia servers can viewed as a
trial balloon for plans to suppress the use of the
Internet as a way to bypass the controlled corporate
media.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Vietnam is persecuting Christians, who are mostly minority peoples
whose lands were taken away for plantations.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The US would be in a better position to criticize this double oppression if it were behaving in an upright way itself.
The UK government admitted its claims about Saddam Hussain's
chemical weapons
were false--but meanwhile it is trying to undermine
Hans Blix by publishing half-truths.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Bush claims to have deployed an ABM system, but its developers have
never conducted a realistic test. Perhaps they know the system would
fail if it were ever really tested.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I think that missile defense systems are a good idea in principle, assuming the country that deploys them is not bent on aggression. However, that's no excuse for squandering money on ineffective systems.
Anarchists protested at the European Social Forum, claiming that government sponsorship had tamed it as an opposition force.
A leaked email shows that the Republicans in Florida
have continued trying to disenfranchize Democratic voters.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Human Rights Watch says that the systematic Israeli demolition of
homes in Gaza is not only against international human rights treaties,
it is also unnecessary and ineffective in its own terms.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
There is new,
conclusive evidence that Bush gets prompting through his
earphone.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I am not sure this is necessarily something to criticize, except in debates where it is the equivalent of cheating in a sport. However, the lack of attention given to the story in the US media is a good measure of how effectively controlled it is.
Updates on several instances of Bush's trampling civil liberties. One
conviction was overturned because the FBI's evidence was fraudulent.
Aside from that, little has changed for the better.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
When Bush released Yaser Hamdi to Saudi Arabia, the regime not only showed that its previous claims that he was somehow dangerous. But by taking away his US citizenship, it showed its true spirit. Hamdi was guilty, in their eyes, of being stubbornly innocent. Once he came under suspicion, they could not let him go without punishing him somehow, because that would be admitting they are wrong.
When it comes to killing children, the Israeli army outdoes
the Palestinians 5 to 1.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
(I think killing adults is just as bad as killing children, when there's no special reason to justify it.)
Bush has imposed US-style plant variety patents in Iraq, and is pushing genetically modified plants there.
This is just one of many ways that Bush plans to permanently suck money out of Iraq for his friends. (I've mentioned others here.)
All together, they mean that the only patriotic candidates in the coming Iraqi elections will be those that set out to eliminate the permanent bondage Bush has imposed on their country. However, to do that they would probably first have to tell Bush to take his troops out.
Bush lives in a never-never land, shielded from bad news, and appears to be gradually cracking up.
Reckoning Deaths in an Agitated World.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
It occurs to me that one other factor that may have contributed to Edwards' bias in the debate was that he too has been misled by the prevailing media bias, which gives a lot of publicity to the occasional Israeli children that are murdered, and much less to the many Palestinian children that are murdered.
Pharmaceutical companies misrepresent drug side effects when bribing
researchers to keep them quiet does not work.
They systematically
distort science.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Next time someone tells you that drug companies must have patents to make big money to do research, show them this article about what kind of research they do.
This article, by an author who is Christian and does not like
abortion, points out how Bush has increased the rate of abortions
in the US with policies that impose hardship on most Americans.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I am generally in favor of abortion, and one reason is because the overpopulation of the Earth threatens to cause billions to die in pain while civilization and half the species of life die too. If the increased rate of abortions means slower population growth in the most resource-guzzling country on Earth, that could be the only good result of Bush's cruelty. It doesn't justify the cruelty, but it could partially compensate.
Remember the
Supreme Court ruling that said Guantanamo detainees had
the right to a court hearing? Bush is carrying this out in a way
designed to sabotage the decision.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I think his prestige is so wrapped up in the claim that these people are dangerous terrorists, and that he is protecting America from them, that he can't ever admit they are not.
How companies are planning to raid pension benefits.
A government of the people, by the people, for the people could vigilantly block such moves, and ensure that companies put aside money in good years to cover their future pensions even if things go bad.
The CIA is still holding prisoners that it
refuses to let the ICRC visit,
and holding their children hostage.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
By the way, I wonder whether the anonymous sources quoted in the Editor's Note are people we ought to place credibility in. If they work for Bush, or Al Qa'ida, or both, should we expect them to tell the truth?
The sorry state of Iraqi hospitals and public health.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Israeli police arrested peace activists who wanted to help
Palestinians harvest their olives. They said they were afraid
that settlers would attack the peace activists.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Given the violence documented in this article, that concern may be well-founded. But wouldn't an honest police force protect the peace activists, and arrest the settlers?
Here's a small sample of what Israeli terror raids do.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
America has
lost this election. What we should do to have a chance
of winning one some day?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Cockpit recordings show that Bush forces fighter pilots fired
at Iraqis without even trying to find out who they were.
By luck, they were unarmed civilians. Oops!
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Burma's dancing dolphins are endangered--due to fishnets, and captures for display to the public.
The low morale of the Bush forces shows when supply troops refused
to carry out orders which they term
suicidal.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-27 because the old link was broken.]
Arrested war protestor Rosemarie Jackowski
speaks to the court.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Where Did These Conservatives Come From?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The puppet government of Iraq is borrowing money to pay reparations to various multinational corporations. The money being spent on "reconstructing Iraq" is less than what Iraq is being forced to pay out.
Afghan warlords with bloody pasts may
get posts in the new government, as part of wheeling and dealing
organized by the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-27 because the old link was broken.]
The UK ambassador to Uzbekistan says the Uzbek government uses torture to get false confessions for the CIA and MI6--false evidence designed to convince them of what the Uzbek rulers want them to believe.
The European Commission held a hearing on Digital Restrictions
Management--and arranged it so that the representatives of the public
ended up with zero minutes to speak. Only the media companies were
allowed to speak. This shows who side they're on, and it's not the
public's side.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
DRM is Theft!
Indymedia's servers were returned,
without any answers as
to why they were seized. Which means, in effect, that any
journalistic web site could be seized at any time.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The EFF will go to court to try to get answers.
The Republican Party has paid a company to pretend to register voters--then throw the registration forms in the trash, so they will be unable to vote.
Corporations are paying tax-exempt organizations to do election
campaigning for them. (It is illegal for tax-exempt organizations to
campaign for or against a candidate.)
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
More evidence that Bush gets tips through an earphone on what to say.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I don't find this especially scandalous, personally. If presidents can have speechwriters, why not prompters? The problem with Bush is not that his speeches or policies were suggested to him by someone else. It is what those policies are. If he had thought of them all on his own, that would hardly be an excuse.
The fine print in a bill now in congress would exempt the FBI, the
Energy Department and the Treasury department (among others) from the
Freedom of Information Act.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The UK imprisoned an animal rights protestor for shouting at a person who works at a company that is the target of a protest campaign.
I do not support the animal rights movement; for instance, I eat meat and intend to continue doing so. But whether you or I agree with this protestor is a side issue. The issue is whether peaceful protest is allowed. This case is not unique, it is part of a pattern. When the UK treats peaceful protest as "crime", and imposes orders on the protestors that permanently forbid them to participate in the protest campaign, the effect is to harrass democracy. The UK government ought to take out an "antisocial behavior order" on itself.
The Taliban failed to disrupt
Afghanistan's election, but there are
accusations that the election was unfair.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Before Bush invaded Iraq, some equipment that could be used for making
nuclear weapons was kept under watch by the UN. But Bush kicked out
the UN weapons inspectors, and since the Bush invasion,
this equipment
has been disappearing. Nobody knows where it is now.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Israel admits that withdrawal from Gaza is an excuse to forget about
peace in the west bank.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Uri Avnery has been saying this all along. Here he analyzes this, and how the photo-analyst's mistaking a stretcher for a rocket is just one example of a practice that frequently leads to shooting a rocket at civilians.
CO2 levels are rising faster and faster,
suggesting some positive
feedback system is accelerating global warming.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-27 because the old link was broken.]
This could mean that the chances of a catastrophic 100-foot rise in sea level is increased. How many feet above sea level do you live?
Is the UK government training Colombian military units to
kill
union organizers and political activists?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
At every turn, Indymedia is getting stonewalled about why its
disks were seized.
Here are some reports that have been published
about possible reasons, and treaties that make it easy to attack
the press globally.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Perhaps the reason why the corporate media do not fear that these treaties will be turned against them is that they are already so in bed with government that they know it will never want to do so.
Zelikow, who led the 9/11 commission's investigation, is now
complaining that people disbelieve the commission's report.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The first step in winning people's trust in the report is to have an honest and thorough investigation and publish all the evidence.
Republicans in Ohio are trying many methods of "voter suppression".
US forces in Afghanistan are now saying it isn't important to capture
Osama bin Laden,
the exact opposite of their previous position.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I agree that one shouldn't overestimate the importance of that one person; however, there's something orwellian about making a big fuss about a goal and then, after it is not achieved, pretending it was never presented as a priority.
An interview with James Kunstler about what peak oil might do to
suburbia.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Mexico's biggest oil field, the world's second largest,
is gradually
going down in production, due to depletion.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Most US TV networks distorted coverage of the presidential debate in favor of Bush, on specific items that are precisely documented.
Bush has intensified the
closure of unlicensed radio stations.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This fits in with a general policy of encouraging consolidation of the
mass media, which increases the
capability to suppress opposing views.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo has provided little useful intelligence, say some in the Pentagon and the FBI. But it has persuaded some prisoners to make false confessions.
Stanley Hilton is suing the US government on behalf of 400 relatives
of 9/11 victims, alleging
that the Bush administration planned the hijackings and the
attacks. He is using subpoena power to give soldiers a legal basis to
spill the secrets they have been ordered to keep, and facing
government threats in return.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The election is being held in Afghanistan, but some warlords are
trying to intimidate the voters--and they run the
polling places too.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
How pollution was illegal in the US until business changed the law...back in 1876. And lots more.
A new book gives information about Operation Northwoods, the plan for faking attacks by Cuba against the US so as to excuse an attack on Cuba. The plan was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and rejected by President Kennedy.
It took decades for this information to become known. Will it take decades to learn what really happened on September 11?
The UK's detention-on-suspicion law is challenged in court.
British hostage Bigley was pleading for Blair to negotiate.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-27 because the old link was broken.]
If a nation is fighting a justified and necessary war, against an enemy that has done things that make war necessary, it would be ludicrous to forfeit any military advantage to save the life of a hostage. A British division in World War II would not have retreated because Nazis threatened to kill some civilians. But Blair cannot appeal to this principle, because people know his war was never justified, and far from being necessary to continue, it is a futile quagmire.
A conclusive determination that Saddam Hussein
did not have
nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
The FBI seized Indymedia servers in the UK, through
a subpoena to its ISP's US office,
and refuses to say why.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Fortunately, Indymedia had backups (they had probably planned for such harrassment).
A car powered
by compressed air is going on sale in Spain.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Compressing the air to run the car will use energy, of course, but it can easily be electricity, and that electricity can come from renewable sources.
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Dubya's rhetoric about "god" resembles that of another leader who launched wars of conquest.
The conquest of Iraq would fulfill a
30-year-old dream, if it succeeds.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Instead of asking how Dan Rather got those documents about Bush,
let's demand
Bush give a straight answer about those facts.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
In India, even when Dalits manage to go to college, they face such strong prejudice that no one will hire them.
Bigoted businessmen faced with affirmative action proposals often pretend this would prevent them from hiring based on merit. However, the problem exists because they don't really judge these people on merit.
The UK Tory leader
accused Blair of lying about Iraq, and others are calling on him to resign.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
US publishers sue to print works
from Iran and Cuba.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_3930.shtml
In Samarra, the Bush forces pretend that
everyone killed was a resistance fighter. In the morgue, the dead women and
children pile up.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This is the persistent blatant lying of people who have learned to have no respect for truth.
Cat Stevens Slams U.S.
Deportation.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
My friend Nick Hill told me:
I suspect there is a feedback system where the amount of money pumped into the republican party by big business is related to how well the republican party are doing in the polls. If the republicans are ahead, business is un-inclined to pump money in. If republicans are lagging, they start pumping money in and turn up the propoganda. This explains how the parties are so often neck and neck in the polls.Therefore, a good democrat must tell pollsters he is voting republican or he is opening up the money tap to make more republicans to counteract his vote.
A peaceful protest against the annexation wall was met with violence from Israeli soldiers.
For statistics on the various forms of violence, see the B'Tselem web site.
Public Citizen beat Bush in court, requiring public rulemaking about nuclear plant rules.
More about a related case.
The Bush forces are gradually losing the war in Iraq.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
North Korea's state religion
worships the ruler,
whose family is treated as divine,
and natural disasters are blamed on the US.
[Reference updated on 2018-08-27 because the old link was broken.]
They need not worry so much about letting Koreans have contact with the outside world. After all, a parallel system in the US manages to maintain itself even though many Americans openly denounce it.
With legal music downloading, the record companies get more than half
the money, as pure profit for no work.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This result is symptomatic of the stranglehold that current copyright law has given the record companies over music listeners and musicians.
The Bush forces reoccupied Samarra, an Iraqi city.
The insurgents followed standard guerrilla tactics: when confronted with overwhelming force, they melt away so they can attack somewhere else later. Thus the occupying troops have really achieved nothing.
Voters
chose Aung San Suu Kyi as "Asia's hero 2004".
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
A soldier who fought in the Bush forces committed suicide as a
result of what he did there.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
I would urge anyone who feels that bad about his life to lose it fighting for freedom rather than throwing it away.
EU arms export rules are failing to block
exports to many countries with oppressive goverments.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Too bad that the US manufactures its own arms.
It can't be restrained from aggression this way.
Greg Palast evaluates the Bush-Kerry debate.
I think it's not just Saudis that need to be investigated carefully for connection with the 9/11 attacks, it's the Bushmen's cover-up.
The Bush forces are
exaggerating their success at training Iraqi soldiers and police.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
This shortfall may be just as well for them, since the Iraqi soldiers
and police they train often fight or spy for the rebels. See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48707-2004Sep24 for
the background.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Several elite Israeli military commanders
condemned the army's activities in the occupied territory, and said that
razing of houses was immoral.
Judges in Nevada used legal
technicalities to reject the MPP's petition to legalize marijuana.
Republicans are pursuing
many parallel attempts to falsify Florida elections.
Prominent Colombian Sociologist Assassinated--
by pro-government gunmen, it seems.
State terrorism, as carried out by the US, UK, Israel, and Russia.
Bush and his cabinet are champions of flip-flop, on various issues.
A study finds that articles published in open-access journals
tend to have more research impact.
I've been pushing for free redistribution of scientific
articles for a decade.
With massive intimidation of voters, the election in Afghanistan
looks set to be a total failure.
The Human Rights Watch report is in
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/asia/afghanistan0904/.
Neither Bush nor Kerry supports abortion
rights.
I am getting mailings urging me to "save the Supreme Court" by
supporting Kerry. I wish I could believe he would do so.
The Globalizer Who Came
In From the Cold.
In the UK, children are being kept indoors and denied the freedom to move about independently.
I've seen the same overprotectiveness in the US as well. It amazes me
to think that children 10 years old are typically forbidden to walk to
a park on their own. I walked to school in Manhatten at the age of 6,
and so did everyone else in my class. It was normal. There is no
reason it should not be normal today.
The death rate in Baghdad has more than doubled since the war,
and are rising still.
As Al Qa'ida become decentralized,
Bush doesn't have a clue about how
to fight it.
Democrats approve Bush tax breaks for corporations
Book review: Secret Evidence.
Only 30% of the "Iraq reconstruction" funds benefit Iraqis.
Cheney persistently tries to give a false impression that there was a
connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qa'ida, while avoiding
actually saying so (since he doesn't want people to be able to
catch him in a specific lie).
At Bush rallies, reporters are not
allowed to talk to the audience!
If I were his opponent, I would do the same thing too, putting
reporters in a cage, when the rally starts. But later, during my
speech, I would tell the reporters that it is wrong to keep them
locked up, and that they are free to leave the cage and mingle with
the crowd.
Who is more dangerous-- bin Laden or Dr
Khan?
Bangladesh is doing a
better job at health and education for the general public than India is,
partly because it has decided to spend more money on these things and less on
the army.
Amnesty International says the Sudan government is still supporting
the Janjaweed militias.
Amnesty International called for an arms embargo to
Sudan in July.
What would the actual conditions in Iraq look like if they were in the
US?
The FBI
never really tried to investigate the origin
of the forged documents that gave Bush "proof" that Saddam Hussein
was buying uranium.
We can guess why. We now know that the only uranium in Iraq is that
which was exploded there by the Bush forces during the war; Saddam was
not buying any. But Bush wanted an excuse for his war, and these
papers provided it. Perhaps that was no accident--perhaps the Bushmen
arranged for these papers to turn up. Perhaps the FBI is not
investigating their origin because Bush or Cheney told them "we
already know".
Bush's ten positions on Iraq
(nine flip-flops).
If it is true that Kerry voted for the war as an act of support for
Bush, I think that is discreditable in itself.
Al Qa'ida
boasts of controlling Afghanistan.
The UK released one of the aliens imprisoned without trial. He
never found out why he was imprisoned, and doesn't know why he was
released.
I am glad they are willing to release these people when they learn
more about the situation--it is better than if they were NOT willing
to consider that a past decision was mistaken. We often see that in
the US.
Diebold computerized voting systems have a back door in the central
tabulating system that makes it easy to
alter vote counts. This can be done remotely by telephone.
You can tell the real purpose of police from looking at
their priorities.
This was written about police in Ireland, and the examples cited are
from there, but I'd expect that it's the same for police in the US or
anywhere.
As Bush destroys the living population of Iraq with dirty uranium
bombs, looters and the Bush forces are
destroying the ancient cities of Sumer, where civilization began.
You could see a lot of irony in this, but the tragedy hurts me too
much for any sort of amusement.
Congressman DeLay's top aides were indicted
for illegal fund-raising.
Interview with Daniel Gross,
leading the Starbucks unionization effort.
A protest temporarily stopped construction of the Annexation Wall,
although
protestors were attacked with gas and other weapons.
Destroying the National Guard: morale is
crumbling among soldiers mobilized to fight a war they know is
unjust.
Civilian casualties in Iraq are caused 2/3 by the Bush
forces and 1/3 by the Iraqi resistance.
The Bush forces say, "We only kill civilians because the insurgents
are fighting us--it is their fault for not accepting the conquest of
their country." The resistance turns that around and says, "We only
kill civilians because the Bush forces are occupying our country--it
is their fault."
These statements are mirror images, but the situation is not
symmetrical. The Bush forces are fighting to conquer Iraq; the
resistance is fighting to liberate their country. Therefore, all these
casualties are the fault of the Bush forces.
Terrible
v. Worse
The US Army is
developing video war games to attract young people to join up.
I don't think this is quite as sinister as the writer puts it--for
boys to play at war is nothing new. These games might have helped
recruiting in previous conditions, but I don't think that video games
will convince many people to risk their lives in an unjust war of
conquest.
I wish that the Army would release these games as free software, with
the source code. Then I could install them and play them myself.
Mothers of troops killed in the Bush forces are starting to
fight back against Bush.
Concealing Pakistani involvement in
the 9/11 attacks.
A Palestinian suicide bomber killed
two members of the Israeli Border Police. The Border Police have a
reputation for particular cruelty.
I don't know whether the woman's decision to the Border Police was a
last-minute expedient or a prior plan. If she decided from the
beginning to attack armed occupation forces, that is a very different
thing from attacking civilians.
An investigation in Iraq has
found many previously unknown Bush-run prisons, and evidence of torture
(including rape) throughout them.
Meanwhile, the Bush forces continue employing the company
whose employees ("contractors", according to the Bushmen)
were caught abusing prisoners.
Burmese exiles are on hunger strike in front of the UN, calling for the UN to
take action against the Burmese military dictatorship.
A former Northern Ireland police informer
plead guilty to murdering a lawyer who defended IRA suspects. The
police knew the murder was planned and did nothing to stop it. There
is pressure now for a public inquiry into the whole business.
Ashcroft's
phony war on terrorism.
How does Bush plan to get more
troops to feed into Iraq?
Only a few percent of these troops will be killed or wounded
in combat, but a large fraction of them are likely to get
sick from Dirty Uranium bombs.
How anti-trust law in the US has become
ineffective.
The case for impeachment:
There is no doubt Blair misled parliament over the war.
Indigenous protestors and trade union members were beaten by police,
then arrested, in Oaxaca.
The original spanish.
Later I read that the police had published doctored photos trying to
hide how they had beaten the arrested people. This link points to an
article about the
police doctoring the photos.
The
NATO administration of Kosovo is imposing privatization. And
perhaps privatization was a secret motive for the NATO intervention in
Kosovo.
How millions of Black Americans are being
stopped from voting.
Some of the methods involve intimidation that plays on the consequences
of being poor in America.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is trying to hamper the use of absentee
ballots by Americans that are outside the US.
Doug Rokke commanded the US Army's Dirty Uranium decontamination team
after the first Gulf War. He found that
decontamination was nearly
impossible and said DU should be banning, so the army fired him.
Before Dubya attacked Iraq, he warned of the danger from DU.
30 of his 100-man team had already died in 2002, just 10 years after
they did their work. Rokke is badly sick from the uranium he inhaled.
Here is a
speech made by Rokke.
Warning: the US is moving towards imposing fingerprinting of everyone.
I love what the US used to stand for, but I would rather leave the
country and go into exile than submit to that demand.
Experience in other countries shows that such measures do not prevent
terrorist attacks, not even those which are not sponsored by a
government.
Edwards
promises no return to the draft.
There is a
new attempt to challenge the constitutionally of changes
in the US copyright law, that have made many out-of-print works
into orphans, unable to move forward to the computer age.
Double standards: documents about Bush that are not certainly
authentic, vs the documents Bush used for war that were certainly
fake.
Further injustice in the Moussaoui case.
Challenging Bush and his friends to take a vacation in Iraq.
Howard Dean challenges Bush to say
whether he will impose conscription.
Republican senators are criticizing Bush for "mistakes".
However,
they are not prepared to admit that attacking Iraq was a mistake (and
illegitimate), or that continuing the occupation is a mistake.
This article analyzes what would be needed for the Bush forces
to win.
It does not point out that this would be a cruel and inexcusable act
of imperial conquest.
Putin
accuses 'complicit' West of harbouring Chechen terrorists. A Chechen rebel
leader has claimed responsibility for the attack on the Beslan school.
Even though the Russian troops have committed many more atrocities
in Chechnya, that doesn't excuse the butchery of Beslan. Surely
Chechen rebels can find ways to fight Russia without murdering children.
Embarrassing find: comparing South Korea's WMD program with Iran's.
Why the West is
Losing.
Bush pretends not to see global warming, but his brother can't
avoid the hurricanes.
How Bush is shifting
taxes from the rich to the middle class--step, so people won't realize
where it is leading.
A Republican proposal would use a forest fire as an
excuse to open a large wilderness area to logging.
Here's how I learned of the plan:
The Bushmen changed their story about the copters that fired at
the crowd in Baghdad, but the new story is false too.
Rumsfeld is reported to have had a secret plan drawn up for provoking
terrorist groups to carry out attacks against the US, so that they
would provide an occasion to attack these groups.
Secret papers show Blair was
warned a year in advance that invading Iraq would lead to chaos, and
that any new Iraqi government would be likely to get the same WMDs that
Saddam was claimed to have.
In other words, Bliar has been faking all along
when claiming that the invasion would improve things,
either for Iraqis or for the West.
Meanwhile, here's information on Allawi's
background of bombings in Iraq.
I don't think it was wrong to plant bombs to attack Saddam's
forces--he was a dictator, and a dictator is never legitimate. As
long as the bombs were not aimed at civilians, I would not call them
terrorism, just as bombing the Bush forces or Iraqi police
collaborators is not terrorism. The article gives conflicting
claims about whether Allawi's bombings included terrorism.
Former UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali blames Bush for increasing
world terrorism, and says the Bush
forces should leave Iraq.
American Jews have started a
campaign to support the next US president in pushing for peace
between Israel and the Palestinians. Although they support Israel in
general, they reject the Israel-can-do-no-wrong lobby exemplified by
AIPAC.
Baghdad's Thriving
Kidnapping Industry.
Perhaps one of the reasons Bush has diverted "reconstruction" funds to
security is that it's impossible to do any reconstruction with the
situation as it is. However, no one working with the Bush forces
could ever restore security in Iraq, except through massive butchery.
Anyone attempting this would be despised by most Iraqis as a
collaborator.
Medical doctors
argue with the evidence that was
used to argue that David Kelly committed suicide.
The CIA has
fewer people searching for bin Laden now than on
11 Sep 2001.
Putin is
using terrorism as an excuse to eliminate election of
state governors. How would this make anyone safer?
Bush criticizes Putin's plan:
Some would criticize Bush for this, since it is hypocritical given
Bush's own policies. I disagree; even though it is tragic that Bush
opposes democracy in the US, it remains better for him to support it
in Russia than oppose it there. Bush is indeed a hypocrite, but let's
criticize what he does that is wrong, rather than what he says that is
right.
A court decision in Alaska ruled that possession of small amounts of
marijuana is legal under state law. Meanwhile, the MPP, which
helped in this court case, has put a referendum on the ballot
to treat marijuana like alcohol.
The government of India has decided to
repeal the unjust "anti-terrorism" law.
The party now in power went to the mat to oppose this law when it was
passed by the previous government, and is prepared to act on its
opposition now that it is in power. I wish the US had an opposition
party that was committed this much to freedom and justice.
A study of
"friendly AI"--how to design artificial intelligence so
that it won't threaten humanity's freedom and existence.
Who really
kidnaped Italian and Iraqi aid workers in Baghdad?
Police in various parts of the UK have been authorized to impose
blanket curfews on people under 16,
with no recourse.
A teenager is going to court against this.
Police in London are stopping and questioning people
in the underground just because they look foreign.
Mordechai Vanunu has received the LennonOno
Grant for Peace.
An
Autopsy of the American Dream
Police in California attacked a nonviolent sit-in by
putting pepper in
the protestors' eyes, one person at a time. Now they are on trial.
The Pentagon's casualty counts of Americans in the Bush forces are an
undercount. They list 7000 wounded but do not count 17000 others who
were also wounded.
800 of them are psychotic--that's almost as large as the number that
have been killed.
More evidence that Bush fled his National Guard duty because
he was abusing drugs and would have failed the physical exam.
The Bush Drug Lottery
Flops.
Retired US generals and military strategists are saying that
Bush has
lost the war in Iraq--and they say that the commanders realize this.
One reports that Bush is planning to exterminate the population of Falluja, just after the election.
Soldiers understand keeping secrets or lying about tactics
in order to defeat an enemy. But when they are ordered to
lie to their country about whether they have won or lost,
the effect is to corrupt them--perhaps permanently.
Meanwhile, the US army reserve and national guard are
being used up.
Even Newsweek is starting to admit that Bush's plan is
falling apart--although it pretends that Iraqis "hate the
insurgents" and that the resistance is "unfortunate".
What's unfortunate in Iraq is that the country was invaded by a jerk
who is prepared to keep up the lie no matter how threadbare it gets.
Librarians are
organizing the largest opposition to the USA PAT RIOT act.
However, it is not enough to exempt libraries from unreasonable
searches for information about you. Your civil liberties should be
respected fully, not just when you're in a library.
Costa Rica asks to be
removed from the list of countries in the Bush
coalition. While this will not withdraw any troops from the Bush
forces, it is still good to reduce even symbolic support for wars of conquest.
California to Sue Diebold
over False Claims regarding electronic
voting machines.
The US Census Bureau
reports that poverty is rising in the US.
Bush is using
deceptive accounting measures to disguise the fact that
he is running the national debt past the limit approved by Congress.
He has added 1.3 trillion dollars to the debt in 4 years.
Palestinian and Jewish activist organizations have launched
a campaign for sanctions against Israel as long as the
occupation of the Palestinian territories continues.
The UN Secretary-General has said that the Bush
invasion of Iraq was illegal, and that he doubts the planned
elections can really be held.
The report says he has been saying similar things all along,
though in softer words.
Oil prices
continue to rise, as demand exceeds the maximum supply.
The coming new oil fields referred to here may be those described
elsewhere in another
article as the last few left to be developed.
The Clinton administration lied to Congress and
trained Indonesian army units that were connected with massacres
in East Timor.
The UK was also involved.
The ACLU has taken up the case of people who arrested for wearing
unfriendly shirts at a Bush rally.
There are many other instances of
silencing and punishing Americans for criticizing Bush.
Clarence Darrow is quoted as saying, "I have never killed a man, but I
have read many obituaries with pleasure." I don't think people should
be executed for crimes, even huge crimes such as Dubya's. However,
reading Dubya's obituary would be a pleasure, if it comes soon enough
to make a difference. Not as much as Cheney's, though!
Building a wall between Palestinian children and
their schools.
Polution from the burning World Trade Center 'could cause more
deaths than attack'.
Comparing Sudan
and other forms of terror.
(This article says that the victims in massacres in Darfur are
Muslim;--the other reports say they are non-Muslims and their
persecutors are Muslim. I don't think this changes the conclusions,
though.)
Israel has put a peace activist in prison without a trial, citing
"secret evidence" (which often means "lies"). This resembles the
practices of the apartheid government of South Africa.
For reference, see the third article in this page:
"I am dismayed that the most effective anti-Kerry ad was the one that
highlighted the one time in his life he told the unvarnished truth
."
The Bush regime is indeed considering
attacking Iran.
The goal of preventing nuclear proliferation is important, but the
Bush regime has shown little respect for this goal except when it
suits their other goals. The invasion of Iraq is the greatest impetus
for a country such as Iran to seek nuclear weapons.
I would have greater respect for US policies, and probably
so would Iran's government, if they were applied more uniformly,
including Israel's nuclear weapons too.
New Scientist: Copyright is hampering our basic freedoms, by Danny O'Brien
The way my friends in New York say it: "DRM is theft".
Book review: The War on Civil Liberties.
A journalist's dying act:
televise the Bush forces' attack
on a crowd in Iraq.
We Should Not Have Allowed 19 Murderers to Change our World --
Fisk
Arguing that Kerry should withdraw and give someone more spirited a chance
to run against Bush.
While I don't support Kerry, I am not convinced that someone else
would have a better chance to beat Bush. Bush and his men control
most of the media--and most is enough to do the job--and they have the
skill, the will and the money to make a mountain out of any molehill
in a shadow of a shade of a flaw in whoever they wish to discredit.
How Do You Say
"Death Squad?"
See www.killercoke.org for more information about their
exploits.
The Israeli army contains units of religious students (the Jewish
equivalents of the Taliban) who obey specific rabbis. These rabbis
have just authorized
killing civilians for the sake of security. Rabbis for Human
Rights refuted their reasoning, but the students won't care about
that.
Ashcroft has taught police in the US to treat protest as an
occupying army would--never mind laws--and taught the FBI to
assume "that dissident speech and associations should be prevented
because they were incipient steps towards the possible ultimate
commission of an act which might be criminal."
If they really believe in shutting down associations that might lead
to crime, they ought to close down all corporations first. It's not
unusual for corporations to engage systematically in crime; Think of
Enron, and Coca Cola Company.
Not every corporation engages in crime, just as not all protestors do;
but if that's not enough excuse to permit protest, why should it be an
excuse for corporations?
A former Black Pather Party organizer, who was convicted of murder
(but claims to have been framed), is being kept in prison
illegally despite laws saying he is now entitled to parole.
Several Black Panther Party organizers were convicted of murder
in trials that smell bad.
Richard Clarke is
condemning the invasion of Iraq, saying it "made people hate us."
Amen to that.
However, I think it is just as well that steps have not been taken to
"protect" trains and stores from bombings, because (1) there hasn't
been another bombing in the US in 3 years, so the danger is pretty
small, and (2) so-called "protective" measures are likely to be
tyrannical as well as protective. They would be the sort of intrusions
that make people feel they are being protected instead of really
protecting anyone.
AMTRAK's policy of demanding identification from passengers is already
going too far, and therefore I don't use AMTRAK--I take buses instead.
I am worried by the reported plans to try to "protect" city subways,
which can't possibly be effective unless they turn cities into police
states. All this to protect against a minor cause of death. 4,000
Americans die in road accidents every month; instead of paying for
more police on subways and buses, let's run more subways and buses, so
that more people leave their cars home. That would really save lives.
Specifics of how Bush
told the FBI not to investigate bin Ladens, Dr. Khan, etc.
Interview
with Putin regarding Chechnya.
During School Siege, Russia Took
Captives in Chechnya
I'm encouraged by the openness Putin shows now towards changes
in the policy towards Chechnya.
Should Russia be willing to negotiate with Chechens? The Russian
troops have committed acts equally brutal and much more in number in
Chechnya, and we still think that Chechens should be willing to
negotiate with the Russian government. So it seems fair to apply the
same principle in the other direction and say that Russians should
negotiate with the Chechen leaders (who have condemned the raid on the
school).
1000 Americans in the Bush forces have died in Iraq, but Iraqi casualties are
uncounted.
The WWF says that many species (including fish and trees) are threatened
as a result of global trade.
Bush is against terrorism, except when it involves killing
tourists in Cuba.
Chile's endangered alerce tree faces extinction, although protected,
because of weak
law enforcement.
Even as the physical evidence of what happened to the World Trade
Center was being destroyed, people were objecting, trying to stop it.
Dubya and his men
must have intended to destroy the evidence.
Millions will
die due to climate change.
The CIA has
held as many as 100 secret prisoners in Iraq.
Now that documents have been found to discredit Bush's phony National
Guard service, his supporters are
fabricating excuses to call them false.
This is an example of how Bush treats any unpleasant truth (including
the truth that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and the truth
of global warming): mobilize people to lie to discredit it.
As Bush fights to grab Iraqi oil, minor hoods fight over the
oil of Equatorial Guinea.
The UK and US governments used various dirty tricks and lies to remove
the population of the Chagos Islands, about 35 years ago. Many
committed suicide, having nowhere to live and nothing to eat, but some
went to court. They won a ruling allowing them to go home to some of
the Chagos Islands, but
Bliar has sabotaged it.
I partly disagree with some of the views expressed by the author about
other issues, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but those don't negate the
article's main point.
A Canadian province risks nullifying its
privacy laws
by letting a US company handle its health data.
It appears that the school-attackers in Russia were not
Chechens at all. (Who were they?)
The US is pursuing research into scientific
techniques to control people's minds. Some techniques may actually
be used today, though it is hard to be sure just how far they work.
Did the 9/11 investigation look at why and how
weapons were prepositioned on other planes that day?
Free software enabled Indymedia to organize large
protests against the RNC.
Neocons in the US are supporting Chechnya against Russia,
simply because they want to weaken Russia.
I disagree with this author on several points. From what I have
heard, Putin does more or less control the media in Russia; he may not
have imposed strict Soviet-style censorship, but opposing candidates
could not get coverage. The Chechen situation is clearly a political
issue. Meanwhile, we should not let our disgust for the atrocities
committed (by whomever it may have been) against Russian children lead
us to condone the larger atrocities committed by Russian troops in
Chechnya.
Building a DNA database of everyone in the US,
for surveillance.
The Optimism of Uncertainty,
by Howard Zinn
Representatives of the megacorporations are opposing a UN plan to
hold them accountable for respecting the human rights of people.
The warning that this would "discourage investment" in poor
countries--which is really rather a threat than a warning--
constitutes an admission that what businesses "invest" in, in poor
countries, is the opportunity to trample people's rights.
No country ought to welcome, or even tolerate, this kind of
investment. "If you intend to treat workers like that, not in our
country!" should be the position of each and every national
government. However, "free trade" lures them into a foolish
competition for a larger share of "investment", where each country
tolerates more and more abuse of human rights (and of the
environment), hoping to win "investment" away from other countries.
If only one country did this, it might profit (though at terrible
expense). But when they all do it, none of them gains anything, and
the only result is increased abuse everywhere. A UN standard could be
the answer.
The objections of the megacorporations don't prove that the plan is
flawless, but they do suggest it is on the right track. If a plan
doesn't make them squeal, it's surely not going to solve the problem.
"Decontextualizing" terrorism--but only the part that isn't
committed by armies.
Prison conditions in the UK are
driving increasing numbers of prisoners to commit suicide.
I would expect it is worse in the US, though I don't have an article
in hand to substantiate it.
Dalits have been sentenced to execution for
resisting massacres by upper-caste armies.
Senator Graham's book gives details on the
lies that were used to justify attacking Iraqa, and on how aspects
of the 9/11 investigation were suppressed. It also shows that the army
was preparing to attack Iraq a year before the war took place.
The Iraqi puppet government has excluded Al Jazeera permanently from
reporting in Iraq, citing
objections to their "editorial policy".
This shows what Bush means by "freedom and democracy".
The Bush forces are
abandoning more Iraqi cities.
Perhaps their strategy is to hold only the oil fields and pipelines
and supply lines, and let cities alone, as an excuse for not rebuilding
the damage they did.
Dude,
where are the Arabs?
How
Israel sabotages nonviolent resistance and opposition.
A protestor's experience in NYC,
being arrested along with bystanders, kept in jail illegally, etc.
Bush plans to undermine Social Security.
Miloshevic has been denied the right to represent himself.
The crimes he is accused of (and, I think, guilty of) are grave, but
this doesn't justify denying him a fair trial. Meanwhile, "political
grandstanding" is what judges say when any accused person tries to
raise larger issues that the judges would like to suppress. Anyone
accused should have the opportunity to criticize his accusers.
Israel has
refused to let UK journalist Ewa Jasciewicz enter the
country to write about the Israeli peace movement.
The US also
excludes UK journalists.
Ashcroft is proposing to establish concentration
camps for "enemy combattants".
Bush is trying to
privatize social security again.
The result would be
disaster.
The facts show that
national ID cards do not prevent terrorism.
An Israel spy scandal is damaging the
influence of AIPAC. It may have to do with jockeying about whether to
invade Iran.
Bush says there is no plan to resume conscription, but seems
to be arranging to do so.
The argument that conscription will restrain wars of aggression is not
just theoretically flawed. Historically, it didn't work. The draft
did not stop the US government from entering the Vietnam War--it just
manufactured a fraudulent excuse. It did not stop various US
interventions in other American countries.
Police in New York City arrested 1000 protestors during the Republican
Convention,
including the press, and often acted indiscriminately.
The police held these protestors in jail so long that a judge found
the city in contempt and fined the city government. This looks like
an attempt to prevent them from participating in protests. It wasn't
the first (see previous notes for other dirty tricks).
One person was
charged with attacking a policeman who was, at the time, wantonly
attacking protestors with his motorcycle. I hope that he succeeded in
preventing the cop from hurting innocent people.
Through all this, Mayor Bloomberg chose the side of the police rather
than that of democracy.
One of Schwarzenegger's favorite stories is about how he was
influenced by a presidential debate between Nixon and Humphrey.
There never was such a debate.
However, while we consider what this falsehood says about
Schwarzenegger's character, and that of the journalists that make
light of it, we should not get distracted from the more basic
deceptions underneath. For instance, Schwarzenegger equates the
welfare state with socialism, and right-wing commentators label
cruelty as "compassionate".
The War Neither Kerry Supporters or Critics Want to Talk About: The Real Vietnam
A secret government
report says that Bush forces soldiers raped prisoners in Iraq, and
committed other kinds of physical cruelty. It also ties the torture to
higher-ups.
Evidence that Cheney was involved in managing the 9/11 attacks.
Witnesses report that additional bombs were used in the bombing of the
Oklahoma City federal building.
Arab-Americans should not waste their votes on Kerry.
Police arrested union organizers
for no reason, as they held a rally
against Starbucks Coffee's union-busting.
Open Letter to Congress from 25 Nobel Laureates
(to provide free access to scientific literature).
The athletes in the Iraqi olympic soccer team
used their moment
in the limelight to condemn the Bush occupation of Iraq.
Increasing the level of political intimidation in the US, Bush is
trying to subpoena logs to find out who posted info about delegates to
the Republican Convention.
If I were participating in the Republican Convention,
I wouldn't want anyone to know it.
Why the Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike.
The peak oil extraction rate
seems to be already past.
>From now on, available oil will decrease.
A whistleblower in the INS has exposed visas-for-bribes
corruption that is related to the 9/11 attacks. For this service
to the public, she has been punished by her employers.
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Ten years ago I used to give money to my local public radio station,
but I stopped when I heard them broadcasting commercials. (They don't
admit these are commercials, they call them another name, but they are
commercials.) But the right-wing attitude that I heard in their
political reporting even in the Clinton years bothered me too.
Islamist terrorists--either real or fake--
are holding French
journalists hostage in Iraq, and making demands about French schools.
The article argues that these are fake Islamists, working for Bush,
and that their goal is to manipulate French public opinion in support
of Bush. I would not put this past the Bushmen. On the other hand, I
can believe that real Islamists might do this, thinking that the
French government will not have the courage to stand firm.
I hope that the French government and French people stand firm, and
refuse to let this act of terrorism influence them in any fashion.
That way, it will fail in its aims regardless of what those aims
really are.
A
poll finds that half of New Yorkers believe the Bush administration
knew about the 9/11 attacks and consciously let them happen.
Two thirds demand a real investigation.
I can't draw such specific conclusions and be confident of them.
However, the reluctance to investigate carefully what happened on that
day shows that Bush has something dirty to hide.
The Palm Beach election supervisor is
excluding poll-watchers from her
own election vote count, and using this lack of supervision to
arbitrarily rejecting absentee ballots cast by Democrats.
Palestinian protestors
climbed the Israeli annexation wall
to prove it is mainly a barrier against the weak and helpless.
Here's a site that argues that the most important acts of terror and
war against the US for the last 6 decades were all
fake.
According to what I've read, some of these charges are justified
but some are not.
The fraudulence of the supposed Gulf of Tonkin attack is well
established.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was not fake. It was indeed a
response to the US trade embargoes, but it was not a compelled
response: Japan also had the option of ceasing its aggression in
China. The Japanese leaders chose to start a war with the US rather
than to stop their expansion. A side point: Germany declared war on
the US first, not the other way around. It might have been hard for
Roosevelt to get a declaration of war against Germany if Germany had
not already made one.
The Iraqi attack on Kuwait was real, and even if a story about
stealing incubators and dying babies was falsified, the truth was bad
enough. However, the US encouraged the attack by having its
ambassador telling Hussein that it would not object if Iraq conquered
Kuwait. This made the US government partially responsible for the
attack.
I have never before seen the accusation that the Oklahoma City bombing
was carried out by the government, and at first sight it seems
implausible. McVeigh's lawyers would have pounced on any evidence
that the bombing was done in some other way.
The Sudanese government has arrested refugees who testified about the
murderous activities of government-supported militias.
US media will broadcast lies about Kerry's war record, but the truth
about Bush's national guard record (and blackmail record) is too
controversial for them.
Settlement Growth: Bad for America, Worse for Israel
The US media are trying to marginalize protests against the Republican
Convention, just as they failed to show the
opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
It's Peace [in Najaf] but the
Dead are Everywhere.
US-sponsored torture,
from El Salvador to Iraq.
Gandhi's grandson led a rally of 2000 Palestinians and Israelis
against the annexation wall.
Air fresheners, carpets, heater fumes, air conditioning all
increase asthma.
Unarmed marchers on a peace mission to Najaf, under the direction of
Ayatollah Sistani,
were fired at with mortars, then with guns. It is
not certain who fired the mortars, but the gunfire came from the Bush
forces.
Police in Florida are trying to scare Blacks
into not voting.
This is part of a
widespread pattern of trying to stop
Blacks from voting in many states.
When Blacks do vote, their votes are especially likely to be called
"spoiled" and
not counted.
The Indonesian army is in a quagmire
fighting against the decades-long insurgency in Aceh.
The rebels in Aceh are Muslim extremists, and I don't think I would
want to live under the government they would establish. But there is
no use trying to impose a non-Islamic government on them by force
when most of the Acehnese wouldn't support it.
The reason Dubya's men restrict and arrest protestors is simply out of
concern they might be injured... by Dubya's
men
Defend the Homeland!-- Support All
Suspicious Activity
The Bush administration continues to try to authorize
torture, by redefining the meaning of the word "torture" that the
law forbids.
People ridiculed Clinton for splitting hairs about the meanings of
"sex" and "is". Splitting hairs about the meaning of "torture"
is deadly serious.
Environmental changes have caused a great
increase in many kinds of brain diseases.
This article is about the UK, but I'd expect it is the same elsewhere.
A US army investigation has
inculpated commanders at Abu Ghraib for torture there.
Knowing what we know about the explicit Bush decisions to authorize
torture, it would be an injustice to let the buck stop there.
The Guantanamo kangaroo courts have begun--accepting evidence
obtained by torture. So they could torture you into confessing to
a murder, then fry you for it.
If Bush is ever put on trial for these crimes, I hope he gets a fair
trial. I would not support anything less. It would be turnabout for
Bush to be tortured into confessing having connived at the murder of
thousands of New Yorkers (regardless of whether he really did this, he
might confess it under torture); but by doing so we would demean
ourselves, and set a bad precedent that might later endanger the
rights of others. Rather than giving vent to feelings of anger by
torturing Bush, we should set a higher moral standard for ourselves,
and be proud of having decided not to torture him.
Nonviolent protestors against the annexation wall confronted Israeli
soldiers who had detained Palestinian youths for hours for no
particular reason. One of the protestors was
dragged away, imprisoned, and beaten by the police.
A UK member of parliament plans to move the impeachment of Tony Blair
on charges of
deliberately misleading the public and parliament.
"There is more than one way not to tell the truth: half-truths, omissions
and deliberate ambiguities can be just as effective as crude lies if the
mission is to mislead." Well said!
Criticizing the
usual story of why the US developed and used nuclear weapons.
I disagree with one aspect of the author's point of view. The Soviet
Union was a bloody dictatorship, and at the end of World War II it had
a large army and a penchant for conquest. Even despite US nuclear
weapons, the Soviet Union took over and occupied eastern Europe for 45
years. Such a threat justifies strong countermeasures, and I will not
criticize people for thinking to develop super weapons as a way to
hold the Soviet armies in check.
The use of nuclear weapons on cities in Japan is a separate question.
The US government has escalated the War on Copying by
raiding people who were sharing songs and movies over the
Internet.
This is an example of the result of having a government dominated by
large corporations. It serves them, not the public.
Meanwhile, the music factories have
sued almost 1000 individuals for sharing music.
Friendship is sharing. Anyone who tells you it is wrong to share
is the enemy of you and all the friends you might share with.
Arundhati Roy: TIDE? OR IVORY SNOW? Public Power in the Age of Empire
The US National Academy of Engineering sent its members an email
criticizing the US goverment for interfering with scientific cooperation
by making it hard for scientists to get visas to visit the US.
It talked about efforts to convince US consular officials to change
their policies, and how hard it will be to convince foreign scientists
that the US is an "open and welcoming country".
I sent back this message:
The US is not an open and welcoming country. For instance, if these
scientists do visit the US, they will be fingerprinted like criminals.
There is also the danger that they will be arrested, as Dmitri
Sklyarov was (see www.eff.org)--or shipped summarily to Syria or Egypt
to be tortured. (For more information on one known case,
see.
Rather than trying to convince our colleagues that it is good to visit
the US, we should recommend that they uphold their dignity and safety
by staying away. I would stay away from the US if I were them.
International scientific conferences should be held outside the US, in
countries that are open and welcoming.
Marin County is considering a resolution opposing dirty uranium
weapons.
More on the background of Leuren Moret.
One caveat about that article is that "atomicity" is not a meaningful
way to measure radioactivity.
This article explains that point
and many other useful points about dirty uranium bombs.
A study of Al Qa'ida reports that it is
decentralized--more a social
movement than a unified organization. Its strength, while not zero,
is overestimated by governments that are manipulating public fears.
The official 9/11 investigation says that the
FBI failed to do its
best in stopping the funding for 9/11.
Direct
intervention by the Bush administration played a role in this
failure.
The US is
supporting expansions of Israeli settlements in Palestine.
The Arctic ice cap is
breaking up--for the first time in
human history, but surely not the last.
At last the Democrats criticize one thing Bush has done: cut
overtime pay for many Americans.
If they start criticizing 20 more, I will start to say
they aren't gutless.
The US military
blocked a UN human rights investigator from visiting prisons in
Afghanistan.
Driving land cruisers in the desert has caused a tremendous
increase in dust storms, world wide.
John Kerry: the Warchurian
Candidate
OCAP is fighting against campaigns in Toronto to sweep away
homeless people.
In little over one year, almost half the soldiers in one unit in the
Bush forces
have developed cancer--almost certainly due to the dirty uranium
bombs that were used in large quantities.
Over half the troops that participated in the first Gulf War in 1991
are now on permanent disability. This could also be due to dirty
uranium bombs. They were used then in smaller quantities, so troops
got a smaller dose and would not get sick as fast.
Many of Iraq's cities may now be uninhabitable, by the standards of
people who are not desperate.
What was the other jet that was near United
93 when it crashed?
Iraqi athletes at the Olypmic Games are
speaking out against Bush.
The Sierra Club charges the Bush administration with deliberately
suppressing information that people working near the World Trade
Center were in danger from the fumes.
Palestine: A
Very One-Sided War
The official 9/11 investigation failed to investigate whether the
reported cell phone calls from passengers could really have
worked. It appears that the planes were flying too high for this,
and that the calls must have been faked.
Neither Bush nor Kerry is trying to prepare the US to get through the
effects of decreasing oil production.
The Bush forces have bombed Najaf heavily, but al Sadr's army
remains determined to fight.
A
visit to al Sadr's stronghold.
"Let them starve to death" is the Israeli
state's policy toward all Palestinians--those now in prison, and
those yet to be put in prison.
Dubya will be the subject of unofficial war crimes trials
in New York City. Too bad they can't really arrest him and
imprison him.
The Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike is motivated by many forms of torture
that are applied in Israeli prisons. Israeli officials call this
nonviolent activism "terrorism".
Like Bush, their policy is, "lies built on a foundation of lies."
When Nader criticized Sharon's power over US policy towards Israel,
the Anti-Defamation League called him a "bigot". However,
criticizing
governments is not racism. This particular false accusation is
frequently used against anyone who criticies Israeli policy.
Here is Ralph Nader's response to the Anti-Defamation League.
If the ADL makes this policy consistent, it will accuse me, and my
(Jewish) Israeli friends and relatives, of hating Jews. That would
make the accusation totally absurd and divorced from reality.
World military spending nears
1 trillion dollars per year, mainly as a
result of increased US spending. And this doesn't include the costs
of war.
Compared with the 500 billion that the US will spend, some 9 billion
dollars (almost 2 percent) are unaccounted for in Iraq.
Some of this money went to Iraqis, who are mostly unemployed.
Some of it went to Cheney and his rich cronies.
Bush gambles as Najaf burns.
The 9/11 Commission
report has contradictions and mysterious omissions
in regard to how the hijackings were handled by the FAA and NORAD.
Climate modeling yields projections of sour wine, less milk,
and sweltering heat in US cities that are currently livable.
Is Kerry really a lesser evil? Or is this just a distraction
from what's really wrong in the US?
Saudi Arabia says it has imprisoned a US citizen at the request of the
Bush regime, which pretends that it can't get Saudi Arabia to release
him.
Bush follows the Humpty Dumpty approach to laws: they mean what Bush
says they mean. It follows that the Bush regime has no more legal
standing than any criminal.
Where Kerry
really stands on the environment.
How Bush
sullied the once heroic term "draft evader."
The US is
cutting the funds for AIDS treatment; Bush is trying to
provide just enough to keep the problem out of the news until after
the election.
Since treatment delayed costs much more, the only way this policy
makes sense is if it is intended to kill these people. However, at
least it is a positive sign that it suggests Bush is acting as if
there will really be an election.
(Temporary) Continuance of the American Way of Life At Stake in Iraq.
At least if oil consumption decreases it may limit the
extent of global warning.
When the poor-middle class can't afford to live in suburbs and drive
around any more, they are likely to move into cities and semi-gentrify
them, forcing the poor into the suburbs where they can't go anywhere
except by occasional buses designed to take them to and from work.
Sharon has torn up Bush's "road map" by announcing plans to
expand settlements in Palestine.
The annexation wall is designed to
take Palestine's water,
leaving many Palestinian farmers with none.
Anticipatory harrassment of activists by police and federal
agents: sometimes they tell your boss you are a "terrorist",
trying to scare you that you'll be fired.
More information on the plans to impose round the clock surveillance
on 56 activists.
If I were one of them, I'd have lots of fun giving those police
watchers a hard time.
Free software voting machines
are a step forward,
but not enough.
Mordechai Vanunu defied the prohibition on speaking to non-Israelis by
giving a series of interviews to the press.
Here is an interview with
Democracy Now.
A Republican congressman made news saying it was a
"mistake" to attack Iraq,
and entertains the possibility that he was lied to by Bush & Co.
He is not running for re-election--perhaps others who do seek
reelection are afraid to speak up. But why should this be,
when polls show most of the public even now thinks it was wrong?
Forgotten news: On Sep 12, 2001, William Safire
reported
that the Bush administration received terrorist threats
from someone who knew internal communications codes.
As far as I know, the official investigation has not even looked at
this. (If I'm wrong, please let me know.)
A
volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands could scour the east coast
of North America, and there could be nothing left on many islands in
the Carribean.
The Abu Ghraib whistleblower is
getting death threats.
Apparently some people in the army are angry that
their friends are getting punished.
Developments in neuroscience are starting to endanger the
freedom to think--even inside one's own head.
Barbie in a Blender Day celebrates a court victory over
Mattel's attemps to censor art.
This note is a little too late for this year's celebration, but if
they do it next year, you'll have a lot of time to prepare.
The Iraqi police in Najaf ordered all journalists to leave,
then shot at them when mere orders did not suffice.
2000 civilians, unarmed from now, have gone to Najaf
to act as
"human shields" for al Sadr.
A year after a major US power blackout, Bush still
supports the deregulation policies that caused it.
The US military investigation of torture in Abu Ghraib is a blatant
whitewash, leaving the generals free to order
others to do the torture in future.
A year after a major US power blackout, Bush
still supports the
deregulation policies that caused it.
The US military investigation of torture in Abu Ghraib is a blatant
whitewash, leaving the generals free to order others to do the torture
in future.
Starbucks is making false accusations in an attempt to fire a union
organizer.
The Iraqi puppet government has banned Al Jazeera for giving
"a bad picture of Iraq". Interestingly, this does not accuse
Al Jazeera of lying.
"Bad picture" could mean that Al Jazeera was not parroting the
official line, or that it is as biased as US media but in
a different direction.
Al-Sadr's militia is
gaining strength as Shi'as in Iraq
become increasingly hostile to the occupation.
UK
oks use of evidence obtained by torture (in Guantanamo) provided
the torture wasn't "connived at" by the UK.
The claim that torture in Guantanamo is not supported by the UK
government is absurd, given the decades-long practice where each
government spies on the other country's citizens for the other
country's government.
Bush is
using the distraction provided by Iraq as cover to change many
federal regulations--generally to favor business and shaft the public.
The Iraqi puppet government has
charged Ahmed Chalabi and Salem
Chalabi (organizer of Saddam Hussein's trial) counterfeiting and
murder, respectively.
It looks to me like a gang of thieves falling out.
I would not be shocked if the charges were true,
nor if they were a complete frame-up; both sides are so
far from honesty.
Venezuelan President Chavez
won the recall referendum.
I'm proud to say that I was asked for, and gave, a message
of support for his campaign. I hope I gained a few
votes for him among free software users.
A good critique of the values of modern economics, first published in
1966.
Palestinian prisoners on
hunger strike--many of whom have never
been charged with a crime--are demanding decent food, family visits
and not to be kept for long periods in solitary confinement.
An Israeli official described the hunger strike as "terrorism".
Bigotry against lower castes in India remains so strong--and so
cruel--that they are almost entirely excluded from most professional
and business jobs.
US government "terror alerts"
magnify the intended effect of terrorism, which is to disrupt
people's lives and minds.
Meanwhile, when the administration gets real information, its response
may
be not to issue any warning.
This reinforces the conclusion that these "terror alerts"
serve no purpose except to scare people.
A group of bereaved parents has begun organizing an anti-induction
campaign, aimed at getting recruits
to refuse to join the IDF.
It's all-out war in Najaf again. The Bush forces won't estimate
civilian casualties because they don't want people to think about
them.
They may be following the Vietnam-War practice of counting all dead
bodies as "insurgents", to present massacres as victories.
Kerry says he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even if he
had known Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.
Does Kerry say what reason he believes would have justified
this war?
A timeline of Bush administration actions in regard to Iraq shows that
the administration, not intelligence agencies, were to blame for
the false warnings about Iraqi weapons.
A father in the UK calls on Blair to get his son, who is being
tortured, out of Guantanamo.
Bush now
opposes inspections in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, in
effect making the treaty much less effective.
Perhaps Bush gives low priority to the danger posed by development of
weapons of mass destruction, when they are not a convenient excuse.
Or perhaps he intends to invade every country that develops them
and feels a treaty is superfluous.
You and I might call Bush a paranoid megalomaniac and mean it loosely.
Various psychiatrists say this, and
mean it literally.
Porter Goss, Bush's nominee to run the CIA, wants to officially
authorize the CIA to spy on Americans inside the US, and even to
arrest people.
The Presbyterian Church criticized Israel's annexation wall.
The US government funds "democratic change" in countries whose
elected leaders are not to its taste.
The Democratic Party's platform is as militaristic as Bush's policies.
Most Americans are coming to oppose the war, but neither
major party represents these views.
Nixon prologed the Vietnam War for political purposes even though he
had already concluded it was lost. This is an example of the "never
admit a mistake" attitude that we often see in governments,
but especially in Bush.
Dubya's nominee to head the CIA told Michael Moore's interviewers
that he isn't qualified to work at the CIA.
GIs in Iraq are asking, "Why are we
here"? They have a "pervasive sense that Iraqis do not want their
help", which means they have more sense than Bush or Kerry.
I would guess that the governor of Anbar, who doesn't want the
Bush forces to leave, was installed by the Bush forces
and figures that the resistance will consider him a collaborator.
An Iraqi official in Basra is calling for
secession of that region from Iraq.
The breakup of Iraq has been a fairly likely possibility
ever since the Bush forces invaded. Hatred for Bush and
his men could make Iraqis stick together voluntarily,
or a new dictator (perhaps Bush-installed, perhaps not)
might in theory be able to impose unity on the whole country.
Opposition is growing even in the UK government to the tyrannical
anti-terrorism laws there.
The US government is using
businesses to spy intensively on Americans in ways that it is
legally prohibited from doing directly.
In order to give companies less information about me, I don't buy
retail goods with credit cards, and I don't carry a portable phone.
Portable phones report your whereabouts constantly, even when you
are not using them.
For crushing the resistance in Sadr City, the
epidemic of typhoid there could be more effective than the
Bush-imposed daily curfew.
6000 or so US soldiers have been
wounded in recent wars, most of them
in the Bush forces in Iraq.
Note the subtle propaganda in labeling the invasion of Iraq as part of
the "War on Terrorism", since it had nothing to do with that.
Rove's White House
'Murder, Inc.'
The US government is using businesses
to spy intensively on
Americans in ways that it is legally prohibited from doing
directly.
In order to give companies less information about me, I don't buy
retail goods with credit cards, and I don't carry a portable phone.
Portable phones report your whereabouts constantly, even when you
are not using them.
Blair's "Labor" party has helped the rich in the UK get richer
while doing nothing about poverty.
The problem of unverifiable electronic voting machines
is being addressed by some states, but
others are failing to act.
How the TV broadcasters effectively
copyright Bush's
blunders, and use this power to protect him.
The Secret Service has been
circulating fliers showing pictures of
political activists, as if they were planning to attack Bush
physically rather than just attack his conduct. And they have tried
to cover it up, too.
A challenge invites people to find and document security holes
in electronic voting machines.
These people have confused
hacking with cracking, but I've made a link anyway because this
activity is important.
The TSA confiscated a Baptist peace organization's peace banner,
calling it
"security threat". They also threatened to destroy it
summarily.
The arrogant tyrants in the TSA are more of a danger to our freedom
than any terrorists could be.
Information Liberation, by Brian Martin.
Of course, I don't agree with all of the many ideas in this book; it
would be an amazing coincidence if I did. Nonetheless, it is
well worth reading.
Chapter 3 is partly weakened by its use of the term "intellectual
property", which tends to lead people to lump together disparate legal
issues. Martin has mostly managed to resist the confusing effect of
this term, though not entirely. (For instance, the basic purpose of
trademarks has nothing to do with providing an incentive for anything
in particular. Rather, it is so that buyers can be sure of what they
are buying.)
You can play it much safer by not using that term at all, and by
thinking about copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets as
entirely separate issues.
A
woman is running for president of Afghanistan, defying
intimidation.
A former deputy chief of the Mossad (Israel's spy service) denounced the
army as having discarded its ethics.
It is interesting that the chief of the army responded by suggesting
that Toledano didn't understand Israel's security needs. If he
doesn't, who does?
The Israeli army destroyed
40,000 olive and fruit trees in Beit Hanoun, as "reprisals" for a
few rockets. They destroyed houses and factories too, and stole cash.
Idema, on trial in Afghanistan, claims Pentagon
support for his private torture operation.
He could be making this up, but I would not be surprised if it were
true. Rumsfeld called him a "mercenary", which he probably is, but
that does not contradict his story. The Pentagon employs thousands of
mercenaries, and some of them have been employed to torture prisoners.
Blair is facing demands to reopen the inquiry
about Dr Kelly since information was withheld. A majority of the
UK now say Blair lied to make an excuse for war.
Public Citizen reports:
(See
http://www.whitehouseforsale.org)
If Kerry wins, he will probably pay his managers by supporting
further draconian extensions in copyright law, and escalating
the War on Sharing.
Indonesia's
trials for war crimes in East Timor were a sham: everyone was let
off, except for two Timorese. ETAN calls for UN trials.
The UK plans to protect dolphins
which are being killed by the
thousands by fishing for striped bass.
The Sudanese army is working closely with the Janjaweed militias to
kill non-Muslim civilians in southern Sudan.
Israel regularly
imprisons Palestinians without charging them
with any crime, sometimes over and over. They can't have family
visits because the guards say, "Prove this is your mother."
The increasing price of oil is likely to mean big changes
in the American way of life--and, to the extent it has been
imitated by other countries, in their way of life also.
Bush's prisoners
at Guantanamo have been tortured like those in Iraq.
Privatization in the UK
has been a failure in its own terms.
How doctors assisted
torture in Iraq, and helped to cover it up.
Here is more information on how the
right-wing smear machine
fabricates accusations, then tries to make them seem like truth
through repetition.
John Scarlett
, new head of MI-6, has been personally inculpated for
secretly pushing the weapons inspection in team to lie about its
findings. (They defied Scarlett's pressure and released a report
saying they had found nothing significant.)
The Bush invasion
of Iraq has had the ironic effect of strengthening
the position of Iran in the region. You wouldn't expect Bush to want to do this,
but hey, religious fanatics have to stick together.
John Kerry
needs a lesson on Latin American democracy.
Doctors Without Boarders
has pulled out of Afghanistan after some of
its people were killed by the Taliban. Afghanistan was never given
the aid it was promised after the war.
The Bush administration
scored an "own goal", arresting a spy inside
Al Qa'ida. Bush was telling the truth, for once, when he said,
"Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country
and our people, and neither do we."
A Republican Congressman
admitted seeking to prevent Detroit voters from voting. Some people argue that "Detroit" stands for "Black". It might be
true, but I don't think it makes any difference which one he meant.
Either way, it is contrary to the spirit of democracy.
FBI harrassment of anarchists in the US includes giving them subpoenas
to appear in court when they were planning to go to protests.
Gulf War Syndrome may be due to
low level exposure to some of Saddam's
chemical weapons, after they were hit by a US bomb and spread through
the air.
It occurs to me that most of the civilians in Iraq were probably
exposed too.
The Internation Red Cross says that former Guantanamo prisoners could
have a real case for war crimes prosecution of their captors.
Meanwhile, many retired judges and former FBI director Sessions
(under Bush I) have condemned the Bush administration legal
opinions that purported to legitimize torture.
The handful of people who took control
of most of Russia's wealth
after the fall of the Soviet Union are now boasting of how they did
it. Privatization gave them their predictable opportunity. They
gained full control of the media, got Yeltsin reelected, then ruled
through him. Putin chased them out of Russia, but they managed to
take a lot of riches with them.
Putin has since taken control of all media in Russia himself, kicking
out journalists that criticized the government. It appears that
Russia today is democratic in form, but not in fact.
The Thai National Human Rights Commission
condemned the Thai government for trampling civil liberties.
The Bush forces have
lost control over much of Iraq;
the puppet government is ineffective, and probably
will be unable to hold the promised elections.
Before the war, I said I would support an invasion to liberate Iraq
from Saddam Hussain's dictatorship, provided (1) the Iraqi people
wanted this kind of liberation and (2) we could trust the invading
forces to establish freedom and democracy. But I didn't think either
of these conditions was true. Events have confirmed they were not.
The Iraqi resistance doesn't believe in freedom or democracy any more
than Bush does, and uses tactics as brutal in their own way as the
Bush forces' tactics. But I still hope they win, because they are
better than a foreign occupying army whose real purpose is to help
corporations steal the country's wealth. The end result will probably
be another dictatorship, but it will probably kill fewer Iraqis than
the Bush dictatorship.
A dictator is never legitimate, so I will once again be ready support
an invasion to liberate Iraq from the new dictatorship, provided (1)
the Iraqi people want this kind of liberation and (2) we can trust the
invading forces to establish freedom and democracy. But the first
condition surely won't be true, and I'd be skeptical about the second
if someone like Bush or Kerry is in charge.
The National Geographic Society officially isn't a business, but it
now acts on behalf of businesses: its magazine for children is
loaded with ads for candy and junk food.
This article says how to contact the head of the society to express
your views about this.
How Bush misuses "intelligence information" to mislead
people.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the prisoner told that lie because he
realized it would help Bush attack Iraq, which in turn would help Al
Qa'ida? Naturally Dubya fell straight into the trap.
"Intelligence information" in the hands of the inexperienced and
stupid can easily turn into "stupidity information".
Colombia's president Uribe, whose US-funded government presides over a
paramilitary death squads, was listed in 1991 as a major drug
trafficker.
An Iraqi group has counted almost
40,000 Iraqi civilians
killed since the invasion by Bush forces.
The Bush forcesd don't try to keep track of Iraqi casualties,
neither military nor civilian, because they figure that
"out of sight, out of mind".
Prisoners in
Guantanamo have been tortured like prisoners in Iraq.
They were tortured, for instance, into making confessions that are
demonstrably false. Some are reported to be going crazy from long
isolation. Meanwhile, the evidence now shows that the UK government
was complicit in the torture practices.
The Bush forces have been
imprisoning minors as young as 12,
and
appear to hold around 100 minors in prison now. Some of them have
been tortured.
It's hard to imagine what crime a child of 12 would be suspected of,
but recall that the Bush forces have a practice taking hostages. When
they can't find the person they want to arrest, they arrest people in
his family and keep them prisoner. Some of these children may be
hostages.
Sibel Edmonds
open letter to Thomas Kean points out several forms of
malfeasance at the FBI which the 9/11 investigation has failed to
investigate.
Halliburto
is being investigated for illegal ties with Iran under Cheney's adm
inistration.
India is building a new highway
right through wildlife preserves. It
threatens to destroy the largest remaining population of wild tigers,
along with various other species.
Household garbage from Ireland is persistently being sent to India
despite treaties banning the practice.
Israeli scholars have given the army a document spelling out the
ethical ways to fight Palestinian fighters;
but the army ignores it,
and continues shooting innocents, torturing them in public, and
knocking down houses on top of old people.
The army destroyed a food-processing plant just after it was set up by
a charitable foundation hoping to give Palestinians some work and
income.
The implicit message of this attack was that Israel is determined to
reduce Palestinians to poverty, and will destroy any help that they
get.
Workers at a chicken slaughterhouse were found to be regularly
torturing the chickens. People are upset about this.
I see a different scandal here. These workers were cruel to the
chickens to take out their anger at the management for making them
work
too long hours. Instead of punishing these workers, we should
help them form a strong union.
There is
evidence that the US is keeping hundreds of disappeared
prisoners on prison ships kept 3 miles off Diego Garcia.
This is like a secret version of Guantanamo.
Regarding the exile of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia: it can be
justified to take private lands for a military base, but those who are
thus evicted are entitled to compensation, and they shouldn't be
exiled among another people.
A senator is now
accusing NORAD of lying about the events of 9/11.
Seabirds in Scotland are
being wiped out; this year they are failing
to raise any young. They are the victims of an ecological chain
reaction caused by global warming. In a few years they may be gone.
Perhaps small populations of a few species will be able to find enough
to eat. Or perhaps such a small population would be wiped out by
predators. (These birds find safety in their numbers.)
The right-wing conspiracy that attacked Clinton is now
operating against Kerry's wife.
Here we see how it operates: by persistently making disproportionate
fuss about minor things. Often the things are distortions of the
facts, or are not actually bad, but sufficient media criticism makes
them look bad and their truthfulness is then irrelevant. Recall what
was done to Howard Dean: his go-get-em war cry was broadcast over and
over, minus the noise of the crowd in the room, and thus made to seem
peculiar.
Bush is
trying to push NATO to support the occupation of Iraq, and
France is blocking it.
The US military is trying to limit the blame for torture to the
underlings who were taught to carry it out. Meanwhile, Congressman
Markey is courageously trying to end the US government practice of
disappearing people at whim into countries that will torture them.
The FBI is questioning many political activists about
supposed plans to "hurt people", which they surely have fabricated.
I think the decision to suspect political dissidents is meant as both
intimidation and propaganda. Some may be too scared to protest;
meanwhile, the protestors are smeared in the public's eyes. Instead
of saying that all protestors are terrorists (which has been tried),
they point at each protestor and ask, "Are you a terrorist?" It has
the same effect.
The obvious parody web site
http://www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk
bothered the UK government so much that they asked the operator
to take it down.
Greg Palast:
Has Johnnie been good?
The US is turning into a
nation of prisons. Over 2 million Americans
are in prison. Almost 7 million (over 2% of the population) are in
prison or parole.
Beware the mythical super-pot.
Garment sweatshops in many countries will be closed
as China welcomes them all.
The corporate owners of the song This land is my land
are
threatening to sue people who used it to lampoon Bush and Kerry.
The concept that parody words "damage" a song is a perversion
promulgated by philistines who appreciate music only as an income-producing
property.
Pressure increases
for reform of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza,
against Arafat's control.This is in anticipation of Sharon's talk of removing Israeli
settlements and troops from Gaza.
The
"free speech zone" in Boston carries limitation and harrassment of
protestors to an extreme. It impossible to really protest there, but
people who look like they might want to try are threatened by police.
The Swedish government grabbed two people and
suddenly deported them without a hearing to Egypt,
where they were tortured. The plane that
brought them there was apparently a US plane.
The Swedish government is now complaining they were lied to; Egypt
promised not to torture these people, but tortured them anyway.
However, that's ducking the issue. The Swedish government surely has
laws to require people get hearings before they are deported. It
should not have let people be arrested and shipped off unwillingly to
any country respecting their rights.
Swedes should press their government on this issue until it falls
from power and is replaced by one that respects civil liberties.
Iran:
Secularist critic of the regime sentenced to five years in
prison. Nigeria: smear campaign against atheists.
Iraqi insurgents are
taking hostages to pressure various countries
to withdraw troops from Iraq, and to show the government's weakness.
This is a despicable tactic, but we have to remember that the Bush
forces have done things just as bad (and did so before the
insurgents). The Bush forces have even held hostages in Iraq, and
probably still imprison them, although they have not killed them.
The Bush forces in Iraq are considering
the idea that they should stay out of the cities and stop patrolling.
The idea is to let Iraqis do all the work of keeping the
Bush forces in power.
Here's an example of what it looks like:
This might be an effective idea in some other time and place, but
given how much Iraqis hate the Bush forces, and their tendency to
attack Iraqi collaborators, I don't think it will work. It may reduce
non-Iraqi casualties, but it can't win.
British MPs
As a group of British MPs were looking at the place where British activist Tom Hurndall was shot by Israeli troops,
they were fired at by Israeli troops.
Teaching Torture: Congress Quietly Keeps School of the Americas Alive
Fighting Israel's Wall - by ANN PETTER
Farmers in Colombia are trying to organize and practice sustainable
agriculture,
but they have been attacked by paramilitaries.
These paramilitaries are supported by the Colombian government
with US backing and perhaps US funds too.
We are seeing
a pattern of attacks on the careers of musicians and
performers who criticize Bush. It adds up to censorship.
I think hotel owners should be able to decide who can speak at their
hotels, and radio stations should be able to decide what songs to
play. This has the effect of censorship today because industry is
concentrated in few hands and performers don't dare offend them. You
could write a protest song about Iraq today, but no matter how good it
is, people would only hear it on the Internet.
To end corprate rule and restore democracy requires breaking
up the large corporations. Radio and TV are no exception.
Kerry is starting, reluctantly, to talk about the
problem of
disenfranchisement of Black voters.
Japan is buying votes
in the International Whaling Commission in a
campaign to allow resumed whaling.
Florida Governor Bush is flouting a court order to
prevent many ex-felons from regaining their voting rights.
Kerry, who declines to call Bush a liar,
apologized for people who called Bush a thug.
The original thuggees were religious fanatics that killed
for their religion. Doesn't Bush qualify?
The US and Saudi Arabia
released terrorist suspects in a deal designed
to gain partial Saudi support for the invasion of Iraq.
It is possible that the Saudis in Guantanamo deserved to be released;
they certainly did not deserve to be held without trial, or tortured.
However, the prisoners released in return by the Saudis were convicted
of a car bombing, and their release was not due to doubts about their
guilt. It was just a deal.
This is one of many ways that Bush accepted an increased danger of
terrorism increase in order to achieve his real goal.
About half the carbon dioxide humans have released
into the air
has gone into the ocean. While this as prevented global warming
from proceeding even faster, it also puts the survival of shellfish
in danger.
Many "US" companies are incorporating offshore to avoid taxes.
Both Bush and Cheney were active in doing this with their
own companies.
Sharon caused an uproar by publicly urging Jews to leave France to
escape anti-semitism there.
Ironically, Sharon is largely responsible for the anti-semitism in
France. Thoughtful people criticize Israeli government cruelty
without being anti-semitic, but not everyone is thoughtful, so
Israel's cruel treatment of Palestinians tends to result in increased
anti-semitism.
Chirac might well respond by inviting Jews to move from Israel to
France. There are so many reasons he might give: to avoid the
domination of the ultra-orthodox, to avoid being inculpated or
dragged into the Israeli government's bestial behavior, etc.
The Democratic Party's decision to woo wealthier voters,
and abandon the cause of the workers against the rich,
led to a situation where in
many areas poor Americans support the Republicans more even as they
get poorer.
Muslim militias in the Sudan are
systematically raping the non-Muslim women, as well as killing the men.
Get the unofficial Michelin
Guide to Israeli Prisons...before Michelin shuts it down.
Israeli troops
shot two Palestinian bystanders in their own home.
With helicopters shooting missiles into a populated area, it's a
wonder they didn't kill more civilians.
Israeli forces claim these attacks on civilian areas are for "safety",
but the main perpetrators of violence in the region are Israeli
troops, and most of the civilians killed are killed by them.
Farmers in India are
killing themselves as drought makes them unable to pay their debts.
Offering government compensation to the families is a kind gesture,
but what the Indian government really needs to do is consider the needs
of farmers who are still alive. Otherwise it is driving them to
kill themselves.
The Iraqi resistance has stepped up its attacks since the
handover of nominal authority to Iraqis.
Over 10,000 troops in the Bush forces have been wounded so far; I
don't know how many of those were serious wounds, but it is a lot
of casualties.
The US is moving to
cut off aid to Uzbekistan. It is the right thing
to do, but it's so unlike Bush to do anything right that I have to
wonder if some subtle evil scheme lurks behind it.
Bush plans to allow lots of
logging of trees in large areas now protected.
Sunni leaders in Iraq
call for war. (I wonder if the one who was imprisoned was tortured.)
Iraqi professors are being
systematically murdered. We don't know by whom.
Western journalists
no longer dare travel around Iraq,
which has the result that Bush forces can bomb a wedding
party and deny it, and nobody can even say it isn't so.
What does
"sovereignty" mean in Iraq?
Seymour Hersh reports seeing
a video of Iraqi prisoners being raped.
Gulf War Syndrome victims get a hearing in the UK.
We don't know what
the cause or causes are, but we know from the figures that it is a
real problem.
Bush is trying to
eliminate overtime pay for 6 million US workers.
Uncritical support for Israeli policies in the US now comes more from
Christian fanatics than from Jews. The fanatics are not concerned for
the well being of Israelis, any more than they are for Palestinians,
but rather
seek to bring about conditions they believe will trigger
the end of the world. Can anyone get more crazy than that?
By trying to make propecies come true, these fanatics are treating
their supposed god as a sort of machine, preprogrammed to activate the
desired sequence of events whenever certain conditions are met. "God,
activate world destruct sequence." The god responds, "Enter
password." So they arrange for a new temple in Jerusalem to be
constructed, and the god says, "Destruct sequence activated."
And to think that people used to accuse engineers of worshiping the
machine.
They have a backup system, too: in case no god shows up to carry out
the prophecies, they are burning up all the oil. At least they
will get another flood.
Sibel Edmonds isn't even allowed to tell a court where she was born.
This article also gives more info about the
treachery she found inside the FBI, which has been covered up.
Life expectancy in parts of Africa is
under 40 years, due to AIDS.
Previous UK inquiries about false reports of Iraqi weapons were kept
in the dark. The responsibility for this is narrowing in towards Blair.
Fallujah: inside the Iraqi resistance.
I am not sure how to reconcile the statements in this article
about a friendship between Fallujah and Saddam with statements
elsewhere about a hostile relationship between them. Perhaps someone
who knows can explain.
Kerry would
keep troops in Iraq longer than Bush.
Former officials who urged Bush to attack Iraq are now
working for companies that profit from the war.
Bush could try to
manipulate the election by faking a terrorist
alert on election day, timed to prevent voting in California cities.
Given that we know some past terror alerts were fishy,
and given that the Bush campaign cheated in 2000,
we cannot regard this danger as beyond consideration.
You might wonder why I am concerned about fixing or canceling the
election, given that Kerry agrees with Bush on the major issues of the
day. The reason is that elections may someday provide a chance to
peacefully obtain leaders that stand for freedom and democracy.
Even if there is no hope of this in 2004, there may be some day.
More evidence about how false intelligence about Iraqi weapons
was obtained and used in Washington.
Insiders who wanted an invasion of Iraq surely had contacts with each
other. Richard Perle certainly knows Cheney. I would expect ties can
be found between Woolsey and people such as Cheney who profit from the
war.
We can envision what was happening: while Cheney and Bush were trying
to pull something out of the DIA that they could use, Woolsey and
Perle were pushing from the other side.
The Bush regime has been
denying data about Iraq expenses to UN auditors.
How slimy it is to praise the auditors to sidestep the failure to help
them. A lack of cooperation from the entity being audited is surely a
"challenging environment"--and whose fault is that?
The UK is considering
legalizing brothels as a way of helping
the women who have been pressured into prostitution.
There is no legitimate reason to prohibit prostitution.
Information that
MI6 knew the supposed evidence for Iraqi weapons was false
was withheld from previous inquiries in the UK.
It looks like the blame for this deception is becoming
localized in the highest levels of Blair's government.
A major British bank is
closing the bank account of the British National Party.
The BNP is racist and right-wing, and I don't agree with it at all.
Islam, like Christianity, is very dangerous, but people have a right
to believe in it and should not be the victims of prejudice.
However, that is no excuse for closing the BNP's bank account. To
close a political party's bank account is tantamount to banning the
party.
Banks should not be allowed to close anyone's account, except for
cause such as misbehavior towards the bank or a criminal conviction.
The editor of the
Russian edition of Forbes was shot and killed,
apparently for his writing about rich Russians who are probably
criminals. Meanwhile, freedom of speech in Russian mass media is
being eliminated even more thoroughly than in the US.
Even the
GAO says that US government "terror alerts" are meaningless.
A
Russian journalist who writes about rich people (who are often
criminals) was assassinated--apparently because they don't
want to be written about.
Official protest against the Democratic National Convention is
supposed to occur in an unfree "free speech zone" where there is room
for only 1000 or so people, each of whom is to be searched by police.
Gas masks, to protect against police attacks such as occur frequently
at protests, are prohibited. People who go in will be sitting ducks.
So the Black Tea Society
calls on protestors to refuse to use this zone, and protest elsewhere.
Militarisation of the US is proceeding on a number of parallel tracks,
which add up to the end of everything the US is supposed to stand for.
This article
explains how they fit together.
I am not convinced that Al Qa'ida is "a CIA asset"--the arguments I
saw for that have too many possible weak points. But these arguments
seem pretty convincing.
Ken Lay has been
indicted for operating "The Microsoft of the energy world".
Microsoft's crimes are larger and more harmful, but they are also
subtler, so it has been able to buy its way out of trouble despite
being convicted twice in court.
The most central part of economics is the value system it assumes to
be everyone's sole motivation: personal gain. By repeating this
assumption, it acts as propaganda convincing people to submerge other
aspects of their personality, other motivations. In other words, it
is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is evidence that studying economics makes people more selfish in
general; it does not surprise me to learn that a robber baron like Lay
started out as an economist.
Bush and his supporters participate in a "social phantasy system",
where they reinforce each other's false beliefs and become
increasingly disconnected from reality.
The
Republicans failed in their attempt to limit marriage to
heterosexuals, but Bush vows to continue trying.
The bizarre assumption in Bush's speech is that the existence of
homosexual couples ruins marriage for all other Americans. I know a
recently-married homosexual couple--the invitation to their party was
the first such invitation I have ever accepted. I invite Bush to meet
them, and then tell us if they have damaged his marriage.
Is the International Space Station failing so fast that will soon have
to be abandoned? This article
argues for that.
I hope it isn't true. I don't have enough expertise to judge
for myself.
Overfishing in the North Atlantic threatens to wipe out the
population of blue whiting.
Many fish populations around the world are in danger;
modern fishing methods are too effective to be sustained.
(Many of them also destroy other animals.)
Blaming the CIA for "mistaken intelligence" about Iraq overlooks
the political pressure from above and its influence on the CIA's
evaluation of available information.
911 Truth is campaigning for an
honest and thorough investigation of the many suspicious
circumstances involving the 9/11 attacks.
Governments are
endangering the neutrality of NGOs, which in the end puts their
ability to operate in danger.
Israel is profiting from the Bush invasion of Iraq to arm Kurds to
fight Iran. The Kurds can use the same arms to fight Turkey, or
the Bushist government of Iraq.
Iranians do not like their Islamic government very much, but if
anything could make them support it, it would be an external attack
like this. Whether deliberately or carelessly, Bush is paving the way
to strengthen Islamic terrorism yet again.
Stupid White Movie: What Michael
Moore Misses About the Empire
The Deepening
Crisis in America's Prisons
Public Citizen defeated Bush's
attempt to trash the US govt rules for nuclear waste
disposal. When it was found that the planned Yucca Mountain site
didn't meet the established criteria, Bush wanted to do away with the
criteria.
Bush will surely try again if he has a chance.
Disposing of the waste unsafely is not the right way to handle it.
However, if the waste can't goin Yucca Mountain, where SHOULD it go?
Reports say that the WTO is on the path towards a treaty that would
restrict vitamin supplements and herbal medicine.
The most important point here, as I see it, is the way the WTO
subjugates democracy. For democracy's sake, we have to abolish the
WTO.
People are "liberating" aquarium fish in the wrong ocean, and this is
causing ecological damage. Fish can reproduce like kudzu when they
enter an ecosystem where nothing eats them.
Increased CO2 in air causes peat bogs to release carbon in the form of
CO2. We can expect around twice
as much global warming as was previously estimated.
Don't buy property less than 100 feet above sea level.
How
Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About
You
A planned execution in India has stimulated a strong
campaign to abolish the death penalty.
Here are some examples.
Bush wants legislation to enable the Department of Homeland Security
to
postpone the November election. Perhaps forever--or till the "end"
of the "war on terrorism", which would mean forever.
Various rebel groups in the Congo are jointly committing the genocide of the
pygmies.
The UN has asked to
talk with the prisoners held by the US outside the US, to assure
they are being treated humanely.
A Canadian Muslim women's group warn that allowing Shari'a courts for
divorce will result in pressuring them to use these courts, and the
results could be
systematically harmful to women.
The DMCA, the law that prohibits free software for important purposes
such as viewing a DVD, has been interpreted
to prohibit independent support providers for a proprietary software
package. It's as if it were illegal for you to hire an
unauthorized mechanic to service your car.
The decision is preliminary, but if it stands up, many proprietary
software developers may use the same method to forbid users access to
parts of their software.
I refer to this article for the sake of the factual information in it,
but its general assumptions are questionable. The intended purpose of
the DMCA was to impose DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) on the
public, not merely to prevent private copying (although preventing
private copying is bad enough!).
The term "piracy" embodies another assumption: that sharing is wrong.
That word is the basis of a propaganda campaign meant to demonize
sharing.
The Bush forces hit a car,
killed the driver, then shot the passenger. Then they tried to
threaten journalists who were watching.
Like the Rodney King beating, this is an unusual well-documented
instance of a frequent practice that is usually covered up.
After the FBI found that their accusations of terrorism against
artist/professor Steve Kurtz couldn't stand up, they found
a bizarre excuse to charge him with a crime--receiving a sample of
harmless bacteria from another professor. In other words, ordinary
scientific cooperation.
The FBI's policy is, "Once we target you, we can always find something
to accuse you of."
Given that governments have a pattern of stretching laws to get
whoever they want, we cannot afford to give them discretion in the
matter. Laws, in order to be just, must constrain the government more
clearly. They must be designed to resist the police and prosecutors'
attempts to stretch them.
We're making progress in the fight against software
patents in the European Union.
Contrary to what the article says, the campaign against software
patents was launched by
free software activists, not by the open source movement.
In 2001 we heard that someone had taken out lots of stock options
before 9/11,
suggesting that this someone knew about the attacks in
advance. Three years later, the public has not been told who it was,
but there are signs of a coverup, and an executive at the bank where
these options now works for the CIA.
A serious and thorough investigation of the 9/11 attacks must
investigate this issue, along with many others.
Polls show Venezuelan President
Chez headed for a big win in his recall referendum.
Bush and the Republicans should give back what they
bought with Enron money.
Iraqi guerrilla leader al Muhammadani, who fought Saddam before, gave
Bush a chance to see what he would do. Now he says Iraq has gone from
one dictator to another, and he is fighting the Bush forces.
Israeli troops shot a Palestinian boy playing football in Rafah, where
they are also demolishing houses again--part of a long-drawn-out campaign of collective
punishment and ethnic cleansing.
A suicide bombing in Israel typically kills several persons; only one
boy was shot in that place at that time. But the relentless shooting
of Palestinians kills more people than suicide bombings in Israel used
to kill when they were common (and now they are rare). All in all,
Israeli terror is several times worse than Palestinian terror.
If we sincerely condemn terrorism, we must not focus on the lesser
terror while disregarding or excusing the greater terror. Steps to end
the terror are ineffective if they focus narrowly on the lesser
terror. A separation wall on the Green Line, one that did not annex
Palestinian land, might be a good measure to reduce terror in both
directions.
Bush is
pressing Musharraf to take big risks to try to catch some Al Qa'ida
suspects in a hurry (before the election). Previously, Bush
thought it was ok to go slower and avoid the risks.
Gene Warfare in Oaxaca: Genetic Mutation of
Mexican Maize
Sibel Edmonds reports on a court decision that upheld the Bush
administration, preventing her
from telling us (or even Congress) what she knows about the
antecedents of the Sep 11 attacks.
The
World Court denounced the Israeli annexation wall, saying it
should be torn down. However, the decision has no power, and the Bush
government has rejected it already.
One of the reasons for suspicion about the official story of what
happened on September 11 is the presence
of strange attachments photographed under one of the planes that
hit the World Trade Center. I know what conclusion to draw from this,
but it appears to come from reputable sources and Boeing's refusal to
explain is very suspicious.
A translation of
the article from La Vanguardia (Spain).
The Venezuelan Referendum, Beware Jimmy
Carter!
Bush is developing procedures for postponing the
next election on account of "terrorism". I guess this means that
he expects to lose the election if it is held.
Having Bush in power is ideal for Al Qa'ida recruitment, and people
have wondered if Al Qa'ida might carry out some action in order to
make Americans too scared to think.
There are also those who suggest that Bush would cooperate
intentionally with the attack. Whether that is true, I do not know,
but the conclusion here does not require that assumption. The
cooperation Bush provides through actions that help Al Qa'ida
recruiting is sufficient.
Depleted Uranium: The Trojan
Horse of Nuclear War
Blair's former legal advisor condemns
the occupation of Iraq as illegal, and says the Bush forces may be
guilty of war crimes.
Saleh shouldn't feel ashamed of how he was treated in AbuGhraib-- only
indignant.
The Bush forces tried to
censor audio from Saddam's hearing, then lied about the
censorship. They also tried to disguise their presence there.
The Bush administration continues to support
torture and empoverishment in several Latin American countries.
Bush uses
mercenaries for interrogation as a way to sidestep military law
that prohibits torture.
Bush's policy, at every level: one law for
Bush--another for you.
Blame the Culture of War for the Chaos in the Middle East
General Wiranto, who commanded Indonesia's armed forces while they
organized death squads and massacres in East Timor, did not made it
into the final stage of voting for president of Indonesia. Wiranto
is under international indictment for war crimes.
A
non-radical critique of Bush's war and the situation in Iraq.
The Bush regime is keeping
veterans ignorant of the health benefits they are entitled to, as
a cost-saving measure.
You've got to cut corners somewhere, to make room for those big tax
cuts for the rich.
Here is further information about how the FBI responded when Sibel
Edmonds
warned the leadership of corruption and disregarded warnings. Its
persistent policy was to deny problems and cover them up. Eventually
the FBI fired her and lied about her.
As for "retroactive classification", that is simply newspeak for
keeping the public in the dark.
Canada is considering a bill to
prohibit people from watching non-Canadian satellite TV channels.
This means, among other things, censoring Al Jazeera, which is the
source for news about Iraq that isn't what Bush wants people to hear.
This article uses the fashionable propaganda term "intellectual
property". Please don't imitate it. Most likely its author isn't
aware of the misleading and biased assumptions hidden inside that
term. See
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html for more
explanation.
What
Fahrenheit 911 covers, and what it leaves out.
The Supreme Court decision condemning Padilla
to limbo was as twisted and disingenuous as the one that put Bush
in office.
Uri Avnery reports on how the Israeli
border police attacked a joint Palestinian-Israeli peaceful
protest to provide the excuse to lie to the Israeli Supreme
Court. The court did not swallow the lie, and it ruled to move the
separation wall.
The Bush forces have at least 100
child prisoners in Iraq, and they have tortured the children too.
With constant US support, Colombia is moving
towards a dictatorship in which opposition and independent
activity (aside from some armed guerrilla groups they cannot defeat)
are not tolerated.
Here is a sympathetic article about the new Iraqi prime minister,
Allawi.
Notably absent from the article is anything about having a record of
support for democracy. In any case, it will be hard for Allawi to be
seen by Iraqis as anything but Bush's man if he lets Bush stay in
control.
Kathy Kelly's sentence for her protest at Fort Benning is over. She
now plans to
support efforts to eliminate the mandatory sentences that have put
other women in prison for many years.
The best way to end the problem of illegal drug sales
is to legalize and regulate the drugs--as we do with those
extremely dangerous drugs, tobacco and alcohol.
The International Herald Tribune has acknowledged that the world now
doubts, and even disbelieves, the unquestionable
proposition that the US has moral authority--that it should be a
model for others.
The US in the past partially deserved moral authority; it defended
human rights and democracy in some countries while intervening in
others to crush them. In the 80s, after Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal,
the US seemed to be learning to do less of the latter. But since 1990
it has got rapidly worse. Clinton subordinated the US government to
corporate power, and Bush has broken the back of human rights in the
US even though fragments of them linger on. The recent US-supported
coup in Haiti, which put gangsters in power, shows what the US means
today.
It is good to know that people in other countries are starting to
recognize this. Even as the US makes democracy a sham and tears up
civil liberties, people still value them elsewhere. Perhaps anger at
the US will help some countries find the strength to repudiate their
debts and tell the IMF and WTO to buzz off.
John Walker Lindh was going to
testify about Bush regime torture practices in his trial. It
appears the Bush administration gave him a plea bargain (which
included a gag clause) as a way to prevent that testimony from coming
out.
Something similar almost happened to Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield.
Even after the Spanish police told the FBI that Brandon Mayfield's fingerprint did
not really match the print on a bag from Madrid, the FBI kept
trying to insist he was involved in the bombing there.
Here's the New York Times article that Cassel refers to. It is clear
that the FBI saw in Mayfield the kind of person they wanted to lock
up, never mind for what. Never mind that he had
never been to Spain.
The Bush administration has a pattern of accusing people who act as
lawyers for accused terrorists. They can deprive these suspects of a
fair trial if they make good lawyers too scared to represent them.
The US government demands fingerprints of all foreigners entering the
US, with the exception of certain countries. If this applies to you,
you had best to stay away from the US. If the authorities don't like
your face, and if your fingerprint vaguely resembles one that they
found on a murder weapon somewhere, they will have an excuse they can
stretch to accuse you. The Spanish police can't always be in a
position to help, and they might not even let you have a trial.
Former Halliburton employees say that management was
deliberately cheating the US government.
However, Halliburton is allowed to do this; the Vice President
must have told them it's ok.
One reason police act like bullies and tyrants is that the government
gives them the power that defines a tyrant: the power to put you in prison
simply for disagreeing with them.
This example is from the US, but I would not be surprised if things
are similar in other countries.
Police are well known to lie outright (they call it "testilying") to
put people in prison. After such lies are exposed, even officials
generally condemn them, and governments will usually though grudgingly
reconsider convictions shown to be based on lies. When a law gives
police power to make you guilty of a crime on their mere say-so, the
injustice is the same, but the entire state is complicit in it. Since
no outright lie about facts is involved, there is nothing to
expose--except that the government has made its police into tyrants.
At large protests, the protestors often intervene to un-arrest people
that the police have unjustly arrested, before the police can take
them away. If there had been a crowd of protestors where that women
was unjustly arrested, they might have been able to save her.
An Israeli Supreme Court decision requires
rerouting of separation wall so as to reduce the confiscation of
Palestinian land and the harm imposed on their lives. It's not
entirely the right thing, since it accepts building the wall through
the Palestinian territories, but it says that the wall cannot serve a
political purpose such as annexation.
Real-time video editing technology makes it easy to
produce lying videos.
I think that the most important danger in this is the loss of the
possibility for factual evidence to contradict official lies.
Bush has shown us clearly how the government of a corporate-dominated
country with corporate-dominated media can lie, and have its lies
repeated and supported so widely that it takes moral courage to
disbelieve them. Bush did not need fake video to make people believe
that Saddam Hussein had ties with the perpetrators of the 9/11
attacks, or that Saddam was still developing nuclear and chemical
weapons, or that Bush was going to give Iraq freedom and democracy.
All were lies; those people who were skeptical of Bush recognized them
as probable lies even before the proof came out, but most Americans
wanted to believe them. Bush also led Americans to believe that the
Bush forces were treating prisoners decently. Americans wanted to
believe this.
Photos provided the evidence that gave the lie Bush's claims to have
ended torture in Iraq.
Without the ability to produce photos as evidence, I'm afraid that
anyone who contradicts the official lies will be unable to convince
the public. It will be easy to tell oneself that the whistleblower or
dissident is the liar, so that one can comfortably believe the
government is honest, and the whistleblower will have no means to
prove his report is true. Police who say that the protestors attacked
them will soon be able to fabricate seamless false video as "evidence"
for this. They already tried doing this in Sweden after the protests
in Gothenburg, but that time they were caught. When they learn to do a
better job, they may not be caught.
We are getting ever closer to a "democracy" conducted by citizens
living in a virtual reality controlled by the government. This is no
democracy.
You don't have to go to Abu Ghraib to find Americans abusing
authority. The police in Miami attacked, injured, arrested, and
then tortured dissidents during the protests against FTAA. It was
systematic and planned campaign of violence, and like the invasion of
Iraq, it was preceded by a systematic campaign of lies to create an
excuse.
I expect there will be similar scenes in Boston and New York this
summer. In 1968, when Chicago police rioted at the Democratic
Convention, it was covered on television. This time, it will not be a
riot, but a planned attack, and today's corporate media will probably
cover only the police spin.
Prize-winning American journalists report on the important stories they
were not allowed to publish in the major US media.
Clive Smith has
saved a number of innocent people from being executed. Now he
plans to work for release of those imprisoned without trial in
Guantanamo Bay.
The most important part of this article is the casual carelessness
with which courts convict people and then sentence them to death.
Costco is being criticized...
for not abusing its workers the way other companies do. Does it
make them look bad?
What's wrong here is the system: the idea that a company has more
responsibility to its shareholders than to its workers (or customers)
must be rejected, condemned, shredded, and dropped in the garbage.
Everyone is partly selfish; most people recognize responsibilities
as well. Those who don't are called psychopaths.
The "handover of power" to the interim Iraqi government is a sham,
because it is only the name, not the real power, that has been handed
over.
The Bush forces have put outside companies in charge of many
ministries in Iraq,
so that the "Iraqi" government will have little power. It won't
even have command of "its" army. Some of these companies have been
given terms of control lasting beyond the proposed election--so even
the future "elected" government won't have much control.
The Bush forces have even retained the power to decide who can run
in the coming election.
The Bush occupation Iraq is violating international law in many ways,
including
plundering the country. It reflects a long-standing idea--which
Bush has carried to a new and blatant extreme--that no rules
whatsoever apply to the US government.
The Bushmen tried hard so to see Iraqi WMDs that eventually they
fooled themselves.
People often see what they are looking for.
The Dutch parliament voted to
take Dutch support away from the EU software patent
directive. This has never happened before in the EU, not with any
directive. If a few other countries also withdraw their support,
software patents in Europe may be defeated in the Council of
Ministers.
If we lose in the Council of Ministers, we still get a chance
in the European Parliament, which voted against software patents
last September.
A Falun Gong practitioner in South Africa was shot in
the car while on the way to a protest about the visit of Chinese
officials.
Polution of low Earth orbit with fast-moving fragments of old
satellites is dangerous to satellites and spacecraft. The FCC has imposed
new rules to dispose of all satellites in orbits that won't contribute
to space junk.
This is an important, though belated, step. I hope
it is not too late. The International Space Station
was already struck and damaged at least once by a piece
of space junk too small to detect and avoid.
This issue also provides an interesting example of how corporations
will poison their own wells for short-term profit. Companies that
operate satellites will lose their business entirely if low Earth
orbit becomes uninhabitable; but many of them will risk this disaster
for the sake of greater profit today. The surest way to destroy any
durable asset is to make a corporation its proprietor.
As the US fingerprints most visitors, and Blair in the UK tries to
impose fingerprinting of everyone in the country,
teenagers in South Korea are fighting against the fingerprinting of
everyone there (a system set up back when South Korea was a
dictatorship).
This letter, written by a journalist who visited Fallujah during the
height of the fighting there, reports on Bush forces soldiers who hated Iraqis
and wanted only to kill them, indiscriminately.
These soldiers realized that, as an conquering army, they were
regarded as the enemy by nearly the whole population. And they
thought of the whole population of Iraq as their enemy.
Drug testing of employees at work is expanding from the US into the
UK, even though there is no evidence that
it improves safety.
A much better way to ensure safety, without prying into employees'
private lives, is to have each employee take a test of alertness on
reporting to work. These tests are like video games, and not very
hard. If the employee fails the test occasionally, he is not
punished, but he gets put on a desk job that day. (Everyone has bad
days.)
If an employee fails repeatedly, that is a real problem. The employer
needs to investigate why. The cause might be stress, problems at home,
sleep disorders, illegal drugs, legal drugs, or other things.
Whatever the cause is, maybe something can be done about it;
dismissing the employee would be the last resort.
With this system, nobody will be detected, let alone dismissed, except
for problems that really affect job performance.
Amnesty International reports a situation
in Chechnya that I'd compare with Iraq. The "authorities" make
people disappear in the night, and torture and kill. Meanwhile, their
enemies sometimes set off bombs that kill passers by. The disappearances
are starting to spread to neighboring Ingushetia.
The Supreme Court, in its decisions about detainees, upheld the
authority of courts, but let civil
liberties down. Most disappointing of all was their cop-out
regarding Padilla, sentencing him to Kafkaesque legal proceedings that
can never end.
I do see one useful aspect to the decision. If detainees can speak
with lawyers, they can find out about the world situation, and send
out inspirational messages such as "I have been tortured" or "Don't
mourne, organize!"
A few months ago I wondered if Bush would turn to Saddam Hussein to
run Iraq. Instead he figured there are more where Saddam came from.
Here's an article on Allawi's
terrorist background, working for Saddam Hussein and the CIA.
The handover of titular authority to an Iraqi is not likely to
disguise the continuing occupation. No matter how Allawi tries to
distance himself from Bush, he won't be seen by Iraqis as anything but
Dubya's man as long as he depends on the Bush forces to keep him in
power.
If Allawi does declare martial law, there would be even less freedom
in Iraq than now. Martial law won't affect the armed resistance much,
but it can easily crush newspapers and other democratic forms of
opposition.
Armed resistance will become the only possibility for opposition.
The Bush forces plan on
conscripting former soldiers
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This won't be enough, and drafting young people is the obvious next
step. Americans have to start organizing now to oppose the draft. If
you work with high school or college students, it would be good to
start raising the issue with them.
The US is still preparing some sort of coup or destabilization in Venezuela.
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http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/09/1695695.php
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[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
Kerry has raised significantly more than Bush from lawyers and the
media/entertainment industry.
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
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[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-08-28 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
[Reference updated on 2018-05-06 because the old link was broken.]
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Copyright (C) 2004 Richard Stallman
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