America's Disappearing Actions: Rendition, Torture, Murder and Repeat

America's Disappeared

by Andy Worthington - FFF

Injustices do not become any less unjust the longer they are unaddressed; and when it comes to the “war on terror” launched by George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, those injustices continue to fester and to poison America’s soul.

One of those injustices is Guantánamo, where 166 men are still imprisoned, even though 86 of them were cleared for release by a task force established by the president four years ago. Another is Bagram in Afghanistan (renamed and rebranded the Parwan Detention Facility), where the Geneva Conventions were torn up by Bush and have not been reinstated and where foreign prisoners seized elsewhere and rendered to U.S. custody in Afghanistan remain imprisoned. Some of those men have been held for as long as the men in Guantánamo, but without being allowed the rights to be visited by civilian lawyers: the men in Cuba were twice granted visitation rights by the Supreme Court — in 2004 and 2008 — even though those rights have since been taken away by judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., demonstrating a susceptibility to the general hysteria regarding the “war on terror” rather than a desire to bring justice to the men in Guantánamo.

Another profound injustice — involving the kidnapping of prisoners anywhere in the world, and their rendition to “black sites” run by the CIA or to torture dungeons in other countries — also remains unaddressed.

Some of “America’s Disappeared” eventually turned up at Guantánamo, and the foreign prisoners held at Bagram also fit into that category. What happened to others, however, is as unknown now as it was six years ago, when six NGOs — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reprieve — issued a report (PDF), “Off the Record: U.S. Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror,’” identifying 39 prisoners whose whereabouts were unknown

At the time — June 2007 — there was some interest in the story because Bush had run into a credibility problem in his second term, but interest had already waned by 2010, Barack Obama’s second year in office. That was the year a follow-up report (PDF), the “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” was published by the United Nations.

I was the lead author of the sections dealing with U.S. disappearances in the “war on terror,” which was prepared for the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, for the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, and for the Working Groups on arbitrary detention and enforced or involuntary disappearances.

In the report, I noted, “Based on figures disclosed in one of the Office of Legal Counsel’s notorious ‘torture memos’ (PDF), written in May 2005 by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bradbury” and made available by Obama as part of a court case in April 2009, “the CIA had, by May 2005, ‘taken custody of 94 prisoners [redacted] and [had] employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these detainees.’”

Those 94 men were part of the “high-value detainee” program and were held in secret prisons run by the CIA in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Morocco, although most also passed through the network of secret prisons in Afghanistan en route.

An unspecified number of other prisoners, however, were also rendered to other countries for torture, including Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The only estimate of numbers came in September 2007, when CIA director Michael Hayden told Charlie Rose that the number was “mid-range, two figures since September 11, 2001,” without elaborating. As Rose stated in response, “Two figures. So 50, 60. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Have been renditioned to somewhere.”

Two weeks ago, the latest update in this sordid and neglected story arrived through the Open Society Justice Initiative, which issued a new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition.” As the press release explained, the report “identifies for the first time a total of 136 named victims and describes the complicity of 54 foreign governments in these operations.” The governments, “ranging from Iceland and Australia to Morocco and Thailand,” are revealed to have “enabled secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations in various ways, such as hosting CIA prisons, assisting in the capture and transport of detainees, and permitting the use of domestic airspace for secret flights.”

The press release also noted that “the report underscores the U.S. government’s failure to confront the legacy of abuses committed in the name of counterterrorism.” It was not lost on the Open Society Justice Initiative that the report was being published while the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence sits on a 6,000-page report that took three years to complete, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the CIA’s torture program under the Bush administration. At the same time, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie Zero Dark Thirty continues to pump out the irresponsible false message that torture played a key role in identifying the location of Osama bin Laden, and John Brennan was about to be confirmed the director of the CIA, even though, under George W. Bush, he had explicitly supported torture and renditions.

Amrit Singh, the author of the report and a senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, said, “The time has come for the U.S. and its partner governments to own up to the truth and secure accountability for the abuses committed around the world as part of these CIA programs. The taint of torture and other abuses associated with these programs will continue to cling to the US and its collaborators as long as they hide behind a veil of secrecy and refuse to hold their officials accountable.”

That is true, of course, but it remains to be seen whether anything can awaken the American media or the public to sufficient outrage that any action will be taken to hold anyone accountable. Singh notes that the best hopes for accountability still lie elsewhere — in Europe, where, in December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held that the Macedonian government had violated the rights of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, during an operation with the CIA that led, in a case of mistaken identity, to El-Masri’s being kidnapped and rendered to a “black site” in Afghanistan, where his treatment “amounted to torture.”

In addition, in 2009, an Italian court convicted in absentia 23 Americans — almost all CIA officials and operatives — for the brazen daylight kidnapping in Milan, in February 2003, of a cleric, Abu Omar, who was subsequently rendered to torture in Egypt. And, just last week, an Italian appellate court sentenced the country’s former intelligence chief, Niccolò Pollari, to ten years in prison “for complicity” in that kidnapping.

As the Open Society Justice Initiative notes, “Other legal challenges to secret detention and extraordinary rendition are pending before the European Court of Human Rights against Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Italy; against Djibouti before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights; and against domestic authorities or officials in Egypt, Hong Kong, Italy, and the U.K.”

Those undertakings remain the best hope that one day someone at the highest levels of the U.S. government will be held accountable for his crimes. In the meantime, the senior Bush officials — up to and including the former president — walk free, and Obama has his own “kill list” and drone program, which, one day, will be seen to have been as monstrous and illegal as Bush’s program of rendition and torture.

Moreover, as the Open Society Justice Initiative also notes, “The Obama administration has not definitively repudiated extraordinary rendition. In 2009, President Obama issued an executive order disavowing torture and closing secret CIA detention sites, but the order was reportedly crafted to allow short-term, transitory detention prior to transferring detainees to countries for interrogation or trial. Current policies and practices with respect to extraordinary rendition remain secret.”

As with so much else in the “war on terror,” secrecy is never a good sign. It is too much to hope that Obama will willingly address the legacy of “America’s Disappeared,” inherited from his predecessor, but one day someone must be held accountable for this global program of torture.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

School of Hard Locks: Education After Newtown

The School Security America Doesn’t Need After Newtown: Turning Schools Into Prisons

by Chase Madar - TomDispatch

Outrage over the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre may or may not spur any meaningful gun control laws, but you can bet your Crayolas that it will lead to more seven-year-olds getting handcuffed and hauled away to local police precincts.

You read that right. Americans may disagree deeply about how easy it should be for a mentally ill convicted felon to purchase an AR-15, but when it comes to putting more law enforcement officers inside our schools, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and liberal Democrats like Senator Barbara Boxer are as one. And when police (or “school resource officers” as these sheriff’s deputies are often known) spend time in a school, they often deal with disorder like proper cops -- by slapping cuffs on the little perps and dragging them to the precinct.

Just ask the three nine-year-old girls and an eight-year-old boy who got into a fight at their Baltimore elementary school -- then got arrested by real police. Or Salecia Johnson, age six, cuffed and arrested for throwing a tantrum at her elementary school in Milledgeville, Georgia. Or Wilson Reyes, a seven-year-old at a Bronx, New York, elementary school who last December 4th was cuffed, hauled away, and interrogated under suspicion of taking $5 from a classmate. (Another kid later confessed.)

The last of these incidents made the cover of the New York Post, but the New York City Police Department still doesn’t understand what they did wrong -- sure, the first-grader spent about 4 hours handcuffed in a detention room, but that’s “standard for juvenile arrest.”

Which is precisely the problem: standard juvenile misbehavior (a five-year-old pitching a fit, a 12-year-old doodling on a desk, a 13-year-old farting in class, a class clown running around the football field at halftime in a banana suit) is increasingly being treated like serious crime, resulting in handcuffs and arrest. If you can’t understand why such “consistency” is crazy, please desist from reading the rest of this article.

Tomgram: Chase Madar, Handcuffing Seven-Year-Olds Won't Make Schools Safer

It was, in a sense, so expectable, so leave-no-child-behind. I’m talking about the arming of American schools. Think of it as the next step in the militarization of this country, which follows all-too-logically from developments since September 11, 2001. In the wake of 9/11, police departments nationwide began to militarize in a big way, and the next thing you knew, the police were looking ever less like old-style neighborhood patrollers and ever more like mini-anti-terror armies. The billy club, the simple sidearm? So Old School. So retro.

When it came to weaponry for the new, twenty-first-century version of the police, it was a matter of letting the good times roll: Tasers, flash grenades, pepper spray, incendiary tear gas, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, bomb-detection robots, armored vehicles and tanks, special-ops-style SWAT teams, drone mini-submarines, drone aircraft, you name it. Today, even school police are being armed with assault rifles. And with it all goes a paramilitary fashion craze that anyone who observed the police in the Occupy moment is most familiar with.

In addition, the U.S. military is now offloading billions of dollars worth of its surplus equipment, some of it assumedly used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan against armed insurgents, on police forces even in small towns nationwide. This includes M-16s, helmet-mounted infrared goggles, amphibious tanks, and helicopters. And now, the same up-armoring mentality is being brought to bear on a threat worse than terror: our children. Think of it as the reductio ad absurdum of the new national security state. First, they locked down the airports, then the capital, then the borders, and finally the schools. Now, we’re ready!

But the seldom-asked question is: ready for what? After all, with a few rare exceptions (including unpredictable lone wolf attacks like the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords; the disgruntled software engineer who flew his plane into a building containing an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; Major Nidal Hassan’s murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Texas; and the Newtown slaughter), just about all “terror” threats in the U.S. have essentially been FBI sting operations involving crews of “terrorists” who were, by themselves, incapable of planning their way out of the proverbial paper bag. Imagine for a moment how much better off we might be today if the money that has, for more than a decade, poured into the militarization of the police had been plowed into American education or infrastructure or just about anything else. In that case, we might be prepared for something other than fighting phantoms and -- as TomDispatch regular Chase Madar, author of The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower, points out today -- handcuffing seven-year-olds. For the TV version of what’s happening in our schools at the moment, you would have to imagine “Homeland” populated by overarmed Muppets and Thomas the Tank (not the Tank Engine). Tom

The School Security America Doesn’t Need After Newtown: Turning Schools Into Prisons

by Chase Madar

It seems grotesque that the horrific slaughter of those 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, will result in more children getting traumatized, but that’s exactly where we’re headed -- with firm bipartisan support.

In his amazing post-Newtown speech last December, Wayne LaPierre, the CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, called for armed guards in all schools -- a demand widely hailed as jaw-droppingly nutty. A few weeks later, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) proposed $50 million in federal grants to install more metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and National Guard troops in schools, but made her pitch in the caring cadences of a Marin County Democrat. And when President Obama ordered more police in schools (point 18 in his 23-point Executive Order responding to the Sandy Hook tragedy), it was all over.

So here’s an American reality of 2013: we will soon have more police in our schools, and more seven-year-olds like Joseph Andersons of PS 153 in Maspeth, New York, getting arrested. (He got handcuffed after a meltdown when his Easter egg dye-job didn’t come out right.)

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

In fairness to the feds, similar kinds of local responses were already underway before the La Pierre-Boxer Axis of Tiny Handcuffs even arose. Across the country, from Florida and Connecticut to Tennessee, Indiana, and Arizona, despite tough budgetary times, municipal governments are now eagerly scrounging up the extra money for more metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and armed guards in schools. (The same thing happened after the Columbine shooting 14 years ago.) No one keeps national statistics, but arrests of the 10-and-under set do seem to be on the rise since Sandy Hook. A typical recent case: in January, a seven-year-old at a Connecticut school was arrested by the police for “threatening” a teacher. Jitters are understandable after the trauma of Sandy Hook -- but arresting a seven-year-old?

Truth be told, we were already well on our way to turning schools into carceral fortresses before the Sandy Hook slaughter even happened. In fact, the great national infrastructure project of the past 20 years may be the “school-to-prison pipeline.” After all, we are the nation that arrested Isamar Gonzalez for being in her high school early to meet with a teacher, then arrested her principal, Mark Federman, when he tried to intervene.

The stats speak as loudly as the anecdotes: of the Chicago School District’s 4,600 arrests in 2011, 86% were for misdemeanors. That school system spends $51.4 million on security guards, but only $3.5 million for college and career coaches. And for every incident that makes the news, there are scores that don’t. Despite a growing body of damning research by civil libertarians of the left and the right, including Annette Fuentes’s excellent book Lockdown High, political opposition to the school-to-prison pipeline has proven feeble or nonexistent. Brooklyn State Senator Eric Adams, who represents one of the most liberal districts in the country, has staked out the civil libertarian outer limit by helpfully suggesting that Velcro handcuffs might be more suitable than metal ones for arresting young children.

The metal detector at the schoolhouse door is threatening to become as iconic an American symbol as baseball or type 2 diabetes. Not that metal detectors in place were capable of preventing the massacre at Red Lake High School in Minnesota in 2005: young Jeffrey Weise just barged right in and shot six people dead; nor could the metal detectors at George Washington High School in Manhattan or Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn prevent teens from getting stabbed. Yet metal detectors and school police proliferate across the country.

One state, however, truly leads the way. Self-satisfied Yankees have traditionally slandered the state of Mississippi as a jerkwater remnant of the past. As for me, I say Mississippi represents the American future. A new report by advocacy groups shows how the Hospitality State is leading the nation in cruel and draconian school over-policing. Felony assault charges for throwing peanuts on the school bus! Dress codes enforced by handcuffing a child to a railing for hours for the crime of not wearing a belt! Cops escorting a five-year-old home for wearing the wrong color shoes! And constant arrests of kids for “disorderly conduct.”

Yes, the “Mississippi model” of non-union teachers plus “zero tolerance” discipline is the kind of schooling that some of the best and brightest among our education “reformers” have been touting -- and what they are increasingly getting. In fairness, Governor Rick Perry’s Texas is struggling with Mississippi for vanguard status, with cutting-edge surveillance of students and 300,000 misdemeanor arrests in 2010 for “crimes” like tossing a paper airplane. And Massachusetts is a strong contender for third place.

Safe Schools Without Police or Metal Detectors

The over-policing of our schools is particularly grotesque because it’s so unnecessary. All schools need order and all students need self-discipline (as do adults), but putting police and metal detectors in a school often just adds another layer of violent chaos to an already tough situation. In my own policy research on school security overkill in New York City, I’ve found plenty of high schools, and not in the fancy parts of town, that do just fine without police or scanners.

In fact, they do better than fine: one report I coauthored with advocates from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform found that schools without police or metal detectors actually get significantly better educational results (higher graduation rates, lower truancy) than their heavily policed counterparts.

So why aren’t these low-impact schools being held up as models? Why don’t City Hall and the New York City Department of Education seem to want to know about these more effective -- not to mention cheaper -- models? Alas, despite a steady 15-year nationwide drop in crime, politicos continue to score points with voters by showing that they aren’t afraid to crack down on children, especially the working-class Black and Latino youth who bear most of the brunt of these policies. The psycho-racial-political dynamics are pretty much the same throughout the country.

But there are proven, demonstrably better, ways to do school discipline. Ask Judge Steve Teske whose visionary common sense has brought down referrals to juvenile court by 70% in Clayton County, Georgia, by forcing schools to handle minor disciplinary infractions without handcuffs or police arrests. (In the same period in that county, serious weapons charges, like bringing guns and knives to school, have fallen by 80% -- further evidence that restraining a police presence actually makes schools safer.)

For another example of the right way to respond to school violence, look no further than Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, site of the 1999 massacre of 12 students and a teacher by two heavily armed students. In response, the school made the choice not to add a phalanx of armed guards. (Columbine actually had an armed school resource officer on duty the day of the killings, and he was unable to slow, let alone stop, the carnage.)

In fact, Columbine today remains an open campus with no metal detector at the front door. Instead, its administration has worked hard to improve communications with the student body, trying to build an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. Columbine parents have supported this approach for a simple reason: they don’t want their children treated like criminals. Because Littleton, Colorado, is a largely affluent community with political muscle, they’ve been able to resist the avalanche of punitive measures that have been generated by every school massacre since the one that took place at theirs.

Other schools -- particularly urban ones with working-class African-American and Latino students -- are not so lucky. When President Obama announced his pledge of more “resource officers” in schools, he was quick to qualify it with an “if they want them.” A laudable sentiment that doesn’t really reflect how things usually work on the ground.

One Brooklyn high school principal I interviewed told me of the constant pressure he experienced from higher up in the New York City Department of Education to put in a metal detector and more police personnel. Another school security success story I profiled back in 2008 has since had a metal detector rammed down its educational throat despite its immaculate disciplinary record. Now, its students are made to feel like potential criminals from the moment they arrive every morning. The logic is, in its way, all-American: crazy white kids go on shooting sprees, and then the screws tighten on Black and Latino kids.

Resisting the Axis of Tiny Handcuffs

Is there any hope of preventing the rush to put more first graders in handcuffs? Yes, but don’t expect any help from the NRA, which is actively promoting a heavily armed vision of heaven on Earth in which armed guards will be everywhere, with all public space turned into an airport security line. As for Barbara Boxer, evidently she wasn’t as struck as I was by the t-shirts that Sacramento’s school security police made with the slogan “U Raise 'Em, We Cage 'Em” emblazoned on the image of a child behind bars. Or maybe she should talk to constituents like five-year-old arrestee Michael Davis or the seven-year-old in San Mateo whom a cop blasted in the face with pepper spray for climbing a bookshelf. It remains to be seen if the NRA and Boxer, united, can ever be defeated.

This response to the Newtown massacre is of a piece with a developing post-9/11 American national-security-lockdown mentality -- the belief that an armed response will solve most of our problems, domestic and foreign. It’s a habit of thought that leads not figuratively but quite literally to a police state. The over-policing of schools is just a part of the increasing militarization of the police nationwide, which in turn fuels the smoldering paranoia that drives civilians to stock up on AR-15s and the like.

Ending this cycle of armed fear and violence will require getting police out of the schools along with the whole battery of security state accessories. The only way to get there will be via the broadest possible civil libertarian coalition: Black community groups and Ron Paul types, immigrants' rights activists and teachers and principals unions that see the big picture, liberals and conservatives united against the nanny/thug state.

There could be no finer spokesperson for such an ecumenical gathering than the newly crowned Miss America, Alabama-raised Brooklyn-residing Mallory Hytes Hagan. After wowing the pageant judges with her terpsichorean prowess, she demonstrated the soundest policy judgment. Asked if she thought it was a good idea to bring armed guards into schools, Ms. Hagan’s response was clear. “No, I don’t think the proper way to fight violence is with violence.” According to the New York Daily News, she said it “firmly.” Let people of goodwill rally behind this model citizen to end all the grotesque violence in our schools.

 

Chase Madar (@ChMadar) is a civil rights attorney in New York City who has written about the proven alternatives to school security overkill. His latest book is The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower (Verso).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Chase Madar

The New Order of Things: US-EU Trade Deal Paves Way for Corporatist Take-Over

US - EU Trade Deal is the Foundation for a New Global Economic Order

by Dana Gabriel - Be Your Own Leader

The U.S. and EU have agreed to launch negotiations on what would be the world's largest free trade deal. Such an agreement would be the basis for the creation of an economic NATO and would include trade in goods, services and investment, as well as cover intellectual property rights. There are concerns that the U.S. could use these talks to push the EU to loosen its restrictions on genetically modified crops and foods. In addition, the deal might serve as a backdoor means to implement ACTA which was rejected by the European Parliament last year. A U.S.-EU Transatlantic trade agreement is seen as a way of countering China’s growing power and is the foundation for a new global economic order.

In his recent State of the Union address, President Barack Obama officially announced that the U.S. would launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union (EU). A joint statement issued by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and U.S. President Obama explained that, “Through this negotiation, the United States and the European Union will have the opportunity not only to expand trade and investment across the Atlantic, but also to contribute to the development of global rules that can strengthen the multilateral trading system.” In a separate speech, European Commission President Barroso also emphasized that, “A future deal between the world's two most important economic powers will be a game-changer. Together, we will form the largest free trade zone in the world. So this negotiation will set the standard – not only for our future bilateral trade and investment, including regulatory issues, but also for the development of global trade rules.”

The decision to pursue a free trade deal was based on the recommendations put forth by the High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth which was created to deepen U.S.-EU economic integration. In their final report, they called on leaders from both sides to, “initiate as soon as possible the formal domestic procedures necessary to launch negotiations on a comprehensive trade and investment agreement.” According to U.S. and EU officials, talks could start in June with the hopes of completing a deal by the end of 2014. The proposed trade pact would include removing import tariffs, dismantling hurdles to trade in goods, services, and investment, as well as harmonizing regulations and standards. It would also cover intellectual property protection and enforcement. This could be used as an opportunity for a backdoor implementation of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). It was a result of public pressure associated with risks to internet freedom and privacy which lead to ACTA being rejected by the European Parliament in July of 2012. There have already been attempts to use Canada-EU trade negotiations to sneak in parts of ACTA.

Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch Director, Lori Wallach cautioned how U.S.-EU talks, “are aimed at eliminating a list of what multinational corporations call ‘trade irritants’ but the rest of us know as strong food safety, environmental and health safeguards.” She went on to say, “European firms are targeting aspects of the U.S. financial reregulation regime, our stronger drug and medical device safety and testing standards and more.” Wallach further added, “U.S. firms want Europe to gut their superior chemical regulation regime, their tougher food safety rules and labeling of genetically modified foods.” In a press release, Earth Open Source warned that, “An EU-U.S. free trade deal would obliterate EU safeguards for health and the environment with regard to genetically modified (GM) crops and foods.” Research Director Claire Robinson pointed out, “If the new trade agreement goes through, it will be illegal under World Trade Organisation rules for the EU to have a stronger regulatory system for GMOs than the U.S. system.” This is disturbing considering that in many cases, GM foods in the U.S. do not require any special regulatory oversight or safety tests.

Overshadowed by the proposed U.S.-EU trade deal is ongoing Canada-EU negotiations on a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). Despite talks being in their final stages, both sides still have some important gaps to be bridged before a deal can be reached. Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star acknowledged that, “Europe’s real interest in negotiating a trade deal with Ottawa was to demonstrate to the Americans that a trans-Atlantic free trade pact was possible.” He noted, “EU negotiators will be even more reluctant to make concessions to Canada for fear of weakening their bargaining hand with the Americans.” Walkom argued that, “Canada is under more pressure to make a deal while Europe is under less.” He concluded that. “A Canada-EU deal seems inevitable. But now, with America in the mix, the terms for Canada may be even less favorable than expected.” The Globe and Mail recently reported that the EU is demanding additional concessions from Canada before any agreement can be signed. In order to wrap things up, a desperate Canada may be willing to give up even more. This was a bad deal from the start and it would be in their best interest to just walk away from CETA.

In the coming months, you can expect the anti-corporate globalization movement on both sides of the Atlantic to mobilize against the U.S.-EU trade agreement. It is big business and financial institutions who are pushing this deregulation agenda which threatens health, environmental and food safety standards. Just like NAFTA, the proposed U.S.-EU trade deal is also likely to include an investor-state dispute process which would give corporations the right to challenge government policies that restrict their profits. A trade agreement between the U.S. and EU is the building blocks for a new global trading system. If you combine NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a U.S,-EU Transatlantic trade deal, you have the makings for a global free trade area.





Related articles by Dana Gabriel:
Deepening the U.S.-EU Transatlantic Trade Partnership
Growing Opposition to the Canada-EU Trade Agreement
Advancing the Transatlantic Agenda
From NAFTA to CETA: Canada-EU Deep Economic Integration

 
Dana Gabriel is an activist and independent researcher. He writes about trade, globalization, sovereignty, security, as well as other issues. Contact: beyourownleader@hotmail.com Visit his blog at Be Your Own Leader

W.E.B. DuBois and the Soviets

DuBois and the Soviet Union

by TRNN

Du Bois and the Soviet Union On the 145th anniversary of the birth of W.E.B. Du Bois, Anthony Monteiro looks at Du Bois's relationship with the CPUSA and the Soviet Union

 Anthony Monteiro is a professor of African-American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Watch full multipart Martin Luther King

The Albert Speer Oscar Goes to...ZDT and the Neo Riefenstahl

Zero Dark Thirty wins ‘Albert Speer Oscar’ for Best Propaganda Picture

by Patrick Henningsen - 21st Century Wire

‘Hollywood history’ is all the rage these days, but it comes at a huge cost

One of the most pervasive trends in 21st century western culture has become somewhat of an obsession in America. It’s called “Hollywood history”, where the corporate studio machines in Los Angeles spend hundreds of millions of dollars in order to craft and precisely tailor historical events to suit the prevailing political paradigm.

‘Hollywood history’ is very much in fashion these days. From Linclon to Dubya, and from Blackhawk Down to The Iron Lady, they constitute a significant portion of today’s major releases. There’s only one problem however, with tailoring a story to fit neatly into a prevailing political paradigm… and over the last 100 years, the Germans and the Soviets did this too – with devastating effect, but back then we just called it propaganda.

No film embodies the Hollywood historical treatment more than the much celebrated cinema release of Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and one of the favourites to grab an armful of Academy Awards this weekend in LA including Best Picture, Bigelow for best director, Mark Boal for best screenplay, and Jessica Chastain for Best Actress.

The film’s main premise is constructed around a female CIA officer, played by Chastain, and her dogged determination to find the highly elusive mastermind of 9/11 and the al Qaeda’s MVP, Osama bin Laden. Chastain’s performance, critics claim, has also ‘empowered women’ by showing how her film character caught bin Laden, but it didn’t actually happen that way. We’ll get to that later…

Where this film starts to take heat is with its sensational on screen CIA torture scenes. Unlike previously less celebrated but more integral, intellectual cinematic efforts at taking on torture – like Rendition and Lions for Lambs, Bigelow seemed incredibly bent on going the distance to glorify (through her attempt at Cinéma vérité) the troubling practice of torture by the CIA – as a means to glean intelligence about the whereabouts of various Islamic terrorists scattered throughout the world’s third world cesspits.




Actor Jessica Chastain unaware that ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ 
was a work of total fiction.

Bigelow and her writing team’s artistic license on the effectiveness of torture even prompted one screen legend, actor Susan Sarandon, to brand the film as a piece of manipulative political entertainment. The veteran human rights defender issued a written statement saying that when watching Zero Dark Thirty, “you should know that the movie has generated controversy because it leaves a mistaken impression: that the CIA’s torture of prisoners ‘worked’ by providing information that led to bin Laden.”

In fact, the US Senate Intelligence Committee spent four years investigating the CIA’s torture program, and according to Senators Diane Feinstein and John McCain, the CIA’s vaunted torture program under Obama did not lead to bin Laden (that’s the only true statement you will ever hear surrounding the government’s Osama bin Laden tale).

Zero Dark’s glorification of torture is merely the first level of moral descent however, because you see, there’s still the thorny issue of Osama bin Laden to deal with…

One thing was clear when watching this film, and also by the reactions of theatre goers at my screening in Brixton, South London, that Zero Dark marks a new low point in America’s now fashionable politicised culture, and Bigelow must be aware of this because she seemed to play this card shamelessly in her highly politicised film.

Never before in the history of cinema has there been such a break-neck rush to complete and release a motion picture so soon after the said event, to serialise the legendary “Hunt for Bin Laden”, and “the greatest manhunt in history” by a gallant Seal Team 6, ending in the siege of the terror kingpin’s alleged place of abode – a compound located in Abbotabad, Pakistan.

Apparently, Bigelow’s production was already in motion in May 2011 in advance of the White House’s announcement that Seal Team 6 had killed Bin Laden, and Bigelow it seems, was either persuaded or herself decided (it’s not clear which one it was), to rewrite the film’s script in order to theatrically chronicle what President Obama had put forward as his greatest achievement since taking office. This was the birth of Zero Dark Thirty. Others are investigating whether the movie’s filmmakers received quiet government funding to promote torture, since they did obtain classified information, according to many reports. Unfortunately for Bigelow, and as some of us learned with Iraq, so-called ‘classified’ information is only as credible as its source (US intelligence unfortunately has a spotty record of late).

Was bin Laden really killed by Seal Team 6 that day? Examine the evidence, if you can find any.



Hitler’s Reich relied on talent filmmakers like Leni Riefenstahl, 
to write the government’s version of Nazi history.

If Pentagon propaganda, or bolstering President Obama’s political trophy were the motives, then one could compare this film’s creators to similarly well-paid cinematic forebears like Albert Speer, or Leni Riefenstahl.

Female cinematic icon Riefenstahl’s involvement in crafting Nazi government propaganda was eventually her undoing. After the Reich fell in 1945, she still maintained that her films were ‘works of art’ and claimed that they had nothing to do with Nazi politics and propaganda. With all the lies and propaganda swirling around Washington’s own criminal class, it will be interesting to see how filmmakers like Bigelow will defend their own ‘art’ in years to come.

But it’s hardly the first time Hollywood has been accused of gross misuse of its creative license. It’s become the norm, rather than the exception.

Other Hollywood attempts to hold the government’s line on history include the box office debacle, “Flight 93″, which derived its plot, characters and production design solely from the federal government’s own Official 9/11 Report. Evidence fleshed out since points to the obvious scenario that Flight 93 was actually shot down by a US jet fighter, with its debris spread over 20 miles in and around Shanksville, PA in 2001. No matter, Hollywood kept to the government’s original outdated script of “let’s roll!”.

The sheer volume of mistruths which have been fed downwards by the US government and its corporate media apologists over the last decade is staggering, and has had quite of profound, polarising effect on media consumers North America and Western Europe. The avalanche of state-sponsored and corporation-sponsored propaganda over the last decade in particular, appears to have successfully divided society into two groups: those who believe official propaganda and government released narratives of major events – and those who question it.

It’s safe to say that the sort of people who would never admit in public to questioning the government’s official explanations about what happened on 9/11 – are generally the same section of the population who would accept a film like Zero Dark Thirty as recorded history. These might also be the same type of people who believed in advance of America’s bombing and invasion of Iraq – Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The bin Laden mythology is powerful, however, and millions of people will walk away from this film feeling as if they’ve learned something about what it's like working the gritty side the CIA.

Under normal circumstances, I would not pay for a ticket to see a historical production which I believe was based on a fictional narrative. I made an exception in this case because it was the only way I could review the film in time to write this piece. But the most profound realisation I got watching the movie was a very sad one. I felt sorry for the director, the cast and all the production crew who put in their hard work and sweat, and probably believed that bin Laden was indeed in the Abbotabad compound in May 2011, and that they were reenacting a rare and proud piece of American history.

In order to believe this, they would also have to have believed; somehow, that same bin Laden also masterminded a multi-pronged assault that managed to bypass the whole of the US Defense apparatus – all from his legendary cave in Tora Bora.

It’s no surprise how much both the Bush and Obama governments and the corporate military industrial complex has benefited from maintaining the mythology of a living Osama bin Laden since 2001. Unfortunately, the mythology does not measure up to reality, with multiple admissions in public by heads of state Pervez Musharraf, and Benazir Bhutto, as well as by Madeline Albright and others; even mainstream media reports going all the way back to 2001, stating that Osama bin Laden was dying, or had in fact died in late 2001.

Knowing all this, when I heard the news of Obama and the Navy Seal Team 6 raid on bin Laden, I knew immediately that not only was this almost certainly a fiction, but that there would be no photographs and videos released, because a dead man cannot come back to life after 10 years for a photo session.

As predicted, a few days later the White House confirmed my suspicions, announcing that indeed, ‘no photos or video will be released’…

On top of that, we were also told that they dumped bin Laden’s body at sea 48 hours after allegedly killing him. Fancy that? But even that pillar of the official narrative fell apart later when it was revealed that no US sailors aboard the USS Carl Vinson ever saw the alleged burial at sea, and that no images exist in any government records of bin Laden aboard the decorated US sea vessel. Hard to believe, but only if you believe the government’s official fiction on the fate of Osama bin Laden.

Also, unknown to Kathryn Bigelow and her crew at the time of production; there was no DNA identification of bin Laden by the Pentagon either, and no autopsy was done. It’s as if he was merely a ghost. Does that mean that White House announcements to the contrary back in May 2011 were lies? Yes, it does.

So let’s get that straight. There no evidence to prove that bin Laden was even there at Abbotabad in May 2011 (or alive for that matter), and Zero Dark Thirty is based on the idea that he was there because the CIA said he was. We can imagine Albert and Leni getting excited right about now.

These facts certainly give my own statements on the incident even more credibility, but that’s nothing to cheer about. We were lied to, again.

Zero Dark is also flanked this year by another historical effort which has relied heavy on Hollywood brand of artistic license is Ben Affleck’s Iranian hostage drama, Argo, which most analysts agree was heavily padded with imaginative characters, written-in backstories and invented obstacles, all woven together to create an ‘interesting’ and entertaining piece of film much the same way Charlie Wilson’s War was a jovial depiction of the CIA’s gun-running in the Soviet-Afghan War, painted by Hollywood as a story of American heroism for the ages. There are literally dozens of other examples of invented Hollywood history, these are only a few.

Rarely is ever – has Hollywood ever actually challenged the political paradigm or the power of the Pentagon in one of its ‘historical productions’. Argo and Charlie Wilson’s ‘semi-fiction’ might seem like harmless Hollywood history to many movie goers, but altering history for entertainment purposes is not just deceptive, besides the fact that it’s not true yet its being passed off as history, it also borders on mass brain washing, further distorting generational truths about what our nations’ governments actually get up to on tax payers’ time.

Rather than betting the farm on a quirky piece of historical trivia, will film goers ever see the day that a director like Affleck might try to tackle the Iran Contra Scandal and the CIA running guns to Nicaragua and Cocaine into Louisiana and Arkansas airports? Or reveal how the same CIA, with the help of the FBI, being responsible for introducing crack cocaine to the streets of Los Angeles during the 1980′s, or even about the CIA shipping heroin out of Afghanistan after 2001? Likewise, ignoring the true historical context that it was the very same CIA, with the help of Saudi oil money, who created and trained the present day al Qaeda by employing the likes of Osama bin Laden to handle the terror group’s finances over the decades.

Sadly, spending $150 million on a film production that could reveal actual history, and out govt corruption – is probably asking too much from Hollywood’s bold and beautiful. No, no, stick to quirky revisions of history, non-events, or outright inventions, and then bask in all the pomp of Oscar night.

Perhaps, upon doing a little research, Kathryn Bigelow might consider doing a sequel to Zero Dark Thirty – and tell us what happened to that famous “Navy Seal Team 6″ after the bin Laden raid. That would make a good story, and one many people would like to know more about.

In the end, Zero Dark can only be summed up as one big, expensive lie in celluloid, in the Riefenstahl and Speer tradition. Regardless of how many awards it wins this winter – that’s how history will eventually label Kathryn Bigelow’s latest piece of moving art.

The good news is the truth has no expiration date, and political propaganda eventually collapses under the weight of its own inflated sense of purpose.All we are seeing here, is simply… Hollywood drifting further towards Washington DC.

Defining Moments: Torture American Style

“I Begged for Them to Stop” - Waterboarding Americans and the Redefinition of Torture

by Nick Turse - TomDispatch

Try to remain calm -- even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. You’re helpless. You’re in agony.

In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.” Or the “water rag.” Or the “water treatment.” Or “tormenta de toca.” Or any of the other nicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.”

Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Hidden History of Water Torture

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The good news is that TomDispatch is back, stronger than ever. As many of you know, it crashed last week after being overwhelmed by visitors. Now, the site, up-armored (special thanks to the Nation Institute’s Jayati Vora and Dimitri Siavelis for their help in a crunch) and transferred to a stronger server, is ready for an ever busier future. The downside, as with so many things in this world, is that all of this costs (and will cost) more money. So let me offer a deep bow of thanks to all of you who decided to donate $100 (or more) for a signed copy of Nick Turse’s new book, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, which hits #31 on the New York Times extended bestseller list next weekend. At this moment, your outpouring of donations has really made a difference. For anyone who still wants to help, please check out our donation page where, in addition to signed copies of two of Nick’s books and a joint book on drone warfare that we did together, several of my books are available, including The United States of Fear and my odyssey through the Cold War years of my childhood (and thereafter), The End of Victory Culture. Tom]

Sometimes, the world can be such a simple, black-and-white sort of place. Let me give you an example. Imagine for a moment that the Iranians kidnap an American citizen from a third country. (If you prefer, feel free to substitute al-Qaeda or the North Koreans or the Chinese for the Iranians.) They accuse him of being a terrorist. They throw him in jail without charges or a trial or a sentence and claim they suspect he might have crucial information (perhaps even of the “ticking bomb” sort -- and the Iranians have had some genuine experience with ticking bombs). Over the weeks that follow, they waterboard him time and again. They strip him, put a dog collar and leash on him. They hood him, loose dogs on him. They subject him to freezing cold water and leave him naked on cold nights. They hang him by his arms from the ceiling of his cell in the “strappado” position. I’m sure I really don’t have to go on. Is there any question what we (or our leaders) would think or say?

We would call them barbarians. Beyond the bounds of civilization. Torturers. Monsters. Evil. No one in the U.S. government, on reading CIA intelligence reports about how that American had been treated, would wonder: Is it torture? No one in Washington would have the urge to call what the Iranians (al-Qaeda, the North Koreans, the Chinese) did “enhanced interrogation techniques.” If, on being asked at a Senate hearing whether he thought the Iranian acts were, in fact, “torture,” the prospective director of the CIA demurred, claimed he was no expert on the subject, no lawyer or legal scholar, and simply couldn’t label it as such, he would not be confirmed. He would probably never have a job in Washington again. If asked whether the Iranians who committed such acts against that American and their superiors who ordered them to do so, should be brought before an American or international court and tried, the president would surely not suggest that this was the moment to “look forward, not backward,” nor would his justice department give them a free pass.

You see what I mean? When evil is evil, the world couldn’t be more cut-and-dried. It’s only when, as Nick Turse, author of the bestselling book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, writes today, the acts in question are committed by Americans on Evil Doers, under the orders or encouragement of their superiors, based on policies set at the highest levels in Washington, that such matters become complex, shaded in greys, open to interpretation, understandable in human terms, and explicable by citing ticking-bomb scenarios (however imaginary). Tom

“I Begged for Them to Stop” 

Waterboarding Americans and the Redefinition of Torture

by Nick Turse

The practice only became widely known in the United States after it was disclosed that the CIA had been subjecting suspected terrorists to it in the wake of 9/11. More recently, cinematic depictions of waterboarding in the award-winning film Zero Dark Thirty and questions about it at the Senate confirmation hearing for incoming CIA chief John Brennan have sparked debate. Water torture, however, has a surprisingly long history, dating back to at least the fourteenth century. 

 

It has been a U.S. military staple since the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was employed by Americans fighting an independence movement in the Philippines. American troops would continue to use the brutal tactic in the decades to come -- and during the country’s repeated wars in Asia, they would be victims of it, too.

Water Torture in Vietnam

For more than a decade, I’ve investigated atrocities committed during the Vietnam War. In that time, I’ve come to know people who employed water torture and people who were brutalized by it. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies regularly used it on enemy prisoners and civilian detainees in an effort to gain intelligence or simply punish them. A picture of the practice even landed on the front page of the Washington Post on January 21, 1968, but mostly it went on in secret.

Long-hidden military documents help to fill in the picture. "I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face, and then poured water over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth,” Staff Sergeant David Carmon explained in testimony to Army criminal investigators in December 1970. According to their synopsis, he admitted to using both electrical torture and water torture in interrogating a detainee who died not long after.

According to summaries of eyewitness statements by members of Carmon’s unit, the prisoner, identified as Nguyen Cong, had been "beat and kicked," lost consciousness, and suffered convulsions. A doctor who examined Nguyen, however, claimed there was nothing wrong with him. Carmon and another member of his military intelligence team then "slapped the Vietnamese and poured water on his face from a five-gallon can," according to a summary of his testimony. An official report from May 1971 states that Nguyen Cong passed out "and was carried to the confinement cage where he was later found dead.”

Years later, Carmon told me by email that the abuse of prisoners in Vietnam was extensive and encouraged by superiors. "Nothing was sanctioned," he wrote, "but nothing was off-limits short of seriously injuring a prisoner."

It turns out that Vietnamese prisoners weren’t the only ones subjected to water torture in Vietnam. U.S. military personnel serving there were victims, too. Documents I came across in the U.S. National Archives offer a glimpse of a horrifying history that few Americans know anything about.

“I had a ‘water job’ done on me,” one former American prisoner told a military investigator, according to a 1969 Army report. “I was handcuffed and taken to the shower… They held my head under the shower for about two minutes and when I’d pull back to breath, they beat me on the chest and stomach. This lasted for about 10 minutes, during which I was knocked to the floor twice. When I begged for them to stop, they did.”

Another said that his cellmate had rolled their cigarette butts together to fashion a full cigarette. When the guards discovered the “contraband,” they grabbed him and hauled him to the showers. “Three of the guards held me and the other one held my face under the shower,” he testified. “This lasted quite a while and I thought I was going to drown.” Afterward, he said, the same thing was done to his cellmate who, upon returning, admitted that “he confessed” as a result of the torture.

Still another captive testified that handcuffed prisoners were taken to the showers. “The guards would hold the prisoner’s head back and make him swallow water,” he explained. “This treatment would cause the prisoner to resist which would give the guards an excuse to punch the prisoner.” He also testified that it was no isolated incident. “I have witnessed such treatments about nine times.”

“Cruel or Unusual”

This wasn’t, in fact, the first time Americans had been subjected to water torture while at war in Asia. During World War II, members of the Japanese military used water torture on American prisoners. “I was given what they call the water cure," Lieutenant Chase Nielsen testified after the war. When asked about the experience, he answered: “I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death."

The same tortures were also meted out to American pilots captured during the Korean War. One described his treatment this way: “They would bend my head back, put a towel over my face, and pour water over the towel. I could not breathe... When I would pass out, they would shake me and begin again.”

For their crimes against prisoners, including water torture, some Japanese officers were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, while others were executed.

The legal response to torturers in Vietnam was very different. While investigating allegations against Staff Sergeant Carmon, for instance, Army agents discovered within his unit a pattern of "cruelty and maltreatment" of prisoners that went on from March 1968 to October 1969. According to an official report, Army agents determined that the evidence warranted formal charges against 22 interrogators, many of them implicated in the use of water torture, electrical torture, beatings, and other forms of mistreatment. But neither Carmon nor any of the others was ever charged, court martialed, or punished in any way, according to the records.

There was similar impunity for -- in one of the more bizarre uses of water torture -- Americans who tortured Americans in Vietnam. Although a 1969 Army Inspector General’s report into “alleged brutality and maltreatment” noted that “the water treatment was administered as a form of punishment and constitutes a form of maltreatment of prisoners,” those who water-tortured American personnel were never tried, let alone sentenced to long prison terms or executed for their crimes. In fact, those implicated -- Army guards working at the American detention facility informally known as Long Binh Jail -- apparently escaped any punishment whatsoever.

This record of impunity has continued in more recent years. While the CIA has acknowledged its use of waterboarding after 9/11 and President Obama has unambiguously stated that the practice is a method of torture, his administration declared that no one would be prosecuted for utilizing it or any other “enhanced interrogation technique.” As a CIA spokesperson pointed out to ProPublica last year, after reviewing the Agency’s treatment of more than 100 detainees, the Department of Justice “declined prosecution in every case."

The 1969 Inspector General’s report on American torture of American prisoners unequivocally defined the “water treatment” meted out to jailed American military personnel as “cruel or unusual.” Bush administration lawyers in the post-9/11 years, however, attempted to redefine the drowning of defenseless prisoners as something less than torture, basically turning the clock back to the ethical standards of the Spanish Inquisition.

At least that 1969 report noted that water torture “was administered without authority” to those American prisoners. The current situation has been radically different. In recent years, it wasn’t merely low-level brutalizers and their immediate superiors who sanctioned and approved torture techniques, but senior White House officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney. From George W. Bush’s own memoir, we know that the previous president gave an enthusiastic order (“Damn right!”) to subject other human beings to water torture, just as we know that President Obama has made certain no one in the government involved in ordering or facilitating such acts would ever answer for any of them.

In 1901, an American officer was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor for waterboarding a Filipino prisoner. By the late 1940s, the centuries-old practice was so reviled that significant prison time or even death lay in store for those using it. In the late 1960s, it was still viewed as a cruel and unusual punishment, even if U.S. troops who tortured Vietnamese and American captives weren’t subject to prosecution for it. In the twenty-first century, as water torture moved from Southeast Asian prison showers to the White House, it also morphed into an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Today, the president’s pick to head the CIA refuses even to label waterboarding as “torture.”

What does it say about a society when its morals and ethics on the treatment of captives go into reverse? What are we to make of leaders who authorize, promote, or shield such brutal practices or about citizens who stand by and allow them to happen? What does it mean when torture, already the definition of “cruel,” becomes usual?

 

 

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). You can watch his recent conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. His website is NickTurse.com. You can follow him on Tumblr and on Facebook.

[Note: I’m not the first to write about the American use of water torture on U.S. prisoners in Vietnam. See Cecil B. Currey’s 1999 volume, Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam’s Notorious U.S. Military Prison. For an account, both gripping and harrowing, by a victim of water torture, see The Question, journalist Henri Alleg’s bite-sized account of his torture by French forces in Algeria during the 1950s.]

Copyright 2013 Nick Turse

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Dawn Morrison, Beatrice Lindstrom, Janine Bandcroft Monday February 25th, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Pacific Free Press

It's said, "March comes in like a lion..." and from Ireland to Norway to Vancouver the month will begin with the 'March for Wild Salmon,' an international coalition of citizens', environmental, and indigenous groups roaring its determination to halt the spread of the transglobal fish farming industry.

Vancouver's mobilization is led by the Indigenous Salmon Defenders, kicking off a month-long campaign consisting of a series of events, culminating on the final day of March with a global vigil for wild salmon. The timing is no accident, as the coming Spring is the most crucial moment for the next generation of salmon smolt, who must transit a veritable gauntlet of disease-ridden, seal lice spawning fish feedlots dotting their migratory route to the open ocean.

Listen. Hear.

Dawn Morrison is founder of the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Network, a group formed in conjunction with the BC Food Systems Network. She also coordinates the Vancouver Native Health Society's Urban Aboriginal Gardens and Kitchen Project. Morrison is too a leader for Indigenous community engagement in association with the BC Bioregional Food Assistance Planning Project, and she'll be at the head of the March for Wild Salmon.

She says the message is simple: “Stop Norwegian Fish Farms from Killing Wild Salmon!” 

Dawn Morrison in the first half.

And; fully three years since the great earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti's capital, Port au Prince thousands still remain homeless, jobless, and dependent on foreign aid - such as it is - to survive.The usual, and suspect, agencies are all represented in Haiti, chiefly among them being the United Nations' Minustah, or "stabilization mission."

It's long been believed in the country, it was Nepalese soldiers seconded to Minustah who introduced cholera into the water supply downstream of their base, setting off an epidemic so far credited with killing at least 8,000 Haitians, and sickening many hundreds of thousands more. Though the provenance of the outbreak was obvious, the United Nations has steadfastly denied responsibility. Investigations began, eventually finding, fully two and a half years after the fact, the UN's troopers were indeed the source of the disaster. Last week, claims for compensation, duly filed by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, or IJDH on behalf of the those afflicted, were rejected out of hand by the UN, with that organization's number one, Ban Ki-moon expressing "profound sympathy" for the suffering caused by the worst outbreak of its kind in the world today, while still refusing to accept responsibility for it.

Beatrice Lindstrom is with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and he joins us from Boston with reaction to the UN's decision in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us news from our city's streetz, and beyond. But first, Dawn Morrison and a month of Marching for the Wild Salmon.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Harper Omnibus Guts Canada's Salmon Farm Enviro. Assessments

No More Environmental Impact Assessments for Salmon Farms in Nova Scotia - Navigable Waters Act omnibus cut leaves gap in federal assessments; province won't pick up the slack

by Erica Butler - Halifax Media Co-Op

HALIFAX - "I'm absolutely gobsmacked," says Marike Finlay. "I really cannot believe this is happening in Canada."

Finlay is president of Association for the Preservation of the Eastern Shore (APES), a group that is actively opposing the licensing of two new salmon farming operations in Spry Harbour and Shoal Bay. But it's not the bid to set up open net pens off the Eastern Shore that is surprising to Finlay. In the past two years, four new ocean-based salmon feedlot sites have been proposed and approved in other coastal Nova Scotia communities. What's astounding to Finlay is that unlike the feedlot sites that have gone before them, neither Shoal Bay nor Spry Harbour will undergo an environmental assessment.

Since the federal government passed omnibus Bill C-38 this past summer, no aquaculture projects along Nova Scotia coastline, or anywhere else in Canada, will be assessed for environmental impacts by the federal government. And in Nova Scotia at least, they won't undergo a provincial environmental assessment either.

Shoal Bay and Spry Harbour didn't start out that way. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) documents were prepared for both sites in the fall of 2011, and in spring of 2012, the recently formed Association for the Preservation of the Eastern Shore started filing their responses with Transport Canada, the responsible agency for an assessment triggered under the former Navigable Waters Protection Act.

APES formed just weeks after a public meeting hosted by the Nova Scotia Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture (DFA) to announce and explain Snow Island Salmon’s plans for the eastern shore. APES has roughly 300 members including groups such as the Sheet Harbour Chamber of Commerce, the Eastern Shore Fishermen’s Protective Association, and the Atlantic Salmon Federation. Heading up the environmental assessment response team for APES was vice president Bill Williams, a retired firefighter and avid fisherman.

Williams expressed concern that the currents near the proposed pens would not be strong enough to carry away fish feces and excess feed, and that nets and feed would be treated with chemicals and drugs to help keep pens clean and fish healthy under crowded conditions. Williams also laid out a list of concerns and issues related to the EIA docs submitted by Sweeney International, the project managers for the two Snow Island Salmon sites. Williams cited missing and outdated information on the local commercial, recreational and aboriginal fisheries, along with wind and wave data taken from the South Shore and Gulf of Maine, too far away to be relevant to the site locations. But after submitting his concerns in writing to Transport Canada and DFA, he has yet to hear back.

“The thing that really scares us,” says Williams, “is that the DFA and Minister Belliveau are going to base their decision on a lot of the things said in those [EIA documents] that are not right.”

"We spent huge amounts of time, energy, and expertise making our reply," says Finlay. "We had marine biologists, wildlife specialists, specialists in tides and currents, local fishermen's knowledge. And we replied to each environmental assessment for each of those sites."

And then along came the federal government's omnibus budget implementation bill in July 2012. Among its many changes was a rewrite of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, eliminating federal responsibility for most of the thousands of assessments they had conducted each year, including those already underway for aquaculture sites like Shoal Bay and Spry Harbour.

On CBC Radio's The House, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver defended the federal policy changes. "We did eliminate the review of some projects which were inconsequential," said Oliver. "And that's been used as sort of an instance of reduced environmental protection. In fact, we've been focusing on the projects that can have an environmental impact, and not whether a rink should be set up in a national park."

It turns out that among Oliver’s “inconsequential” projects are open net pen fish farms, a slightly more contentious public issue than your average rink. On both coasts, citizens and non-governmental scientists have been expressing concerns over the environmental impact of open net pens, calling for moratoriums on further licensing of farms and consumer boycotts of farmed fish. Issues are wide ranging and include destruction of ocean habitat underneath pens, use of chemicals and pesticides that kill other marine life, proliferation of viruses (infectious salmon anaemia) and parasites (sea lice) that can infect wild fish populations, and escapes of farmed fish that compete with wild populations.

Most recently, the Atlantic Coalition for Aquaculture Reform issued a report that found significant increases in the number of monitoring stations reporting polluted and grossly polluted conditions on Nova Scotia fish farms since 2006. Conservation Council of New Brunswick biologist Inka Milewski authored the report, which used DFA’s own monitoring data, collected from 11 of 16 fin-fish farms in the province. “There is a tremendous amount of waste that is produced from these fish farms,” says Milewski. “We’re talking hundreds of metric tonnes of waste per farm ... And we know from previous monitoring history that that waste is not being adequately absorbed by the environment. It’s simply degrading the sea bottom and creating these dead zones.”

Milewski confirms Bill Williams’s concerns over the ability of currents to flush out the areas underneath farm sites. “The waters where these farms are located are relatively shallow,” says Milewski. “The currents and the flushing are fairly restricted. As these farm sites operate year after year, even with a little bit of fallowing, the data indicates that the waste builds up ... and as it builds up, conditions become polluted or grossly polluted.”

Dalhousie environmental law professor Meinhard Doelle says provinces will need to reassess their role in the wake of the drastic federal pullback in environmental assessment. "You can't expect provincial laws to be adequate to the task right now in any province, because they were developed based on an assumption that the federal government was willing to play a role that it is no longer willing to play." Provinces will have to determine "whether there are projects that they now feel should be assessed provincially to ensure that they're not missed," says Doelle.

In Nova Scotia, the Environment department response is, well, no. Spokesperson Lori Errington says there are no plans to review the Environment Act or its regulations to make up for the massive gap left by the federal government.

Beyond that gap, there is also the issue of whether environmental assessments were doing the job in the first place. APES and any other intervenors in the short-lived Shoal Bay and Spry Harbour assessments did not hear any feedback to their comments and concerns, and for the most part went in with the understanding that the farms were a fait accompli.

"We were told by other areas that have had fish farms imposed on them, you have to do this," says Marike Finlay. "They told us, you have to do it, to show that you've done it. But in the end it won't matter a hill of beans. They're going to grant them the licenses anyway."

"I think there are better ways," says Meinhard Doelle. "One is to do more strategic and regional environmental assessments, where you go beyond one project." Nova Scotia conducted a strategic environmental assessment for tidal power before deciding to support development of the industry. Strategic assessments can "engage people in a discussion about whether a new industry is a good thing for a region or not, how a new industry might coexist with existing uses of an area. And how that new industry interacts with the natural environment," says Doelle. "If you did that, I think the problems at the project level would diminish significantly."

Marike Finlay wasn't a fan of the environmental assessment process, but says it needed improvement, not scrapping altogether. "There's one casualty, which is our waters," says Finlay, "but another casualty is that people no longer believe they live in a democracy. People have become extremely disillusioned by this whole process."

Is It Free? Is It Trade? What FIP(P)A, TPP, and CETA Agreements Really Mean

FIPA & TPP Corporate Rights Pacts Not 'Free Trade': Harjap Grewal

by Vancouver Media Co-Op

On Thurs. Feb 21st: Harjap Grewal spoke about what FIPA and other 'trade agreements' are really about at the What’s Next? Vancouver network's Demystifying, Debating, and Digging in to Trade Agreements panel at the Rhizome Cafe in Vancouver.

Harjap Grewal is the Council of Canadians' British Columbia-Yukon regional organizer and has written about the bilateral trade agreement between Canada and China known as the Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement (FIPA) as well as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. http://www.canadians.org/trade; http://www.bilaterals.org

Britain Follows American "Foreign Aid" Militarism Model

Henningsen on RT: 'Foreign Aid Trap' - Cameron using tax cash for military projects

by RT 

21st Century Wire's geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen talks to RT about Prime Minister David Cameron's latest campaign, saying he wants pledge more cash to the UK's foreign aid budget for overseas 'military aid' - a proposal that the British government has admitted in the past as 'wasted aid which often falls into the wrong hands'. Aid money is to be used for three areas including security, demobilization and peacekeeping.

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/YDyLsr

Perils of Barack: Obama Tied to the XL Pipeline Tracks

Perils of the Keystone XL Pipeline Confront Obama

by Ralph Nader- CounterPunch

Bill McKibben, a prolific writer and organizer on global warming and climate change, has had a busy year teaching environmentalists not to despair and will soon be learning some lessons himself.

In August 2011, he organized an unprecedented demonstration in front of the White House urging President Obama to deny a permit for the giant Keystone XL pipeline that would haul very dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada down to Texas refineries, largely to be exported. More than 1200 people were arrested over the course of the month to protest the construction of the pipeline. This could be the largest mass arrest before the White House in decades. Kudos to Bill and his associates.

On February 17, 2013, 48 people, including McKibben and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., were arrested for open, non-violent civil disobedience mostly for refusing U.S. Park Police orders to keep moving on the White House’s sidewalk (with some protestors actually attaching themselves to the fence in front of the White House).

This past weekend, McKibben was back at the White House with more than 40,000 anti-Keystone XL protestors along with demands for Obama to act on broader climate issues. Protestors included leaders of Native American tribes, some legislators, corporate executives, farmers, students, workers and other Americans who think saving the planet from a huge rush of carbon dioxide and expanding the very large toxic region of Alberta, was worth some of their direct effort.

President Obama has twice postponed his decision on the XL pipeline, much to the relief of Hillary Clinton, whose State Department would have been blamed for approving the pipeline, much to the detriment of her future political aspirations. Now Secretary of State John Kerry has said a decision is coming “near term.”

The Keystone XL pipeline’s owner is TransCanada, which is busily buying rights of way through the western U.S., and calling on states to use their eminent domain powers when ranchers and farmers resist. Giant pipes have already been shipped to various locations along the way. Actual construction has been underway in Texas. The governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, dropped his objection once the pipeline’s route was alerted to go around the state’s environmentally vulnerable Sand Hills area.

Since fracking is spreading rapidly in many states to increase U.S. oil production, not to mention burgeoning natural gas fracking extractions, why would President Obama want to approve Keystone XL? What about his State of the Union warnings regarding global warming and its terrible costs in lives, property and money?

Notwithstanding the absence of the need for oil from Canada and Mr. Obama’s stated concerns about global warming, TransCanada, backed to the hilt by Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is confident that it will receive a permit from Obama.

First, the pipeline has been promoted as a significant job creator. In reality, building a pipeline in these days of automation requires a few short-term workers. The exporting refineries are even more automated. But with the AFL-CIO and the construction unions combined with the American Petroleum Institute’s lobbying forces in Washington, a majority of members of Congress have signed on.

Second, even without the pipeline, TransCanada can still ship tar sands oil to the U.S. via rail, barge, truck and other existing pipelines. Or the company, with Canadian government backing, can decide to build a pipeline westward through British Columbia for shipment to oil-hungry China.

Those options set up the argument that Alberta tar sands oil will be burned on the planet anyhow so why not have it go through a more efficient pipeline than with railcars and ships.

Third, the “sleeper” argument on Obama’s desk is that TransCanada, having already invested big money in the U.S., can invoke Chapter 11 of the NAFTA trade agreement and sue the U.S. government for big damages if its permit is denied. Incredible as it may seem, the notorious Chapter 11 has been used by numerous companies to seek billions of dollars in damages from governmental official decisions in either Mexico, the U.S. or Canada. Companies have succeeded in obtaining settlements totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. Paid for by the taxpayers, of course.

McKibben and associates know the odds of stopping the Keystone Pipeline are heavily against them. Obama can issue his approval and counteract its impact with intensified White House efforts to reduce the carbon/methane footprint. Obama could, to the delight of conservative and liberal economists, come out for a carbon tax. Obama should be a leader on environmental issues. His environmental supporters voted for him and declined to criticize him prior to the election. The letdown from the high expectation levels built on the many protests would be devastating to the morale and energy of the movement.

McKibben, however, hopes that the struggles’ collateral benefit will be a rise in public consciousness and a recharged Obama Administration to hoist renewable energy and conservation to the top of the President’s expedient “all of the above” policy (coal, oil, gas, nuclear, solar and greater efficiency).

McKibben’s army has thrown its non-violent troops against the Keystone XL Pipeline and tar sands exploitation that will devastate an area in Alberta the size of Florida. This project has been called a massive body blow to the Planet Earth by NASA’s climate scientist James Hansen, who has been arrested several times in the protests.

Obama approving the pipeline makes it happen. While promising collateral offsets by Obama is nothing more than the Obamamania of hope. We know how far hope traveled since Obama became president and never had to worry about political competitors on the ballot, including third parties, attracting votes to environmental and other progressive causes. There are lessons that McKibben may have to explain to his 350.org followers.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition.