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Public InquiryInterested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
Human Rights in IrelandIndymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.
Lockdown Skeptics
Voltaire NetworkVoltaire, international edition
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Web / Press / Offsite Media Updates: June 6th - June 13th international |
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other press
 Sunday June 13, 2004 23:13 by Indymedia Ireland Editorial Group - Indymedia Ireland
 This weblog for Other Media contains information on updated websites, new issues of journals and newspapers, videos available on the net etc. A similar page will be published each week. Use the comments to add a new link with a summary. Please add your information here. Include direct links if you have them, or details on where the print publication is available, if not. This is not a normal newswire page and has different editorial rules. It will stay at the top of the wire no matter how many stories are published in the meantime. It is also designed as a pointer to other sites, so please do not (a) post full articles, or (b) add comments that don't consist of information on new content in the paper/website/whatever. This means that comments on who did what to whom, which party got more votes, what you think of a particular author or article, whose hamster was eaten by Freddie Starr , or anything else, will be hidden. If you are upset by an article linked to, you can add a comment or an (original and more-than-a-single-line) article as a standard newswire story. This is a page for links and updates only. The normal practice of hiding links to sites that are racist, discriminatory etc. will be followed. |
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Comments (59 of 59)
Jump To Comment: 59 58 57 56 55 54 53 52 51 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1http://unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=27&si=1199122&issue_id=11007
check out that id number.
yep.
one one DOUBLE OH SEVEN.
Mr Blair has denied he's planning a heart attack, was just the injections over the weekend.
Miami TV Station Invites Terrorists to Talk Openly About Their Planned Attacks on Cuba and Venezuela
http://www.counterpunch.org/wire06112004.html
governments have been punished in every state except Spain.
and the left have surged.
and nationalists have surged, for the most part those with leftist stances.
morew 2mrw.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3214,36-368681,0.html
I forget to tell you. Antonio Sousa Franco was leader of the Portuguese Socialist Party, a "Smithite pre Blair Labour Party" which has ruled Portugal several times since the country become a democracy and a member state of the EU.
Sousa Franco was finance minister from 1995 -1999, he was buried on friday after collapsing from a heart attack while being driven away from a rowdy campaign session at a fish market in the northern town of Matosinhos.
He is not to be confused with Sousa Kysher the fictional criminal or Franco the former dictator of Spain. Portugal votes today, polls taken after his death were announced indicate 34.9 for the ruling Social Democratic coalition while 35.3 percent said they would cast their ballot for the Socialist Party.
The Communist Party would get 7.3 percent of the votes in the European parliament elections which will be held in Portugal Sunday, while the far-left Left Block would win the support of 5.4 percent of all voters, the poll found.
So Portugal will continue to be a "lefty sort of place" no matter what happens.
I'm not sure if this effected the Football.
He has said to the Independent that DF must make up it's mind on democracy, as it polls its highest in the state ever.
Mikey, the voters have made up thier mind about democracy. That's how liberalism works. And the line "It is coming to a crisis - Sinn Fein members will be elected to councils and under my Garda Bill they will have to decide whether they want to be photographed with the killers of Gerry MCabe in Portlaoise prison or whether they want to be members of the police board in Phibsboro, sitting down with members of the Gardai on local policing issues."
is so _*_egotistical_*_
= Your little bill.
= Your little referendum.
our Gardaí. our Representatives.
Bye bye. You have your shovel and your digging. Slán leatsa.
When Colonel Douglas Macgregor of the US army was preparing to submit his latest manuscript, he struck a deal with his superiors: he could publish his book - a detailed critique of the way the army equips, organises and fights - if he kept his views on the war in Iraq to himself.
"I could talk about the content of the book and anything that happened up to the end of the initial operation to [take] Baghdad, and nothing else," he says. "That was the condition for publication of the book and I agreed to that."
Some in the army leadership might have preferred that his book had never been published.
[....]
"If you're an American soldier or marine, you're wearing 60 pounds of gear, it is 116 degrees outside, you have been in the country for six or eight months," Col Macgregor says. "You are tired, you are fed up, and you are suddenly confronted with large numbers of loud, angry Arabs. What do you do? I don't think we were fair in any way, shape or form to the soldiers themselves."
The Bush administration is wrestling with how to maintain adequate forces in Iraq. Last week, the army announced a "stop-loss" order to prevent more soldiers from leaving the force after their voluntary service commitment is over.
Col Macgregor says that emphasis on numbers is misplaced. "We have people in special forces that know how to work with local populations," he says. "We could have adopted that particular model, opted for a very light presence, and focused our occupation largely on Baghdad, maintaining some mobile armoured reserves that could rapidly move in and crush any real resistance.
"But to conduct house-to-house searches, to conduct heavy-handed raids, to run checkpoints that were extremely humiliating, to arrest people in front of their families, put bags over their heads, handcuff them and treat them with extreme disregard for human dignity, was a serious mistake - and it was not necessary."
more from the Financial Times; Jun 09, 2004....
157 PHOTOS in 2 galleries
to those that wanted another day of war
http://www.forumdelteatro.org/article.php3?id_article=71
1) No War No Bush!: copyleft reportage
2) 06.04.2004 The Pink day
dalle reti, a cura della redazione
m.b.
per la redazione di forumdelteatro.org
Torture? On your watch?
mail us now with your story
New website to be launched in near future exposing corruption and general misconduct within the Irish police. Gardawatch is non-political and will not be used as a platform for garda bashing, our aim is exposing injustices carried out by the force. We need the public to send us details of experiences they have had with the force regardless how insignificant. Email us now.......
Bush and Blair are nominated for "Reckless Endangerment of the Planet" at this year's World Stupidity Awards.
The Stupidity Awards recognize “achievement in stupidity and ignorance” and take place at the world's largest comedy festival Just for Laughs this July in Montreal.
Vote at www.stupidityawards.com.
.
red ink new hours
hi there, just to let everyone know that red ink radical books and zines is well and truly up and running.
we are a co-op of two and the shop is 100 percent volunter run. we depend totaly on the punk and activist community to keep us going and to help spread awareness, books and magazines to the whole city!
our hours are :
tuesday to saturday 11am to 6pm
and thursdays 11am to 8pm
Any suggestions or questions, please pop in!
cheers
willie.
Lot of new stuff coming in every other day, also videos and dvds on their way.
A 21-year-old college student could spend years in jail on bomb threat charges after he stood silently outside a military recruitment office dressed like an Iraqi prisoner: in a black cape, hooded, wearing stereo wires hanging from his fingers. The police charged Joseph Previtera with making a bomb threat since the stereo wires resembled wires to a bomb.
An article in today's Boston Phoenix begins like this:
. . . . .
"It was a skinny pair of stereo wires that got 21-year-old Joe Previtera charged with two felonies. A week ago on Wednesday, the Boston College student poked his head through a gauzy shawl, donned a black pointy hood, and ascended a milk crate positioned to the right of the Armed Forces Recruitment Center's Tremont Street entrance.
"He extended his arms like a tired scarecrow; stereo wires dangled from his fingers onto the ground below.
"Without those wires, the Westwood native could have been mistaken for an eyeless Klansman dipped in black, or maybe even the Wicked Witch of the West...
"But those snaky cords made the costume's import clear: Previtera was a dead ringer for one of Abu Ghraib's Iraqi prisoners - specifically, the faceless man who'd allegedly been forced to balance on a cardboard box lest he be electrocuted."
. . . . .
Prvitera stood outside the recruitment center for over an hour. And then the police arrived. Within hours he was facing charges more serious than any US soldier is facing for their role in the actual prison abuse in Iraq. Previtera was charged with three crimes: disturbing the peace, possession of a hoax device and making a false bomb threat. If convicted he could face years in prison.
The Boston Herald reported on Wednesday that prosecutors in the Suffolk County District Attorney's office are considering ``amending'' bomb-threat charges against Previtera.
But the Boston police have defended the arrest....
Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.
The Saudis then took another flight out of the country. The two ex-officers returned to TIA a few hours later on the same plane.
For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports and widespread Internet speculation about its purpose.
But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA officials have confirmed that the flight did take place and have supplied details.
The odyssey of the small LearJet 35 is part of a larger controversy over the hasty exodus from the United States in the days immediately after 9/11 of members of the Saudi royal family and relatives of Osama bin Laden.
The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.
This torture memo shocked me. And it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we've seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic "working group" and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this "working group," consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president's authority to order people to be tortured.
They had meetings at which I'm sure they all believed very sincerely that they were doing important work on the War on Terror. I'm sure they worked long hours and diligently analyzed the law and offered their advice to the president and secretary of defense with nothing but the good of the country in their minds. And they produced a 50+ page paper from which, I understand, only one person --- the state department representative -- dissented.
And that report, this product of a bureaucratic "working group" of lawyers is so deeply depraved and contrary to American values that one wonders if at any time during the discussions if someone had stood up and said, "we're talking about TORTURE for God's sake!" they would have produced a report at all.
Perhaps they wouldn't have. But, more importantly, I seriously doubt that anyone stood up and said such a thing.
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_digbysblog_archive.html#108684497863346405
---
Torture Memo (download)
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/military_0604.pdf
http://www.corporations.org/system/top100.html
relax their heads.
feed them well.
let them come down slowly.
The Guadalajara Declaration can be made to work with the right form of activism it has the right type of words in it.
:-)
NEAR FM 101.6 will broadcast a special election results program from 11.00 am to 8 pm on Saturday 12th of June.
Tune in to hear , opinion, and interviews on local election and referendum results, from a uniquely local perspective.
votematch.ie
asks a number of question about europe and then responds pointing you to the european parliament grouping the comes from your answers
Two U.S. corporations conspired with U.S. officials to humiliate, torture and abuse persons detained by U.S. authorities in Iraq according to a class action lawsuit filed June 9, 2004, by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Philadelphia law firm of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker and Rhoads. The suit, filed in federal court in San Diego, names as defendants the Titan Corporation of San Diego, California and CACI International of Arlington, Virginia and its subsidiaries, and three individuals who work for the companies. It charges them with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and alleges that the companies engaged in a wide range of heinous and illegal acts in order to demonstrate their abilities to obtain intelligence from detainees, and thereby obtain more contracts from the government.
The lawsuit charges that three individual defendants, Stephen Stephanowicz and John Israel of CACI, Inc. and Adel Nahkla of Titan, directed and participated in illegal conduct at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Further it alleges that CACI International and Titan created a joint enterprise with a third party that became known as Team Titan. The joint enterprise was hired by the U.S. to provide interrogation services in Iraq.
The action also brings claims under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), and the 8th, 5th, and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution as well as other U.S. and international laws.
According to the Complaint, the plaintiffs in the case suffered at the hands of Defendants and their co-conspiring government officials. Plaintiffs endured the following:
• Being hooded and raped
• Being forced to watch their father tortured and abused so badly that he died
• Repeated beatings, including beatings with chains, boots and other objects
• Being stripped naked and kept in isolation
• Being urinated on and otherwise humiliated
• Being prevented from praying and otherwise abiding by their religious practices
more at
http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/reports/report.asp?ObjID=TutDBqRhAY&Content=387
read thoughts and commentary at
http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000619.html
The notion that ideas can be protected, like land or gold, from bandits predates Gutenberg's printing press. But only in the digital age has the concept of intellectual property set off an international free-for-all.
On the one side are the intellectual property holders, predominantly citizens of Western nations. They're squaring off against IP outlaws, who tend to live in developing countries. The propertied class loudly asserts its ownership and control. The insurgents cry for openness and exploit technological loopholes with abandon.
This clash of cultures demonstrates how intellectual property, a phrase with a tidy and proper ring, is actually a messy business.
[....]
Against this backdrop, Wired offers an atlas of the intellectual property world. The maps and charts on the following pages show how IP enforcers are manning the ramparts while IP antagonists are challenging the protection regime. We focus on four industries: media, medicine, agriculture, and software. And while the battle rages, here and there a few pioneers are redrawing the map, marking a third way that respects patent protections and copyright controls while trying to foster more opportunities for broader access. The beginnings can be found in Linux and The Grey Album, generics and the Creative Commons.
Use this atlas as a guide to two worlds in collision - and an outline of a new frontier.
click here for the PDF files (cool graphics!)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/free.html
In the midst of a breakdown in security and squabbling over who will be in Iraq’s interim government, Baghdad’s art scene has thrived in the wake of of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
[....]
....Rasim is an interesting fellow. He organized this show in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Iraqi Communist Party, with whom he became friends when he lived in Jordan from 1997-99. Rasim’s two pieces were moody and brooding, just the kind of art that I like. Both his works were infused with the mythology and history of Mesopotamia, with iconography stretching back to the dawn of civilization and Sumeria. Once piece was an homage to the Marsh Arabs, or the Ma’dan, with their reed boats and reliance on that ancient environment. Another piece explored the life circle that is the menstrual cycle, with deep reds and circles competing with icons resembling cuneiform, all in bias relief made of oil paint.
After two years during which Jose Padilla has been imprisoned in a windowless cell in a navy brig on American soil without charges—and in the final days of the Supreme Court's arriving at a decision in his case—Deputy Attorney General James Comey suddenly hurled a list of detailed accusations against this "enemy combatant" as designated by George W. Bush.
Comey was not speaking in a court-room but rather in a nationally televised press conference. Padilla could not reply to those denunciations in his own defense. Nor could his lawyers. The government had at last allowed them to speak to their client twice after the Supreme Court had surprised the Bush team by taking Hamdi's case. But their meetings with their client were listened to and videotaped by the government.
Moreover, one of Padilla's lawyers, Andrew Patel, tells me that the government has ruled that Padilla's attorneys cannot tell anyone what Padilla would say in answer to any government accusations because everything he told his lawyers is classified. Nor could his lawyers ask him about what he said in his interrogations.
-- -- --
For the president to claim power to lock up Americans on executive say-so for an indefinite period of time without charges or legal representation remains a terrible and frightening idea, and nothing in the release of Padilla information changes that in any way.
- Harvard Law School professor and former deputy attorney general Philip Heymann, Newsday, June 2
The person who is locked up, doesn't he have a right to bring before some tribunal . . . his own words?
- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during oral arguments in the Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi cases, April 28
Ahmad Chalabi was born on October 30, 1944, into one of Iraq’s wealthiest and most influential Shiite families. When the 1958 revolution forced his family into exile, it lost much of its fortune, including what Chalabi said were “a million-plus square metres of land” of prime property in central Baghdad, which he now intends to reclaim. He told an American friend that his father, before going into exile, had had more land and industrial power than anyone else in Iraq. His forebears leveraged their fortune into political clout by performing favors for the powerful, such as paying off the personal debts of the royal family. In his lifetime, Chalabi’s grandfather held posts in nine Cabinets. Chalabi’s father was president of the senate and an adviser to the king
No more than a few weeks ago senior U.S. spy masters could revel in how much they knew about Tehran's most-secret doings. They had their very own keyhole on the theocracy's inner councils. Even better, the Americans could also eavesdrop on Iran's covert contacts with death-dealing organizations like Hizbullah. As a result, many U.S. intelligence officials were convinced that the Lebanese terror group did not pose an immediate threat to American interests, despite its gory past. Now they don't know what to think. Someone tipped off the Iranians that America had cracked the cryptographic system of Iran's principal spy agency, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security [...]
Regardless of who's responsible for the security breach, it comes at a bad moment: reports from Iraq say suspected Hizbullah operatives may be helping Iraqi insurgents mount terrorist attacks on Americans and other foreign personnel.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5146571/site/newsweek/
link and commentary at
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/6/9/151717/4338
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/timespoll/?track=mainnav-timespoll
The Los Angeles Times poll put support for Kerry at 51%, compared to 44% for Mr Bush. When independent candidate Ralph Nader was included in the race, Kerry was leading Bush by 48% to 42%.
A FF election candidate the Lord Mayor of Dublin indeed, has been knocked for six for being a liar. His walter mitty like fantasy is more befitting of a writer, a British one at that, than an elected alderman and first citizen of a city which was bombed.
He ought try and salvage his reputation and gracefully resign.
= RESIGN ROYSTON!
(tell him Bertie)
http://unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1195600
Oil prices are stabilised throughout the World, with the news of a surprise pan-European disarticulation of "the evil-doers".
Oddly enough the Europeans (UK aside) didn't have to invade anywhere to do this.
http://reuters.com
Chirac is holding the non NATO/OTAN in Iraq line, this doesn't effect you, your neutral, aren't you?
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3220,36-368232,0.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1235377,00.html
And I haven't heard a peep from the occupied European Commission offices in Paris.
THere are offices on Molesworth street, maybe someon could ask them.
The Roof...
Hot. It's hot, hot, hot, hot.
The weather is almost stifling now. The air is heavy and dry with heat. By early noon, it's almost too hot to go outside. For every two hours of electricity, we have four hours of no electricity in our area- and several other areas. The problem now is that the generators in many areas are starting to break down due to constant use and the bad quality of the fuel. It's a big problem and it promises to grow as the summer progresses.
I have spent the last two days ruminating the political situation and... washing the roof. While the two activities are very different, they do share one thing in common- the roof, and political situation, are both a mess.
The roof of an Iraqi home is a sacred place. As much planning goes into it as almost anything else. The roofs are flat and often surrounded by a low wall on which one can lean and look out into the city. During this last year, a certain sort of special bond has formed between your typical Iraqi and the roof of his or her home. We run out to the roof to see where the smoke is coming from after an explosion; we gather on the roof to watch the helicopters flying over head; we reluctantly drag ourselves out to the roof to fill the water tanks when the water is low; we hang clothes to dry on the clotheslines strung out haphazardly across the roof; we sleep on the roof during the endless, powerless nights.
Coordinated sabotage attacks on fuel and transmission lines around an enormous power plant south of Baghdad shut the plant down last weekend, American and Iraqi government officials said Tuesday, raising new fears that insurgents were targeting major sectors of the Iraqi infrastructure as part of an overall terror plan.
At full production, the plant is capable of supplying nearly 20 percent of the entire electrical output of Iraq. But the plant's output plunged nearly to zero and was still generating only a fraction of its maximum output, said Raad Al Haris, deputy minister for electricity.
This Wall Street Journal article
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/07/0988582
was about this memo....
http://www.isthatlegal.org/mil_torture.pdf
go download it and read it, copy it, spread it around before Bush comes
Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/dh/0,14-0@14-0@2-3208,39-23073943,0.html
The Danish speak French. They were responsible for building the French Empire which included Afghanistan and Pakistan and most of Tibet.
on 288 boulevard St Germain, opposite the ASsemblé nationale.
100 sans papiers are inside.
The police are outside.
Sans papiers put the toilet paper in both
the European Commission and Assemblée National.
Some sans papiers come from countries with no toilet paper.
That's economics.
You will remember that the French Police are considerably worse than the Spanish Police and have been "laying into" the sans papiers since then began their march on Paris from Brussels. The French Police are so nasty in fact that they were signalled out by Amnesty International in the 2004 Human Rights Report. I once had a machine gun put in my stomach coming back from protesting Le Pen's attempt to get a fellow FN member elected in Strassbourg.
I tried to point out to that police man that using his weapon in a bus on a front row passenger would result in several deaths, and that in two pieces I really wouldn't be pleasant to clean up.
He grunted but I think he got the message.
Call from the Unity Against NATO and Bush - 26-29 June 2004-Istanbul
We are calling on all those who are fighting for “Another World” to come to Turkey against this gathering of global killers. Let’s meet in Istanbul against war, occupation, neo-liberalism, capitalist globalization and the ensuing increasing poverty and injustice. Let’s merge our struggles for a world without war.
NATO, the military face of neo-liberalism is meeting in Istanbul, Turkey on 28-29 June 2004. The US President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair will be attending alongside the top civil and military representatives of NATO member states.
We are calling on all those who are fighting for “Another World” to come to Turkey against this gathering of global killers.
has been arrested in Italy, along with 15 other presumed terrorists in Belgium.
The police are delighted this being the result of long long work, though called "The Egyptian" the man is in fact morrocan.
They wer presumed to be planning a spectacular in Europe at some unspecified date in the future.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1234595,00.html
El Pais the Spanish daily has published details of phone conversations in which the arrested declared themselves "willing to die and be martyrs for the cause of Jihad".
Maybe you should learn what that phrase sounds like. So that when you hear it, you can go "oooo that's one those infamous suicide bomber wannabees".
There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.
The US administration on Tuesday signalled it would press other members of the Group of Eight industrialised nations to relieve Iraq of its $120bn external sovereign debt, as President George W. Bush celebrated the prospect of closer international co-operation.
"It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogations."
[....]
"Every flag JAG lodged complaints," said one senior Pentagon official involved in the process, referring to the judge advocate generals who are military lawyers of each service.
"It's really unprecedented. For almost 30 years we've taught the Geneva Convention one way," said a senior military attorney. "Once you start telling people it's okay to break the law, there's no telling where they might stop."
A U.S. law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon group's report, prepared under the supervision of General Counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority."
The Pentagon group's report, divulged yesterday by the Wall Street Journal and obtained by The Post, said further that the 1994 law barring torture "does not apply to the conduct of U.S. personnel" at Guantanamo Bay.
there are five destroyers of the NATO fleet off of Barcelona. We don't know what's happening.
The british sent a destroyer to observe the seige of BCN after the first bombarment of a civilian area aimed at the CAthedral destroyed four blocks of houses, an are which is now Placa Nueva in the 1930s. But since then only yachts of tourists and occasional cruise liners put to port and of course Greenpeace. Rumours have started that they've come to deal with Al Qaeda in the holy places.
This might be the last message from surreality HQ!!!
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/95703/index.php
This is news of sorts, as the heart has been confirmed as being Louis XVII after DNA testing the bourbon strands, it's also ephemera of sorts, (the type I know some of you love) because the readers of the Irish independent probably don't know a small portion of that heart was ceremoniously eaten. long ago.
:-)
Police dispersed a monthly bicycle protest in Montreal last week, arresting at least one person and handing out $500 in fines. The "critical mass" consisted of approximately 50 cyclists taking up one lane of a street in Montreal. Using the slogan "we're not blocking traffic, we are traffic", critical masses are a form of grassroots protest that aims to direct critical attention at unsustainable forms of transportation, particularly cars.
According to eyewitnesses, police forced several cyclists from their bicycles, issued fines, and threatened other cyclists with fines if they did not disperse. According to cyclists, this was the first time that Montreal police had forced a critical mass to disperse.
The chief Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, the nation's pre-eminent foreign policy club, has quit as a protest, accusing the council of stifling debate on American intervention in Chile during the 1970's as a result of pressure from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.
Kenneth Maxwell, a senior fellow for inter-American affairs at the council, announced his resignation in May 13 letters to James F. Hoge Jr., the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, where Mr. Maxwell had reviewed a book on American involvement in Chile, and to Richard Haass, president of the council's board.
"There is a question of principle at stake here," Mr. Maxwell wrote to Mr. Hoge. "It was made abundantly clear to me, as you know, that there was intense pressure on you, on Foreign Affairs and on my employer, the Council on Foreign Relations, from Henry Kissinger and others, to close off this debate about accountability and Mr. Kissinger's role in Chile in the 1970's."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/05/arts/05CHIL.html
the magazine:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/
...I think there has been some bad information out there. I often say that we can get a lot of good information on the Internet. Still, it can be a dangerous tool, because it puts a lot of misinformation out there, and people tend to take it at face value. For example, people will refer to the new touch-screen machines as computers. They're not computers. They are not part of a system. They are not connected to anything. They are stand-alone machines that are developed specifically for an individual casting his or her vote.
After the 2000 presidential-election debacle in Florida, state and county election officials there agreed to examine whether the names of more than 19,000 people should be restored to the voter rolls because most of them may have been mistakenly identified as convicted felons and thus ineligible to vote. (In Florida, convicted felons must apply to get back their voting rights after their sentences are complete, though few manage to do so.) Those disenfranchised voters took on increased significance when Bush won the state by just 537 votes. Have the snafus been fixed? Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood has now told county supervisors that 47,000 more names are likely to be purged from the voter rolls this year, and election watchdogs fear that Florida is poised to repeat the mistakes of 2000 on a much larger scale.
Hood argues that the criteria for removing people from the rolls are more stringent than they were in 2000 and that supervisors are now required by law to inform those named. "New safeguards assure that error rates will be kept to a minimum," Hood's spokeswoman says. But critics say the state is using the same flawed database that misidentified so many voters in 2000 and has done little to improve its accuracy.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1101040614-646354,00.html
.... this DoD memo appears to be quite the opposite. It is, quite literally, a cookbook approach for illegal government conduct. This memorandum lays out the substantive law on torture and how to avoid it. It then goes on to discuss the procedural mechanisms with which torture is normally prosecuted, and techniques for avoiding those traps. I have not seen the text of the memo, but from this report, it does not appear that it advises American personnel to comply with international or domestic law. It merely tells them how to avoid it. That is dangerous legal advice.
[....]
Joseph Story. Even in wartime, the President's authority to act is limited by the Constitution. There is no general Presidential power to nullify the laws of the United States, nor the laws of war which have been codified in treaties. Advice to the contrary is wrong, and any actions which follow this advice are probably unlawful as well.
- Analysis and commentary from Phillip Carter, a former Army officer, journalist, and recent UCLA Law School graduate
http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1086610719
Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren't getting enough information from prisoners.
The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. In a March 6, 2003, draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used. The complete draft document was classified "secret" by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in 2013.
[....]
A military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture -- to assert "presidential power at its absolute apex," the lawyer said.
[....]
Senior officers at Guantanamo requested a "rethinking of the whole approach to defending your country when you have an enemy that does not follow the rules," the official said. Rather than license torture, this official said that the report helped rein in more "assertive" approaches.
Methods now used at Guantanamo include limiting prisoners' food, denying them clothing, subjecting them to body-cavity searches, depriving them of sleep for as much as 96 hours and shackling them in so-called stress positions, a military-intelligence official said. Although the interrogators consider the methods to be humiliating and unpleasant, they don't view them as torture, the official said.
The working-group report elaborated the Bush administration's view that the president has virtually unlimited power to wage war as he sees fit, and neither Congress, the courts nor international law can interfere. It concluded that neither the president nor anyone following his instructions was bound by the federal Torture Statute, which makes it a crime for Americans working for the government overseas to commit or attempt torture, defined as any act intended to "inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." Punishment is up to 20 years imprisonment, or a death sentence or life imprisonment if the victim dies.
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority," the report asserted. (The parenthetical comment is in the original document.) The Justice Department "concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president's constitutional power," the report said.
read the full article at....
George's daughter Jenna Bush is presently doing a christian pilgrimage in Spain honoring St. James of Compostela.[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3772775.stm ] This saint is also known as “James the Moor Slayer.”
A depiction of him slicing the heads from Arabs is being removed from his church. [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3680331.stm ]
Why choose this pilgramage? Could it be any more of an affront to a third of the world?
Hmmm. What are we trying to say?
---
found at
http://openpublishing.mindismoving.org/blog/index.php?p=11
Test subjects can't see the invisible beam from the Pentagon's new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds.
People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.
The long-range column of millimeter-wave energy is known as the "Active Denial System" for its ability to prevent an aggressor from advancing. Senior military officials, who plan to deliver the device for troop evaluation this fall, say years of testing has produced no sign it will lead to health effects beyond perhaps causing skin to temporarily redden.
It is among the most potent of a new generation of futuristic, "less-than-lethal" weapons being developed by the Defense Department - tools that could dramatically alter the way police control riots and soldiers fight wars.
http://www.ecocitycleveland.org/transportation/traffic/tools/woonerf.html
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000765.html
Why don't we do it in the road?
A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and red
lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. It sounds insane, but
it works.
By Linda Baker
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/20/traffic_design/index.html
FULL TEXT
http://tinyurl.com/3guqw
In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.
But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets. On the contrary, the urban arterials are a communal mix of automobiles, cyclists, pedestrians, and small businesses such as inner-tube repairmen that set up shop directly in the right-of-way.
[....]
"The more you post the evidence of legislative control, such as traffic signs, the less the driver is trying to use his or her own senses," says Hamilton-Baillie, noting he has a habit of walking randomly across roads -- much to his wife's consternation. "So the less you can advertise the presence of the state in terms of authority, the more effective this approach can be." This, of course, is the exact opposite of the "Triple E" traffic-calming approach, which seeks to control the driver through the use of speed bumps, photo radar, crosswalks and other engineering and enforcement mechanisms.
[....]
The absence of traffic controls means that people are out for themselves; the trick is, they have to look out for everyone else as well. Second-generation traffic design is a curious mix of selfishness and altruism, of order amid chaos. And, after a fashion, it just might work.
sounds worse than genoa
An eight-year-old girl stood under the blade of a digger on Monday, as women
and children stopped the uprooting of olive trees on Az Zawiya land for
nearly one hour.
See below for story:
TO THE anti-globalisers, the corporation is a devilish instrument of environmental destruction, class oppression and imperial conquest. But is it also pathologically insane? That is the provocative conclusion of an award-winning documentary film, called “The Corporation”, coming soon to a cinema near you. People on both sides of the globalisation debate should pay attention. Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, “The Corporation” is a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2647328
the movie with trailer:
http://thecorporation.tv/
another good one....
http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/2004/06/07/
By writing to the Diplomatic corp and asking them to vote FF in the European and Local elections and urging them to vote yes in the Citizenship Referendum.
Meanwhile, Eamon O Cuiv has warned against voting for independents. Apparantly they are toothless, which is a sad reflection on the quality of dental care provided to the poorer members of Irish Society.
http://politics.ie/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5453
June 9, 1954: The unravelling of McCarthy's Reign of Terror
Senatot JOseph McCarthy is humiliated on national television and his colleagues begin to find the backbone to challenge him.
Cut and pasted content replaced with URL - 1 of the Indymedia Editoral team
Challenges following reform of the defamation laws
Following the torrent of revelations at public corruption tribunals, the announcement that the restrictive legal framework in which the Irish media operates is set for reform, is welcome news. Should we expect significant change in the approach of the media to in-depth investigation of issues of public governance and other issues of common interest?
Cut and pasted content replaced with URL - 1 of the Indymedia Editoral team
The ARN and also, AWI versus IAWM
I have written an article on todays Blanket website {link attached} entitled the ARN in the beginning {Part 1}, This is an indepth look at the ARN and its formation. It also goes briefly into my view of left paties and democratic centralism. Part 2 will deal with moving on from that initial untied front and mass rally {to attempt to bring an end to the brutal attacks in South Belfast} onto local community agitation and mobilsation. It will explain the development of the now local trade union and community activists groups that have came out of the organisation of the united front {which included that of the trade union movement - ICTU} therefore then enabling the ARN's move to becoming an activist based and local grassroots network - who can now and have responded to attacks by mobilising the relevant local communities in which we have a base. It shall again deal with the 'organised Left' and their 'Relationship' with the ARN and deal with the other tactics they espouse and some interesting 'converstaions' I have had with some of their leading figures etc over the issues. And it will deal with my 'initial' surprise at some of their tactics they where embracing and then my understanding as to why I believe they were {and had to} embrace them. This shall be followed with another indepth look at the NIPSA dispute and the left and those histotic walkouts etc..
Secondly there is a large article in todays Irish News on the AWI as opposed to the IAWM with comparisons of the Life of Brian given. It does though set out each campaigns stall and gives reasons as to differences. I say this as it is the paper read by many who will travel to the South for the demonstrations therefore providing an insight of the 'splits' as the irish News puts it and each campaigns 'differences'..
A new anti-war website has just got up and going, and it is planned to develop and expand it over time.
The new Anti-War Ireland website - unsurprisingly called antiwarireland.org - is now online.
At the moment it's fairly basic, and nowhere near as interactive as we'd like it to be, but we intend to develop the categories and we're planning to improve the features over time. For instance, it is planned to have interactive news, events and discussion threads, as well as a resources section where posters, leaflets, and other items, can be downloaded.
What's up now is a beginning rather than an end-place.
Many thanks to those who lent a hand and who continue to provide technical support. The project (obviously) is ongoing.