WAR OPPONENTS OCCUPY CONGRESSIONAL OFFICES

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WAR OPPONENTS OCCUPY CONGRESSIONAL OFFICES
by Mike Ferner

February 6, 2007




From Alaska to Washington, D.C. yesterday, peace activists escalated their tactics and occupied Congressional offices, demanding elected officials vote against George Bush’s request of $93,000,000,000 to extend the war.



The Occupation Project, organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence (VCNV), kicked off at noon, Eastern Time when four people were arrested holding a funeral service in the Chicago office of Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and four more people were arrested in the Chicago office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), reading names of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers.



At the same the same hour, 10 people sat down and were arrested in the Washington, D.C. office of Senator John McCain (R-AZ), including Garett Reppenhagen, a director of Iraq Veterans Against the War, Franciscan priest Jerry Zawada, and Kathy Kelly, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-director of VCNV. McCain’s office in Phoenix was also occupied.



On the opening day of the six-week project, a total of eight local congressional offices were occupied across the country, including the San Francisco offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and the Portland office of Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). Members of Veterans For Peace, one of the 18 organizations endorsing the campaign, participated in an action at a congressional office in Fairbanks, Alaska.



Dan Pearson, a spokesperson for the Occupation Project, explained the campaign’s goal is to defeat the $93 billion “emergency supplemental” war funding bill that the Bush administration forwarded to Congress yesterday.



Pearson and three others were removed from Obama’s Chicago office yesterday after the office manager told them they could stay until closing time if they stopped reading names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. Pearson responded that “We didn't come here to sit down and be quiet. We are responding to an emergency. If an apartment were on fire across the street I would bang on every door and interrupt whatever the neighbors were doing and I wouldn't feel bad about it.”



Today, organizers are targeting congressional offices in Minneapolis-St. Paul, St. Louis, and Seattle. Plans for other occupations are underway in over 20 states as a way to pressure elected officials to “defund” the Iraq war.



The Occupation Project got a boost yesterday when United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the coalition that brought some 300,000 protesters to Washington on January 27, endorsed it and sent an email letter to its 1400 member organizations around the nation, urging their participation.




Mike Ferner is a freelance writer from Ohio. www.mikeferner.org

Cruiser with Ralph

Cruising With Ralph Nader
by Joshua Frank

www.dissidentvoice.org
February 5, 2007

I've always seen The Nation cruise as somewhat of an oxymoron: a bunch of well-heeled progressives floating around the sea on a mammoth ship discussing how to change the state of our dying planet. Aside from the truly bourgeois nature of most cruise liners, with their gluttonous buffets and lustrous ballrooms -- their collective environmental destruction alone should be enough to steer anyone clear of booking a trip. And now I've just found out that Ralph Nader, of all people, is supporting such a horrible industry, not to mention the magazine that has flogged him so hard, so many times.

That's right, maverick consumer advocate Ralph Nader has been booked as a guest speaker for this year's Nation get-away. The Nation magazine does offer its participants a buy-in option to "reforest an area in Guatemala recently devastated by mudslides, planting enough trees to offset the carbon emissions produced by each Nation cruise passenger." While this may sound reasonable, Carnival cruise liners -- which owns the Nation's liner of choice, Holland America -- has been sited for numerous environmental damages over the years. The carbon credits will never offset the damage cruise liners do, nor repair the damage they have already done.

Carnival, one of the world's largest cruise operators, holds a virtual monopoly in the business and is responsible for most of the industry's environmental violations. In 2001, the popular Dawn Princess of Carnival's Princess Cruise line, struck and killed a humpback whale. The company was fined $750,000 for the incident last month. In 2004, Holland America was fined $10,000 after former Vice President, Richard K. Softye plead guilty to falsely certifying the company's environmental audits. Softye was ordered 450 hours of community service and three years probation.

Alas, that's not even the worst of the company's recent environmental offenses. In August of 2002 Holland America was fined $2 million after 40,000 gallons of sewage sludge, likely full of human fecal matter, was discharged into an Alaskan harbor near Juneau. A year earlier, in an April 2002 plea agreement, Carnival paid a total of $18 million in fines and court ordered fees after the company pled guilty to discharging tons of oily waste near the Florida coast from 1996 to 2001. The company also pled guilty to falsifying their Oil Record Books in order to conceal its practices of improperly using pollution prevention equipment that was responsible for the illegal discharge.

And the list goes on. So why is The Nation, one of the most popular progressive magazines in the country, even supporting the cruise line industry that is so flooded with gross environmental abuses? More importantly, why is Ralph Nader, the great crusader against corporate crime and abuse, supporting such an enterprise? While I won't assume that the publisher and editors of The Nation know any better, surely Nader does.

So this is a call to Mr. Ralph Nader. Bow out in protest and oppose Carnival's environmental crimes by ditching your seat on The Nation's cruise.




Joshua Frank is Co-Editor of Dissident Voice, and the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. He edits BrickBurner.org, the official blog of Dissident Voice. He can be reached at: joshua@dissidentvoice.org.

Other Recent Articles by Josh Frank

* What America Really Needs to Hear: Offering a Response to Senator Webb
* The Semiotics of Iniquity: Hillary Clinton and the Pro-Israel Lobby
* Obama and the Middle East: The Next Big Bamboozler?
* Turning on the War
* A New Congress? Not When It Comes to Iran
* Eliot Spitzer's Constitutional Hang-up
* Death By Coke
* Jon Tester’s Neopopulism: The Montana Formula
* A Progressive Sweep?
* Bye-Bye Coke, Hello Pepsi: Anatomy of the Midterms
* It’s 2004 All Over Again...
* Snake Oil and the Midterm Elections
* The Antiwar Movement and Independent Politics: An Interview with Cindy Sheehan
* Cindy Sheehan’s Lesser-Evilism: Democrats or Bust?
* Bye, Bye Civil Liberties: Blame the Democrats
* Fat Cat Democrats Versus the Antiwar Movement
* How Jonathan Tasini Helped Hillary Clinton by Hurting the Antiwar Movement
* Corporate E. coli
* The People’s Struggle in the Middle East: An Interview with Ramzy Baroud
* Democrats Stifle Antiwar Voices, Again
* Revolution of Hope with Kim Petersen and Sunil Sharma
* Official Justification for Israel's Invasion of Lebanon on Thin Ice
* How the Kyoto Protocol Was (Al) Gored
* Farewell Sleater-Kinney
* Al Gore the Environmental Titan?
* Challenging Hillary Clinton: New York Takes on the War Party
* Kerry's Halfhearted Reversal
* A Plan to End the War: Dump the Democrats
* The Trouble with Big Greens: Trapped Inside the Beltway
* Pentagon Thievery: An Interview with Jeffrey St. Clair
* War Supporters Still Looking for a Smoking Gun
* Twist and Hate: The Smearing of Paul Craig Roberts
* How the Green Party Slays Their Own: An Interview with John Murphy
* Enabling Bush: Senator Feinstein’s War Profiteering
* The Democrats' Withdrawal Plan: Another Election Year Stunt
* The Rhetoric of Al Gore: Not to Be Trusted
* Hillary and George: Two Warmongers in a Pod
* Cindy Sheehan and Lesser-Evil Politics

Resisting Corporate Power in Colombia

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An Interview with Aviva Chomsky by Hans Bennett

www.dissidentvoice.org
February 5, 2007

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. She is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector.

Hans Bennett: What happened to the community of Tabaco in 2001?

Aviva Chomsky: Tabaco was an Afro-Colombian village in the northernmost Guajira province. It was the largest of a network of small indigenous and Afro-Colombian villages, the only one with paved roads, a school, a post office, and other government services. In August 2001, this village was violently displaced as part of an expansion project by the Cerrejon coal mine, the largest open-pit coal mine in the world. The mine was then jointly owned by Exxon and a consortium made up of BHP Billiton (an Australian company), Glencore (a Swiss company), and Anglo-American (a British company).

As one resident described the events: "We didn't know what was happening. All of a sudden we saw the police, the riot police, and the army surrounding our houses and people coming into the town in trucks, in bulldozers. We went into our houses to watch what was happening and they began to raze the town, to raze the houses. And we were shocked, we didn't believe that the mine could be doing this."

HB: Has anything been done to compensate the Tabaco community?

AC: When our delegation was there in November 2006, we interviewed 61 heads of households from families displaced from Tabaco, all living under squalid conditions in the nearby town of Albania. We heard the same story again and again. We are peasants, we are farmers, people told us. We used to be productive people, we used to support ourselves and our families. We were not rich, but we worked our land and we provided our children with what they needed. Since the company took our town and our land, there is nothing for us to do. There is no work.

In May 2002 the Colombian Supreme Court ruled that the people displaced from Tabaco must be relocated in such a way as to be able to reconstruct their community -- meaning that they needed land to farm and the public infrastructure that had been destroyed. They are still waiting for this decision to be enforced. One resident told us, "We have exhausted all of the possibilities in Guajira, in all of Colombia. We've gone to the courts, but they won't help us because the mine has so much power."

The company claims that they followed a process of individual negotiations, offering people money to give up their houses and land. When we met with company officials in August 2006, they told us that only eight families had refused to sell and that they were still making offers to these eight.

Tabaco's residents described these "negotiations" to us. They told us that starting in 1997 the company began to make people offers to turn over the title of their land, but promised that they would be able to continue to farm on it. That the company needed the titles for legal protection, but they would never actually use the land. A lot of people did "sell" because they thought they were selling only the title, not the right to use the land.

Then around 2000 the "negotiations" started getting more coercive. The company threatened people that if they did not sell, their land would be expropriated and they would get nothing in return. The government began cutting off services to the town -- the health center, the school. The priest sold the church that the people themselves had built. So more people agreed to sell.

Some people from Tabaco have been forced to leave the region altogether. But the people who remain are organized. Tabaco in Resistance has a very clear set of demands: they want to be recognized as a community, for the company to negotiate collectively with their representatives, and to be collectively relocated and compensated for their losses. They want to achieve a settlement that will allow them to reconstruct the social and economic fabric of their community.

HB: How is the Cerrejon company responding to these demands?

AC: We met with Cerrejon officials twice in 2006. In August our delegation met with a group of about 15 officials from different departments of the operation. In November we met with the president of the company, Leon Teicher. Interestingly, Teicher and other officials acknowledged that "mistakes were made" in Tabaco and that they want to avoid such mistakes in the future. Clearly, they are unhappy about the international scrutiny of their human rights practices. They say they are willing to negotiate with three of the other villages currently in the path of mine expansion. But they refuse to negotiate with the people displaced from Tabaco or with those from any of the other communities affected by their operations.

HB: What is being done to apply international pressure?

AC: We are working internationally on many different fronts. We have people in Australia, England, and Switzerland who have attended the owning companies' shareholders meetings to bring the issues of the communities into public light there. We have sponsored tours by members of the affected communities in all of these countries, as well as in the U.S. and Canada, where we receive a lot of the coal. In Salem, Massachusetts, where I live, and where our power plant imports coal from Colombia, the city council, the mayor, our state representative, and our congressional representative have all written letters to the mine asking it to recognize Tabaco's right to relocation. We've also met with power plants in Salem, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. New Brunswick Power has also written to the mine urging it to negotiate with displaced Tabaco residents. Dominion Energy, the owner of our plant, made a somewhat vaguer statement calling for a "just resolution" of the issues.

In Denmark and Holland, two major importers have suspended contracts with the U.S.-owned Drummond coal mine in Colombia because of the murders of three union leaders there. This also sends a strong message to other foreign-owned mines in Colombia that their human rights practices are important to their clients.

HB: How does this relate to the anticorporate globalization movement?

AC: These mines are a perfect example of corporate globalization. All of these mining companies are multinational enterprises. In Colombia they have been key players in implementing the neo-liberal agenda. One piece of this was working with the IMF and World Bank to rewrite Colombia's mining code to grant more privileges and profits to foreign companies. The Cerrejon mine used to be half-owned by the Colombian government and it was privatized as part of this process.

Practically the only state presence in Guajira where the Cerrejon mine is located is the army. Schools, roads, health care, and other social services are almost nonexistent. Paramilitaries operate freely and profits flow out freely. It's a neo-liberal paradise.

Creating people-to-people ties, or "globalization from below," has been an important part of the anti-corporate globalization movement. We need to be able to create a global movement to deal with the power of these global companies. When we bring people from Nova Scotia to see the mine that their coal comes from, or bring people from Guajira to the power plants thousands of miles away that burn coal from the mine that displaced their villages, we empower all of us to work for a world that values people and their rights over the profits of multinationals.

HB: In December 2006 Sintracarbon (the National Union of Coal Industry Workers) entered into internationally monitored contract negotiations. The union's website explains that "violence against trade unionists in Colombia is widespread and often increases during contract negotiations. This time the union is taking the courageous stand of calling on the mine to address the rights and needs of the Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in the region...." What has been happening since?

AC: As a result of our November delegation, we formed an International Commission to monitor the contract negotiations that began in early December. We've been receiving daily updates from the union as to the progress of their negotiations, which we've been translating and distributing to members of the Commission and also posting on the union's website that we made to support them in the negotiations. The Commission includes representatives from labor, social, and community organizations in the U.S., Canada, England, and Switzerland.

During our November delegation, we took Sintracarbon representatives to visit the communities affected by the mine and they decided to include a demand that the mine recognize the communities' rights to collective negotiation, collective relocation, and reparations in their bargaining proposal. This is something quite unprecedented. Union members were appalled at the conditions in these communities. It may seem surprising, but the union and the communities have been separated by a huge gap: the mine won't employ people from the surrounding communities, partly because they want them to disappear and partly because the mine employs people with a fairly high level of education and technical training -- it's an open pit mine and most of the people who work there are mechanics or heavy machinery operators. People from Afro-Colombian and indigenous villages have no way to get the education and skills needed to do these jobs.

I think unions in the United States are still struggling to figure out how to engage with globalization. How can they deal with issues of global justice and human and social rights at the same time that they're trying to protect their members' jobs and privileges? The progressive unions that we've been working with in the U.S. and Canada are extraordinarily impressed with how Sintracarbon is going beyond workplace issues and working with the communities that are resisting their own employer.

Too often, we get overwhelmed by the enormous power of multinationals, by how implacable the global system is. Here we have some of the most powerless people in the world -- indigenous people with no resources, no electricity, no water -- and some of the most vulnerable, a union in a country with the highest rates of assassination and repression against union activists in the world -- taking on some of the most powerful multinationals in the world today. We have a lot to learn from their example.



Hans Bennett is a Philadelphia-based photo-journalist mostly focusing on the movement to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners. His website is: insubordination.blogspot.com.

* Visit the home website of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee and also their blogspot.



Other Articles by Hans Bennett

* Freiheit für Mumia Abu-Jamal!: German Book Reveals New Evidence in Death-Row Case
* They’ll Never Silence the Voice of the Voiceless
* Challenging Corporate Media In a Time of War: An Interview with Norman Solomon
* The Legacy of Martin Luther King: It’s All About Class War
* Death Row? Shut It Down!
* What the Corporate Media Didn’t Tell You: An interview with Ramona Africa
* Chant Down Babylon!: Radical Artists Challenge Bush’s War on the World

Failed Spangled States

Failed States:The US and Israel

Paul Craig Roberts

Information Clearing House

Monday, 05 February 2007

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Iran, a nation with a 5,000 year history, is certainly not a failed state. The main failed states in the Middle East are those that are US puppets. They represent American hegemony, not the interests of their people.

02/05/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- Growing references by the US and Israel to the Muslim Middle East as a collection of failed states are part of the propaganda campaign to strip legitimacy from Muslim states and set them up for attack. These accusations spring from the hubris of many Israelis, who see themselves as “God’s Chosen People,” a guarantee of immunity instead of a call to responsibility, and many Americans, who regard their country as “a city upon a hill” that is “the light of the world.” But do the US and Israel fit the profile of successful states, or are they failed states themselves?

A compelling case can be made that the US and Israel are failed states. Israel allegedly is a democracy, but it is controlled by a minority of Zionist zealots who commit atrocities against Palestinians in order to provoke terrorist acts that are then used to perpetuate the right-wing’s hold on political power. Israel has perfected blowback as a tool of political control. The Israeli state relies entirely on coercion and has no diplomacy. It stands isolated in the world except for the US, which sustains Israel’s existence with money, military weapons, and the US veto in the United Nations.

Israel survives on life support from the US. A state that cannot exist without outside support is a failed state.

What about the United States? The US is an even greater failure. Its existence is not dependent on life support from outside. The US has failed in another way. Not only has the state failed, but the society as well.

The past six years have seen the rise of dictatorial power in the executive and the collapse of the separation of powers mandated by the US Constitution. The president has declared himself to be “The Decider.” The power to decide includes the meaning and intent of laws passed by Congress and whether the laws apply to the executive. President Bush has openly acknowledged that he disobeyed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and unlawfully spied on Americans without warrants. Bush and his Attorney General could not make it more clear that their position is that Bush is above the law.

It is also Bush’s position that he is above the Constitution. Bush and his Attorney General maintain that as commander-in-chief in “the war on terror,” the executive has the power to decide the applicability of civil liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. The US Department of Justice (sic) has taken the position that this decision is an executive decision alone beyond the authority of the judiciary and the legislature.

An enfeebled and eviscerated Congress has acquiesced in the growth of executive power, even legislating unconstitutional executive powers into law. The Decider has grabbed the power to arrest people on accusation alone and to detain them indefinitely without charges or evidence. He has obtained the right to torture those whom he arrests. The Geneva Conventions do not apply to the US president, declares the Regime. Bush has obtained the right to commit people to death in military tribunals on the basis of hearsay and secret evidence alone. The Bush Regime has succeeded in moving the American state off the basis on which the Founding Fathers set it.

The Bush Regime led the American people to war in Iraq based entirely on lies and deception. This is a known and undisputed fact. Congress has done nothing whatsoever about this monstrous crime and impeachable offense.

Under the Nuremberg standard, unprovoked aggression is a war crime. The US established this standard. Bush has violated it with impunity.

Bush and his Attorney General assert Bush’s power to attack Iran independently of a Congressional declaration of war or any form of congressional approval. Bush claims that his power to attack Iran is merely an extension of his present power to conduct war in Iraq, a power seized on the basis of lies and deception. Congress has taken no action to disabuse Bush of his presumption.

Bush’s preparations for attacking Iran are highly visible. The entire world can see the preparations and expects the attack. Congress is mute in the face of a catastrophic widening of a war to which a large majority of the American people are now opposed.

In national elections three months ago the American people used democracy in an unsuccessful attempt to restrain the Bush Regime from its warmongering ways by defeating the Republican Party and giving control of both houses of Congress to Democrats.

Instead of acting, the Democrats have postured.

Indeed, some have joined Bush in his warmongering. Hillary Clinton, regarded as the frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, recently declared at an affair hosted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a leading instigator of war with Iran, that Iran is a danger to the US and a great threat to Israel.

Hillary’s claims are preposterous. Israel has large numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Iran has none. Iran has no ability to harm the US and would have no motive except for the Bush Regime’s gratuitous provocations. A state in which a leading contender for the presidential nomination can make utterly absurd claims and suffer no consequence is a failed state.

The United States is a failed state, because in the US it is not possible for leadership to emerge. Politics is controlled by powerful interest groups, such as AIPAC, the military-industrial complex, transnational corporations, and “security” agencies that are accumulating vast amounts of unaccountable power. The American people spoke in November and it means nothing whatsoever.

The people are enfeebled because the media no longer has independence. The US media serves as propagandist for the state. It cannot be otherwise in a highly concentrated media run not by journalists but by advertising executives protecting stock values that derive from federal broadcast licenses granted by the state.

Like the three monkeys, Congress sees no evil, the media speaks no evil, and the people hear no evil. In the US “news” consists of the government’s propaganda. “News” in America is exactly like the “news” in George Orwell’s 1984.

The US is a failed state, because it is not true to any of the principles upon which it was established. All over the world today, America is seen as a rogue state, a hegemonic evil, and as the greatest threat to peace and stability. In its new identify, America is the total opposite of the Founding Fathers intention. There is no greater failure than that.

Academics differentiate between failed states and rogue states. The US and Israel meet both criteria. The US and Israel lead the world in aggressive military actions and in killings of civilian populations. Both countries meet the main indicators of failed states as published in Foreign Policy’s 2005 Failed States Index.

The leading indicators of failed states are inequality (not merely poverty), “criminalization or delegitimization of the state, which occurs when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal, or ineffective,” and “demographic factors, especially population pressures stemming from refugees” and “internally displaced populations.”

All economic indicators show that income and wealth inequality is rapidly increasing in the US. The growth in inequality is the result of the state’s policy that favors shareholders and corporate executives at the expense of American workers.

The income differences between Israelis and ghettoized Palestinians are huge.

Trials and investigations of leading political figures in the US and Israel are an ongoing occurrence. Currently, the former chief-of-staff of the vice president of the US is on trial for lying to the FBI in an attempt to obstruct an investigation into the Bush Regime’s illegal disclosure of an undercover CIA operative. The accused claims he is the fall guy for higher ups.

In Israel the president of the country is accused of rape and faces indictment.

Both the US and Israel routinely ignore international law and are accused of committing war crimes by human rights organizations. The US Congress stands revealed as totally ineffective and unwilling to constrain the executive. The American people have learned that they cannot change the government’s policies through elections. By fomenting the demise of the civil liberties that they are sworn to uphold, President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales have delegitimized the American state, turning it into an instrument of oppression.

Israel’s policies in the West Bank have displaced a million Palestinians, forcing them to be refugees from their own land. Jordan is filled with Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian existence in the West Bank is being increasingly confined to ghettos cut off from farm land, schools, medical care and from other Palestinians. President Jimmy Carter has described Israeli-occupied Palestine as “apartheid.”

For decades in the face of public opposition the US government has encouraged massive legal and illegal immigration of diverse peoples whose failure to assimilate is balkanizing the US population. Economic refugees from Mexico are changing the culture and allegiance of entire sections of the American southwest, and racial animosities are on the rise.

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky defined one characteristic of a failed state as a “democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion.” We see this gap in Bush’s decision to escalate the war in Iraq despite the opposition of 70% of the American public. What does democracy mean if elected leaders ignore public opinion?

Another characteristic of failed states is the failure to protect their own citizens. Israel’s aggressive policies against Palestinians provoke terror attacks on Israeli citizens. These attacks are then used to justify more oppression of Palestinians, which leads to more terror. Bush’s military aggression in the MIddle East is the main cause of any terror threats that Americans now face.

Another characteristic of a failed state is the departure of citizens. Many Israelis, seeing no future for Israel in the government’s hostility to Arabs, are leaving Israel. Among Israelis themselves, the legitimacy of the Israeli state is so endangered that the Knesset has just passed a law to revoke the citizenship of “unpatriotic” Israelis.

In the US a large percentage of the population has lost confidence in the government’s veracity. Polls show that 40% of Americans do not believe the government’s story that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Arab terrorists. Many believe the attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by elements in the Bush Regime in order to create public acceptance for its planned invasions in the Middle East.

A state that cannot tolerate moral conscience in its soldiers is a failed state. The failure of the American state can be seen it its prosecution of Lt. Ehren Watada. Watada comes from a family with a military heritage. His response to the 9/11 attack was to join the military. Diagnosed with asthma, he failed his physical, but persevered and ended up with an officer’s commission.

Watada’s problem is that he can recognize a war crime even when it is committed by a might-makes-right state. The Abu Ghraib prison tortures and the evidence that Bush deceived Americans about weapons of mass destruction caused Watada to realize that he was on the wrong side of the Nuremberg Principles, the UN Charter, and the US military code, which says American soldiers have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders. He signed up to serve his country, not to kill people for illegal and immoral reasons.

Watada refused to deploy to Iraq. He is being tried for refusing deployment and for suggesting that President Bush deceived Americans.

By now every attentive American knows that Bush deceived them, and our greatest patriots have said so. Watada is on trial for suggesting what everyone knows to be true. He is not being tried for veracity. He is being tried for speaking the truth.

Failure to deploy is a more understandable charge. There is no army if soldiers do not follow orders. However, as the US established at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, following orders is not an excuse for participating in war crimes. At the Nazi war crimes trials, it was the US that insisted that soldiers were responsible for using judgment about the legality of their orders.

That is what Lt. Watada did. His trial will not broach the subject of whether his judgment was correct. The evidence against him will merely be that he did not deploy.

By trying Lt. Watada the US government is insisting that American troops are not responsible for judging the legality of their orders, only for following them. The standard applied to WW II Germans is too high to be applied to Americans.

In a draft army Watada’s refusal to accept illegal orders could be used by conscripted cannon fodder to derail the state’s intended aggression. However, in a voluntary army in which soldiers seek to serve, permitting Lt. Watada to have his conscience does not imperil the command structure. Others less thoughtful and less aware will carry forth the state’s enterprise.

The case against Israel and the US does not preclude some Muslim states from also meeting the criteria for failure. However, Iraq, an artificial creation of Western colonial powers, was driven into failure and civil war by American aggression. Iran, a nation with a 5,000 year history, is certainly not a failed state. The main failed states in the Middle East are those that are US puppets. They represent American hegemony, not the interests of their people.

What the US and Israel are attempting to do is to turn the entire Muslim Middle East into failed states, that is, into puppet regimes. By extending their hegemony in the Middle East, the US and Israel hope to prolong their own failed existence.

Starving for Justice in Gitmo North: "We are slowly dying in here..."

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Starving for Justice in Gitmo North:
"We are slowly dying in here..."


Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada
(416) 651-5800, tasc@web.ca

January 30, 2007


"We are slowly dying in here..."

Weekend Scare Underscores Very Real Danger of Sudden Death for Hunger Striking Detainees at Canada's Guantanamo North

Still No Medical Monitoring After Two Months Without Food

JANUARY 30, 2007 -- "We are slowly dying in here," Mohammad Mahjoub says over the phone on day 67 of his hunger strike, day 56 for Mahmoud Jaballah and Hassan Almrei. "Our situation is very bad."

The three men, held indefinitely under the much-criticized security certificate regime of secret evidence and deportation to torture, are kept at the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (KIHC), dubbed Guantanamo North.

Despite last Thursday's visit by Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who did not meet with the detainees, there has been no negotiation with the men, and no effort to end a critical situation that could turn deadly at any time.

NO MEDICAL MONITORING

Indeed, the detainees' lives are on the line as staff at the facility play a dangerous game of roulette: despite considerable medical literature spelling out the need for daily medical checks of hunger strikers who have passed day 10 without food, medical staff have NOT conducted a single physical check on any of the detainees, who are subsisting on water and juice. The need to check weight, pulse, blood pressure, respiration, electrolytes, and sodium and potassium levels, among other standards, is essential in preventing the kind of traumatic incident that occurred this past weekend.

On Saturday, January 27, Mr. Jaballah reports that he felt dizziness at about 3:15 pm, pressed the emergency button, and someone finally saw him at approximately 4 pm. He was very weak and unable to walk, and requested that if he needed to be taken to another area for medical help, that this be done with a wheelchair or cart. He was informed that a cart would arrive
at 6 pm. He again felt quite ill, pressed the emergency button, fell down, and was rendered unconscious, only waking up in another section of the KIHC.

He reports experiencing great pain that left him screaming, and a complete lack of control over his body, with uncontrollable shivering and shaking. "Because there has been no daily monitoring of blood, pulse, weight, or other vital signs, it is hard to pinpoint the exact cause of this incident, but our consultation with a Toronto-area physician who has attended to one of the men during a prior hunger strike says that low potassium or sodium could be one cause, coupled with dehydration and possible heart arrhythmia," says Matthew Behrens of the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada. "Needless to say, all of these can lead to a sudden life-threatening drop in blood pressure that could place any of the men in a coma."

DETAINEES VERY WEAK

Daily calls from the detainees indicate they are so weak that they spend most of the day lying down. One has blood in his urine. Another is suffering the severe effects of high blood pressure. Another has broken out in severe skin rashes causing incessant itching, while a severely swollen
tongue has not been dealt with either. All are weak and dizzy from two months without food.

And there is no end in sight.

The detainees, their families, and friends and supporters are concerned that Stockwell Day used his trip to KIHC to justify his preconceived notion of the situation, rather than use the occasion as an opportunity to actually learn the real reasons behind the hunger strike.

STOCKWELL DAY NOT GETTING FULL PICTURE

Stockwell Day did not get a full picture when he visited Guantanamo North. He was unable to taste the daily humiliation the men face at the hands of guards, nor to hear what it is like to be denied medical treatment for things like Hepatitis C, blood in the urine, or a double hernia. Day
needed to hear what it is like to be held indefinitely, without charge, on secret evidence, for upwards of seven years, as these men are living through, to understand that having a microwave and a TV in your facility does nothing to ease the pain of lengthy separation from families, the mental torture of being held on secret 'evidence' neither you nor your lawyer will ever get to challenge, and the daily fear of deportation to torture in Syria or Egypt.

PROBLEM ALREADY FLAGGED BY CORRECTIONAL INVESTIGATOR

Day also did not get a taste of what it's like when there is no oversight agency or ombudsperson to deal fairly with complaints, a key reason for the hunger strike that was in fact flagged by the federal government's 2005/2006 Annual Report of the Correctional Investigator, which concluded "The transfer of detainees from Ontario facilities to the Kingston holding centre means that the detainees will lose the benefit of a rigorous ombudsman's legislative framework to file complaints about their care and humane treatment while in custody. The Office of the Correctional Investigator is concerned that the detainees will no longer have the benefits and legal protections afforded by ombudsman legislation. Pursuant to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, a non-profit organization with no legislative framework, such as the Red Cross, is unlikely to meet the protocol's requirement for domestic oversight." (See below for full text of relevant section of the report)

INITIAL HOPES DASHED

Mahmoud Jaballah explains that despite initial hope that things might be better at KIHC than they were at Metro West Detention in Toronto, the punitive, mean-spirited atmosphere that has taken hold of the facility, especially after they initially raised minor complaints about guards'
behaviour, has become intolerable. Guards are regularly slamming cell doors, making rude comments, and making daily life difficult for the men, who are not allowed to speak to pre-approved media without those same guards present.

The threat they feel to their personal safety, and the even greater fear of false allegations being made against them, means they are now trapped in an Orwellian nightmare that could cause them their lives.

The men are told that health care, which used to be available to them in their living unit, can now only be delivered in the next building. The men say they do not feel safe going to the next building without a supervisor present so there is a witness to possible false allegations that could
harm their chances for bail. [The facility is top-heavy with staff, including two directors, two secretaries, seven supervisors, 12 guards -- all for the three men] So unless they comply with petty and unreasonable prison rules, they are denied a basic human right.

MEDICAL STAFF AND DUTY TO CARE

Last week, a group of some 70 health workers across Canada challenged the lack of ethical standards at KIHC, and campaign representatives point out that the World Medical Association Declaration on Hunger Strikers (adopted by the 43rd World Medical Assembly Malta, November 1991 and editorially revised by the WMA General Assembly, Pilanesberg, South Africa, October 2006) states at point #5 that "Physicians attending hunger strikers can experience a conflict between their loyalty to the employing authority (such as prison management) and their loyalty to patients. Physicians with dual loyalties are bound by the same ethical principles as other physicians, that is to say that their primary obligation is to the
individual patient."

As each minute ticks by, the spectre of the Criminal Code of Canada looms larger, which defines as criminally negligent anyone who "in doing anything or, in omitting to do anything that it is his duty to do, shows wanton or reckless disregard for the lives or safety of other persons."

TAKE ACTION

1. WRITE /CALL/FAX Day, Finley and Harper. It is crucial that public
pressure continue to be felt in Ottawa. It is such pressure that forced
Day to go to KIHC; such pressure will be required to get negotiations going.

Specific points to raise:

a. The men be should provided with immediate and daily medical care in
their living unit.

b. If the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre will not send in health
care staff (something they did before September), the government must allow an
independent outside doctor in to check on the men.

c. The federal government must immediately appoint a neutral mediator to
deal with the problems, and set up a system to deal with ongoing issues
that is balanced and fair (as per the concerns raised by the federal
government's own Office of the Correctional Investigator)

d. The men should not have to die for a little bit of dignity.

*Stockwell Day, MP
House of Commons, Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Phone: (613) 995-1702
Fax: (613) 995.1154
day.s@parl.gc.ca
communications@psepc.gc.ca

NOTE: Stockwell Day is the Minister responsible for the Canadian Border Services Agency (which runs the KIHC). Demand that he meet immediately with the detainees or appoint a neutral party to immediately resolve the crisis at KIHC.

*Diane Finley, MP
Phone (866) 496-3400 (Simcoe constituency office).
Finley.D@parl.gc.ca

NOTE: Finley is the new immigration minister. Ask that, as one of the two ministers responsible for signing security certificates, she meet with the families of the detainees (who have requested a meeting) and that she also take action to meet the reasonable demands of the detainees.

* Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Phone: (613) 992-4211
Fax: 613-941-6900
pm@pm.gc.ca


2. SOLIDARITY LETTERS.
Write a support card to the detainees (let us know at tasc@web.ca if you
have so we can monitor if mail is getting through). Mohammad Mahjoub,
Mahmoud Jaballah, and Hassan Almrei can be reached:

Kingston Immigration Holding Centre
c/o CSC RHQ Ontario Region
440 King Street West
PO Box 1174
Kingston, Ontario K7L 4Y8


Further info: Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, (416) 651-5800,
tasc@web.ca, www.homesnotbombs.ca

+++++++
Annual Report of the Correctional Investigator, 2005/06 (with respect to
Kingston Immigration Holding Centre)
The second policy issue that concerns my Office is the situation of
individuals detained pursuant to national security certificates. A
national
security certificate is a removal order issued by the Government of
Canada
against permanent residents and foreign nationals who are inadmissible to
Canada on grounds of national security. A recent decision has been made
by
the federal government to transfer security certificate detainees held
under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act from Ontario facilities
to a federal facility, pending their removal from Canada.
In Ontario facilities, the detainees could legally file complaints
regarding conditions of confinement with the Office of the Ontario
Ombudsman. That Office had the jurisdiction to investigate complaints
filed by the detainees pursuant to the Ontario Ombudsman Act.
The Immigration Holding Centre has been built in Kingston within
the perimeter fence of Millhaven Penitentiary. The Canadian Border
Service
Agency entered into a service contract with the Correctional Service to
provide the Border Service Agency with the physical detention facility
and
with security staff. The Border Service Agency has a contract in place
with the Red Cross to monitor the care and treatment of detainees in
immigration holding centres, including the new Kingston holding centre.
The Red Cross, a non-government organization, has no enabling legislation
to carry out a role as an oversight agency. The transfer of detainees
from
Ontario facilities to the Kingston holding centre means that the
detainees
will lose the benefit of a rigorous ombudsman's legislative framework to
file complaints about their care and humane treatment while in custody.
The Office of the Correctional Investigator is concerned that the
detainees
will no longer have the benefits and legal protections afforded by
ombudsman legislation. Pursuant to the Optional Protocol to the
Convention
against Torture, a non-profit organization with no legislative framework,
such as the Red Cross, is unlikely to meet the protocol's requirement for
domestic oversight. (full report available at
http://www.oci-bec.gc.ca/reports/AR200506_e.asp)





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29/01/2007 2:49 PM

Urgent Update from the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, re Hunger
Strike at Canada's Guantanamo Bay

Friends:

Tomorrow (Friday, February 2), family members of the detainees will be in
Ottawa to plead with the government to intervene and bring an end to the
hunger strike. Below is a brief update from a press release that is going
out today.

You can help!

At 11 am central standard time, we will be in front of the Prime Minister's
office seeking an emergency meeting. From wherever you are, please start
calling at 11 am-11:30 am to (613) 992-4211 and urge:

1. That family members of the hunger strikers and one supporter be allowed
in.

2. That Mr. Harper intervene immediately to meet the demands of the secret
trial detainees and help end the hunger strike.

3. That Mr. Harper instruct Stockwell Day to immediately appoint the
Correctional Investigator (an independent ombudsperson responsible for
federal prisons) to assume jurisdiction over the Kingston Immigration
Holding Centre, as per Mr. Day's discretion in Section 170 of the
Corrections and Conditional Release Act ( 1992, c. 20 ) (ie, 170. (1) The
Correctional Investigator may commence an investigation: (a) on the receipt
of a complaint by or on behalf of an offender; (b) at the request of the
Minister; or (c) on the initiative of the Correctional Investigator.)

If you can please also call Stockwell Day or email him the same message as
in point # 3 above:
Stockwell Day, MP
House of Commons, Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Phone: (613) 995-1702
Fax: (613) 995.1154
day.s@parl.gc.ca
communications@psepc.gc.ca


Update below...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Families of Secret Trial Detainees To Seek 11th Hour Solution to End Hunger
Strike;
Former Solicitor General Proposes Solution to Life-and Death Situation at
Canada's Guantanamo Bay as Facility Rejects Outside Negotiating Team

PRESS CONFERENCE: 10:15 am, Charles Lynch Room, Centre Block, Parliament
RALLY: Steps of Parliament Hill, 10:30 am

FEBRUARY 1, 2007 -- On Day 70 of a hunger strike for secret trial detainee
Mohammad Mahjoub and day 59 for detainees Mahmoud Jaballah and Hassan
Almrei, friends, family, and supporters of the men will converge on
Parliament Hill Friday, February 2 at 10:30 am to call on the federal
government to immediately intervene and bring about an end to the crisis
situation at Canada's Guantanamo Bay (aka Kingston Immigration Holding
Centre, or KIHC)

Mona Elfouli, whose husband is Mohammad Mahjoub, and Ahmad
Jaballah, the eldest of six Jaballah children, will be among MPs, a medical
professional, and supporters addressing the media at a 10:15 am press
conference in the Charles Lynch Room in Parliament. MP Bill Siksay will
also participate. They will then proceed to the rally.

This 11th hour appeal to the government comes on the heels of the
rejection of a special negotiating team that was prepared to go to the
Millhaven Penitentiary today and work out a framework to resolve the many
outstanding issues. Team members were to have included former Solicitor
General Warren Allmand, internationally renowned refugee advocate Mary Jo
Leddy, OC, Montreal imam Salam El Manyawi, and Karl Flecker, the national
human rights and anti-racism director of the Canadian Labour Congress.
Former NDP leader Ed Broadbent expressed a willingness to be part of the
team, and has said he is available next week should the government change
its mind.

"Is the government going to let our loved ones die?" Elfouli asks.
"We are very, very concerned that the men are not receiving medical care,
and that no one is talking with them about their demands."

In addition to being denied medical care, the men are also
concerned about a punitive atmosphere at the Kingston Immigration Holding
Centre, and the lack of an objective ombudsperson to deal with the many
grievances that continue to arise.

Warren Allmand, meanwhile, is calling for the Correctional
Investigator, the ombudsperson for all federal inmates except the three men
on hunger strike, to assume jurisdiction over the KIHC, investigate the
complaints, and "prepare an independent set of recommendations to assist in
resolving this emergency situation. Unfortunately, there is no other
independent ombudsman for these detainees and the Correctional Investigator
provides the only hope of resolving the crisis. I urge the government to
act quickly."

Last week, a group of 70 medical professionals called on Ottawa to
immediately provide medical care for the detainees and ongoing monitoring
of their vital signs as the hunger strike drags on. To date, they have yet
to receive any medical care.

For more information: The Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada,
(416) 651-5800


(In this email are a callout for vigils on Wednesday, February 7, a guide
to MPs who need to be contacted before Tuesday morning, and an update on
the hunger strike and events of the past two days)


1. CALL FOR "LET THEM EAT CHOCOLATE SAUCE" ACTIONS WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7

2. LATEST EVENTS (Families Face Slammed Door at Prime Minister's Office;
Outside Physician Rejected by Kingston Immigration Holding Centre)

3. BACKGROUND. Documents, letters, statements, and more on the hunger
strike are all available at http://www.homesnotbombs.ca/gitmonorthstrike.htm


1. URGENT CALL TO ACTION FOR WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7
The hunger strike at the Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (KIHC)
continues with no end in sight. The government of Canada is refusing to
negotiate. As Mohammad Mahjoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, and Hassan Almrei try to
hang on (today is day 72 for Mahjoub, 61 for Jaballah and Almrei), Public
Sadism Minister Stockwell Day continues to spew an atrocious string of lies
about the men and their circumstances, going so far as to state to Canadian
Press, "[They have a] refrigerator stocked with a variety of juices, soy
milk, honey and chocolate sauce."

Well then, it must be okay to deny these men their Charter rights, to deny
them their rights under the Convention Against Torture, under countless
other covenants and treaties Canada has signed, because, after all, their
unit at Guantanamo Bay North has chocolate sauce in the refrigerator!

The Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada is calling for nationwide
vigils and pourings of chocolate sauce on Wednesday, February 7, which will
be day 75 of Mohammad Mahjoub's hunger strike, day 64 for Hassan Almrei and
Mahmoud Jaballah. In Toronto, for example, from 5-6 pm, we plan to pour
chocolate sauce over a copy of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in front
of the Toronto offices of the organization that regularly tramples those
rights and freedoms, CSIS. We will also pour chocolate sauce over the
Convention Against Torture, also being violated in the cases of Canada's
secret trial detainees.

(If you have issues with chocolate sauce and prefer another form of public
vigil, perhaps with maple syrup, or without any sauces, condiments, or
juices, that's fine too. Just email tasc@web.ca if you can do something
publicly on day 75 of the hunger strike)

Please join us in this display of outrage over the callousness and reckless
disregard for human life that is being shown by the Canadian government
towards Canada's secret trial detainees. And keep calling the government
(see update below). They ARE feeling the pressure.


TWO THINGS THAT NEED TO BE DONE IMMEDIATELY
1. On Tuesday, two separate House committees will consider emergency
resolutions calling for the government to recognize the emergency nature of
the crisis and to immediately appoint the Office of the Correctional
Investigator to assume jurisdiction over the Kingston Immigration Holding
Centre to investigate current and ongoing complaints of those currently on
hunger strike, and prepare an independent set of recommendations for
resolution of grievances.

One is the Standing Committee on Public Safety (whose members are Garry
Breitkreuz, Joe Comartin, Roy Cullen, Sue Barnes, Gord Brown, Raymond Chan,
Irwin Cotler, Laurie Hawn, Dave MacKenzie, Serge Ménard, Maria Mourani, and
Rick Norlock).

The other is the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (whose
members are Norman Doyle, Meili Faille, Andrew Telegdi, Omar Alghabra,
Barry Devolin, Raymond Gravel, Nina Grewal, Rahim Jaffer, Jim Karygiannis,
Ed Komarnicki, Bill Siksay, Blair Wilson)

Please call the MPs and urge them to support the resolution on resolving
the hunger strike that will be introduced. If one of these MPs represents
your riding, please let them know that too. If you do not know how to
contact your MP, go to
http://www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/people/house/mpscur.asp?Language=E&p
aram
=c

Find the name of the MP, and the contact information will follow.

2. Call Stockwell Day's office and send him an email with the same message:
resolve the hunger strike, appoint the Correctional Investigator
Phone: (613) 995-1702
Fax: (613) 995.1154
day.s@parl.gc.ca
communications@psepc.gc.ca

3. Call Stephen Harper with the same message: resolve the hunger strike,
appoint the Correctional Investigator
(613) 992-4211
Fax: 613-941-6900
pm@pm.gc.ca


+++++++++++++++

Hunger Strike Update February 4, 2007

A. Harper, Day Refuse to Meet with Families in Ottawa
B. Independent Physician Denied Entry to Guantanamo North
C. Harper checking with lawyers over lawsuits?
D. Why the Red Cross is an Inappropriate Oversight Body
E. KIHC Directors Finally "Meet" with the Men on Day 70 of Hunger Strike
F. "These Men are Being Tortured."

a. Harper, Day Refuse to Meet with Families in Ottawa
At the conclusion of a well-attended press conference during which friends
and family of Canada's secret trial detainees asked whether the government
was willing to let their loved ones die, the answer came back to them in
the form of a slammed door and a refusal to meet from prime minister
Stephen Harper and "public safety" minister Stockwell Day.
About 40 people quickly came together for a rally on Parliament
Hill and a march to the prime minister's office, where they were met by
frowning security and, eventually, a spokesperson who said he could not do
anything.
Mona Elfouli eloquently pleaded the case of her husband, Mohammad
Mahjoub, saying this was the last time she wants to be in Ottawa, because
she wants her husband released and an end to the torture of the secret
trial process that has plagued their family since June, 2000.
Ahmad Jaballah told reporters that the men are being treated like
caged animals and, indeed, that was exactly how Stockwell Day treated them
when he visited the facility almost two weeks ago, peering in at them but
refusing to speak with them or hear their concerns.
Afnan Jaballah, 13, the youngest daughter of Mr. Jaballah and
Husnah Al-Mashtouli, held a picture of her dad. She talked about how
difficult it has been for her and her siblings to not have their dad with
them, how much she wants him home, how unfair it is to keep him in jail
because of secrets.
While reporters seemed interested in minute details of the
conditions at KIHC, they were reminded that the men do not want fresh
newspaper clippings to line the bottom of their cage; it is time to open
the doors of that cage and end the psychological torture of indefinite
detention and deportation to torture.
Strong statements were also issued by Montreal nurse Scott
Weinstein, the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, and NDP MP Bill
Siksay, who has worked tirelessly on this issue. For statements at the
press conference see http://www.homesnotbombs.ca/statements.htm
Media coverage was widespread (though very belated, finally
covering the issue after 70 days of hunger striking!). A good chunk of the
press conference was carried live on CBC Newsworld, and dozens of
newspapers, radio stations, and TV news shows carried the story all day
Friday and Saturday.
Meanwhile, former Solicitor General Warren Allmand called for the
appointment of the Office of the Correctional Investigator, an independent
ombudsperson, to help resolve the crisis.


b. Independent Physician Denied Entry to Guantanamo North
Today Mohammad Mahjoub reports trouble breathing, chest pain (as if
something hard is pushing down on his chest), and pain in his left arm.
This has happened to him repeatedly throughout the hunger strike. However,
the nurse who "presents" daily did not check his pulse, blood pressure,
blood levels, or any other vital sign.
Since day 1 of the hunger strike, medical staff at Canada's
Guantanamo Bay have refused to monitor the vital signs of the men, a
serious breach of medical ethics. Despite repeated requests for health
care, the men are told they can only receive such care if they move to
another part of the facility. Known as the "treatment room," there is
nothing particularly special about it. All it has, in essence, are the
portable tools of the trade that are easily enough carried to the cells or
living unit of the men.
The men are happy to go to the "treatment room" if provided with a
supervisor (to protect against false allegations being made against them by
the guards). A supervisor is never provided, so medical care is denied,
with medical staff claiming they do not have the "consent" of the detainees
to treat them. This is Orwellian nonsense. Daily, the men have made written
and oral requests for health care, but it is denied until they stop
insisting on their right not to be falsely accused (not too much to ask,
given that their whole 6.5 years of incarceration is based on false
allegations!).
The promise of medical care if the men comply with inexplicably
petty prison rules is unconscionable, especially when such care was
provided in the living unit before September. It is punitive, and reckless.
A week ago, Mahmoud Jaballah suffered a severe medical emergency
during which he was rendered unconscious. He woke up in another section of
the KIHC, screaming in pain. He was eventually dumped back in his cell,
with no tests, no follow-up.
In response to this denial of care, supporters contacted a Kingston
physician who has been security cleared for other federal penitentiaries in
the area. This doctor was prepared to go into the living unit, provide an
assessment, and make recommendations. A letter rejecting the doctor was
given to Mohammad Mahjoub on Thursday. In it, the so-called head of "health
care" at Millhaven wrote that the proposed doctor was not to their mind
cleared for penitentiaries and that health care would be provided when they
"consented" to it. (See reference above to the Orwellian nature of consent)

c. Harper checking with lawyers over lawsuits?
One has to wonder if the federal government is consulting its
lawyers with respect to possible lawsuits over charges of criminal
negligence causing death. "The government is pursuing its actions according
to law," Harper said. "We are reassuring ourselves on a constant basis that
these people are being treated in a humane manner." They are not, however,
reassuring "these people" and their families!!!

d. Why the Red Cross is an Inappropriate Oversight Body
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day claims everything's fine because the
Red Cross has toured the facility. As nurse Scott Weinstein pointed out
Friday in Ottawa, "in order for the Red Cross to gain access, they must
make an agreement with the government to keep their findings confidential
between them and the government. This agreement to keep their findings
secret, which the Red Cross has also done with their access to prisoners in
the Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prisons, means the Red Cross is not
able to be a public and accountable advocate and monitor for the prisoners.
We are demanding an open, public and accountable monitoring of the
prisoners. We agree with the call of former Solicitor General Warren
Allmand to appoint the Office of the Correctional Investigator to assume
jurisdiction. The detainees are the only three people in federal
penitentiaries without access to an independent ombudsperson.

e. KIHC Directors Finally "Meet" with the Men on Day 70 of Hunger Strike
On Day 70 of the hunger strike, the two directors of the Gitmo
North finally condescended to visit the men to find out what is going on
(this after much letter writing and phone calling in the previous weeks
reminding them of the urgency of communication!). But the visit was a
pathetic exercise. After all the suffering the men have gone through, they
were only asked, "So, what are your demands?"
Mohammad Mahjoub asked if the directors had heard from their
families, lawyers, and the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in Canada, all of
whom have been writing and calling about the demands for weeks on end. When
they said yes, he asked why they had to ask the detainees about the demands
when the former group of people had already been making this clear.
Mahmoud Jaballah said that the demands had been placed on their
desks 70 days ago, and that the men had already received a written
rejection of all of them. He asked if there was anything new for them to
offer.
There was nothing new to offer.
Hence, there was nothing to meet about. In the Orwellian way in
which Gitmo North operates, the meeting will no doubt be referred to by the
staff as "a refusal to talk" in the same manner that their urgent requests
for health care are being translated into "a refusal to consent to health
care."


f. "These Men are Being Tortured."
(From the press conference statement of the Campaign to Stop Secret trials
in Canada)
The men are constantly asked: why a hunger strike? Aren't you only
hurting yourselves? The answer to that is obvious. The hurting began long
ago. These men have already been deeply hurt by secrecy, by lies, by
unfounded and vicious allegations of so-called security agencies whose word
can hardly be believed, especially in light of the Arar Inquiry, by the
frustration of being allowed no meaningful opportunity to clear their
names, by indefinite detention, by the threat of deportation to torture.
This has gone on for between 5.5 and 6.5 years, and there is no end in
sight.
Torture experts have concluded that the ultimate sign of
successful, psychological torture is to have the subject of that torture
become self-abusing. If we can define two months of no food as
self-abusing, then it is clear that this government's effort to torture
these innocent men, whether in Syria and Egypt, or here at home, has been
successful.
All this for individuals who have never been charged with, much
less convicted of, a single offence.
We want an answer from the government today. Are we to assume that
you are hoping these three men will die? Is this so that you can finally
sweep under the rug the collateral damage of a system of judicial
inquisition that, through public exposure, has embarrassed Canada on the
world stage and become the object of intense criticism from the United
Nations, Amnesty International, and other human rights bodies? Unless you
can show us positive, concrete steps to immediately resolve the life and
death situation of the hunger strike, to stop blocking efforts to release
these men to their friends and families, and to end the process to deport
them to torture, we cannot assume otherwise." (full statement at
http://www.homesnotbombs.ca/statements.htm)



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Gorilla Radio for Monday, February 5, 2007

[Listen to Ape Pod here.]


Welcome to GR, etc. Thank God for Jean Chretien! Six years into the disaster on wheels to south of us, the former democratic nation of the United States of America, Canadians should be lighting candles of thanks that the former prime minister, despite his myriad political failings, had the good sense to maintain a semblence of independence in Canada's foreign police by keeping the country out of the bloody conflagration in Iraq. Sadly, he sacrificed the continuous rotation of nearly three thousand Canadians to sustain the illegal occupation of Afghanistan, another disastrous project of George W. Bush's administration. Unbelievably though, the inheritors of the keys to Sussex Drive are eager to enjoin more closely Canada's ties to Empire America.

Clever Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, his own ascension to power in this country contingent on massive support by agents of the U.S. regime, and his own averred adherence to that regime's militarist philosophy, is determined to carry forward the long-dreamed, in some quarters, political and economic integration of the North American continent; hitching his poltical wagon, and your children's future, to the shooting star of a doomed empire.

Connie Fogal is the leader of the Canadian Action Party. CAP has been at the fore of the fight being waged by those Canadian citizens who believe Canada should remain independent of the elephant to the south, especially in matters of foreign military adventures. Connie Fogal on the conspiracies and less so of a North American Union in the first half.

And; they blazed into Washington riding a wave of voter revulsion of the incumbent government. Scandals of epic, unprecedented dimension are the hallmark of the Bush administration, and now, with majority control of both houses of Congress, the Democratic Party is in a position to initiate, impanel, and chair congressional committees to begin the long process of redress for a criminal conspiracy centred at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and so far responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and the pilfering of untold billions of dollars from the U.S. treasury. David Swanson is the Washington director of Democrats.com and ImpeachPAC.org, and co-founder of the groups, After Downing street.org and Meet with Cindy.org. David Swanson and an accounting of the 110th Congress of the United States of America in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of the good things you can get up to in and around Victoria in the coming week. But first, Connie Fogal and shining a light on the dark corners of the deep integration.

Super Bull 2007: When Hawks Cry

The Super Bowl:
When Hawks Cry

Dave Zirin

Last night's Super Bowl was a Roman Vomitorium of odious spew. This wasn't the good, the bad, and the ugly. It was the dreary, the vile, and the insipid made only palatable by the thought of Mike Ditka in a dark bar drinking whiskey shots, chased with the salty discharge humans call tears.

The game itself, even more than most Super Bowls, ill-served a thrilling NFL season. Despite an electric Devin Hester 92 yard kick off return to open the came, the game quickly devolved into sloppy boredom as the ball and steady rain combined to create something closer to the Poseidon Adventure than a football game.

Color Commentator Phil Simms told us early on that the "weather wouldn't be a factor." Not since we were told the "insurgency is in its last throes" has my dear, innocent television emitted such idiocy.

At the NFL's recommendation--perhaps on advice from the geniuses at Halliburton?--the field was left uncovered all day. As a result, there were eight turnovers in the game, with five first half fumbles. Even worse, despite CBS's investment in 47 High Definition cameras, the lenses were continuously fogged. It was like Cujo was attacking the screen, trying to slobber all over my pretzels.

Yes, the game was close, but when the graphic came on screen that the Colts had 20 first downs to the Bears' four, it only confirmed my impression of what was really happening: a dingy mismatch.

As often occurs in Super Bowls, the Bears got desperate in the second half, which meant their hapless quarterback, Rex Grossman, started winging his famous dying quails all over the field. He threw so many of these lame ducks, he's lucky Dick Cheney didn't emerge from the stands to shoot him in the face. At that point, there wasn't a bookie in Reno who would have let you bet that Rex would throw a disastrous game changing interception, which is exactly what happened when Kelvin Hayden with 11:44 left in the game, returned one for a score.

If the game was a bust, the equivalent of Titanic if it had starred Jim Nabors (Manning) and Tara Reid (Grossman), the halftime show was for me a let down of epic proportions. I love Prince. Repeat: Love Prince. I went to college in the Twin Cities, saw His Purple Highness live, and knew women who went to college in the area just because they thought they might meet him.

Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations that Prince would do Janet Jackson one better, and make her flashing of the infamous nipple look like a Pax TV special. But Prince has in recent years become a Jehovah's Witness, denounced profanity and begun to carry himself in a way that makes Tony Dungy look like Marilyn Manson. So I didn't expect the profane Prince of "Head", "Get Off," or the sly pansexual genius of "If I was Your Girlfriend". BUT Prince, in his 2004 album Musicology, has a brilliant song about anti-Arab racism, called "Cinnamon Girl." So I thought we might get something with some kind of political content. My hopes were too high. But to call his performance, as ESPN.com did, "Badass: start to finish" makes me wonder how far the badass bar has been lowered. Yes he looked great with that purple guitar, but he played a cover of "Proud Mary." Dang, I would have settled for "Little Red (Freakin') Corvette"!

America may have swooned for The Kid, but more than a few hearts were broken along the banks of Lake Minnetonka. If Prince was a letdown, the commercials - always a highlight - were
insipid. Rather than catalog the collectively banal, nihilistic, K-Federocity of it all, I want to focus on one: the Snickers ad where two men accidentally kiss and then proceed to tear out their own chest hair in an effort to recover their "manliness." This stood out as the most tired, homophobic exercise I've seen on television since Rick Santorum explained to America how gay relationships could be likened to "man on dog" love. (For the record, I would hate to die and be reincarnated as the Santorum family pooch.) It was the nadir in corporate America's yearly over-hyped orgy of wasted talent.

The night was turning like mayonnaise left on the radiator, until the commercial break at the start of the fourth quarter. In the middle of this river of waste, was a moment--a kernel of joy--that made the 39 hours I spent in front of my television worth the while.

Appearing on screen was a very regular looking guy with the tag line, "Jonathan Powers, Iraq War Vet." He said, "When it comes to Iraq, America's divided." My hackles immediately were raised. It's the Super Bowl and I was convinced that I was about to be told that we all needed to give Bush a Chance.

But then Mr. Powers faded off the screen, replaced by another vet named Brian Van Ripe who said. "On one hand, you've got two thirds of the American people..." Then another vet, Robin Eckstein saying "A bipartisan majority in congress, the Iraq Study Group,..." then another, Joshua Lansdale: "And veterans like us all opposed to the escalation." Then another named Robert Loria, an amputee, saying, "On the other hand, there's George Bush, who supports escalation. If you support escalation, you don't support the troops." Finally a last vet. Andrew Horne, saying "Join the troops. Stop the escalation." (See this starkly powerful ad at votevets.org)

It seems that this ad was regional, in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area, and not national. In other words far more people were exposed to Kevin Federline than this collection of brave men and women. But this one spot had more genuine drama and humanity than the other 38 hours and
59 minutes of treacle combined. My house of rowdy revelers was struck silent. Announcers speak of football players like they are soldiers in some kind of war. It was bracing and even beautiful to see the day's collective bombast humbled by a calm exhalation of reality.



Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming books: "The Muhammad Ali Handbook"
(MQ Publications) and "Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports" (Haymarket).

You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com


Contact him at
edgeofsports@gmail.com

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The 2007 Homeless Needs Survey

Victoria - After many months of careful research and preparation, the Victoria Cool Aid Society is pleased to announce that the 2007 Homeless Needs Survey has officially begun. The questionnaire will be administered at over 40 locations throughout the capital region over the next four days.

We invite you to join us on Tuesday, February 6th at one location, 1414 Douglas Street, which has been generously donated as a base camp for this project. Here at 1:00 pm, Mayor Lowe and others will be on hand to show their support for this very worthwhile community undertaking.

On Monday, February 5th, 2007, an enumeration was conducted at shelters, facilities, agencies, institutions, motels and other locations which are known to be utilized by individuals and families who are experiencing homelessness. This information, combined with the knowledge we will gain
from the questionnaires completed over the course of this week, will provide valuable qualitative and quantitative data of both housing needs and the barriers encountered by those in our community who are homeless.

The Homeless Needs Survey is a partnership between Cool Aid, Community Council and over 60 social service agencies in the capital region - such as the Victoria Native Friendship Centre and the Salvation Army. The purpose of the needs survey is to gather first-hand information from the people who are homeless that will result in effective solutions to homelessness in this region.

The Government of Canada has contributed funding to this initiative. Other funding supporters include the City of Victoria, the Capital Regional District, the Ladybug Foundation, the United Way, the Victoria Real Estate Board, Vancity Victoria Branch, the Salvation Army, Moore Paterson Architects, Kiwanis Rose Manor, Shoppers Drug Mart, Shaw Cablesystems, Diamond Communications, Thrifty Foods, Old Victoria Water Company, Capital Iron, Anounce Printer, Canadian Home Builders Association, Cob's Bakery, DTI Computers, Fibre Options, Oak Bay Kiwanis, Leadership Victoria, Regent Hotel, Tom Harris Cellular, VIHA - Vancouver Island Health Authority, and others. In fact this project would never have been possible without the
tremendous support from every level of government and assistance received from business, community, individuals and hard-working staff and volunteers throughout the capital region.



N E W S R E L E A S E

For Immediate Release: February 5, 2007

Additional information can be found at our website www.coolaid.org.

Information: http://coolaid.org

Kathy Stinson, Executive Director of Victoria Cool Aid or
Don McTavish, Manager of Shelters
(250) 383-1977

Jane Worton, Researcher, Community Council
(250) 383-6166

Boxing Palestine: Quartet Condemns Justice

‘Quartet’ Corners PLO,
Hamas into Critical Options

Nicola Nasser
5 February 2007

In Washington on February 2, the Middle East Quartet of peace mediators promised the Palestinian people more of the same devastating status quo, perpetuating their 40-year old Israeli occupation, prolonging the international siege imposed on them, exacerbating their internal divide, and thus cornering them into a situation that they can only shake off either through civil war or unconditional surrender to the U.S.-backed Israeli-dictated fait accompli, unless their national sense of accountability could prevail to make mutual compromises into national consensus.

The Quartet statement read to reporters by the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon boils down to promising them only more of what the U.S. former president Jimmy Carter recently summed up: “In the last six years there has not been one day of good faith, substantive negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians, not one day.”

“Recognizing the critical need to end the Palestinian/Israeli conflict,” the Quartet pledged to support efforts to put in place a process with the goal of ending the occupation that began in 1967 and creating an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security with Israel, and reaffirmed its commitment to a just, lasting, and comprehensive peace based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338,” the statement said.

It was a positive introductory comprehension of the end goal, which Ki-moon and his co-mediators – the High Representative for European Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana, European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Russian and German counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- immediately shot in the feet by the “road map” they adopted to reach that goal.

They failed to incorporate any reference in their statement to the UN Security Council resolution 1515, which commits them and the international community to the so-called two-state solution, although it was a non-binding resolution because it wasn’t adopted according to Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Then they evaded any time-tabled commitment to reviving the peace process. True they “welcomed” the 23 December summit of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli premier Ehud Olmert and their trilateral meeting with Rice, scheduled for February 21, but the upcoming meeting according to the Quartet will be only a “dialogue” and to Rice’s on record statements will be “informal.” The Quartet’s pledge “to give active follow-up to these meetings and to remain closely engaged” sounded hollow and meaningless.

The Quartet also “noted the continuing importance of the Arab Peace Initiative,” which envisions an all-comprising and comprehensive solution for the conflict with Israel, but failed to suggest an international peace conferences, some dubs as Madrid II -- a key demand by the Arab League, the PLO and Palestinian Authority (PA). Israel has rejected both the Arab Initiative and the conference idea.

The international mediators “called for continued international assistance to the Palestinian people,” and “encouraged … the development of the Palestinian economy,” but, in obvious self-contradiction, did not lift the Israeli and U.S.-led siege imposed as a collective punishment on the PA and people.

Hypocritically, “the Quartet called for Palestinian unity,” but fomented the Palestinian divide by urging donors to selectively “focus on preserving and building the capacity of institutions of Palestinian governance,” while at the same time maintaining the diplomatic, economic and political isolation of the democratically elected Palestinian government and ignoring Russian, Qatari and British parliamentarian demands to engage the PA government shortly ahead of their meeting.

Similarly, “the Quartet expressed its deep concern at the violence among Palestinians,” but failed to commit its U.S. member to refrain from fueling the violence with money, training and weapons to one side of the infighting in a declared pledge to oust an elected government or coerce it into accepting the Israeli preconditions to lift the siege.

Then the Quartet concluded with reiterating “its call for the Palestinian Authority Government to commit … to non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations,” ignoring the fact that the PA government, regardless of whether led by Fatah or Hamas, is an institution mandated according to Oslo accords to manage the Palestinian apolitical autonomy and is only an administrative tool of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the political authority who sets the PA’s terms of reference and still committed to the aforesaid “principles,” a strict commitment pressuring it into the brink of civil war.

Palestinian Options

The disappointing outcome of the Quartet meeting rules out any early resumption of “formal” peace talks, leaves the Palestinian people and leadership divided on the verge of civil war under the pressures of both the occupation and siege, thus leaving the divide with only one option: Individual and collective dialogue to review the deadlocked and futile peace process as well as the yet un-delivering violent and non-violent resistance, which both have almost reached a standstill.

Palestinian pollster Khalil al-Shikaki in a surveyed analysis dated February 1 (www.pcpsr.org) concluded that President Abbas has four options to break through the Palestinian impasse: 1) to form a national unity government, 2) to organize early presidential and legislative election, 3) to fire the Hamas-led Palestinian government and form an emergency one, and 4) to resign. Al-Shikaki ruled out the last three options as counterproductive to the “Palestinian vital interests” and could lead to more infighting. However his preferable first option could not “completely end the siege and boycott in a short period.”

The only breakthrough left is mutual compromises. According to al-Shikaki, Hamas’ flexibility in dealing “positively” with the Quartet’s three conditions to “respect” the signed accords, recognize Israel as a “fait accompli” and agree to an open-ended truce makes the first option “viable.” The Fatah-led PLO has yet to reciprocate by giving priority to national consensus more than to the Israeli-drafted and Quartet-adopted three conditions. Palestinian national unity will lead in the end to break through the siege.

All sides of the Palestinian divide, the Israeli Occupying Power and the world community should adapt to the fact that the 40-year old monopoly of Palestinian decision-making by Fatah came to an end on January 25, 2006, when Hamas broke into the role of a principal decision-maker by a landslide electoral victory that empowered it with dominant executive and legislative powers, and sooner or later the Islamic Resistance Movement will gain a parallel dominance in the PLO, a democratically-clinched right that Hamas in its defense has tactically contributed to the ensuing bloody power struggle.

However 12 months on, the unity government has failed the national bilateral and multilateral dialogue as well as Islamic and Arab mediation efforts, including Qatari, Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Islamic mediators; several ceasefire agreements have so far collapsed on the security approach. The latest Saudi Arabian good offices are also expected to stumble on the same approach, which foiled previous similar efforts.

Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, chaired by Abbas in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Sunday, suspended a three-day session in waiting for the outcome of the Mecca-hosted talks between Abbas and Hamas’ leader Khalid Misha’al on Feb. 5, but warned the PLO will go for the Hamas-rejected presidential and legislative election in June if the two leaders failed to agree on a unity government based on the Quartet’s three conditions, which practically will sooner or later doom the outcome, because Hamas views its subscription to the Quartet’s agenda as a carte blanche for the Quartet, Israel and the PLO to resume their 15-year old counterproductive and futile so-called “peace process.”

The PLO and Fatah leadership insists on Hamas accommodating the Quartet conditions as a Palestinian obligation to lift the siege, which Hamas says was only tightened after its electoral victory and was in place before that as a mechanism to pressure the PLO into accepting the comatose former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon-initiated long-term interim arrangement of a transitional Palestinian state on 42 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both Hamas and the PLO have recently unequivocally rejected this Israeli unilateral plan. The Quartet’s silence or vague stance on the arrangement and their promised “informal” revival of high-level Israeli – Palestinian “dialogue” should provide enough common ground for a PLO-Hamas consensus.

The deadlocked peace process, the paralysis of the PLO and PA institutions, the inability of the Palestinian presidency and government alike to rule the autonomous 42 percent of the Israeli-reoccupied West Bank or the militarily-besieged Gaza Strip, the zero sum situation where the Palestinians have neither an “armed struggle” nor popular non-violent resistance save for seasonal symbolic expressions and where the erosion of public trust in both leading movements, according to latest Palestinian public surveys, threatens to render the Palestinians leaderless, all have locked the Palestinian national liberation movement in its current impasse.

The ensuing divide has led to bloody street battles that embroiled both the Fatah and Hamas security executive forces in a militia-style power struggle in mutual self-destruction, taking down with them what government institutions the PA has built since 1993, including public services infrastructure like power stations, universities and police and intelligence stations, especially in Gaza Strip - - as this mission was left for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the West Bank - - amid mounting and widening popular outrage, security chaos exacerbated by the crushing economic siege, popular loss of hope deepened by the Quartet’s latest unpromising meeting, helplessness of Arab and Islamic brothers who are too preoccupied to rush for rescue with the several battle fronts opened by turn once by the U.S. and then by Israel.

All these and other factors are creating the ideal environment to look for survival in a new anti-occupation uprising that might sweep away also the autonomy and both protagonists who are wasting their energies in a struggle over who manages the Palestinian prison, according to the Palestinian-Arab Israeli MP, Azmi Bishara, in a recent article.

However, joining of the Oslo political institutions by Hamas, accompanied by the two-year old strict commitment to a unilateral truce, was an indirect declaration of a change in course and tactics that confused the movement’s declared strategy among supporters because of the contradiction between rejecting the Oslo status quo and being incorporated into its institutions, let alone being embroiled in bloody power struggle over who leads them.

Similarly, the dead end the negotiations with Israel has reached, the meager results the negotaitions have produced, the insistence of the PLO on holding the Palestinian self-determination hostage to the whims of the Israeli-U.S. good faith and its determination to commit Hamas to the same futile course – which deprived the PLO even of the limited autonomy it was offered on an interim basis until July 1997, provided a “legitimate” PLO cover to slicing Jerusalem off the occupied territories and isolating it as inaccessible for Palestinians, and doubled the colonial Jewish settlers to more than 450.000 since 1967 -- have eroded the PLO’s credibility.

Salam Fayyad, the former PA Finance Minister and a founder of the new Third Way political party alongside Hanan Ashrawi who are both incumbent MPs, described the current status quo to the Seventh Annual Herzliya Conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 24: “The nature of relations today between Israelis and Palestinians has reached levels of micromanagement, where Israel is involved in the minute details of the lives of Palestinians. It is important to remember that the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is ruled by military orders – not by politics, logic, or reason – but by military orders with (Israel’s) “security” dictating the rules of the game.” To hell of course with Palestinian security!

Both sides have all the compelling reasons to backtrack and bend on individual as well as collective reviews of the status quo.



Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Ramallah, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.