Pledge to support Colombian GM Workers‏

A message from Gail M. Francis…

Dear Friends and Concerned Colleagues,

Help support self organized GM workers in Bogota, Colombia!

 

For 180 straight days of protest outside the US embassy, the workers are protesting GM’s egregious working conditions and its firing of injured workers. They have formed a group named ASOTRECOL (Association of Workers and Injured Ex-Workers of GMC) to defend against a systematic practice of firing them after they suffer workplace injuries. The problems are particularly severe in the painting and welding department.  The most frequent and persistent injuries are to the rotator cuffs, respiratory systems, backs, tendons, and internal organs. These are chronic injuries rendering most of them permanently disabled. The company falsifies medical records so that these injuries are not defined as work-related, thus denying them their occupational health insurance protection.

 

While I was in Colombia, I saw video footage of the conditions under which these workers are toiling.  These conditions virtually guarantee work-place injury.   As someone who used to work in an auto parts factory, I was absolutely horrified for them, and chilled to think that if GM is allowed to run their Colombian factory in this way, then they aim to weaken conditions for workers all over the world.

 

These workers need your support. 

 

Please make a pledge at one of the suggested levels below or at any level you choose. Every penny will go to helping these workers strengthen their movement or to support those who are most in need of urgent medical care, which they are currently unable to receive.

 

Once you make the pledge, I will send you a stamped and addressed envelope for your donation. Simply email me at gailmfrancis@yahoo.com to let me know your contact information and pledge amount.

 

These workers are determined to win this David and Goliath battle, but they cannot do it alone. My goal is to raise $500 by the end of the month. Please give what you can for the Colombian workers of today and the North American workers of tomorrow.

 

Suggested Levels:

 

______$10 (food and supplies for the encampment)

 

______$30 (travel funds and materials to help them organize)

 

______$80 (medical supplies and treatment)

 

______Other

 

Please email gailmfrancis@yahoo.com with your pledge. You can also mail me a check or money order directly at 2933 N State Road 27, Ojibwa, WI 54862. Put ASOTRECOL in the memo field.  Please note, this is not a tax-deductible contribution.

 

Thank you for helping to build worldwide solidarity!

 

Gail Francis

Lifestyle can be tough when you run a variety store

Dépanneur PMS at the corner of Park Ave. and Villeneuve St.

Montreal Gazette

Feb 7, 2008 – Owning a dépanneur has a big impact on your social life, says Yodh Ubhi, standing behind the counter of Dépanneur PMS at the corner of Park Ave. and Villeneuve St.

“You have none,” Ubhi said.

He’s not kidding. Ubhi’s hours – 14 hours a day, seven days a week – would make most office workers weep.

Every morning, he opens the store at 7 a.m., and works without a break until early afternoon, when his wife arrives with lunch.

Ubhi eats in the store’s basement, a former bank vault, before taking a three-hour siesta.

At 6 p.m., he trudges back upstairs and takes over from his wife, who returns home to make dinner. The day finally ends at midnight, when Ubhi closes shop and returns home to Park Extension.

“It’s not a one-person job,” he said, adding his 18-year-old daughter and 21-year-old son, both students, often come to help.

Ubhi, who came to Montreal from India’s Punjab state in the early 1970s, bought his dépanneur in 2002, after nearly two decades in the textile business.

At $65,000 – a little over $100,000 with inventory – the store was a bargain.

Spacious and well-stocked, it had already undergone a $150,000 renovation in the 1990s when it was part of a small dépanneur chain that ultimately folded.

“I had no experience whatsoever in the dep business,” Ubhi said.

“I saw guys working and thought, ‘Hey, that’s nothing, it’s a piece of cake.’ But it’s not that easy. It’s very demanding. There are long hours. You have to know about your supply, cash flow, customers, your neighbourhood, and on top of that you have to provide good service. If you don’t have even one of these, you’re screwed up. You’re not going to last a year.” At the beginning, Ubhi made mistakes, like offering credit.

“When you’re new, you believe everyone,” he said, but he soon realized he had lost nearly $7,000 to customers who had scammed him out of cigarettes and alcohol.

Now, a cartoon drawing of a gangster with the caption, “No Credit: It’s Time to Pay Up, Sucka!” is displayed prominently at the cash.

These days, things are going more smoothly. Ubhi boasts his customers come from “two or three blocks away,” bypassing several other dépanneurs, including an Ultramar gas station and convenience store across the street.

Part of the reason is customer service – Ubhi likes to chat with his regular customers, and he said they appreciate seeing a familiar face everyday.

His dépanneur’s unusual name, PMS, has earned him a certain cachet with some people in the neighbourhood, too. It’s meant to stand for the names of Ubhi’s son, daughter and niece. “Later on we found out it was something else, too,” he said, laughing.

But pricing counts, too. As with every dépanneur, beer makes up more than one-third of Ubhi’s sales, and he keeps his prices lower than those at other stores in the neighbourhood.

At Ultramar, “prices are high, and they don’t sell what I sell. I keep imported and microbrewery beer, which they don’t have, and our prices are much better than theirs,” he said.

Several blocks up Park Ave., Jim Wang has taken similar steps to expand the variety of products at his dépanneur.

In 2004, a year after he moved here from near Beijing with his wife, he bought the tiny, spartan store for $40,000.

The previous owner hadn’t invested much in the business, so Wang installed new fridges, stocked more beer and packaged food and started renting DVDs.

Wang’s approach has been simple: he asks customers what they want and then he orders it.

It seems to be working.

Business has increased every year since he bought the dépanneur.

Despite a mid-block location and a space that is no larger than most living rooms, revenue from the store is enough to support him, his wife and their daughter, who was born shortly after he bought the store.

Like Ubhi, Wang works long hours, from 9 a.m. until late at night. He passes most of the time by watching Chinese soap operas and movies on a TV in the store.

Compared with life in China, where he worked as a computer engineer, dépanneur work is lonely and monotonous.

“It was a big change of pace for me,” he said. “It’s long. After work, I go home, talk with my daughter and wife. Then I might go shopping in the morning before coming back.” When he left China, though, Wang had no illusions about the kind of work he’d be doing. He moved to Canada not for a job, he said, but for education and social services.

“For my child,” he said.

Wang, 35, said he plans eventually to sell the dépanneur, take time off to explore Canada and then come back to start a new business.

Ubhi, for his part, said that owning a dépanneur isn’t a bad line of work – if you can handle the hours.

“Financially, it’s worth it, but don’t expect big money in the first three or four years,” he said.

-30-

this article appeared first at: www.montrealgazette.com

Tranquilo in Bogota, Colombia

I took a solitary stroll around our neighbourhood in Bogota this afternoon (November 7, 2011). Each verse in this poem is a reflection of the people I met and talked to on my walk.

The final stanza is based on my reactions upon my return.

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

“Tranquilo!” says the young girl with her smile

50 years of violence makes this an order

But where is the violence on the streets of Bogota?

The Colombian people have learned from the mistakes of generations.

“Tranquilo!” says the uniformed security agent on every corner

We need peace to smoke our cigarettes and tell our jokes

And the people understand their presence

A city that feels safe within its security.

“Tranquilo!” says the citizen returning home.

Just wait while I unlock the gate to my house

The fence and barbed-wire which make violence obselete

Here is where we find our peace.

“Tranquilo!” says the homeless man

You must not disturb my resting place

And the dog on the street has been adopted by the neighbourhood

While the homeless man must fend for himself.

“Tranquilo!” says the pedestrian crossing the street

We must look in all directions before crossing

As the person on the corner avoids the danger

By signaling for the bus to pick her up.

“Tranquilo!” say the group of boys with their skateboards

We are coming through together

We have grown up together since the cradle

And we will live our lives together until the end.

“Tranquilo!” says the tourist to the cab driver

my plane will not leave for another hour

And I want to share this feeling for just a little while longer

Long live the people of Bogota!

 

A Letter from cell 9 of the Apartheid State of Israel‏

An open letter from one of the Canadians on-board the ship Tahrir :

November 7, 2011 – I write to you from cell 9 of the Apartheid State of Israel

Dear sisters and brothers, friends and loved ones,

I write to you from cell 9, block 59 Givon Prison near Ramla in Occupied
Palestine. Although I was tasered during the assault on the Tahrir, and bruised
during forcible removal dockside (I am limping slightly as a result) I am
basically ok. We, Ehab, Michael, Karen from Tahrir, as well as Karen, Kit (US)
and Jihan who we saw briefly this morning. We are most concerned about our
Tahrir shipmate, Palestinian Majd Kayyal from Haifa, last seen by us at Ashdod
being photographed and put in a police car.*

Although Michael and I (among others) were transported in handcuffs and leg
shackles, let me stress that we are neither criminals nor illegal immigrants
but rather political prisoners of the apartheid state of Israel. Four from the
Tahrir are imprisoned with 12 Irish comrades from the Saoirse, who have more
experience with such issues. The four of us, Ehab and I (Cdn), Michael (Aus)
and Hassan (UK) have joined with the Irish in their political prisoners’
committee in order to press our collective demands:

• association in the block – i.e. open cells
• adequate writing and reading material
• free communication with outside world – i.e. regular phone calls
• information about shipmate women held at same prison

We add one Tahrir-specific demand: that Israeli state recognize the
professional status of Democracy Now journalist Jihan Hafiz in accordance with
her credentials from the US government. All political incarceration is unjust
but let me stress that in duration and conditions, our situation pales in
comparison to the plight of thousands of Palestinian political prisoners and to
the open air prison of Gaza.

If you have energy to devote to solidarity actions in the coming days, please
concentrate on them. We must get Tahrir back and hope Freedom Waves continue.
Free Majd Kayyal! Free all political prisoners! Free Gaza! Free Palestine!

Anishnabe-debuewin, restons humaine, stay human, in love and struggle,

David

* Majd Kayyalwas released, but it appears David the other political prisoners
weren’t told where he was taken.

Former guerrilla Gustavo Petro elected mayor of Bogota

This article appeared first at : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055771/Former-guerrilla-Gustavo-Petro-elected-mayor-Bogota.html

Associated Press

October 31, 2011 – Former leftist rebel and anti-corruption crusader Gustavo Petro has been elected the new mayor of Bogota, the first time an ex-guerrilla has won Colombia’s second most important elected office.

Petro, 51, has been a key player in Colombia’s recent history and ran a “zero corruption” campaign in the nation’s capital. The previous elected mayor of Bogota is in jail for his part in a corruption and bid-rigging scandal.

Five years ago, Petro’s denunciations in the senate, of close ties between national and regional politicians with right-wing death squads spurred investigation into the Colombian “parapolitics” scandal that has landed dozens of lawmakers in prison.

Short, slim and bespectacled, Petro is deliberate in speech and favours tweed and Nehru jackets.

Like many prominent Colombians unafraid to speak their minds, Petro has been periodically targeted by death threats and has long been assigned a phalanx of bodyguards.

He said in 2007 that he had learned of two organised attempts by the extreme right to kill him, one of which forced him into temporary exile to Belgium.

Petro, who finished fourth in last year’s presidential election, won the Bogata mayor’s race with 32 per cent of the vote, with 25 per cent for his nearest challenger Enrique Penalosa declared after nearly all ballots had been counted in the city of eight million people.

Penalosa defeated Petro in 1997 for the same job, which has often been a springboard to Colombia’s presidency.

Urban planners widely admire Penalosa for making Bogota more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly during his term, and for launching a bus rapid transit system that has been a model in Latin America and beyond – but analysts say Penalosa, 57, was hurt by his endorsement from the conservative, former President Alvaro Uribe, in a city more friendly to the left.

“Bogota continues to be a fortress of electoral freedom,” says analyst Alfredo Molano. “Gustavo Petro is a step forward in defeating machine politics.”

Bogota is Colombia’s biggest city, its urban area Latin America’s sixth most populous. Its gritty southern districts teem with tens of thousands of refugees from the country’s long-running conflicts.

The voting in the capital was part of a nationwide program of regional and municipal elections, with 32 governorships and more than 1,100 mayoral and municipal council posts being contested.

Electoral watchdog groups reported some vote-buying in rural areas but relatively few voting irregularities.

Less than two weeks before the vote, 20 soldiers were killed in two separate attacks blamed on FARC rebels, which have commonly made election-day attacks.

But there were no reports of rebel violence Sunday, and President Juan Manuel Santos declared it among Colombia’s most peaceful election days.

Regional and municipal elections tend to be a better barometer than presidential votes in Colombia of the relative health of the country’s democracy.

This year, illegal armed groups including the FARC and right-wing bands, both fortified by drug trafficking profits, intimidated candidates throughout rural Colombia.

Violence has been on the uptick since Santos was elected in mid-2010, and at least 42 candidates in local races were killed in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote.

Petro, who begins his four-year term as mayor Jan. 1, has been harshly critical of the FARC, saying it is tainted by its involvement in drug trafficking and ransom kidnappng.

It is nothing, he says, like the M-19 movement that he joined at age 17 while a civic organizer. Six years later, he would graduate from Bogota’s prestigious Externado University with an economics degree.

Petro and his former comrades and relatives say he was never involved in violence, working instead to clandestinely recruit and organize for M-19.

“He was a small, fragile, skinny person with myopia,” his sister, Adriana, said in 2007.

M-19 was named for April 19, the date of the 1970 presidential election that many Colombians believe was stolen in favour of the Conservative Party candidate, Misael Pastrana.

Friends say the outrage expressed by Petro’s mother over that outcome led him into leftist politics.

While the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, is a mostly peasant guerrilla force formed in 1964, M-19 was a more classic Latin American rebel group formed largely by urban, middle-class intellectuals.

It became renowned for publicity-seeking actions including the theft of the sword of Latin American independence leader Simon Bolivar and the 1980 two-month takeover of the embassy of the Dominican Republic.

Petro was not personally involved in M-19′s greatest fiasco: the 1985 takeover of the Palace of Justice in which more than 100 people, including 11 Supreme Court justices, were killed.

M-19′s detractors contend the late drug lord Pablo Escobar financed the takeover. Petro vehemently denies this, and blames an unprovoked storming by the military for the deaths.

Captured 20 days before the raid, Petro still has scars from a week of torture in which he says he was shocked and beaten, denied food and almost drowned. He was jailed for a year and a half for rebellion.

He made the mistake the previous year of publicly announcing his M-19 affiliation after the government and rebels forged a truce that would later fall apart. It forced him to go underground.

After M-19 signed a peace pact with the government in 1990, Petro helped to rewrite Colombia’s constitution the following year. Petro was then elected to Congress.

Gustavo Petro spent most of the last two decades in Congress and, after being elected senator in 2006 began revealing details of the Colombian “parapolitics” scandal: close collaboration between lawmakers and far-right militias known as “paramilitaries”. The investigations wound up sending more than 60 politicians to prison from crimes ranging from criminal conspiracy to murder.

Last year, Petro helped uncover a bid-rigging scandal in Bogota that landed Samuel Moreno, the city’s previous elected mayor, into jail facing corruption charges.

The state found that some $1.2 billion in government funds had been diverted during the process of awarding government contracts, including the contract for constructing the avenue that links Bogota’s center with its international airport.

-fin-

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055771/Former-guerrilla-Gustavo-Petro-elected-mayor-Bogota.html#ixzz1cc3rcFDG

Occupy Montreal: A Personal Story

“I’m not here for anything” Reda tells me. “I’m here because of what I’m against.” He talks about wars for money, hypocrisy and petroleum, Israel killing Palestinian children, rich countries exporting their deficits to poor countries. “Everything is connected” he says. “I’m against all of what is going on.”

This article appeared first at: http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/

Johan Boyden

October 31, 2011 – As I step onto the night bus, bundled up in a heavy winter coat and sweater, a passenger looks at me curiously. I’m dragging a little rolling suitcase, a small tent and foam mattress. Tonight my partner and I will sleep in the financial district, but not in a posh hotel.

Like many of the 26-and-counting occupations across the country, Occupy Montreal is in a downtown public space. Square Victoria encompasses about two city blocks, at a busy intersection on the edge of old Montreal. It is an ideal symbolic location. We’ve been coming down for a few days, but this is the first time to sleep.

The camp set up on October 15, with about forty tents under the trees. A few days later there were over a hundred.

“Now there are almost 300 tents,” a woman at an information table tells me. Like a patchwork quilt, tents have sprung up over almost every available place. Most are sheltered under large tarps, between the trees. Political signs and banners hang like decorations.

I roll my bundles into the square, looking up at La tour de la Bourse, the Stock exchange tower, once Canada’s tallest building. Since then it’s been occupied by students, bombed by Quebec nationalists, and heard the chants of countless labour rallies. Now we have it partly surrounded.

From tree-top level a statue of Queen Victoria looks back at me, silhouetted by street lights. Her pedestal is covered with signs, stickers and slogans in French and English. She is wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and flying the flag of the 1837 Patriote rebellion of Lower Canada. “Place du peuple” her new sign declares.

On the opposite site of the street is a tiny empty spot under the trees. This where I put my tent, not too far from where Rouky lives – a friendly fluffy dog.

“It’s growing fast and attracting all sorts of people,” explains a young man who is looking after Rouky. That includes homeless people who need “basic medical care, like injuries to their feet”. He’s volunteered with the Medics because he has a First Aid certificate, and there are paramedics and nurses volunteering during the day. Sometimes Rouky carries medical supplies in dog packs and they move around the square, he tells me.

“I had no choice to come down here,” he says. He agrees with the Occupy Wall Street effort. “It is time to spread global awareness about Canada. We have major issues in our government and Canadians care about politics.” He is unemployed and has been down here since the beginning. He talks about democracy, the need to get back our voice, and the Harper Tories in government. “It’s time for the people to rise up” he says.

It’s dark as I put up my tent. An older man appears and helps. I can hear drums from one side of the camp, mixing with street traffic. Young people are still up, walking around debating and telling stories in different languages, having a drink or smoking. Suddenly there is a loud clattering noise – a group of women in high heels marching past, dressed up for a night out in the clubs. Later, I hear a heated argument. A man yells “No violence in the camp” several times. The debate quiets down.

All around are hand-made bilingual signs. They ask for no alcohol or drug use and to make the camp a safe space for women. There are also signs saying women-only tents can be made available.

A little before midnight, my partner arrives. She’s just been interviewed by a campus radio station, and talked about the Charter of Youth Rights campaign. We have to be back to pick up our baby at ten tomorrow, she says.

There are some young families in the camp. A little girl is doing painting with her parents. Behind the future medic tent is a kid’s play area. There are slides, small tables and plastic toys. But it’s getting colder, even under our warm blankets.

We’re not the only people experiencing their first night. Amber is a student at McGill from the United States. A couple of her friends have been here all week. She’s come down tonight because it is an experience.

“The whole 99 percent thing speaks to how bad income inequality is” and how the “one percent are totally disconnected,” Amber says, adding that the situation is “not democratic because the one percent have far bigger influence.” She has been to student demos before, but this is her first time camping out for a political cause.

We shiver and try to sleep. Around 4:00 the car noise drops. So does the talking. At 4:30 I hear the automated brushes and spray of street cleaners passing. It is a bizarrely soothing sound. We fall asleep with the rest of the camp.

Despite the cold, Marie Kim, Louise and Genevieve tell me in the morning that they slept soundly. The three students at a Montreal CEJEP have been camping for almost a week. “I’m here because of the failure of the system” Marie Kim says, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. Genevieve likes the sense of solidarity and community. “We’re building what we want, like a micro-society,” she tells me.

Louise thinks the camp is “a site of experimentation.” She tells me that in the camp there is no ideology – either independentist (Quebec nationalist) or anarchist – and that they will answer with spontaneity, not a school of thinking.

As we wake up, the crisp morning light shines through the remaining leaves on the trees. We walk over to the kitchen station, which is becoming the center of life. Three people are making French toast. Reda calculates that he has made about fifty slices already this morning. The kitchen is a bit messy and damp. Another volunteer says they are getting donations from people’s houses.

“I’m not here for anything” Reda tells me. “I’m here because of what I’m against.” He talks about wars for money, hypocrisy and petroleum, Israel killing Palestinian children, rich countries exporting their deficits to poor countries. “Everything is connected” he says. “I’m against all of what is going on.”

Reda has just finished a BA degree in Marketing. He is also part of the camp’s “political and philosophical committee”. Next to him is Caroline, making coffee. She is a CEJEP student living near Quebec City, where there is also an occupation. She has driven five hours to get here.

Before we leave, I talk with others around the camp. “It is quite inspiring to be part of this kind of mass action and gathering” says Nicola, another student who also just set up a tent. “It is not about countries or communities” says Olivier, a musician who works for a theatre company, “It is about all humanity.”

Michael launches into a long story. “I’ve been on a political camping trip since I left Sault Ste. Marie in May,” he says. “I’ve seen bears, goats, wolves.” Mike is homeless. His shoes are split open. “My issue? My issue is everything.”

Time to head home. We pass through the Centre de Commerce mondial de Montréal – World Trade Center Montreal. It’s another world. The atrium is warm, clean and yet coldly silent and empty. Mannequins in fine clothes and jewels stare at us from glass cabinets. A frozen marble god quietly pours water into a classical fountain. Unexpectedly, we pass a grey block of smashed concrete, streaked with old paints. It is an authentic piece of the Berlin Wall, on display by the 1% like a Cold War trophy to scare us away from socialism.

I glance back. Clusters of tiny tents huddle at the feet of giant skyscrapers: Quebec and Canada’s most powerful corporations.

Whatever you make of the protest, the outlook of the young participants is another crack in the social-economic system that these buildings represent, a system that will inevitably break under the weight of its class contradictions. Whatever direction this movement heads – and it faces difficult challenges – it is a seed, a kernel of resistance. It can grow, with broad support from the working people and stronger organization.

I start to hum the tune to an old labour anthem. “In our hands is placed a power greater than their horded gold, Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. For the union makes us strong!”

Solidarity forever, occupy!

-fin-

(The above article is from the November 1-15, 2011, issue of People’s Voice, Canada’s leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers – $45 US per year; other overseas readers – $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People’s Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

Tunisie, les éditocrates repartent en guerre

cet article etait pris de – http://blog.mondediplo.net/2011-10-27-Tunisie-les-editocrates-repartent-en-guerre

Alain Gresh

Les élections tunisiennes seront à marquer d’une pierre blanche sur la longue voie des peuples arabes vers la démocratie.

October 28, 2011 – C’est la première élection libre tenue dans le monde arabe depuis plus de cinquante ans – à l’exception, particulière, de la Palestine où le scrutin s’était tenu sous occupation.

La campagne a été animée, la participation massive malgré tous les Cassandre qui prétendaient le peuple déçu par l’absence de changements, comme si le peuple ne s’intéressait qu’aux questions de subsistance et pas à la liberté et à la démocratie.

Bien sûr, les élections n’ont pas été parfaites. Certains ont évoqué le poids de l’argent, notamment avec cet homme d’affaires basé à Londres qui a réussi à obtenir un grand nombre de députés (sans doute en amalgamant les rescapés de l’ancien régime).

Mais peu de démocraties ont réussi à régler le problème des rapports entre la politique et l’argent – que l’on songe aux Etats-Unis ou à la France. Les Tunisiens ne s’y sont pas trompés et tous les observateurs ont noté non seulement la forte participation, mais aussi l’émotion et la joie de personnes qui faisaient la queue pendant des heures pour glisser un bulletin dans l’urne.

Mais voilà : certains n’acceptent la démocratie que lorsque les électeurs votent comme ils le souhaitent. Que le peuple palestinien sous occupation vote pour le Hamas, et l’Occident organise le blocus du nouveau gouvernement et sa chute. Que les Tunisiens votent pour Ennahda, et voilà nombre de nos éditorialistes, ceux-là même qui affirmaient que le printemps arabe avait vu la disparition des islamistes, s’interroger gravement et reprendre une vieille antienne : les Arabes ne sont pas mûrs pour la démocratie ou, comme ils l’écrivaient avant, mieux vaut Ben Ali que les islamistes.

Heureusement, tous ne sont pas sur la même longueur d’ondes, mais le titre « Après le régime de Ben Ali, celui du Coran » du journal de 7 heures de France-Inter le 25 octobre résume la position de toutes les chaînes de Radio France, mobilisée sur un anti-islamisme primaire.

…l’article continue: http://blog.mondediplo.net/2011-10-27-Tunisie-les-editocrates-repartent-en-guerre

Pulitzer-Prize winner Chris Hedges Explains “Occupy Wall Street” on the CBC

In his final appearance (more on that later) on Canada’s national broadcaster, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning political commentator Chris Hedges explains the motivation and objectives for the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The segment aired on the Lang-O’Leary exchange October 9, 2011 on CBC. 

  

Shocked, midway through the interview, by CBC host Kevin O’Leary’s antagonistical approach, Hedges compared the CBC to Fox News and pledged never to return. 

I know I would rather listen to Chris Hedges when I turn on the CBC then listen to Fox-style pre-match Wrestling Interviews – If you agree contact Chris at info@chrishedges.net and tell him to return to the CBC airwaves!!!

-tj

The Seven Biggest Economic Lies

The president’s jobs bill doesn’t have a chance in Congress — and the occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society — unless more Americans know the truth about the economy.

This article appeared first at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-seven-biggest-economi_b_1005980.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Robert Reich

October 13, 2011 -Here’s an effort to rebut the seven biggest whoppers now being told by those who want to take America backwards. The major points:

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and has dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False. From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don’t believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.)

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. Wrong again. It means fewer government workers — everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. Untrue. With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They’ll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. Wrong. Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Don’t believe it. Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800.

7. It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax. Wrong. There’s nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

Demagogues through history have known that big lies, repeated often enough, start being believed — unless they’re rebutted. These seven economic whoppers are just plain wrong. Make sure you know the truth — and spread it on.

-fin-

Robert Reich

Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, ‘Aftershock’

Stand Against Bigotry: We Stand With the Irvine 11

This letter describes the outrage felt when two groups, engaging in the same actions, are judged differently for those actions as a result of who they are, and not for what they did.

The letter describes the  difference in treatment for the Jewish protesters at Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in New Orleans last year, who were released uncharged within hours, and the Muslim protesters at US-Israeli Ambassabor Micheal Oren’s speech last week at Irvine, California, who have been charged with legal offenses.

-TJ

This letter appeared first from – http://i-stand.tumblr.com/

October 11, 2011

Dear Tariq,

When we disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s keynote speech at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual general meeting last November in New Orleans, we were met with hisses, boos, verbal harassment and even physical attacks from other members of the audience. But criminal charges were never so much as mentioned. Yet just weeks ago, ten students who interrupted Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at UC Irvine in February 2010 were convicted of two misdemeanors for their participation in that protest.

Today is a national day of action to protest those unjust convictions. We’ve started a blog to show our support for the Irvine 11. We also think this day of action is a perfect opportunity to look at the similarities and differences in these two protests. See if you can spot the difference:

In both protests, each person who stood up to bring attention to the Israeli Occupation and other violations of international law committed by the Israeli government acted non-violently, and cooperated fully with security personnel and the police. So why were we not arrested, charged and tried while the Irvine 11 were? Logically, the opposite should have been true: our target was bigger—the Prime Minister of Israel; our venue was bigger—the largest Jewish event in North America; and our protest came later—inspired in part by the brave actions of the Irvine 11. But there is one more difference, and it proved to be the crucial one: we are Jews and the Irvine 11 are Muslims.

With the convictions of the Irvine 11, Orange County’s criminal justice system has sent a message that the Israeli ambassador’s right to speak without interruption is more worthy of protection than the right of American citizens to protest the illegal and unconscionable actions of Israel’s government.

The fact that the Irvine 11 were charged and tried while we were let off without a mark (as were other non-Muslim protesters in Orange County who later interrupted Dick Cheney and George W. Bush) is testament to the influence of Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism and blind support for Israel on contemporary American society and political discourse. This clear targeting of a minority group should set off alarm bells for those of us who abhor racism and strive for the protection of equal rights for all citizens, regardless of religion or ethnicity.

We join the administration of UC Irvine and the dean of UC Irvine’s law school, along with proponents of free speech and human rights throughout the country, in condemning these convictions. This targeting of Muslim students by the Orange County District Attorney’s office will not stand. Everyone has the right to speak out for justice. Join us today in saying: We stand against Islamophobia, for justice, and with the Irvine 11!”

In solidarity,
Amirah Mizrahi, Antonia House, and Emily Ratner
members of YJP, the youth wing of Jewish Voice for Peace

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOIN THE WALL STREET OCCUPATION

This post appeared at: www.indypendent.org/2011/09/28/revolution-begins-at-home/

“It’s clear that the biggest obstacles to building a powerful movement are not the police or capital – it’s our own cynicism and despair.”  – Arun Gupta

THE REVOLUTION BEGINS AT HOME: Occupy Wall Street – Learn about it; Get involved

Arun Gupta

September 28, 2011- What is occurring on Wall Street right now is truly remarkable. For over 10 days, in the sanctum of the great cathedral of global capitalism, the dispossessed have liberated territory from the financial overlords and their police army.

They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.

While the Wall Street occupation is growing, it needs an all-out commitment from everyone who cheered the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, said “We are all Wisconsin,” and stood in solidarity with the Greeks and Spaniards. This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future.

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. And perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street – whether that’s five thousand, ten thousand or fifty thousand – will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and to begin realizing a society based on human needs not hedge fund profits.

After all, who would have imagined a year ago that Tunisians and Egyptians would oust their dictators?

At Liberty Park, the nerve center of the occupation, more than a thousand people gather every day to debate, discuss and organize what to do about our failed system that has allowed the 400 richest Americans at the top to amass more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom.

It’s astonishing that this self-organized festival of democracy has sprouted on the turf of the masters of the universe, the men who play the tune that both political parties and the media dance to. The New York Police Department, which has deployed hundreds of officers at a time to surround and intimidate protesters, is capable of arresting everyone and clearing Liberty Plaza in minutes. But they haven’t, which is also astonishing.

That’s because assaulting peaceful crowds in a public square demanding real democracy – economic and not just political – would remind the world of the brittle autocrats who brutalized their people demanding justice before they were swept away by the Arab Spring. And the state violence has already backfired. After police attacked a Saturday afternoon march that started from Liberty Park the crowds only got bigger and media interest grew. 

The Wall Street occupation has already succeeded in revealing the bankruptcy of the dominant powers – the economic, the political, media and security forces. They have nothing positive to offer humanity, not that they ever did for the Global South, but now their quest for endless profits means deepening the misery with a thousand austerity cuts.

Even their solutions are cruel jokes. They tell us that the “Buffett Rule” would spread the pain by asking the penthouse set to sacrifice a tin of caviar, which is what the proposed tax increase would amount to. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to sacrifice healthcare, food, education, housing, jobs and perhaps our lives to sate the ferocious appetite of capital.

That’s why more and more people are joining the Wall Street occupation. They can tell you about their homes being foreclosed upon, months of grinding unemployment or minimum-wage dead-end jobs, staggering student debt loads, or trying to live without decent healthcare. It’s a whole generation of Americans with no prospects, but who are told to believe in a system that can only offer them Dancing With The Stars and pepper spray to the face.

Yet against every description of a generation derided as narcissistic, apathetic and hopeless they are staking a claim to a better future for all of us.

That’s why we all need to join in. Not just by linking it on Facebook, signing a petition at change.org or retweeting protest photos, but by going down to the occupation itself.

There is great potential here. Sure, it’s a far cry from Tahrir Square or even Wisconsin. But there is the nucleus of a revolt that could shake America’s power structure as much as the Arab world has been upended.

Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.

To be fair, the scene in Liberty Plaza seems messy and chaotic. But it’s also a laboratory of possibility, and that’s the beauty of democracy. As opposed to our monoculture world, where political life is flipping a lever every four years, social life is being a consumer and economic life is being a timid cog, the Wall Street occupation is creating a polyculture of ideas, expression and art.

Yet while many people support the occupation, they hesitate to fully join in and are quick to offer criticism. It’s clear that the biggest obstacles to building a powerful movement are not the police or capital – it’s our own cynicism and despair.

Perhaps their views were colored by the New York Times article deriding protestors for wishing to “pantomime progressivism” and “Gunning for Wall Street with faulty aim.” Many of the criticisms boil down to “a lack of clear messaging.”

But what’s wrong with that? A fully formed movement is not going to spring from the ground. It has to be created. And who can say what exactly needs to be done? We are not talking about ousting a dictator; though some say we want to oust the dictatorship of capital.

There are plenty of sophisticated ideas out there: end corporate personhood; institute a “Tobin Tax” on stock purchases and currency trading; nationalize banks; socialize medicine; fully fund government jobs and genuine Keynesian stimulus; lift restrictions on labor organizing; allow cities to turn foreclosed homes into public housing; build a green energy infrastructure.

But how can we get broad agreement on any of these? If the protesters came into the square with a pre-determined set of demands it would have only limited their potential. They would have either been dismissed as pie in the sky – such as socialized medicine or nationalize banks – or if they went for weak demands such as the Buffett Rule their efforts would immediately be absorbed by a failed political system, thus undermining the movement.

That’s why the building of the movement has to go hand in hand with common struggle, debate and radical democracy. It’s how we will create genuine solutions that have legitimacy. And that is what is occurring down at Wall Street.

Now, there are endless objections one can make. But if we focus on the possibilities, and shed our despair, our hesitancy and our cynicism, and collectively come to Wall Street with critical thinking, ideas and solidarity we can change the world.

How many times in your life do you get a chance to watch history unfold, to actively participate in building a better society, to come together with thousands of people where genuine democracy is the reality and not a fantasy?

For too long our minds have been chained by fear, by division, by impotence. The one thing the elite fear most is a great awakening. That day is here. Together we can seize it.

 

The Occupy Wall Street movement gathers steam

Americans take to the streets to fight corporate hegemony and reclaim democracy

Jooneed Jeeroburkhan

jooneed.khan@gmail.com

In less than one week, the New Botton Line movement in the US has exploded into a viral Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99% peaceful uprising against the growing economic injustice fostered by the greed of Corporate America and its mounting hegemony on US (and world) politics.

It was on Sept 17 that a handful of students and activists, backed by people like documentary film-maker Michael Moore, set up tents on Wall Street to focus attention on the crippling power of money over the life of ordinary Americans.

A few days earlier, the Census Bureau had reported that nearly one American in six, or more than 46-million, lived below the poverty line of $22,314 a year for a family of four. This marks “the fourth year in a row that poverty has increased,” noted the Washington Post.

The corporate media at first just ignored the movement. Then, as it persisted and grew, they ridiculed and belittled it, reducing it to “the rant of disgruntled and smelly hippies.” The police dealt violently with the demonstrators, too violently as it turned out because their strong-armed tactics back-fired.

Social media breaks the corporate media black-out

The protest just grew and grew. In New York, demonstrators blocked Brooklyn Bridge. More than 700 were arrested, with unnecessary violence. Electronic social media came to their rescue and they broke through the corporate media black-out. The US (and the world) as a whole took notice.

As the week drew on, workers, trade unions, university students, climate activists, anti-globalists, and people like writer Noam Chomsky, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold and former White House advisor Van Jones joined in.

With live text, video and vimeo coverage on blogs, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, the protest got wired and spread to Boston, Los Angeles, and other cities. And it keeps spreading, with no clear leadership but with well focused battle-cries and slogans.

“This movement is making the Tea Party (populist right wing Republicans) look like a… tea party,” said Feingold. “This kind of citizen reaction to corporate power and corporate greed is long overdue,” he added. “This is the beginning of non electoral politics, the only way to break the stranglehold of big money on the US government,” said writer David Swanson.

1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth

The slogan “We Are the 99%” refers to the fact that, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and sociologist William Domhoff,   the top 1% of  Americans own more than 40% of the nation’s wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), while the bottom 80% of  the population own only 7% of the wealth.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), that top 1% own more than half the country’s stocks, bonds and mutual funds, while the bottom 50% of Americans own 0.5% of these investments. And the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities states that the top 1% of Americans “is taking in more of the nation’s income than at any other time since the 1920s.”

As the discontent spread and snow-balled, the White House chimed in: “I don’t know if it’s helpful” to the administration’s push for its American Jobs Act, said Bill Daley, Obama’s chief of staff and former employee of the JP Morgan Chase mega-bank.

“I feel a lot of sympathy for… the general sense among Americans as whether we’ve lost the sense of possibility”, said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, arranged the rescue of Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs in 2008.

Appearing on Tuesday before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, said he “can’t blame” protesters for “taking to the streets” while high unemployment and slow economic growth continue. “They blame, with some justification, the financial sector for getting us into this mess,” he added.

Reaganomics and the ballooning corporate clout

The discontent has been building up at the grassroots across the US since the introduction of “reaganomics” in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan decided to reduce government spending and regulation, as well as the Income Tax and Capital Gains Tax.

The corporate greed that ensued led to ever bigger mergers and growing financialization of the economy. Matters worsened with the repeal in 1999 of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, removing the separation between commercial and investment banking along with the conflict of interest prohibitions between the two.

The war policies of George W. Bush, the astronomical sums poured into the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Irak through mega-contracts to “friendly” companies (involving among others Vice-President Dick Cheney), the sloppy accountability and the “disappearance” of tens of billions of dollars only worsened the situation, which the crash of 2008 brought to a head.

Corporate clout has ballooned, globally but also within the US itself where the administration is hostage to the Military Industrial Financial Congressional Complex. According to Global Trends, of the world’s 100 largest economic entities in 2009, 44 were corporations.

The largest, Wal-Mart Stores, had revenues exceeding the respective GDPs of 174 countries, including Sweden, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and employed over 2 million people, more than the entire population of Qatar. If it were a country, it would have the 22^nd largest economy in the world!

Massive tax evasion and fat government contracts

Other examples: Shell had bigger revenues than the combined GDPs of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the 6^th and 7^th most populous nations in the world, and together home to 350 million people. Sinopec, China’s leading energy and chemical company, was bigger than Singapore. Ford was bigger than New Zealand.

To make matters worse, wrote Arianna Huffington on her post last year, “America has two sets of rules, one for the corporate class, another for the middle class”. “The middle class by and large plays by the rules and watches its jobs disappear; the corporate class games the system, making sure its license to break the rules is built into the rules themselves”, she added.

Quoting the Government Accounting Office (GAO), she denounced “the ability of corporations to cheat the public” out of $100-billion a year “by using offshore tax havens (clinically dubbed financial privacy jurisdictions), leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab”.

Using 2004 White House figures, she wrote that 83 multinational corporations (MNCs) paid $16-billion in taxes on $700-billion in foreign active earnings, putting their tax rate at around 2.3%. At the same time, 74 of these MNCs “received government contracts in 2007 from the government, i.e. from the taxpayers”.

“Corporate personhood” ruling of the Supreme Court

The last drop was delivered last year by the US Supreme Court which, by a 5-4 vote, ruled in favour of “Corporate Personhood”, meaning corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money to buy the election results they want and manipulate politics and policy in their self-interest.

According to the Alliance for Democracy, “that ruling overturned previous Court decisions that limited corporate money in politics.” “In lifting the previous federal ban on corporate independent expenditures, the Supreme court has overridden laws in 22 states banning independent expenditures by corporations and unions,” the AFD said immediately after the ruling.

Reclaim Democracy is one of many US organizations fighting to roll-back the concept of corporate personhood. It is campaigning for an amendment stating that “corporations are not persons and possess only privileges we willfully grant them”. “Granting (them) the status of legal persons effectively rewrites the Constitution to serve corporate interests as though they were human interests… This doctrine gives a thing illegitimate privilege and power, and undermines our freedom and authority as citizens”, it says.

This is the deep backdrop against which Americans, young and old, women and men, of all colours, are coming together to assail corporate greed, to display the suffering and humiliation which growing impoverishment is inflicting upon them, and to demand that their leaders act to curb the clout of corporations and give back power to “We the People”.

The struggle is national, and also global

The struggle is national. It aims to overturn the trend towards ever-greater corporate clout. Its exact demands are not yet precise and definite. It is a work in progress. There is no clear leadership but the watchwords are converging, the crowds are getting bigger and the shouts are getting louder.

One line of action is a proposal by Congressman Peter DeFazio and Senator Tom Harkin, both Democrats, for a tax on the trading of stocks, bonds, and derivatives. Declaring Wall Street a “gambling casino,” DeFazio said the new tax would “raise needed revenue for the Treasury and rein in speculation on Wall Street.”

 

And the struggle is also global. In the words of the ANSWER coalition, one of tens of organizations that have joined the nation-wide movement: “We are waging wars all over the place, our youths are being sent to fight unknown enemies, the arms industry continues to reap huge contracts and profits while the middle classes are losing their jobs and their homes, and the war in Afghanistan is costing us $330-million every day, an amount equivalent to the salary of 8000 teachers in America”.

The movement is still very peaceful. Protesters have not reacted violently to police brutality. But in the wake of 9/11, the US has armed itself with powerful repressive tools, from privacy intrusions to surveillance of all kinds, from its privatized “prison industry” to the practice of torture at Guantanamo and its many other hidden gulags worldwide.

The Homeland Security Act, widely denounced for its assault on civil liberties, is being constantly reinforced in preparation for unspecified “major catastrophes”. Two bills are moreover pending in Congress, one to authorize the President to shut down the Internet in an emergency, the other to set up “martial law” type prisons on army camps around the country.

Defenders of the unequal status quo are shouting “class warfare”. It is not yet class warfare. Global historian Immanuel Wallerstein sees what’s happening as capitalism hitting a brick wall and declining as a result of its own inner contradictions. However, the conflict could still slide into class warfare.

-30-

Occupy Wall Street: It’s a Living, Breathing Process

This blog appeared at : http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/aalya/2011/10/noooo-canada

by Aalya Ahmad

October 4, 2011 – Nooooo, Canada!

Don’t you DARE turn these bright rainbows of limitless possibility into another dreary downpour of boring grey raindrops on Bay Street on October 15th! Keep your cheerless sniffs and sneers, your cringe-inducing and silencing accusations to yourselves. Wipe those dour smirks of smugness off your faces. Save the sanctimonious nitpicking for later. Take your pet issue and shove it. Talk to someone other than your circle of like-minded cronies and allies. Let’s carpe fucking diem on this one, eh? The way this world is going, many of us may not get another chance.

Professional activists, radical Eeyores and oppression olympians: I hear your muttering and I call you out. Hands off these newer movements for social justice sprouting in the streets of North American cities! Give them some air. Let them grow. The protesters in New York and elsewhere might lack analysis and their politics might need critique. They might not come up with goals or tactics that make sense to you. They might not look like you, talk like you or agree with you. There are exclusions, to be sure, and privilege always rears its ugly head. There are also, from what I’ve seen so far, honest, compassionate and collective attempts to remedy the inevitable political and logistical problems that come with getting hugely disparate groups of people together and trying to make change. Occupy Wall Street isn’t an organization. It’s a living, breathing process, a big old improvised street performance, a series of creative acts. It might be flawed. So what? Didn’t we learn from the last century that purity in politics is for the fanatical few? Don’t we still have much to learn from each other, no matter where we’re at?

Like many others, I am tremendously energized by the events on Wall Street, particularly by the sense that more than “the usual suspects” are participating, by the idea that a popular movement can swell and add people to its ranks who have not been activists, who do not usually demonstrate, who do not easily use the language of class war, capitalism and oppression. American people, moreover, who have been and continue to be consistently manipulated and lied to by an enormously powerful propaganda machine, who grew up under a succession of neo-liberal regimes, who have spent most or all of their lives having it repeatedly drummed into them that there is no alternative; people who have no health care and no social safety net. Knowing that Americans could finally muster up the anger and the courage to get out, stay out and demonstrate on Wall Street struck a ray of light into this cynical heart right from the start and since then, it’s just been getting better and better.

So, I’m feeling a bit protective of this movement and a bit dismayed to think that if it comes to Bay Street in Toronto, it might be beset by all the waffling, shuffling and tokenistic gesturing that we on “the left” use to cast webs around juicy movements and suck the life out of them, while intoning our stale old mantras and checking off our speakers’ lists. There’s always someone who’s got to apologize for not getting it right and plenty of us around to point out their sins. Mea maxima culpa. But, as I struggle to practise self-awareness, the more I see that behaving in this way just turns people off. There are alternatives. There is activism that doesn’t just judge, position, denounce and condemn. There is activism that beckons, that dances, that encourages and that inspires. And that’s a hell of a lot more fun than wrapping yourself in anger and beating up on your comrades.

Since when did we become such a bunch of clucking naysayers when it comes to transformative mass social action? Is it because we’re all so terrorized by 30 years of trickle-down that we insist on making revolution perfect? None of us are perfect nor can we ever be, as individuals or collectively. We are individually and collectively capable of great injustices. But what I’ve been seeing on the faces of those people in New York, even as they were getting pepper-sprayed and arrested in the hundreds, was something I haven’t seen in North America in my lifetime, at least not in such numbers (and if you’ve been part of such a struggle and have already seen it, I envy you); a certain crazy kind of joy, a wonderful and utterly infectious exhilaration, conveying above all a sense of the potential of this uprising. It might even be, to paraphrase those lovely words of Arundhathi Roy, the preliminary kicks of that other possible world. Can you hear her breathing? I thought perhaps, here and there, I could, reading newly jubilant accounts of assemblies and marches, seeing photos of a phalanx of pilots, a rage of Marines, a forest of brightly-marked cardboard signs all naming our collective wisdom, making it new. And if it isn’t another world breathing just yet, there may be a few last promising gasps of democracy in this corporate-infested one that make me want to grab the defibrillator and yell, “Clear!”

Of course, the Occupy movement isn’t a unique and unprecedented struggle, nor should it take preeminence over other resistance struggles. It is part of something much, much bigger than whichever patches of paved paradise the protesters are sitting, standing and marching on — a history of colonialism, capitalism and resistance. After centuries of sacrifices and brave struggles mounted by those in the Global South, indigenous peoples, activists and decolonizers, we here in the belly of the beast owe it to all of those who have resisted in so many forms to seize on whatever opportunities may arise. Let’s try not to screw it up for each other. Let’s try to make it grow.

I’ll see you in Toronto this October. Let’s dance like it really might be a revolution. You never know who might join us.

-fin-

Aalya Ahmad has a PhD in comparative literature, a crush on George Orwell and a rather impressive collection of cloth bags from the various public service unions she has worked with over the years. She writes about and practices cultural politics, feminism and activism.

DJ Skoal – PodCast “Charlie Chaplin/Severyn Suzuki”

DJ Skoal – PodCast “Charlie Chaplin/Severyn Suzuki” 13min28sec

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Divisive comments on Islam hurtful, wrong: Jinny Sims MP

This press release appeared first at: http://jinnysims.ndp.ca/posts/press-releases

September 20, 2011

Today, Jinny Sims sent the following Open Letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing to you today as a Member of Parliament representing one of the most diverse ridings in Canada – one that also includes a large Muslim population.

During your recent interview on CBC you referred to “Islamicism” being the “major threat” to Canada. These comments are not only confusing and misleading – as others have rightly pointed out – they are also deeply offensive to the many hard-working, peaceful Muslims who live in my riding of Newton – North Delta and across the country.

This summer’s horrific events in Norway, where a right-wing extremist gunned down dozens of innocent teenagers, confirm that security threats can come from many different sources. To single out one group of Canadians as more of a threat than others is both divisive and wrong.

Simply put, Canada needs its leaders to bring us together, not further divide us. As the Prime Minister for all Canadians, I hope that in the future you will choose your words more carefully.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Jinny Sims, MP

Mauritian-Canadian Kevin Chan Personifies a New Generation:

Second-Generation Canadians Using Soccer to Bridge the Gap

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

September 20, 2011 – While traditionally most home-grown Canadian kids with athletics in mind grow up dreaming of become ice-hockey stars, a new generation – the sons and daughters of immigrant parents to Canada in particular – seem to have developed more of an appreciation for the global game of soccer and the opportunities to connect internationally which “football” provides.

Montrealer and current Universite de Montreal midfielder Kevin Chan is a prime current example of this new generation in Canada who seek to share what Canadians have on the world stage.

Kevin, whose parents hail from the African island-nation Mauritius of Chinese ancestry, grew up in LaSalle and played his youth soccer for the Lac-St.Louis Lakers in the West Island region of Montreal.

At an early age, young Kevin recognized his skills at soccer and maturely realized, thanks in part to his parents, the opportunities that pursuing a career in the sport could provide in life as well. Kevin, and his father Patrick, made a priority for the advancement of Kevin’s soccer career, and with a few years of hard work Kevin was invited for Canada’s Under-17 National Soccer Team.

Kevin, now 21, spent a year at Vanier College in Montreal, after his U-17 National Team experience to concentrate on his studies. That effort paid off with a scholarship to Syracuse University in New York and a spot on the school’s NCAA Division 1 Orangemen Soccer squad.

With two years of invaluable experience, contacts and life lessons in tow, Kevin has now returned to town to continue his studies at the French-language Universite de Montreal. He has also secured a spot as one of a slew of strong midfielders on the school’s soccer team.

And while the competition and emphasis placed on Inter-University sports in Canada may be different, Kevin says it’s not less.

“In the United States, the coaches place the emphasis on training and fitness levels – while in Canada there is more of a focus on technique. It varies with the coaching staff, but I always appreciate a coach who will tell me how or what to do to improve, not just that I did something wrong.”

Making the improvements necessary to succeed at life is what Kevin and his family have been working at steadily since they arrived in Canada. And succeeding through soccer has the potential to open the doors to an entire world of contacts and possibilities.

Recently, Kevin was invited and selected to play for the Quebec Provincial Under-23 team which hosted the youth squad of FC Metz, the professional team from France, for a series of challenge matches in Quebec. With each one of these experiences Kevin is seen by more and more scouts world-wide and the opportunities expand.

“There seems to be a lot more involved in team selections than simply the talent of a player,” said Kevin. “There are players and coaches who I know and who know me and this will help to see how far we can go.”

Kevin is on a 60-man list of players to be called up to the Canadian Men’s National Soccer Team, and has grown up regularly practicing and playing with many of the top players in Canada today. The professional Montreal Impact, who will compete in North America’s top professional league next season, are well-aware of Kevin and the talent he can bring on the field and the local interest he can generate off the field.

Members of the Mauritian community in Montreal play soccer regularly throughout the spring and summer in Verdun, holding an annual tournament in the fall, which was held this year in LaSalle – the Canadian hometown of the Chans. So while Kevin did not participate in the tournament because of his commitment to U de M and its soccer team, he was in attendance with a large contingent of Mauritian-Montrealers to cheer on the players, who ranged in age from 15 to 70.

Patrick, Kevin’s father, captained one of the tournament’s teams so it was an interesting role reversal as it was the younger Chan in the stands watching the well-entertaining matches, while his father played.

In fact, every soccer game can be regarded as a cultural event, and perhaps that is why a distinct generation of young Canadians has taken to soccer as their means through which to express themselves athletically – recognizing that soccer truly is a global game. In addition, the love of the sport carried forth by many young Canadians’ parents remains a link that is able to bond family members, despite different generations having grown up with different realities and circumstances.

There is a Mauritian restaurant in Verdun that is the annual post-tournament meeting place and for some members of the community here in Montreal it is the only time some Mauritians will see each other over the course of the year. Given the atmosphere of joviality and Sega music that lasted long into the evening, it is safe to say that this community group has put into practice the best of Canadian values and traditions, making sure the next generation is actively involved. Kevin Chan and his family have soccer to thank for that.

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Tariq Jeeroburkhan is an Independant Content Enhancer and can be reached at tjeero@hotmail.com

Tariq Ramadan Draws Lessons from Norway: Why the West Needs to Wake Up

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

September 9, 2011 – The Palais des Congres in Montreal was the sight of world-renown philosopher and political commentator Tariq Ramadan’s latest discussion appearance.  As the Islamic thinker and Oxford professor addressed the crowd of several hundred, it seemed as if there were just as many tourists in attendance as Montrealers, for a presentation that coincided with the end of Islamic evening prayer held inside the hall.

Quite an interesting mood-setter for the crowd as they walked into one of the larger halls in the Salle Montrealais  to be greeted by the sounds and sights of daily occurrence through the rest of the world that exists outside of the consciousness of so many of us.

Maybe it was necessary in a way that the crowd being greeted by this scene understand that not only an open mind would be required to exchange the full meaning of Ramadan’s talk, but a realization that the perception and ideas that would be presented by Ramadan over the course of the evening, while being in some cases alternate to the prevailing Western views, are actually realities of perception that exist throughout the world.

To disagree with these perspectives is one thing, but to pretend that they don’t exist or that they have no relevance is simply feigning ignorance, and Tariq Ramadan’s discussions are not for the ignorant.

A bright man, with a varying range of emotions, always well-displayed and well received by the Montreal crowd in attendance, with an excitement that made one associate with a pop star, rather than a philosopher.

Ramadan opened the evening by explaining that there are world circumstances occurring which affect us all. These same occurrences are having different effects for the Arab World, where we have the legacies of the Spring Revolution, while for the West we have seen a repercussion in Norway that was the topic of the evening’s discussion.

Ramadan explained that there are three important factors that the Norway tragedy shows the West must wake up to and address:

-As the West feels it is under threat there is an increase of violence and insecurity which equals instability.

-Prejudice in government, in particular immigration, leads to the entrenchment of a growing difference between the perceptions in the minds of westerners and reality.

-Believing in false Muslim stereotypes and perpetuating a misdefinition of Islam increases the ignorance and distance between community members.

Ramadan stated that the foundations for addressing these problems were best found in a law-abiding, secular state. “Secular”, as Ramadan defined it, meant a state with no religious persecution, open or hidden. “Secular” could not mean a state where religion would be abolished.

He also, over the course of the two-hour lecture, spoke very highly of the concept of setting the standards for an International Moral Citizenship, something that resounded much like Murray Dobbin’s concept of Intentional Citizens.

Ramadan’s prescription for life was simple: Live, don’t hide your faith or beliefs.

Although there was a warm atmosphere throughout the evening, things got a little excited when Ramadan described how to apply this prescription in Canada.

“I think Canadians have to read more. You have to immerse yourself in all culture – sports, arts, literature. Rap culture, Internet culture, this is not culture, this is ignorance.”

This could be seen as quite an interesting comment from someone who has so successfully used the internet at as communications tool and message-spreading utility. And for Muslim-Canadians, Ramadan had a particular message that also applies to all Canadians.

“Do not accept to be self-isolated or self-marginalized – Be patient, things are not negative.”

When it came to discussing the media outlook in North America, particularly from the mainstream, Ramadan warned us that we must change the way we interpret the news itself. We must stop taking the news we have reported to us for granted, as “gospel”, and become more like media watchdogs: thinking about what is reported to us and not just accepting.

Ramadan blamed the mainstream western media for perpetuating what he called the “Distraction Theory”, whereby each nation is allocated one controversy to occupy consciousness and divert attention from everyday problems. As soon as the people’s attention returns to their everyday problems, another controversy is thrown into the spotlight.

After an extended question and answer session, Ramadan thanked the Montreal crowd, many in attendance coming from France, the Middle East and Northern Africa to hear him speak, and moved on to sign copies of his latest book, The Quest for Meaning. The book is meant to be a study on how to apply a philosophy of pluralism in today’s reality, when so many people are living in and experiencing different realities.

As a message for Canadians, Ramadan explained that we must be very watchful of our protectionist-leaning government if it tries to cut immigration ties or social spending. The tragic events that unfolded in Norway are liable to occur here if we allow our government to follow the path of the national policies in Europe that lead to prejudice and fear-mongering.

So while we weigh the dilemma of applying that prescription with little option in the face of a majority government, maybe we should realize Ramadan’s other, more achievable prescription: Live, don’t hide your faith or beliefs.

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City Set to Reclaim Cinema V

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

August 16, 2011 – The old Empress Theatre on Sherbrooke Street and Marcil in NDG has been a cultural landmark since 1927, since which time it has housed a first-run theatre, a repertory theatre, an abused children’s drop-in centre, several offices and most recently the Empress Cultural Centre. All this despite a fire in 1992.

The Cultural Centre signed a fifty-year lease with the city 12 years ago, and it has taken that long to find a developer willing to upgrade the building and its facilities. Now, as the Empress Cultural Centre had located such a developer and the project looked set to take flight, the city has moved towards breaking the lease with the Empress and has cited the lack of certain cultural requirements agreed upon in the lease as justification for the break.

“We have no idea what these cultural requirements were,” said Jason Hughes, board member and treasurer of the Empress Cultural Centre. “The city has not told us what their plan is based on or showed us a plan at all.”

At the close of the NDG Borough Council meeting last night five city councillors out of six voted to break the lease with the Empress Cultural Centre. The lone dissenting councillor, Peter McQueen of Project Montreal had his motion to postpone the vote virtually ignored earlier in the evening.

In fact, Councillor McQueen made clear that as far as he was concerned and aware the ECC had followed all of the city’s guidelines to the letter.

“(The ECC) plan is not finalized, I agree, but it’s a very good start and it’s exactly what Mayor Applebaum and the city asked them to do,” McQueen said. “So we’re all just a little distraught and surprised that now the rug is being pulled out from underneath them.”

The city had asked the Empress Cultural Centre to come up with a plan for the future of the space by the end of June, and the development proposed by the ECC included a 25 million dollar renovation (by a world-renowned architect), condo and commercial development and a dedication for cultural space. The mix of private and public sector money for this project was an important factor that the ECC hoped would swing the council’s support to their side – unfortunately not after last night’s vote.

The city now has a sixty-day hold on the building and has proposed a partnership of NGOs to combine efforts in determining the fate of the Empress Theatre, basically starting the speculation process over from scratch despite the 12-years of work put in by those involved with the ECC. The city said that it will look at plans and proposals for the Empress again by the end of December.

Paul Shore, a media consultant who has been heavily involved with the Empress project in both the planning and fund acquisition stages was visibly distraught as he questioned Mayor Applebaum before the vote last night.

“Why take steps back? We already have a viable plan in place for development – a 25 million dollar development. What other non-profit (organizations) in NDG or beyond can offer what we have?” asked Shore.

The Mayor responded by saying that it was the contributions of other NGOs that he was interested in seeing – although the only one he mentioned by name was a group called Cinema NDG.

The NDG Borough Cultural Director summed up the city’s position clearly:

“Eleven years later and 1.5 million dollars of public money on this building and the story is that we are at the beginning – the building is empty, no project in the building for us we just want to take back conditional property rights,” said Gilles Bergeron.

Meanwhile, Jason Hughes and the Empress Cultural Centre are just hoping that they will get an opportunity to help with establishing a cultural venue in NDG that has been a long time coming.

“In the summer we signed a letter of intent with a developer, we have a working plan. We think we need more time and we also need the city’s support – not to be put in conflict with other projects or other developers.”

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Tariq Jeeroburkhan is an Independent Content Enhancer and can be contacted at

tjeero@hotmail.com

Weekly Update into Afghanistan Situation – June 24, 2011

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

June 24, 2011 – President Obama addressed the nation Wednesday evening, finally outlining the details of the United States plan for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan that the world has been waiting for.

By the end of this July, the United States will withdraw 10 000 troops and by the end of next July an additional 23 000 troops will be returned safely home, for a total of 33 000 soldiers to be withdrawn from Afghanistan within the next twelve months.

“After this initial reduction, our troops will continue coming home at a steady pace as Afghani security forces move into the lead. Our mission will change from combat to support. By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghani people will be responsible for their own security,” said the President.

In 2009, President Obama spoke of a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan; however that surge was never realized or mentioned since, up to and including the President’s address on Wednesday evening.

The President’s announced plan includes withdrawing twice as many soldiers this year as the military would have hoped to maintain something General David Petraeus referred to as “battlefield geometry” in written submissions to the President.

Obama also introduced and confirmed a commitment to join diplomatic, peaceful initiatives “that reconcile the Afghani people, including the Taliban. Those who want to be part of a peaceful Afghanistan must break from AlQaeda, abandon violence and abide by the Afghani constitution”.

It is the first time in a President’s address to the nation regarding Afghanistan that the separation of AlQaeda and the Taliban was acknowledged and rightly so, since the Taliban have always viewed AlQaeda as a foreign entity no different from NATO or the Soviet Red Army when it comes to respecting the lives and welfare of Afghani civilians. It is because the Taliban refused to grant Osama Bin Laden refuge in Afghanistan that he was forced to hide out in Pakistan.

“Even as there will be dark days ahead in Afghanistan, the light of a secure peace can be seen in the distance. These long wars will come to a responsible end,” the President concluded.

With regards to negotiations with the Taliban, which were confirmed publically on Sunday afternoon by General David Petraeus, many analysts are suggesting that the success of the US-backed Afghani government initiative to provide upwards of 1 700 Taliban fighters with homes and civil services jobs if they agreed to switch sides rests squarely upon the United States’ ability to negotiate in good faith and to demonstrate to the Taliban that the Americans and the Afghani government can be trusted.

Basically, many diplomats and intelligence officers have concluded that a significant number of Taliban fighters will not switch sides unless such negotiations and peace talks advance.

The US announcement by President Obama that troops will begin withdrawing according to an established timeline opened the door for other countries, many of whom had been waiting for this opportunity for a long time, to officially begin planning their troop pull backs as well.

France announced that it will be withdrawing 1000 soldiers by the end of the year and will have its entire 4000 strong contingent removed by July 2012. France’s withdrawal will take place in co-ordination with allies and Afghani officials and “in a proportional manner comparable to the withdrawal of American troops,” according to a statement from French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s office.

Germany has not made any official announcements, but immediate reaction is that they will reduce their contingent of close to 5000 troops by the end of the year.

David Cameron in England announced that Great Britain will maintain their pullout date of 2015, but plan to have all 10 000 combat soldiers out by that time. Cameron did indicate that Great Britain was prepared to maintain, past 2015, as high a number of support mission trainers and ‘mentors’ as required by the Afghani government.

Meanwhile, in a rare English statement, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said that the US “must take serious steps to stop this pointless bloodshed”. There has not yet been a Taliban statement in reaction to the President’s drawdown announcement – it will be interesting to see if the Taliban will interpret the withdrawal scheduele as a sign of good will. I think that after 10 years fighting Soviets and 10 years fighting NATO, the Taliban will believe the troop withdrawal when they see it.

“Afghanistan wants to make it clear that the solution for the Afghani crisis lies in the full withdrawal of all foreign troops immediately,” Mujahid said.

Canada’s Role in Afghanistan – June 24, 2011

-On Wednesday afternoon the Canadian Government released another 4, 000 pages of documents pertaining to the handling of Afghani detainees by Canadian forces in Afghanistan. Despite the allegations that the Canadian military knew that Afghani detainees were being subjected to physical and mental torture and abuse since at least 2006, the government now portends that the release of this newly unclassified information clears Canadian culpability.

“The allegations of improper conduct are unfounded,” said Foreign Minister John Baird.

The opposition New Democrats, however, have been wary of the governmental proceedings on this issue from the start – and the NDP refused to participate in an ad-hoc committee that was formed a year ago to review and approve the documents for release.

NDP defence critic Jack Harris called the government out for spending 12$million dollars of taxpayer money in a committee designed “to suppress the truth.”

“This only offers some additional disclosure,” said Harris, “we think that there has to be an independent review so these things never happen again.”

The claim made by the government that these documents give Canada an “all clear” sign with regard to torture allegations is hardly credible considering that the documents were released only two days before Parliament’s summer break. This means that the government will not be held accountable or be questioned on the newly released information until Parliament reconvenes in the fall.

Canadian avoidance of accountability is one reason for the transfer of Afghani prisoners to torture at the hands of local security outlets in Afghanistan; to keep Canadian hands clean – but that doesn’t make Canada’s involvement in this process any less criminal. Putting our actions to account and getting a full public inquiry into the Afghanistan detainee issue is the only course of action that will restore Canada’s faith and goodwill internationally and domestically.

All opposition parties have united in their call for a full public inquiry into Canada’s relationship with torture and prisoners in Afghanistan.

“It is a case of wilful blindness on the case of the government,” said Liberal defence critic John Mackay. Mackay also pointed out that no new systems or procedures have been drafted since the scandal came to light with the testimony of Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin.

Beginning in 2006, Colvin sent memos, reports and letters to Canadian intelligence describing the procedures of Canadian military in Afghanistan and how the procedures were leading to the torture of Canadian-captured prisoners.

Testimony by Colvin almost two years ago threatened to bring down the Conservative government when he revealed that Canadian soldiers knowingly transferred detainees to Afghani forces engaged in torture. Since that time, Colvin’s testimony has been corroborated by other witnesses, internal “intelligence” documents, and military police commissions.

One of the revelations discovered in the newly-released documents from Wednesday, is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself visited Afghanistan on May 22, 2007 and directly raised the concerns of prisoner abuse with Afghani President Hamid Karzai. Meanwhile, back home, Harper and the Conservative government made no mention of his inquiries or the issue to the Canadian public or House of Commons.

Obviously there is Canadian culpability of knowingly handing over Afghani detainees to be tortured and even testimony of first-hand Canadian involvement in the torture of Afghani prisoners.

“The real question is ‘what is the government holding back – and why?” said NDP leader Jack Layton.

“They chose a date that will prevent Parliament from asking questions in the House of Commons and the big question is going to be which documents did they not release.”

Only a full public inquiry will tell.

-Despite the announcement this week of concrete American plans to draw down its soldiers in Afghanistan and the subsequent announcement of international partners to draw down their troop involvement as well, Canada appears to be committed to nothing more then re-labelling their soldiers in Afghanistan as “trainers”.

No official announcement from the Prime Minister regarding reaction and accordance with the US troop withdrawal plans for the end of this year and 2012. In the wake of Canada’s detainee-torture mess and Parliament’s summer vacation just two days away maybe the Prime Minister is hoping Afghanistan will go away, just like it did in the recent Canadian election campaigns.

The truth is it won’t just go away as long as Canada continues using Afghanistan as an expense account for the corporate and military establishment charged to the Canadian taxpayer and until Canadians get a full public inquiry into the Afghani detainee-torture scandal.

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http://ottawa.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110622/detainee-documents-110622/20110622/?hub=OttawaHome

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=699118&publicationSubCategoryId=200

http://www.globalnews.ca/afghanistan/Canadians+support+soldiers+still+question+Afghanistan+poll/4994286/story.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/06/19/taliban-talks.html?ref=rss

http://calgary.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110623/nato-welcomes-us-withdrawal-110623/20110623/?hub=CalgaryHome

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Canadian+officials+knew+Afghan+torture+claims+Documents/4996583/story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/asia/23obama-afghanistan-speech-text.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/asia/23military.html?emc=eta1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/asia/20afghanistan-taliban.html?emc=eta1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/world/asia/23assess.html?emc=eta1

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/06/24/why-the-only-solution-in-afghanistan-was-always-going-to-be-talking-to-the-taliban-115875-23222805/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/23/afghanistan-withdrawal-barack-obama-troops

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/06/23/afghanistan-allies-withdrawal.html?ref=rss

Canadian officials knew of Afghan torture claims: Documents

This article appeared at : http://www.canada.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Canadian+officials+knew+Afghan+torture+claims+Documents/4996583/story.html#ixzz1QDjhm29f

By Jeff Davis and Jordan Press, Postmedia News

June 23, 2011 - Thousands of pages of newly released documents about Afghan detainees show  diplomats were aware of widespread abuse, such as electrocutions, whippings and  sleep deprivation, in Afghan prisons where Canada’s detainees were held.

The documents appear to support the government’s assertion that Canadians did  not knowingly transfer detainees who were tortured.

However, the 362 heavily censored documents released Wednesday describe  private torture chambers, squalid prisons, rumours of summary executions and  officials losing track of Canada’s detainees.

The political fallout continued Thursday, a day after the government released  more than 4,000 pages of documents.

Opposition parties are demanding a public inquiry, saying the document dump  had not answered key questions.

NDP defence critic Jack Harris chided the government for spending $12 million — the cost of preparing the documents for release — “to suppress the truth.”

“This is clear evidence they knew something was up,” Harris told Postmedia  News Thursday.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said the yearlong process culminated with  an “unprecedented amount of information” being put before politicians and the  public.

“Canadians have got a clear picture that our men and women in uniform fully  accepted all of our international obligations and have done a heck of a good job  representing this country,” Baird said.

The documents show Canadian diplomats heard allegations of abuse and  mistreatment on a regular basis in 2006 and 2007, and were aware of the Afghan  National Directorate of Security’s pattern of torture.

Diplomats relayed allegations of torture to senior cabinet ministers in  Ottawa, who raised the issue with Afghan authorities. In one document listing  “actions on the detainees issue” for 2007, a redacted and summarized portion  noted Prime Minister Stephen Harper raised concerns with Afghan President Hamid  Karzai.

Although the exact date of the meeting is not filed, Harper made a surprise  visit to Afghanistan on May 22, 2007 and met that day with Karzai. That same  day, the two held a joint news conference where Karzai publicly denied any cases  of detainee abuse.

An account at the time by the Globe and Mail cited 30 cases of prisoners  being abused in Afghan jails.

“We do not have any such case of torture,” Karzai told reporters at the news  conference. “So I can tell you . . . that story was not true, as much as it  caused news and controversy in Canada.”

During a June 2007 visit to an NDS facility in Kabul, Canadian-transferred  detainees told diplomats their bodies and feet had been beaten with cables. One  detainee claimed he had been given electric shocks, while another said he had  been forced to stand for two days.

Detainees also relayed claims from other prisoners that inmates at the NDS  Kandahar facility had their fingers cut and burned with lighters.

In a case that caused Canada to suspend transfers of detainees, one of  Canada’s detainees brought a Canadian official to a room where he was  interrogated, showed the official a four-inch bruise on his back, and pointed  out the “large piece of braided electrical wire” and rubber hose used to beat  him.

The documents also show Canadian officials, in those early days in Kandahar,  had problems tracking detainees they had transferred.

In June 2007, Canadian officials visited an NDS facility to check on 12  detainees transferred by Canadians. They were surprised to learn that 10 had  been released without their knowledge.

Afghan officials criticized Canada for detaining apparently innocent Afghans,  and sending them to detention facilities.

In an April 2007 meeting with NDS chief Amrullah Saleh, Canadian officials  asked how many of the fewer than 150 detainees transferred by Canada’s regular  forces were in fact Taliban, and not innocent local farmers. In response, Saleh  said “he simply did not know.”

“Most of those detained by Canadian Forces, he guessed, would subsequently  have been released,” the report reads.

Transfers of Canada’s detainees to Afghan authorities restarted after the two  nations reached a “Supplementary Agreement,” which granted Canada additional  rights of oversight and visitation.

Canadian officials frequently visited prisons unannounced to interview  detainees. In some cases, Canadian officials were not allowed to meet with  detainees despite the transfer agreement stating they had full access to  detainees.

Numerous minor instances of abuse, such as yelling and slapping, continued to  occur after this new agreement was reached and concerns were raised with Afghan  officials after each incident, federal officials said this week.

During a November 2007 visit to Sarposa prison, one detainee told Canadian  officials that “detainees captured by ISAF forces were treated well but those  captured by Afghans (sic) authorities are often subjected to ill-treatment.”

When journalists reported allegations of abuse, the documents show diplomats  attempted to verify the stories were true. In one case, the documents said  allegations of abuse were “misconstrued” in a newspaper article. In another  case, diplomats determined an anonymous detainee interviewed for a story made  similar claims to Canadians officials. However, verifying the abuse was  impossible “without a name from the journalist.”

Included in the documents are memos authored by diplomat Richard Colvin, who  raised concerns over torture to his superiors.

Colvin’s secret reports from April 2007, sent to Ottawa’s highest-ranking  foreign affairs and security intelligence officials, detailed a meeting held  with Karzai’s chief of staff Omar Daoudzai.

“Awareness of detainee mistreatment was discussed,” Colvin wrote. “Such  practices would constitute a violation of Afghanistan’s international  obligations, as well as Afghan domestic law.”

After visiting Sarposa Prison, Colvin reported he was concerned by the  treatment of detainees handed over by Canada.

“Concern expressed about the situation in Kandahar is not the prison itself  but overall treatment of detainees, including those transferred to Afghan  custody by Canadian forces.”

Colvin described the prison’s general shortcomings, such as guards taking  bribes, children of detainees being kept with the general prison population,  insufficient water and sanitation and lack of prayer facilities.

The name of Asadullah Khalid, governor of Kandahar from 2005 to 2008, also  appears in the documents in relation to claims he personally tortured people in  his prison.

“It has been reported by multiple sources that the governor maintains a  private detention facility,” the documents read. “It has been reported that  Khalid had admitted to keeping detainees there.”

Stories of alleged detainee abuse made their way home to Canada outside of  official channels.

A Military Police academy instructor shared anecdotes of abuse in a lecture  to trainees. He told his class a story he heard second-hand of Afghan National  Army troops dragging a detainee to a grisly death behind a pickup truck.

An investigation was conducted into the incident, which determined the story  to be hearsay.

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jdavis@postmedia.com

 

Twitter.com/jeffdavisottawa

 

jpress@postmedia.com

 

Twitter.com/jordan_press

Read more: http://www.canada.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Canadian+officials+knew+Afghan+torture+claims+Documents/4996583/story.html#ixzz1QDkFYKXk

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

To begin with, the expression “war evloves” is an oximoron because war is a de-evolution of humanity – the point of war in the big picture is so that those who believe in war as a viable solution will kill each other off and allow the rest of us who want to live in peace to do so. The terminonolgy and references points used by those who profit from war and destabilty – “game-changer”, “growth market” – indicate that the military complex has lost its ability to distinguish between the reality of life from their own war games – and seek to impose their inability to think for the greater good on all of humanity.

tj

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER

June 19, 2011 – WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video — from as far as 20 miles away — of insurgents planting homemade bombs. “It’s been a game-changer for me,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson said in Sangin this spring. “I want a bunch more put in.”

From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.

The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies” equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.”

In recent months drones have been more crucial than ever in fighting wars and terrorism. The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan by video transmitted from a new bat-winged stealth drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, otherwise known as the “Beast of Kandahar,” named after it was first spotted on a runway in Afghanistan. One of Pakistan’s most wanted militants, Ilyas Kashmiri, was reported dead this month in a C.I.A. drone strike, part of an aggressive drone campaign that administration officials say has helped paralyze Al Qaeda in the region — and has become a possible rationale for an accelerated withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. More than 1,900 insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas have been killed by American drones since 2006, according to the Web site www.longwarjournal.com.

In April the United States began using armed Predator drones against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in Libya. Last month a C.I.A.-armed Predator aimed a missile at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen. The Predator missed, but American drones continue to patrol Yemen’s skies.

Large or small, drones raise questions about the growing disconnect between the American public and its wars. Military ethicists concede that drones can turn war into a video game, inflict civilian casualties and, with no Americans directly at risk, more easily draw the United States into conflicts. Drones have also created a crisis of information for analysts on the end of a daily video deluge. Not least, the Federal Aviation Administration has qualms about expanding their test flights at home, as the Pentagon would like. Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington’s restricted airspace.

Within the military, no one disputes that drones save American lives. Many see them as advanced versions of “stand-off weapons systems,” like tanks or bombs dropped from aircraft, that the United States has used for decades. “There’s a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn’t have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”

To Mr. Singer of Brookings, the debate over drones is like debating the merits of computers in 1979: They are here to stay, and the boom has barely begun. “We are at the Wright Brothers Flier stage of this,” he said.

Mimicking Insect Flight

A tiny helicopter is buzzing menacingly as it prepares to lift off in the Wright-Patterson aviary, a warehouse-like room lined with 60 motion-capture cameras to track the little drone’s every move. The helicopter, a footlong hobbyists’ model, has been programmed by a computer to fly itself. Soon it is up in the air making purposeful figure eights.

“What it’s doing out here is nothing special,” said Dr. Parker, the aerospace engineer. The researchers are using the helicopter to test technology that would make it possible for a computer to fly, say, a drone that looks like a dragonfly. “To have a computer do it 100 percent of the time, and to do it with winds, and to do it when it doesn’t really know where the vehicle is, those are the kinds of technologies that we’re trying to develop,” Dr. Parker said.

The push right now is developing “flapping wing” technology, or recreating the physics of natural flight, but with a focus on insects rather than birds. Birds have complex muscles that move their wings, making it difficult to copy their aerodynamics. Designing insects is hard, too, but their wing motions are simpler. “It’s a lot easier problem,” Dr. Parker said.

In February, researchers unveiled a hummingbird drone, built by the firm AeroVironment for the secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which can fly at 11 miles per hour and perch on a windowsill. But it is still a prototype. One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill.

There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although plenty get lost. One American service member in Germany recalled how five soldiers and officers spent six hours tramping through a dark Bavarian forest — and then sent a helicopter — on a fruitless search for a Raven that failed to return home from a training exercise. The next month a Raven went AWOL again, this time because of a programming error that sent it south. “The initial call I got was that the Raven was going to Africa,” said the service member, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss drone glitches.

In the midsize range: The Predator, the larger Reaper and the smaller Shadow, all flown by remote pilots using joysticks and computer screens, many from military bases in the United States. A Navy entry is the X-47B, a prototype designed to take off and land from aircraft carriers automatically and, when commanded, drop bombs. The X-47B had a maiden 29-minute flight over land in February. A larger drone is the Global Hawk, which is used for keeping an eye on North Korea’s nuclear weapons activities. In March, the Pentagon sent a Global Hawk over the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan to assess the damage.

A Tsunami of Data

The future world of drones is here inside the Air Force headquarters at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., where hundreds of flat-screen TVs hang from industrial metal skeletons in a cavernous room, a scene vaguely reminiscent of a rave club. In fact, this is one of the most sensitive installations for processing, exploiting and disseminating a tsunami of information from a global network of flying sensors.

The numbers are overwhelming: Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the hours the Air Force devotes to flying missions for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance have gone up 3,100 percent, most of that from increased operations of drones. Every day, the Air Force must process almost 1,500 hours of full-motion video and another 1,500 still images, much of it from Predators and Reapers on around-the-clock combat air patrols.

The pressures on humans will only increase as the military moves from the limited “soda straw” views of today’s sensors to new “Gorgon Stare” technology that can capture live video of an entire city — but that requires 2,000 analysts to process the data feeds from a single drone, compared with 19 analysts per drone today.

At Wright-Patterson, Maj. Michael L. Anderson, a doctoral student at the base’s advanced navigation technology center, is focused on another part of the future: building wings for a drone that might replicate the flight of the hawk moth, known for its hovering skills. “It’s impressive what they can do,” Major Anderson said, “compared to what our clumsy aircraft can do.”

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this article appeared first at – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&emc=eta1

Weekly Update into Afghanistan Situation – June 17, 2011

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

June 17, 2011 – The United States Conference of Mayors hold their 79th annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland this weekend and the number one item on their agenda is a call for an end to the Afghanistan War and to re-direct spending towards job creation at home. 

The resolution will be put to a vote on Monday, and is expected to be overwhelmingly approved by the representative mayors of all major and intermediate US cities, who will be joined by Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi at the conference.

-President Obama and his national security team met on Wednesday with Afghanistan ground troop commander General David Petraeus to consult and discuss options for the commencement of the imminent troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Although Wednesday’s meeting was not listed on the President’s official schedule, leading some to speculate that it was a “secret meeting”, a Whitehouse spokesman said that Obama will soon begin withdrawing the 30 thousand troops that were surged in 2009. However there have still been no official numbers discussed or date provided. At the time of the surge, the President promised that the drawdown would begin in July 2011.

-Yesterday, Joint Chief of Staff Mike Mullen and Defence Secretary Robert Gates announced, on behalf of the Pentagon, that they have decided to re-route 800 US Soldiers destined for deployment in Afghanistan as of July 1st. The two battalions will be sent instead to Kuwait and will aid with training operations in neighbouring Iraq.

The decision, taken on behalf of the Pentagon, was suggested by Afghanistan ground troop commander David Petraeus and was approved by President Obama.

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will drop by 40$billion, in the year starting October 1st, from 160$billion to 120$billion, according to Defence Secretary Gates. Pardon me for maintaining a “believe it when I see it” attitude on this one…

-Meanwhile, more civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the past month (May) then in any month since 2007. According to the United Nation Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), there were 368 civilian deaths and 593 civilians injured in Afghanistan during May.

The Human Rights Director with the UNAMA was quite clear about what needs to be done.

“We have called on pro-government and international forces to ensure that night raids are carried out in a manner that protects Afghani civilians,” said Georgette Gagnon. “We have urged them to stop using devices that hurt people indiscriminately.”

Eighteen months ago, after demands from Afghani President Hamid Karzai, NATO agreed to cease and desist from all night raid operations and make an attempt to lessen civilian and non-combatant casualties. Three days after NATO made that commitment; twelve Afghani civilians were killed in a night raid by NATO forces.

-Since the beginning of June things haven’t gotten much better for Afghani civilians either. Fighting between foreign forces and Afghanis has led to the displacement of 12 thousand refugees in Faryab Province.

The refugees have come from at least 20 different villages to camp in the remote northwest of Afghanistan, and the Red Crescent is reporting a dire need for water, sanitation and other essentials.

A separate study by the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Bank estimates that there are over 400 thousand refugees in Afghanistan, and over 200 thousand refugees have been internally displaced during the last two years of foreign occupation in Afghanistan.

Canada’s Role in Afghanistan – June 17, 2011

-Despite a majority of Canadians wanting an end to Canadian troop presence and public resource spending in Afghanistan, Canada continues to plod ahead with its campaign of international disrepute, this week also extending the timeline for Canadian operations in Libya until the end of September.

In what was described as a “morale boost” for Canadian personnel already on the ground, the extension of the Libyan engagement is a clear indication that the Conservative government has its own agenda when it comes to the use and manipulation of Canadian forces and resources that is not in tune with the priorities of the Canadian people. Unfortunately, even the newly-anointed NDP opposition supported this war extension, with Green Party leader Elizabeth May being the only Canadian parliamentarian to vote against the prolongation of Canadian military actions.

Just like in Afghanistan, Canadian presence in Libya has been justified by a blanket commitment to NATO operations and a loosely interpreted spin of the UN mandate for involvement. In Libya, the UN mandate is to specifically target the Gadhafi regime – and the announcement by Canadian military this week that CF-18 fighter jets are involved in day and night raid bombing on the Libyan capital, Tripoli, is seen by many as condoning and participating in actions which target the entire Libyan population and not just the Gadhafi regime. Clearly this oversteps the boundaries of the UN mandate as several Canadian political commentators have pointed out. Should we be surprised that none of the voices of Canadian consciousness have come from the meanstream Canadian media?

-Testimony by diplomatic whistleblower Richard Colvin almost two years ago threatened to bring down the Conservative government when he revealed that Canadian soldiers knowingly transferred detainees to Afghani forces engaged in torture. Since that time, Colvin’s testimony has been corroborated by other witnesses, internal “intelligence” documents, and military police commissions. What Canadians still don’t have is an open public inquiry into this war crimes scandal that will allow Canada to identify and fix problems within its military and intelligence operational systems. The open, transparent public inquiry is just as important to save Canadian face internationally as it is necessary to restore Canadian face domestically.

Since the original allegations surfaced, the Conservative government has prorogued Parliament, shut down military and judicial fact-finding commissions and censored documents to prevent any information or responsibility for Canadian actions to be acknowledged. All the while the Conservatives have continued to play cat-and-mouse games within the Canadian legal system, the Canadian media and the House of Parliament itself, doing nothing but delaying the calls for accountability that leave the international community wondering what they are hiding and Canadians wondering what we have to do to get a government that will be responsible enough to be held accountable for its actions.

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^{http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/17/3707958/us-mayors-announce-call-to-end.html}

^{http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/06/obama-meets-with-petraeus-as-afghanistan-decision-nears/1}

^{http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5id_1t3i6a4aKhEsrNcBkSkOMat2Q?docId=CNG.e0a7053e6c093f750ec8db0f1cc01cc0.621}

^{http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-16/afghan-cuts-begin-troops-diverted-to-iraq.html}

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^{http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=92909}

^{http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/libyan-war-updatesstop-nato-news-june-17-2011/}

^{http://www.themarknews.com/articles/4619-government-seeks-to-limit-probe-into-afghan-detainee-issue}

Public servant slams response to harassment claim

This article appeared first at – http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2011/05/09/ott-public-service-harassment.html

Julie Ireton

May 9, 2011 – A Gatineau, Que., woman says she was wrongfully dismissed after complaining about continual sexual harassment at her federal government job.

Zabia Chamberlain worked as a director inside Human Resources and Skills Development Canada until, she says, chronic abuse from her director general forced her to leave her job. She says the department refused to transfer her to an equivalent job, away from the aggressor.

The department won’t comment on her case. Since Chamberlain was in an executive position when the harassment occurred, she’s not entitled to union representation.

She’s taken several complaints to the Public Service Labour Relations Board, but one grievance has already been dismissed on the grounds the board doesn’t have jurisdiction. Chamberlain is appealing that decision in federal court.

She says the issue is now about much more than the initial harassment, but is also about the federal government’s inaction and reaction.

Chamberlain, 44, worked for the federal government for more than 20 years, working her way up the career ladder. Her family came to Ottawa from Trinidad in the 1970s and she’s proud of her accomplishments.

“I remember beautiful years,” says Chamberlain. “It was pretty much half my life.”

But she says those good memories are now overshadowed by what she calls abuse from her immediate supervisor, a director general.

Alleged problems began in 2007

In the fall of 2007, Chamberlain was seconded to a director position in the Skills and Employment branch at HRSDC. Chamberlain says her boss regularly intruded into her personal space, with inappropriate touching, pushing himself against her and rubbing her shoulders.

“I don’t know what his intentions were, but this seemed to be fun for him. And I was easy prey. I really felt violated. I felt the violation of sexual impropriety and I started asking him to stand back from me. I thought maybe there may have been something wrong with him at times.”

Through tears, with shaking hands, Chamberlain explains the harassment didn’t end there. She says he would sometimes fly into a rage and storm into her office.

“It was so volatile. He came into my office and slammed the door so loud, it’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. He swore. Don’t you ever F—ing do that again.”

She says she asked her boss not to raise his voice or touch her. Then Chamberlain started applying for other jobs inside the public service. She says she had a lot of responsibilities so she was working long hours. She started losing weight and having nightmares.

Several of Chamberlain’s co-workers say they witnessed harassment. Some felt bullied themselves by the same manager. Several have written sworn affidavits, documenting what they saw, heard and experienced.

Yelling forced nearby worker to relocate

“This loud behaviour became a habit of at least once a week,” writes one public servant who witnessed Chamberlain’s supervisor yelling and swearing at her.

“As I have been diagnosed with sporadic epilepsy attacks and panic attacks, I could not bear to hear it anymore. I started worrying about her so I talked to my manager and it was agreed that I would be relocated about 50 feet away. This would resolve me hearing what was going on, but my manager never mentioned Zabia.”

This witness writes that she was later told by a supervisor if she wanted to advance in government she should be quiet about Chamberlain’s boss.

Chamberlain alleged the harassment began in October 2007, and after several months she lodged an official complaint in April 2008. She took the allegations to the assistant deputy minister of the division, Karen Jackson.

As a solution, emails show Jackson asked Chamberlain to come to the table and mediate with her supervisor. Chamberlain says Jackson told her the director general needed to learn from this. But by this point, Chamberlain says she was afraid of her supervisor and refused to participate in mediation.

“I didn’t know at the time, inside all I could think was I can’t do this. I can’t see this person. I had stopped going to lunch because I was afraid of seeing him on the elevator, because he was always going down for cigarettes and stuff,” remembers Chamberlain.

Finally, nine months after being seconded to the executive position, Chamberlain asked the assistant deputy minister to move her to an equivalent job or another department so she didn’t have to work with the aggressor.

“I talked to the internal mediator who was a manager. I told her, he’s always on me. I can’t fend him off. Please move me. Protect my [executive status].”

CBC has obtained a copy of the report Jackson filed after an internal investigation. She focused on a couple of issues and incidents involving the director general.

Using his initials only, her report reads: “JA behaved improperly and he should have known that his behaviour would cause offence and harm…JA’s behaviour in this instance is defined as harassment under the Government of Canada’s policy on harassment in the workplace.”

Supervisors say ‘corrective measures’ taken

Jackson goes on to write: “There is sufficient evidence and substantiation of a pattern of behaviour to conclude that JA intruded into Zabia Chamberlain’s personal space…There is evidence of JA speaking loudly and in an aggressive tone of voice. It should be noted that JA is at least sufficiently aware of his loudness and excitability that when it is brought to his attention, he adjusts his behaviour.”

In subsequent emails, Jackson tells Chamberlain she has “taken corrective measures” and considers “the matter closed.” Chamberlain was never told what those corrective measures were. She’d learn from co-workers that her supervisor received coaching. He remains on an upward career track as an executive in the public service.

Chamberlain went on leave in May 2008 and has never returned. She has since gone on disability leave due to what her doctor calls Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Officials offered Chamberlain the opportunity to return to her lower-level position, away from the office in which she’d suffered the harassment, in the fall of 2009, but she refused.

She said they told her if she wanted the role she’d been filling she’d have to compete for it, but the man who had harassed her was in charge of the hiring process.

Chamberlain was removed from her executive role and sent a record of employment. She calls it a wrongful dismissal. Chamberlain says she can’t explain her treatment.

“I think it’s because they took a lot of missteps and it was too much for them to back track and say they’re sorry.”

During the complaints process, Chamberlain was asked by government officials to sign a form, claiming the abuser was a third party, meaning he didn’t work for the government.

Third party form unusual: lawyer

CBC has a copy of this letter and form. Chamberlain refused to sign it. In fact, she questions its legality.

“The third party is not an employee of the Crown. This person is not a third party. He is a paid, permanent, federal employee, a senior executive,” notes Chamberlain.

Paul Champ, an Ottawa lawyer who takes on many federal government harassment cases each year, says this third party form is exceptional.

“In almost any context, including the federal public service, if a manager or supervisor has done something to wrong or harms an employee, the employer is responsible, ultimately, so it’s very rare you’d see an employer trying to avoid liability in that fashion.”

The most recent Public Service employee survey from 2008 showed 31 per cent of women and 25 per cent men reported having been the victim of harassment in the previous two years.

Only 46 per cent of women said that they were satisfied with how their department or agency responded to the complaint.

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1o Reasons why the Opening of the Rafah Crossing Isn’t Enough

This article appeared at – http://www.gazagateway.org/2011/06/the-top-10-reasons-why-the-opening-of-rafah-crossing-just-doesnt-cut-it/

www.gazagateway.org

June 17, 2011 – In no particular order of importance, we thought we’d list some of the reasons why the opening of Rafah, while significant and helpful, doesn’t meet all of Gaza’s needs for access and why, as some voices in Israel have recently suggested, it can’t serve as Gaza’s only access point. Despite four unanticipated days of closure last week, the crossing has been operating for the passage of travelers on a more regular but still semi-limited basis.

1. Passage through the crossing remains limited: Egypt has indicated that it will operate the crossing six days per week during regular working hours, but it seems this won’t be enough: between 400 – 450 individuals have been able to travel through the crossing per day from Gaza to Egypt. From November 2005 to June 2006, approximately 660 passengers per day exited the Gaza Strip through Rafah and according to the Palestinian Crossings Authority, 10,000 people are currently waiting to travel.
2. The situation is unstable: As last week’s closure of the crossing indicates, the situation on both sides of Rafah remains unstable, such that it’s not clear whether the crossing will remain open, nor exactly to what degree.
3. Rafah doesn’t lead to the West Bank: Travel and movement of goods between Gaza and the West Bank remains severely limited, a problem which Rafah cannot address, as goods and Gaza ID holders are not allowed into the West Bank even via the Egypt-Jordan route. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are part of the same customs envelope, and are recognized, including by Israel, as a single territorial unit, which, despite four years of tight closure, still shares one economy, one education system, one healthcare system and countless familial and social ties.
4. Export is not moving and not through Rafah either: Export remains severely limited (about 2 truckloads per day, the last of which left Gaza on May 1, 2011, compared with a target of 400 per day in the Agreement on Movement and Access) and is currently not taking place through Rafah at all. This is impacting industries across Gaza which used to sell or export their wares in Israel, the West Bank and abroad. Before the closure, the vast majority of Gaza’s “exports” were sold in Israel and the West Bank.
5. Construction materials do not enter through Rafah: Construction materials are being let into Gaza via Kerem Shalom only (between Israel and Gaza) for approved projects undertaken by international organizations and following exceedingly lengthy bureaucratic procedures. Each month since January 2011, about 10% of what entered monthly in the years prior to June 2007 has entered for these specific projects. At present, Egyptian authorities have not indicated if or when they will allow construction materials to pass at Rafah.
6. Import of goods does not take place at Rafah: Imports to the Strip purchased by the private sector enter Gaza from Israel via Kerem Shalom Crossing. Even if Egypt were to allow goods to enter at Rafah (and there is no indication that they intend to do so nor when) the crossing and surrounding roadways are not currently equipped to handle the transfer of large quantities of goods, on the scale of the access needs of the Strip.
7. Humanitarian aid does not regularly enter through Rafah: Aid enters Gaza via Kerem Shalom Crossing, between Gaza and Israel. At present, Egyptian authorities have not indicated if or when they will allow convoys of humanitarian aid to pass at Rafah.
8. Medical patients in need of treatment not available in Gaza cannot always make the long journey to Egyptian hospitals. In any case, Palestinian hospitals in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, part of a common Palestinian health care system, are there to serve all residents of the Palestinian territory, including Gaza residents.
9. Reports prove it: Restrictions on access at the crossings between Israel and Gaza (at Kerem Shalom for goods and Erez for people) continue to impact the well-being of residents of the Strip. Yesterday UNRWA published a study showing high rates of unemployment and the Association for International Development Agencies also reported recently on how limits on the entrance of construction materials primarily impacts the work of aid agencies and residents of Gaza.
10. Rafah doesn’t lead to the West Bank: Oh wait, did we say that already? Well, we’re saying it again, because it’s very, very important.

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The Gaza Gateway site provides up-to-date information and commentary on the situation at the Gaza Strip border crossings.

Gaza Gateway is updated weekly and allows visitors to easily access credible information about the amount of traffic that Israel allows to pass through the Gaza Strip border crossings. The data is presented alongside relevant background information, such as the amount of goods allowed through relative to the needs of the population of Gaza.

No Justice in Kafka’s America

This article appeared first at – http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_justice_in_kafkas_america_20110613/

Chris Hedges

June 12, 2011 – In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law” a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits outside the law court for days, months and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.

Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists in the United States as it was for Kafka’s frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, wasting away in supermax prisons. These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror, waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.

The best the U.S. government could offer as evidence of Fahad’s crimes was that an acquaintance who stayed in his apartment with him while he was a graduate student in London had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks in luggage at the apartment and that the acquaintance eventually delivered these to al-Qaida. But I doubt the government is overly concerned with a suitcase full of waterproof socks taken to Pakistan. The reason Fahad Hashmi was targeted was because, like the Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, he was fearless and zealous in his defense of those being bombed, shot, terrorized and killed throughout the Muslim world while he was a student at Brooklyn College. Fahad was deeply religious, and some of his views, including his praise of the Afghan resistance, were to me unpalatable, but he had a right to express these sentiments. More important, he had a right to expect freedom from persecution and imprisonment because of his opinions. Facing the possibility of a 70-year sentence in prison and having already spent four years in jail, much of it in solitary confinement, he accepted a plea bargain on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism.

It has been a year since his 15-year sentence was pronounced in a New York courtroom. He is now held in Guantanamo-like conditions in the supermax ADX [Administrative Maximum] facility in Florence, Colo. He is isolated in a small cell for 22 to 23 hours a day. He has only extremely limited contact with his mother, father and brother, often going weeks without any communication. Between his transfer to Florence last August and this March he was permitted only one phone call. The rule of law in America, especially if you are Muslim, fits Kafka’s grim parody. The tyranny we impose on those held in Guantanamo, Bagram and the secret CIA “black sites” we impose on ourselves. This is and always has been the disease of empire. Empire imports the crude and brutal tools of control and violence back to the homeland. It creates internal as well as external colonies.

We no longer have freedom; there is only the appearance of freedom. We are consumed by an endless and vague war on terror in which the perfidiousness of our enemy, whose number, location and nature are never clearly defined, justifies the shredding of constitutional rights, torture, kidnapping, detentions without charges or trials and an occult-like battle against an absolute evil. And if you think the state intends to limit itself to the persecution of Muslims, especially once there is an increase in domestic unrest and instability, you know little about human history.

I spoke Saturday night to Fahad Hashmi’s father, Syed Anwar Hashmi. The elder Hashmi came to the United States from Pakistan when Fahad was 3 and his other son, Faisal, was 4. He worked for more than two decades as an accountant for the city of New York. He came, as most immigrants have, for his children. He believed in America, in its fairness, its chances for opportunity, its freedoms. And then it all crumbled when the state proved as capricious and cruel as the Pakistani dictatorship he had left behind. On the day of his son’s arrest, he says, “my American dream became an American nightmare.”

Three law enforcement officials appeared at his home in Flushing, Queens, on June 6, 2006, to inform him that Fahad, who had been in London completing a master’s degree in international relations, had been arrested at Heathrow Airport on terrorism charges. Fahad, after fighting the order for 11 months, was the first American citizen extradited under the post-9/11 laws. He was taken in May 2007 to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan and placed in solitary confinement.

“I came to this country from Pakistan nearly 30 years ago, in 1982 with my wife and two young boys,” Fahad’s father said. “Coming from a Third World country, we were full of hope and looked towards America for liberty and opportunity. I had an American dream to work hard and give my sons good educations. I worked as an assistant accountant for the city of New York, six days a week, nine hours a day, including overtime, to support my family and to send both my kids through college. We all became U.S. citizens, and my sons fulfilled my dreams by completing their undergraduate and postgraduate education. I was very proud of them.”

“In high school and then as a student at Brooklyn College, Fahad became a political activist, concerned about the plight of Muslims around the world and the civil liberties of Muslims in America,” he went on. “Growing up here in America, Fahad did not fear expressing his views. But I was scared for him and urged him not to speak out. He would remind me that everything he did was under the law. But having grown up in a Third World country, I had seen that it did not always work this way, and so I worried. He was monitored by law enforcement and quoted in Time magazine. But he kept speaking out. And then, with his arrest, my fears came true.”

Judge Loretta Preska denied Fahad bail partly on the grounds that he had no ties to family and community. His family and friends, who sat crowded together in the courtroom, listened in stunned silence. And then, after five months, Hashmi, already isolated in solitary confinement, was suddenly put under “special administrative measures,” known as SAMs. SAMs are the legal weapon of choice used by the state when it seeks to isolate and break prisoners. They were bequeathed to us by the Clinton administration, which justified SAMs as a way to prevent Mafia or other gang leaders from ordering hits from inside prison. The use of SAMs expanded widely after the attacks of 2001. They are frequently used to isolate terrorism case detainees before trial. SAMs, which were renewed by Barack Obama in October, severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world. They end calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. Fahad, once in this legal straitjacket, was not permitted to see much of the evidence against him under a legal provision called the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from those being prosecuted.

The weekly visits Hashmi’s family made to the jail in Manhattan were canceled. A single family member was permitted to visit only once every two weeks, and on a number of occasions the family member was inexplicably denied admittance. During the last five months of the trial Hashmi’s family was barred from visiting him. Anyone who has contact with a prisoner under SAMs is prohibited by law from disclosing any information learned from the detainee. This requirement, in a twist Kafka would have relished, makes it illegal for those who have contact with an inmate under SAMs—including attorneys—to speak about his or her physical and psychological condition.

Once the SAMs were imposed, “He wrote us occasionally—one letter on no more than three pages at a time—but he was allowed no correspondence or contact with anyone else,” his father said of his son. “In addition, because of Fahad’s SAMs, we were not allowed to discuss anything we heard from him, including his health or any details of his detention or what he was experiencing, with anyone else. It was like being suffocated.”

In a pretrial motion, Hashmi’s lawyer presented the extensive medical and scholarly research that demonstrates the severe impact solitary confinement has on human beings, often leaving them incapable of defending themselves during their trial. It did not sway the judge. Fahad lived in a universe, before ever being sentenced, where he had no fresh air and was subjected to 23-hour lockdown and constant electronic surveillance including when he showered or relieved himself. He was barred from group prayer. He exercised alone in a solitary cage. He was denied access to television or a radio. His newspapers were cut up by censors. And this was all before trial.

“These years have brought deep disillusionment for my family in the American justice system,” his father said. “Fahad was restricted in reviewing much of the evidence against him, and even his attorney could not discuss much of the evidence with him. Secret evidence is something we knew from back home. The judge accepted the prosecutor’s motion to introduce Fahad’s political activities and speeches into the trial to demonstrate his mind-set. Where was the First Amendment to protect Fahad’s speech? Two days before the trial was set to begin, Judge Preska agreed to the prosecutor’s motion to keep the jury anonymous and kept under extra security—even though this could have frightened the jury and affected how they viewed Fahad.”

“On the day before trial, nearly four years since he had been arrested, I had just returned from dropping off clothes for Fahad to wear to court when I received a call from my attorney,” Fahad’s father said. “The government had offered a deal to drop three of the four charges against Fahad, if he accepted one charge which carried a 15-year sentence and Fahad had agreed to this plea bargain. I was shocked by my son’s decision on the eve of his trial, but after I thought more, I wondered how anyone could have decided differently in his situation. Fahad had been in solitary confinement, under SAMs, for nearly three years. The judge had in every instance sided with the government in pretrial motions. If convicted, Fahad faced a possible 70-year sentence. Under those circumstances, Fahad’s decision to accept one charge was no longer surprising. He has been in for five years this June.”

“The U.S. government is concerned about human rights in China and Iran,” he went on. “I wonder about Fahad’s rights, and how they have been blatantly violated in this great land. It seems like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is only a saying. My son was treated as guilty until proven innocent.”

“The Muslim community supported my son by offering prayers, particularly in the month of Ramadan,” he said. “But they were initially afraid to raise their voices against injustice. This reminds me of the fear the Chinese have under Communist rule, or Iranians under Ahmadinejad. As a citizen, I now have developed fear of my own government.”

“For one charge for luggage storing socks, ponchos and raincoats in his apartment, he is serving a 15-year sentence in the harshest federal prison in the country, still in solitary confinement, still under SAMs,” his father said. “The cooperating witness in the case, the one who brought and delivered the luggage, is now free and able to enjoy his life and family.”

The state, by making us afraid, is able to justify the disease of permanent war and the silencing of those who dare to dissent. The terrible suffering we have unleashed throughout the Middle East is rendered invisible if there is no one to decry it and document it. Communities and families, not only in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but at home, have been plunged into needless grief and suffering because of the atrocities committed in our name. The despair and bewilderment of Fahad’s father are a reflection of the wider despair and bewilderment that have gripped the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have been forced to confront the dark heart of empire. In their pain we stand condemned.

“There are many things I’d like to be able to say about the visit and my son’s continuing detention, but because of Fahad’s SAMs, I am forbidden,” his father said. “Everything has changed for my family. Our first grandchild was born 19 days after Fahad’s arrest, our second two years later. But now everything has a cloud over it—graduations, birthdays, holidays, going to the store or the park or visiting family or running errands, and particularly the Eid day. In other words, we have lost our happiness.”

-fin-

Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is

“The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

Measuring Quick Sand

Matthew Hoh

June 9, 2011 – In the Autumn of 2006, in the western part of Iraq’s Anbar Province, US Marine and Army units were taking dozens of attacks a day. Leaving one of the many bases we occupied in the Euphrates River Valley seemingly guaranteed a firefight, attack by a sniper or, more likely, a strike from an IED. Cooperation and coordination with local Anbaris, was, to put euphemistically, difficult. When we came on the streets, the people left the streets. Tom Ricks’ prize winning account of our war in Iraq, Fiasco, could not have had a better title to account for what we were enduring.

However, visible and evident change in the conflict occurred because of the Anbar Awakening and the transformation of “Anti-Iraqi Forces” into “Sons of Iraq”. Those Iraqis that had formed the core of the insurgency in Anbar changed sides. The Anbaris that had been putting bombs in the sides of roads and providing safe shelter for snipers turned on the bomb makers and shooters. Politically, the tribal leaders of Anbar abandoned their previous hospitality towards al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, and reversed their previous rejection of cooperation with the Shia dominated government in Baghdad. For those present, what was most important was that attacks against us, against US Marine and Army units that were operating in the hell that was Anbar Province, were, by early Spring 2007, down to merely a handful. The presence of this change was meaningful and concrete. It was not limited to just certain locations, its rapidity was spooky and the very dramatic drop in our casualties was real proof of its existence.

The change in the Iraq War that began in Anbar in late 2006 was sincere and lasting. In April 2007, one of my replacements lamented his deployment into “a boring area”, while by September, General David Petraeus, backed by clearly understandable data and evidence, was testifying to Congress that progress in Iraq, again, best underscored by a very real drop in violence and casualties, was well underway.

Now, similar claims of progress in Afghanistan are being pronounced and accepted despite an absence of evidence to demonstrate such progress. Statements from officials, military or civilian, are swallowed without question and even stalwart critics of the war in Afghanistan caveat their assessments and recommendations with assertions of military progress.

But progress, militarily and on a strategic level, is just not there.

If General Petraeus were to testify today and to use the same forms of data he used in 2007 it would show this past May to have been the deadliest May ever for US and NATO troops; with April and March achieving the same dubious titles. He would note wounded totals on pace for 600 a month, while IED attacks occur over 50 times a day. The General would show that from January-March 2010, the insurgency launched roughly 1800 attacks in Afghanistan, while from January-Mach 2011 they were able to launch nearly 2700. General Petraeus would highlight that attrition in the Afghan Security Forces is so bad that we must recruit three Afghans to fill each space and would acknowledge that currently eight in ten Afghan men believe our operations are bad for their country. All this following 2010, which was the deadliest year of the war for all sides.

Against this, and nearly all other data and evidence, it is clear that the insurgency’s momentum and tempo of operations has not been adversely affected by our surge in Afghanistan. Against a great input of American troops and money over the last two years, and by any measurable standard, the insurgency has only gained in its effectiveness and strength, which translates into an increased reluctance to negotiate.

In 2009, the United States had the opportunity to disengage itself from an internal Afghan conflict and to transition its role from one of belligerent to one of mediator. Rather than de-escalate the conflict in an attempt to stabilize Afghanistan and the broader region, we chose to escalate the conflict. We now must accept we have gone from being waist deep to chest deep in someone else’s quicksand.

We expect our service members in Afghanistan to do the hard, brutal and savage fighting our policies ask of them without question. They do. Their expectation of those of us in Washington, those of us in air conditioned offices, wearing ties and high heels, who wake each day safe with our families, is that we ask hard questions, examine the reality of the conflict and not accept assertions of success without fact. As we reach an opportunity in July to transition our role in Afghanistan, we must recognize our current policies have proven counter-productive and shift to a policy of de-escalation and negotiation.

Similar to Henry Kissinger’s recommendation yesterday, the Afghanistan Study Group recommends ceasefires, large troop reductions (30,000 this year, 40,000 in 2012), reformation of the Afghan government, and political negotiations within Afghanistan and amongst its neighbors to stabilize Afghanistan and the region, and to begin to get the United States out of Afghanistan’s quicksand.

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This article appeared at – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-hoh/measuring-quick-sand_b_873801.html

You can help by calling your Senators’ offices and tell them to sign onto the bi-partisan Merkley-Lee-Udall letter urging President Obama to begin significant and substantial troop reductions from Afghanistan next month.  You can also sign this petition.

Follow Matthew Hoh on Twitter: www.twitter.com/matthewhoh

Weekly Update into Afghanistan Situation – June 10, 2011

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

June 10, 2011 – The results of a two-year congressional investigation were released on Wednesday and called on the Obama Administration to seriously consider from all angles, the future of the Afghanistan nation-building assistance programs in the reality of US troop withdrawal to begin this summer.

Although the report was issued by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic team, bi-partisan feelings for the reduction of American taxpayer money being spent in Afghanistan are stronger than ever, considering that the vote last week in Congress to amend US-Afghanistan spending was only 12 votes short of passing.

Although the report condoned the practice of using aid money to “stabilize” (read: bribe locals into submission & pay families off for dead civilian losses) it also, for the first time, recognized that the addition of large sums of foreign dollars into the local economy, such as the addition of large sums of foreign soldiers into the local communities, has had the effect of de-stabilizing the entire Afghanistan economy and social structure – and it currently accounts for 97% of the country’s gross domestic product.

There is also aid corruption that detracts from any attempts to build an Afghanistan Nation. This is done in the large scale by the foreign aid entities which take their money directly from their taxpayers back home and from international monetary relief funds. Unfortunately, that attitude of the foreign relief workers filters down to the collaborating Afghani locals, leading to local pettiness and in-fighting – as opposed to the attitude of “needing to get the job done to better life for the community” filtering up from the locals to the foreign aid workers who keep tight rein on the resources that are supposedly intended for the community.

There is also a more sinister practice of corruption, which is being continued in Libya today, consisting of aid money being committed to projects that are then the targets of direct military hits so there is no accountability as to whether or not the job was done. This results in a culture of aid corruption based on taking money to complete the project and not even attempting the job, just pocketing the cash.

-Jay Carney, Whitehouse spokesman, was asked on Thursday what President Obama meant when he said earlier in the week that a “big chunk” of objectives in Afghanistan had been met. Carney explained that Bin Laden has been killed, the Taliban’s momentum has been halted and there has been success against preventing an alQaeda “haven” in Afghanistan.

What Carney did not explain was that alQaeda has never been accepted by the Afghani people since alQaeda seems to have the same no-holds-barred policy on civilian casualties that NATO does. As for the Taliban, 90% of Afghani resistance to foreign soldiers in Afghanistan are Afghani civilians doing the same thing me or you would do if a foreign army invaded our homes. Because less than 10% of Afghani resistance to foreign forces is Taliban it has become less important to halt their momentum then to halt civilian and non-combatant casualties. In fact, it is the same disregard for civilian casualties by foreign armies that has actually increased solidarity between Taliban and any other entities that civilian Afghanis see protecting civilian life.

-On Thursday morning, at a closed-door meeting of NATO defence ministers, countries that have so far been allied in support of US actions in Afghanistan discussed the beginnings of a timetable for the withdrawal of US soldiers from the country, a withdrawal that many international defence ministers are hoping will be the cue for their own soldiers to finally be able to stand down.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that although the troops will begin pulling out from Afghanistan next month, the President will “resist a rush to the exits and we expect our allies to do the same”. The current target is a 2014 withdrawal date, but many fat-cat contractors have been joking for years how they will never leave. Hopefully, a staggered pullout this summer culminating in a larger removal of troops in 2012 can be agreed upon.

General David Petraeus was on-hand to brief the 28 foreign ministers in attendance and will be responsible for presenting President Obama with several different options for troop reduction within the next two weeks.

-Meanwhile, Pakistan and Afghanistan heads of state and communities met this past week to declare unity of struggle and purpose to co-ordinate efforts for a collaberative peace committee comprised of members from both nations who will be meeting for the first time officially tommorrow. The first purpose of the committee will be to arrange for official peace talks to begin with the Taliban and to try to make NATO understand that wanton disregard for civilian and non-combatant casualties and victims makes the job of maintaining the peace harder in the respective governing states and provinces.

“The struggle (to fight terror) is the struggle of all and the victory will be in the interests of all,” said Afghanistan President Hamid Karzi.

Canada’s Role in Afghanistan – June 10, 2011 

-Despite a ridiculously costly effort (charged to the Canadian taxpayer) by the Canadian Military and the meanstream media to prolong the occupation of Afghanistan, the fat-cat contractors in this country are going to have to face the reality that their “golden goose” contract cover in Afghanistan is coming to an end.

No matter how many articles get written in the media applauding Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan - Pamela Wallin in the Vancouver Sun this week went so far as to call it “worthwhile” - the famous excuse of having to win Afghani “hearts and minds” has never had any hope of being achieved by any foreign armies, Canada’s included, that show no respect or heed to the value of Afghani civilian life. In fact, there are analysts suggesting that the lack of concern for civilian casualties by NATO and foreign forces is a direct result of their awareness that they are incapable of winning Afghani “hearts and minds” because they are unwilling to share the reconstruction effort and resources with the Afghani people – this would defeat the purpose for what the fat-cat contractors are using Afghanistan for in the first place.

The only battle for “hearts and minds” that the Canadian Establishment truly feel they have to win is the PR battle at home, for Canadian “hearts and minds”, which will allow the Afghanistan disaster capitalism scheme to continue profiting Canadian contractors at the expense of Afghani civilian and non-combant lives and Canadian taxpayer dollars.

Unfortunately, it is not just contractors who are milking the life out of Afghanistan, the country is also being milked dry by the “intelligence” cells of Western agents who view the segregated Green Zones, setup throughout the Middle East from Iraq to Afghanistan, as their own personal, private resort and night clubs –the time of their lives funded by the lives of Afghani civilians and a vacation charged to the taxpayers at home. Pakistan shut down three Western “intelligence” fusion cells last week for various reasons, and Afghani President Hamid Karzai has been calling for a more inclusive and honest collaboration between Afghani and Western representatives for the last five years.

It has become so painfully obvious that foreign forces are just holding in Afghanistan to prolong the cash cow from their taxpayers at home that the reality of a withdrawal from Afghanistan has finally been recognized. This reality has not only been recognized by the world community but even by those “intelligence” agents and crews who have no clue as to the needs of Afghani civilians. Maybe the needs of Afghani civilians weren’t listed in the briefing at the courtesy tent in the Green Zone – Kabul. I don’t know, I was never invited.

-Murray Brewster, in the Canadian Press this week tried to define the Canadian “legacy” in Afghanistan – what will remain after we have left. Clearly, the 155 dead Canadian soldiers were not mentioned, but Canada’s relationship with Improvised Explosionary Devices (IEDs) was the gist. Most important for Canadians to understand, perhaps the very reason for our upcoming withdrawal, is the fact that the Canadian “legacy” in Afghanistan will not be what’s left behind in that country after we leave as what remains in Afghanistan will have remained despite our efforts.

The Canadian “legacy” from Afghanistan will be what we have failed to accomplish in this country, in Canada, with the 7 million dollars a day of public tax money that has been spent for eight years in the sandbox on Green Zone nightclubs, extraneous military hardware and fluffer expense accounts. Meanwhile, at home, Canada’s Health Act will have to be re-evaluated in 2014 and the Conservatives are planning to cut Canada’s social Medicare programs heavily – they will claim the Afghanistan drain of public monies as their reason for needing to privatize health care.

Basically, the same fat-cats and government contract hogs will try to start keeping their troughs full at the expense of Canadian social services, since they will no longer be able to skim off Afghani social programs once Canada leaves Afghanistan.

It is most ironic and most telling how the transgressions that Canadian citizens let pass in other countries, even when it is our very own Canadian companies and multi-nationals responsible, will always come home to infect our operational systems if Canadians citizens are complacent long enough.

For years Canadians stood by, watched and said nothing, other than token face-saving gestures, while Canadian mining companies and other resource “developers” pillaged resources and communities from Africa to Latin America and the Middle East. What happened? If Canadians were willing to allow resource extraction to destroy environmental sustainability and continuity in other countries then it was only a matter of time before Canada would be subjected to the same land-rape; hence the Tar Sands. After all, why wouldn’t Canadian companies continue at home what they have been doing abroad for years? Especially if Canadians didn’t raise a condemning fuss when the damage was being done in Mexico or Guatemala.

Now we return to the Canadian “legacy” from Afghanistan. Even though a majority of Canadians oppose what Canada is doing in Afghanistan, the Canadian public has simply allowed “business-as-usual” to continue for the last eight years at the cost of seven million dollars a day of taxpayer money. What has Canada been doing in Afghanistan? Absolutely nothing but holding.

All the money accumulated in the name of creating an Afghani infustructure and social service has gone into preventing Afghanis from developing their own social structures, destroying all the existing community networks and creating Afghani dependency on foreign aid funding. It’s almost as if Canadian Forces are stationed in Afghanistan to prevent Afghanistan from developing itself, just so the Canadian military and industrial overlords can continue taking from the Canadian public purse in the name of developing Afghanistan.

When Canada is finally forced to leave Afghanistan, although it will be at least five years too late, where do you suppose all those military and industrial cash cows will turn to maintain their profit margins? The Canadian Establishment has spent the last ten years perfecting the techniques of privatizing social infustructure development in Afghanistan and is only too eager to try out those methods at home starting in 2014 with a rewriting of Canada’s Medicare system. If Canadian citizens just shake our heads and look down when we see Canadian actions that we know are wrong happening to citizens in other countries then it will only be a matter of time before Canada gets what it deserves. Remember the Tar Sands, but if you plan on forgetting then there is a little problem of Afghani-detainee torture abuse that Canadian officials still have to answer for that may refresh our collective cultural consiousness.

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The Weekly Update into the Afghanistan Situation and Canada’s Role in Afghanistan are published every Friday at ^{www.jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com}  You can contact me at tjeero@hotmail.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/afghan-nation-building-programs-not-sustainable-report-says/2011/06/07/AG5cPSLH_story.html

http://www.enewspf.com/latest-news/latest-national/24777-white-house-press-briefing-by-jay-carney-june-9-2011.html

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/jun/09/eu-nato-afghanistan/

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/canada-in-afghanistan/Afghan+mission+worth+effort/4924263/story.html

http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/news/national/article/136282–as-the-clock-ticks-down-canada-s-army-searches-for-legacy-from-afghanistan

http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2011/06/10/afghanistan-to-be-handed-over-to-gangsters.html

http://www.dawn.com/2011/06/10/afghan-president-karzai-opens-pakistan-talks.html

Weekly Update into Afghanistan Situation – June 3, 2011

Tariq Jeeroburkhan 

June 3, 2011 – This week Afghan President Hamid Karzai once again demanded that NATO attempt to reduce the amount of civilian and non-combatant casualties and victims that are caused by foreign operations in the country. It seems as if the call from Afghanis to NATO to please stop killing civilians is made every week and every week there are more non-combatants dead. This week Karzai made the specific demand that NATO cease all air attacks on homes.

“This should be the last attack on people’s houses. Such attacks will no longer be allowed,” Karzai demanded following a weekend airstrike in Helmand Province that Afghani officials said killed 14 civilians, 11 of them children.

About a year ago Karzai demanded that NATO cease all night raids in local villages – NATO agreed and then three days later killed twelve civilians in a night raid on a local village. This time Karzai has asked NATO to stop all air attacks – drones and manned – on Afghani homes. The only change in NATO’s response to the latest request to show some respect for civilians’ lives is that they politely declined.

In Brussels, the Associated Press reported that Oana Lungescu, a NATO spokeswoman said that the airstrikes would continue as NATO needed.

Clearly, it’s not the Afghani people who have created the impression of disrespect and irrelevance for Hamid Karzai – it is the reality of how the entire country and its civilians are regarded and used by NATO. With the latest round of Afghani civilian deaths and NATO’s reaction to it, it seems that military arrogance has reached such a point in the world today that entities like NATO are killing the very people for whom protecting is the justification used for engaging in foreign lands with an expense account budget from home.

-Perhaps as part of the fallout from not consulting with Pakistani intelligence before launching the Bin Laden assassination in Pakistan, the United States has learned that three of its intelligence “fusion” cells in Pakistan have been shut down by government authorities. The three US intelligence cells, one in Quetta and two in Peshawar, were set-up by the United States as intelligence-gathering cells for American operatives and Special Forces. However, according to a 2009 cable, they had never been granted official permission by the Pakistani military to engage in ground maneuvers with the Pakistani military – only to share in training and intelligence.

Pakistani tolerance for unilateral military decisions and actions taken in the region is finished. Not just as a result of incidents such as the shooting of two men by CIA operative Raymond Davis, who was then airlifted out of the country before having to face charges – but also as a result of what Pakistanis see happening to Afghani civilians who are at the mercy of NATO’s self-perceived impunity.

After the Davis incident, Pakistan expelled twelve US diplomats in response. Now, after the US attack on Bin Laden without Pakistani consent, permission or acknowledgment, Pakistanis look at these intelligence “fusion” cells, supposed to be for sharing intelligence information and have to ask “What are they there for?”. The closure of these “fusion” cells has effectively stopped the US training at these facilities; however, Pakistani intelligence will allow US experts to go over some of the documents and materials found at the Bin Laden compound.

-Maybe one of the reasons that Pakistan and other countries throughout the world are no longer willing to trust the United States with free hand in their lands anymore is because of how the United States shares information with its own people and handles its own resources. When President Obama deployed 30 000 additional troops to Afghanistan last year he announced that withdrawal would begin in July 2011.

CBS news first reported about a year ago, “It’s become increasingly clear that the July 2011 deadline is more about politics than policy”. As we’ve suggested all along here at Weekly Update the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan will be co-ordinated to win Obama back support from the US peace vote – just in time for his re-election campaign. This will be done in much the same way that adding troops in Afghanistan was done in time to win Obama support from the military establishment in Washington.

-House Democrats met with Obama at the White House on Thursday to discuss Afghanistan options and to lobby for an end to the war. Jim McGovern, from Massachusetts, was part of a recent Bill amendment designed to end the war in Afghanistan. The Bill only lost by twelve votes but will be re-introduced and passed this summer when Obama needs it.

“We need to get out of Afghanistan,” McGovern told the President yesterday morning, “we’re broke and the American people want an end to it”. Apparently, the President was sympathetic but gave no assurances. “I told (the President) that if it’s just a token drawdown, I think people will be pretty outraged by that. The American people want an end to this war,” explained McGovern.

-Despite last week’s commitment from Gen. David Petraeus to maintaining a military strategy in Afghanistan at basically any cost, it is clear that such a strategy has already failed. The acknowledgement of this failure and the removal of military personnel in Afghanistan is what the majority of American people are waiting for. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that recommendations on the widely expected withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan will come in the next few weeks and move rapidly after that.

-The problem with peace efforts in Afghanistan that everyone knows about but no one feels they can say out loud is the same problem as peace efforts in Iraq and with countless others: Those for whom profit and livelihood depend on war simply increase the amount of random attack chaos the closer the country gets to peaceful resolution.

This can come in all forms – in Iraq this was done by countless mercenaries with no allegiances (except to their own bank accounts) simply attacking any and all sides of the population  in attempts to cut off communication between the different communities within the society. In Afghanistan the problem is the same. Even with Obama’s surge of official troops last year, there are still more mercenaries (104,000) in Afghanistan then soldiers (100,000) and they hold the country hostage while they use it as their setting in which to play war games. The ability of the mercenaries to de-stabilize the host society is measured by the amount of money the American government can then divert from public funds in the name of “re-stabilizing” the host society. Basically both sides receive their funding from the same source – the American military establishment; however both sides will also suck up anything they can get from the taxpayers through the public treasury as well.

As both American and Afghani sources last week confirmed that German and Qatari-led efforts to peaceful negotiations between the US and Taliban had led to already three successful meetings between the two sides over the last several months, it is no surprise that the mercenaries were once again in action this week to surge an increase in civilian and non-combatant violence.

On Thursday afternoon unknown insurgents attack and killed 27 members of the Pakistani military and on Wednesday, a group of 300-400 unknown insurgents stormed a Pakistani border-checkpoint. Considering that this came a week after Pakistan shut down US intelligence cells in Pakistan and Taliban-US peace talks were confirmed, there would be absolutely no reason for any Afghani, Taliban or otherwise, to attack any segment of Pakistan or its military. So who would be responsible for the attacks? I would say those who have the most to lose from a peaceful settlement in the region and those who have the least regard for civilian and non-combatant life – namely the same mercenaries whose strategy of applying random chaos to overcome all human efforts to live peacefully is the only operational mandate of what they have done to Latin America and the Middle East over the last fifty years.

Canada’s Role in Afghanistan – June 3, 2011

-The whole kit and caboodle of Canadian Government bigwigs was in Afghanistan this week for their requisite flak-jacket photo opportunities. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Defence Minister Peter McKay were lodged in the Horn of Panjwa’i. They spoke of hope to members of the Van-Doos, the Royal 22nd Regiment stationed in Southern Afghanistan – although whether they hoped for an extension of military funding or a chance for the soldiers to return to their families at home was unclear. 

-Meanwhile, Opposition Defence Critic Jack Harris re-iterated calls for the Canadian government to release all the documents pertaining to the Afghani-Detainee Issue which have already been vetted by a judicial panel now that the Canadian election is over.

“What has changed since the election?” Harris asked. “We’re now supposed to wait for a House and maybe wait for another committee and maybe something else? This is all just part of the same process to hide the facts from the Canadian public”.

The New Democrats are therefore calling for a public inquiry to find out if members of the Canadian Forces consciously handed over detainees to abuse and torture from Afghani security forces.

The NDP said the Conservative government has the ability to release the information immediately.

-If anyone is wondering why we, as Canadians deserve a full public inquiry into what we are responsible for in Afghanistan, it is because of testimony that has made it through the stalling tactics and censors – such as from former army translator Ahmad Malgarai that Canadian intelligence officers in Afghanistan deliberately sent prisoners to be interrogated under torture by that country’s secret police:

“There was no one in the Canadian military with a uniform who was involved in any way – at any level – with the detainee transfers that did not know what was going on and what (Afghanistan National Security) does to their detainees.”

“I saw Canadian military intelligence sending detainees to the (Afghanistan National Security).”

-Thomas Walkom summed it up most succinctly in his analysis from one of his columns over a year ago:

“It would have made more political sense for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to blame the previous Liberal government that set up the transfer system, announce he had fixed everything and made all of the relevant memos public. But if these memos show that the reason for Canada’s cozy relationship with the Afghan secret police was to circumvent this country’s laws against torture, then a good many senior officials — and senior politicians — could face serious criminal charges.”

Maybe Thomas Walkom, Ahmad Malgarai and the NDP know something that we don’t and it’s about time we found out what, for the good of the country.

-It’s time to shift the debate about Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan from “Is this strategy working?” to “Can we still afford this?” Domestically, the Canada Health Act will expire in 2014 and the Conservatives are showing that they intend on privatizing Canadian health care. By maintaining a 7million dollar per day expenditure in Afghanistan the Conservatives can then claim a low budget barrel is the reason behind privatizing and cutting back on Canada’s healthcare service. If we, as Canadians, do not want to see our social services cut in 2014 then we have to call for a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan today.

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The Weekly Update into the Afghanistan Situation and Canada’s Role in Afghanistan have returned and are published every Friday at ^{www.jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com}  You can contact me at tjeero@hotmail.com

^{http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FRoyal_22e_R%25C3%25A9giment&ei=om3pTfjzG6bm0QHUvtzLAQ&usg=AFQjCNFk9ojXCPY3gLL0mwWMygGAlR7AIg&sig2=5_f-E7Qsz-1uJIgjrDG34w}

^{http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/796809–walkom-was-afghan-torture-a-deliberate-tool-for-canada}

^{http://www.winnipegsun.com/2011/05/13/release-afghan-detainee-documents-now-ndp}

^{http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-civilians-20110530,0,5897212.story}

^{http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2011/june/jun22011.html#1}

^{http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/jun/03/afghanistan-plan-remains-uncertain/}

^{http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20008781-503544.html}

^{http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/21/details-of-us-military-support-for-pakistan.html}

^{http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-us-pakistan-20110527,0,5278634.story}

^{http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghanistan-karzai-20110601,0,1448735.story}

^{http://jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/afghanistan-demands-that-nato-cease-all-air-attacks-on-homes/}

Afghanistan Demands that NATO Cease All Air Attacks on Homes

this article appeared first at – http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/31/afghanistan

Glen Greenwald

May 31, 2011 – A spate of horrific civilian killings by NATO in Afghanistan has led Afghan President Hamid Karzai to demand that NATO cease all air attacks on homes.  That is likely to be exactly as significant as you think it would be, as The Los Angeles Times makes clear:

“This should be the last attack on people’s houses,” the president told a news conference in Kabul. “Such attacks will no longer be allowed.”

Karzai’s call was viewed as mainly symbolic. Western military officials cited existing cooperation with Afghan authorities and pledged to continue consultations, but said privately that presidential authority does not include veto power over specific targeting decisions made in the heat of battle.

So we’re in Afghanistan to bring Freedom and Democracy to the Afghan People, but the President of the country has no power whatsoever to tell us to stop bombing Afghan homes.  His decrees are simply requests, merely “symbolic.” Karzai, of course, is speaking not only for himself, but even more so for (and under pressure from) the Afghan People: the ones we’re there to liberate, but who — due to their strange, primitive, inscrutable culture and religion — are bizarrely angry about being continuously liberated from their lives: “Karzai’s statements . . . underscored widespread anger among Afghans over the deaths of noncombatants at the hands of foreign forces.”

Indeed, the Afghan People — on whose behalf we are fighting so valiantly — are total ingrates and simply do not appreciate all that we’re doing for them.  A poll of Afghan men released earlier this month by the International Council on Security and Development found overwhelming opposition to NATO operations in their country.  First there was this in Southern Afghanistan, where most of the fighting has taken place and where we are liberating residents from Taliban tyranny:

 

Then there’s this from Northern Afghanistan, long said to be the region most sympathetic to NATO’s fighting:

 

The Taliban is widely unpopular among Afghans (though in the South, a majority oppose military operations against them); but whatever else is true, 8 out of 10 men, spread throughout all regions of that country, believe that NATO operations are bad for the Afghan people.

So the decisions of the Afghan President are totally irrelevant (when it conflicts with what we want).  The views of the Afghan People are equally irrelevant.  But we’re there to bring them Freedom and Democracy (while we decree their elected leaders’ decisions “merely mainly symbolic”) and are fighting for their own good (even though virtually none of them recognize that).  What a great war, now America’s longest and close to a decade old.

-fin-

Brampton man sues government alleging CSIS harassed him

This article appeared first at – http://www.thestar.com/news/article/997508–brampton-man-sues-government-alleging-csis-harassed-him

Isabel Teotonio

May 27, 2011 - A Brampton man is suing the Canadian government alleging Canada’s spy agency launched a smear campaign against him, painting him as a terrorist and pedophile because he refused to be an informant.

The recently filed $10-million lawsuit comes after child pornography charges against Ayad Mejid, 48, were dropped when a Superior Court judge ruled his Charter rights were violated by agents with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

In October, Justice Jane Kelly ruled Mejid was threatened and intimidated into handing over his laptop to CSIS to prove he wasn’t the online jihadist they suspected. Instead, the agency says it found images of child pornography — evidence deemed inadmissible because it was obtained under the guise of national security, which constituted a “flagrant abuse” of his Charter rights.

In a statement of claim, filed in a Brampton Superior Court, the father of three alleges he “continues to suffer physically, psychologically and emotionally” as a result of CSIS’s “campaign of harassment.”

The “innuendo” that he was involved in terrorism and pedophilia “have destroyed Mr. Mejid’s reputation, cost him many of his former friends and associations and made him effectively unemployable,” according to the lawsuit.

“(Mejid) was respected by the community and (CSIS) wanted an influential person they could use, but you don’t get informants by intimidating, harassing and threatening them,” said Mejid’s lawyer Anser Farooq. “You don’t go around telling people, ‘Help us or else.’ ”

Mejid alleges CSIS agents acted negligently, breached their statutory duty, abused public office, intimidated him and intentionally inflicted mental suffering.

None of the allegations in the lawsuit has been proved in court. A statement of defence has not yet been filed. Neither the Department of Justice nor CSIS will comment because the matter is before the court.

Mejid says CSIS agents became obsessed with the idea that he was Abu Banan, an online Islamist propagandist who supported Al Qaeda. He says when they couldn’t find evidence on his computer that he was Abu Banan, and when he refused to spy on the Muslim community, the agency turned against him.

To date, the Iraqi-born Canadian citizen maintains he has never engaged in terrorism or associated with any terrorist organization. He also says he has no idea how images of child pornography appeared on his computer but suspects they were planted by a CSIS agent.

According to the statement, Mejid alleges he was “forced” to give CSIS access to his computer about five times between 2005 and Oct. 16, 2007 to search for matters of national security. On Oct. 23, Toronto police arrested him for child pornography.

Mejid spent 39 days in jail, where he was “beaten by other inmates and threatened by both guards and inmates,” according to the lawsuit.

Prior to being charged, he was employed as a database administrator and office manager, earning about $39,000 annually, but since then he has been unable to find work.

Mejid alleges he suffered and continues to suffer loss of income and loss of opportunities as a direct result of CSIS’s conduct.

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Weekly Update into Afghanistan Situation – May 27, 2011

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

May 27, 2011 – At least one American Representative has begun calling for the re-evaluation of US Afghanistan strategy and patience is wearing thin. Vermonter Peter Welch is proposing a five-point plan for amending the Defence Authorization Bill that is up for Congressional approval and the first item on the agenda is a new strategy for America’s imposition in Afghanistan to be proposed within 60 days.

Also on the floor of Congress was the McGovern-Jones “Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act” which yesterday came within 12 votes of passing. This was a noticeable change in attitude on the floor of the Congress compared with the last 3 years’ worth of Congressional proposals to end America’s involvement in Afghanistan which had been received, up until yesterday’s vote, with nothing but yawns and “who cares?” from Congress. The defeated Amendment will now be converted into a Bill that will be re-introduced in the summer and will be timed to pass perfectly in co-ordination with Obama’s re-election campaign, during which he will attempt to win back support from the anti-war voters.

The Afghanistan Study Group, headed by Matthew Hoh – who resigned from the American Foreign Service because he refused to accept the country’s lack of direction in Afghanistan – had a good description for the apparent awakening of US politicians:

“(Congress is coming to) the realization that support for $120 billion a year nation-building adventures may not convey the appropriate image of fiscal responsibility to constituents enduring budget cuts back home”.

This would be doubly true now that Osama Bin Laden is dead – there are no longer any of the original reasons left for going into Afghanistan in the first place that NATO’s current methods of operation can achieve.

-Meanwhile, NATO’s affect of continuing to drone bomb and kill civilians with perceived impunity is apparently getting worse, not better, judging by their latest actions in the country. This afternoon a NATO airstrike has killed 85 people in Nuristan Province – of which 17 were Afghani policemen.  The chief of police and the head administrator were also wounded in the attack, in which exact death tolls are not yet certain, although approximately 70 of the dead are claimed to be Taliban fighters.

Understanding the methods of operation used by NATO is not difficult to understand given an objective interpretation of these emerging figures, and are a clear indication why 90% of Afghani resistance against NATO is purely civilian-led and has nothing to do with the Taliban. It appears as if the NATO strategy in Afghanistan is simply to have Afghani police and local soldiers confront armed resistance on the ground and then NATO airstrikes move in and carpet-bomb everything and everyone in sight, regardless of civilian or allied designations.

The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is simply a pseudonym for NATO operatives, has claimed that no Afghani policemen had been killed or wounded and that no civilians had been killed in any regional airstrikes. In fact, today’s ISAF press release did not even mention the attack at all.

-Britain’s former ambassador and special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles had some highly critical insights this week regarding the use of international force in Afghanistan and America’s lead role in particular. Cowper-Coles stated that the American direction taken by General David Petraeus has been “counter-productive” and “profoundly wrong”. He added that Petraeus should be “ashamed of himself” for boasting about body count numbers.

“(Petraeus) has increased the violence and tripled the number of Special Forces raids going out killing Taliban commanders. It is profoundly wrong and it is not conducive to a stable political settlement. I think that any general that boasts of the number of insurgents he’s killed should be ashamed of himself.”

Throughout England, in general, there is growing uneasiness that the United States is becoming further off-track from what they are trying to accomplish in Afghanistan. “There are different parts of the Washington establishment who are pulling in different ways,” said an anonymous British Intelligence official. “But as long as Petraeus is in Kabul, the military approach will take precedence”.

As Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit and expert on the Taliban sees it, “The Red Army tried that for ten years, and they were far more ruthless and cruel about it than us, and it didn’t work out so well for them”.

-And some good news is that the NY Times is reporting that American officials have met with senior aides to the Taliban leadership at least three times in recent months to explore and lay foundation for direct peace talks. The meetings have been facilitated by Germany and Qatar and have been confirmed by both American and Afghani sources, however under the conditions of anonymity because of an apparent media ban on reporting peaceful developments in the region.

Hopefully, the establishment and continuation of these talks, in addition to the re-commitment for defining an exit strategy in Afghanistan by the US congress – are not just showing the world that the US is slowly understanding that a change in direction is necessary – hopefully this time the US will deliver, the world, specifically regional partners Pakistan and India have long been calling for these negotiations to begin.

Canada’s Role in Afghanistan – May 27, 2011

-Canada’s death toll in Afghanistan is now 155 as Cpl. Yannick Scherrer today became the latest Canadian soldier to be killed in a bomb blast in Afghanistan, just southwest of Kandahar City.

-Nik Nanos made some interesting comments and stats analysis on his blog this week. He noted that 67% of Canadians believe that Canada’s actions in Afghanistan make this country and its citizens more at risk of terror attacks – precisely the opposite result of what a “security” mission should accomplish. He also noted that 55% of Canadians believe Canada should pull out of Afghanistan if casualties continue – 40% of Conservatives, perhaps unsurprisingly as their families make up a large part of our Forces, felt the same way.

In terms of affecting Canada’s political future, Nanos explained that although most foreign policy issues usually stay below the radar, Afghanistan is a sleeper issue.

“Whenever Afghanistan is in the news Tory numbers in Quebec drop. Although the mission may be good at consolidating core Tory support it basically throws a wrench in any effort for the Tories to build a majority coalition.”

Basically, maintaining a majority government will depend on Conservative support in Quebec that will not be there as long as the Conservatives keep Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.

-What Nanos didn’t mention (maybe he didn’t have the numbers!) is that the primary Afghanistan issue, the issue that has the potential to bring down the majority-Conservative government before their mandate is up –  is the Canadian- Afghani detainee issue and its fallout.

With the stigma of war crimes looming over all Canadians for 5 years now, the Conservatives have done nothing but stonewall and obstrifucate on releasing any information pertaining to Canada’s involvement in torture and assistance in the torture of Afghani detainees. In fact, many insiders are claiming that the Conservative government and the Department of Canadian Defence have been well aware of Canada’s culpability in torture since at least 2006, and have gone so far as to prorogue Parliament in order to avoid dealing with this issue; instead just hoping to put it off until another government has to deal with the ramifications. Now with a majority government and looking at a fresh five-year term, the Conservatives are going to have to give the Canadian people the full public inquiry that we have been calling for – calls coming in particular from now-opposition NDP defence critic Jack Harris and Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair.

Politically, the Conservatives are once again liable to be found in contempt of Parliament (if not the entire country) should a full public inquiry uncover that the government has known about this issue for years and not done anything about it. What is most interesting is that scandals like this usually surface at the end of the term – MP Mulcair went so far as to compare it to Nixon’s Watergate -”The truth always gets told…it always comes out,” said Mulcair. In this case we have a newly-elected government that still has not answered or addressed the transgressions and stigma of war crimes’ allegations that affect and misrepresent Canadians worldwide.

-What will be noteworthy, and Canadians have to realize that this is what the rest of the world is seeing Canada become, is that should our government fall as a result of the full public Afghani-detainee inquiry, that would mean that our last two governing dynasties, representing the two most established political parties in Canada, the Liberals and the Conservatives – will both have had their holds on power prematurely ended because of corruption, transgression and/or belligerence. Some Canadians may still feel as though we are a role model to the world but we can no longer assume that we still have the image of Boy Scout to the world. Do Canadians even care?

-Not surprisingly, the Department of Defence on Monday appointed a former Provincial Supreme Court Chief Justice, Patrick J. LeSage to review Bill C-25, the Statutes of Canada 1998, which made amendments to the National Defence Act concerning the military justice system, the Canadian Forces grievance process, and the military police complaints process. Unfortunately, the history of Canadian government’s handling of these affairs is accomplished in these steps: 1. Determine the extent of the damage 2. Amend the laws to remove accountability for the actions 3. Then have the inquiry.

This would be step two in that process.

One of many specific prior examples of this operation involves Canadian citizen Abdullah Al Malki, who was tortured for 482 days in Syria based on CSIS and RCMP mis-information. Two government inquiries, the Iacobucci Commission and the O’Conner Report undertook proceeding to determine the extent of Canadian culpability in Mr.Al Malki’s torture. While the inquiries were deliberating the Canadian Department of Justice amended their definition of complicity versus responsibility so that to this day no Canadian official has ever been held accountable or even apologized for the torture of Mr. Al Malki. This has occurred despite the fact that both government inquiries found that Canada did directly contribute to the torture of Abdullah Al Malki.

The most obvious connection here between Al Malki’s case and those of the Afghani detainees is that they were both a result of the same sense of impunity from the “security” agencies who acted as though they were not bound by the laws or regulations that they are paid to uphold. If Canadian security agencies were guilty of rendering a Canadian citizen to torture – how can our government expect any Canadian to seriously believe that the same organizational mentalities weren’t rendering Afghani citizen detainees to the same results? Obviously there is guilt of holding violations here if not overt war crime violations and every move that our Canadian government has made and continues to make on this issue must be scrutinized with overdue vigilance from a Canadian public that has been acting like they have forgotten how to care.

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The Weekly Update into the Afghanistan Situation and Canada’s Role in Afghanistan have returned every Friday at www.jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com

references -

http://www.wptz.com/news/27993350/detail.html

http://www.1stheadlines.com/afghanistan.htm

http://www.pajhwok.com/en/2011/05/27/police-among-85-killed-nuristan-airstrike

http://www.isaf.nato.int/article/isaf-releases/isaf-joint-command-operational-update-6.html

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h1735/text

http://www.afghanistanstudygroup.org/2011/05/27/afghanistan-weekly-reader-may-27-2011-congress-checks-president-almost/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/afghanistan-tactics-profoundly-wrong-ambassador

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/world/asia/27taliban.html?_r=1

http://www.ctv.ca/war/

http://www.nikonthenumbers.com/topics/show/27

http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/feature-vedette/2011/05/20-eng.asp

http://jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/morality-lessons-in-canadian-torture/

http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/defeated-amendment-to-end-afghanistan-war-made-into-bill

 

 

Gore Vidal Not Afraid To Tell It Like He Sees It

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

May 19, 2011 – Summer is just around the corner in Montreal; springtime is here, and with it the annual literary gathering known as the Blue Metropolis Festival, which last week welcomed to its stage renowned author, essayist and liberal activist Gore Vidal to set the tone for the literary happenings to come.

As the octogenarian was wheeled on to the dais, he paused, as if to announce himself to the crowd, and was overcome by the appreciative applause from the 600-plus crowd.

Before the night was over he was labelled as “cantankerous” by one young student, held up as the greatest U.S. president they never had by another, and would thoroughly entertain, if not enlighten, the congregated mass, though a dozen or so walked out before his talk had concluded.

In an intimate setting, Vidal opened by telling the audience that he “travels under the guise of a Canadian, which is still better internationally then the failed U.S. republic”.

“Americans are the dumbest people on earth, and I only want them to get better. Canadians are catching up (or down, depending on how you look at it),” he said.

Vidal spared no lash of the tongue for the United States and declared, “The American narrative that the U.S. gives aid through support and money to the nations of the world has been a lie since World War II.”

On the extent of the American Empire, Vidal declared, “the world should be grateful we ran out of gas; the American Empire will be little more than a footnote of history.” Then, in his best Texas-drawl, the 85-year-old Vidal paunched his jaw and explained “I’m a war-time president,” in tribute to George Bush, whose Republican Party Vidal proclaims has become an “openly fascist party.”

The political spectrum, internationally and domestically, was not the only target for this piquant, jovial public voice. Vidal had some harsh criticisms of today’s notions of journalism as well.

“The American and Canadian media are lacking, completely lacking in thought or original perspective. I prefer European sources for my information, not just for the events, but for the various perspectives presented.”

A lifelong historian and student of human experience as the nature that makes the world tick; Gore Vidal gave Montrealers a much-needed lesson in the history of their own media for the majority that had no clue about its origins.

Montreal’s English-language daily, The Gazette, has a history embedded with the evolution of the United States and its very creation can be identified as a turning-point in the role of the media as a tool for public relations spin.

“In 1776, Ben Franklin came to this city and helped to found and establish the Montreal Gazette, not to spread freedom of information to the free world as he saw it, but as a propaganda tool to monger up support in Canada for the American Revolution and to influence public perception.”

There were about a dozen or so attendees who walked out within the first 15 minutes. Some prepared for neither the direct, straight-talking honesty of Mr.Vidal nor the target of this honesty being so unabashedly the American Empire and what he considers the devolution of the global community as a result of the way that the United States conducts itself in international affairs.

Once the crowd got settled in, however, those who approached the evening with an openly academic mind were rewarded with an educating session of shared experiences, leaving the hall with more knowledge then when they arrived.

The second half of the programme had Vidal taking open questions from the floor, which became a learning experience for those listening, despite thestrangely entertaining fact that Vidal prefaced his responses to each with either a “what did he say?” or “what a ridiculous question!”

We learned that his favourite books were Thieves Fall Out, A Star’s Progress and Creation. We learned that he has a play re-opening on Broadway for its third run. Interestingly enough, Vidal’s attestation that he cannot live without anaesthetic, however jovial, did conjure up images of Brave New World’s soma dependency and prompted further the author to announce his position when asked about the de-criminalization of drugs.

“I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t do it around me!”

The most revealing moment arose when Vidal told the audience how he sees himself and his life when he pauses to reflect. Quite simply, Vidal told the hushed crowd he has dedicated his life to the study of history.

“My life has been a study of history. How we screwed up the United States step-by-step from the Revolution in 1776 to President Obama today. We were borne out of an uprising of tax offenders whose attitudes can be summed up by Ben Franklin’s belief that ‘Good ideas fail because of the corruption of the people’ and it doesn’t get any better from there.”

Gore Vidal impressed all in attendance — and, thankfully, all bodes well for the future of tell-it-like-it-is truisms in the literary world. As Gore Vidal has spent his life proving that the truth will come out even if not everyone likes to hear it.

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Tariq Jeeroburkhan is a Freelance Journalist and an Independent Content Enhancer and can be reached at tjeero@hotmail.com – His blog is at www.jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com and a 24 hour video stream featuring events and interviews from Montreal is available at www.livestream.com/montrealwhat .

Weekly Update into Afghanistan Situation – May 17, 2011

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

May 17, 2011 – The South Asia News has reported the death toll of foreign soldiers in Afghanistan during 2011 reached 171 as a roadside bomb in Southern Afghanistan killed a NATO soldier last Sunday; a soldier whose nationality was not released by military spokesmen.

-Meanwhile, the death of Osama Bin Laden should have been a successful culmination of eight years of international force being applied in the quest for justice; instead it was a perfect example of everything that the growing majority of the world’s population despise about forceful military intervention.

Pakistani intelligence, for example, felt “out of the loop” and declared that the “unilateral” action by the United States against Bin Laden had caused a breakdown in trust over security cooperation. In a ten-hour parliamentary session on Saturday, Pakistani lawmakers adopted a unanimous motion to review all aspects of their relationship with the US and urged the government to cut the NATO supply line through Pakistan if there is no change in the NATO drone bombing which has caused unacceptable amounts of Pakistani and Afghani civilian casualties. The use of force with impunity is the biggest double-standard that the US and its “coalition of the willing” impose in Afghanistan and beyond – much to the detriment of any good faith that the world might still hold waiting on the West. Goodwill Ambassador John Kerry will be in Pakistan this week to try to soothe tensions.

In his Cairo Address, Obama called on the Arab World to renounce violence as a practice and to use the examples of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela as role models for achieving success. Here is the problem: How can Obama call on the Arab World to resolve problems through non-violence and then expect to have US diplomacy taken seriously anywhere in the world when the US operation against Bin Laden is seen and applauded, by US government officials openly, as an assassination?

The attitude of vengeance killing displayed by the US operation on Bin Laden is absolutely contrary to the change in the US for the better that Obama had represented to the rest of the world. In fact, a capture mission, with the intended purpose of using a legal framework against Bin Laden as a precedent to show the world – in action, not words – that current world justice is obtainable through due process, would have won more hearts and minds throughout the world then any amount of soldiers or drone attacks. Unfortunately to indicate how low the global reputation of the Empire has sunk, it wouldn’t be surprising if the US was unable to pursue legal action against Bin Laden, as was the case with Saddam Hussein, because they didn’t have any evidence to convict him.

The Nuremberg Trials held to hold the Nazis to account after WWII were based on the human understanding that justice had to be obtainable through non-violent means to be sustainable. That is what the United States has failed to show the world that it is capable of doing – being sustainable through non-violence. The majority of the world is no longer interested in justifications for violence, only that it comes to an end.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden cannot even be justified as a means to an end because it’s a week after the assassination took place and the foreign soldiers are still in Afghanistan. The latest chapter of US military actions began in Iraq in 2003 on the basis of two things: Find the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and get Osama Bin Laden. The WMDs were a lie and Bin Laden is now dead – what is the US’ next excuse for invading and occupying the rest of the world? Protecting the people in the Arab World and Latin America who are revolting against the dictators that the United States imposed? No wonder Obama preached non-violence in Cairo. The majority of the world is no longer interested in excuses – it’s time to turn off the direct feed military trough from the public purse.

-Creating foreign addicts to US monetary aid is nothing new for American foreign policy, only maintaining this dependency while simultaneously claiming that Afghani independence is the measure for when we leave is a new low. This week, the white knights from the World Bank – International Development Agency – unleashed another 15o million dollars of baksheesh on Hamid Karzi’s Afghani government. The money was given to the Afghani government in the form of two separate grants – 100 million for irrigation and water-development, while another 50 million to develop the Telecommunications and IT sector. Any foreign involvement in Afghanistan which revolves around created dependency and not self-sufficiency for Afghanis is maintaining a perpetual occupation which is killing Afghani civilians and bankrupting American civilians.

-Despite the negative world view and declining coalition support, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was on Sixty Minutes Sunday night displaying remarkable optimism about US operations in Afghanistan. Gates claimed that the American offensive had driven the Taliban out of the populated areas and had set the stage for a “possible reconciliation”. That may be true with regards to the Taliban, but the reality on the ground in Afghanistan is that after 8 years of almost zero regard for Afghani civilian life by NATO and other foreign operatives, less than 10% of the armed resistance is comprised of Taliban. Over 90% of the current armed resistance to foreign occupation is comprised of Afghani citizens – farmers and city-dwellers- who are doing the exact same thing me and you would be doing if a foreign army invaded and occupied our country and cities.

-Remarkably, Gates suggested that Bin Laden’s death might enable “reconciliation” with the Taliban because the leader of Al-Qaeda would no longer be able to interfere with possible negotiations. The Taliban, fiercely independent, have always viewed Al-Qaeda as foreigners no different from NATO or the Soviet Red Army with regards to their imposition on Afghani self-determination, which is the reason that Bin Laden was forced out of Afghanistan by the Taliban and had to seek refuge in Pakistan. If the United States has dragged its feet and the public’s wallet for five years before considering the negotiation proposals originally made by the Taliban back in 2006, the Secretary of Defense had best come up with a better excuse then Bin Laden. The greatest deterrent to negotiations is and has always been NATO’s disregard for Afghani civilian life.

-Earlier in the day, NATO apologized for the death of a 12-year old girl and said it was investigating injuries to four other Afghani civilian girls, all under age 16. According to the Afghani provincial governor, the 5 girls were collecting firewood at the time of the attack. These incidents occurred in Kunar Province over the weekend, while in Nangarhar Province last week two children were also killed during night raids by US forces, causing angry civilian protests during which another young boy was killed. In March of last year, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan apologized, while President Obama expressed “deep regret” over the deaths of nine Afghani children, killed in an airstrike, who had also been collecting firewood.

Canada’s Role in Afghanistan – May 17, 2011

Richard Colvin

-Interesting that there was little to no discussion about anything involving Afghanistan during Canada’s recent election campaigns, it’s almost as if there was some sort of conspiracy of silence (politically it’s referred to as a “gentleman’s agreement”). That would never happen in an open, transparent democracy like Canada would it?

-Now that the election is over it is apparently fair game to discuss Afghanistan once again – and the newly-anointed opposition NDP firmly led the way.

NDP defense critic, MP Jack Harris announced last week that thousands of documents relating to Afghani prison visits, interrogations and diplomatic overtures should be made public immediately. There are reasonable grounds to suspect that the Canadian government and its field operatives knew or should have known that battlefield prisoners taken by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were being abused. That would implicate Canada in war crimes and violate international humanitarian laws.

In fact, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Louis Moreno-Ocampo said just before the Canadian election that he will investigate the war crime allegations against Canadians in Afghanistan if Canada won’t. Moreno-Ocampo explained that Canadian officials are not immune to prosecution if there is evidence – “We’ll check if there are crimes and also we’ll check if a Canadian judge is doing a case or not . . . if they don’t, the court has to intervene. That’s the rule, that’s the system, one standard for everyone.”

Opposition defense critic Jack Harris added to the calls of fellow NDP MP Thomas Mulcair in demanding a full public inquiry into Canada’s involvement in Afghani detainee torture and abuse.

-The CBC reported last September that Canada`s defense department had secretly began a “major inquiry” into actions and violations by Canadian special forces soldiers in 2008. Allegations were raised by one of the unit`s members which seriously implicated colleagues within the unit as well as the entire task force.

The initial probe looked into the mistreatment of detainees by Canadian forces between 2005 and 2008. No charges were filed, however before the election there was a follow-up, broader investigation on-going – the defense department has declined to comment.

The question that is on the minds of Canadians right now is that if two criminal investigations were launched by military police to probe the connection between Canadian special forces and the alleged improper killing of Afghanis, then why hasn’t there been a full public inquiry called to investigate the stigma of war crimes that is hanging over all Canadians internationally?

Obviously there was enough of a concern raised by the Canadian people to have the then-minority Conservatives release several box-loads of censored documents on the matter. That may have been enough to placate some people but it hasn’t cleared Canada’s international reputation and it is still leaves doubt in the mind of Canadians to the morals and values of their own representatives. This mess is so entrenched in the operating system that nothing less than a full public inquiry will restore faith in Canada’s honesty.

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The Weekly Update into the Afghanistan Situation and Canada’s Role in Afghanistan have returned and are published every Monday (new day!) at www.jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2010/09/14/sand-trap.html

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/southasia/news/article_1639225.php/NATO-says-foreign-soldier-killed-by-roadside-bomb-in-Afghanistan

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/15/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110515

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/05/congress-poised-to-give-president-power-to-continue-gwot-indefinitely.php

http://reliefweb.int/node/401852

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/267360/secretary-gates-rather-optimistic-about-afghanistan-bing-west

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/05/16/2016825/bomb-blast-kills-4-western-troops.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/16/us-afghanistan-civilian-deaths-idUSTRE74F31G20110516

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Kaa47svqM

http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/14/pakistan-nato-afghanistan-bin-laden

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/990894–ndp-calls-for-immediate-release-afghan-detainee-documents

http://jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/international-court-could-probe-possible-canadian-war-crimes-in-afghanistan/

NDP calls for immediate release of Afghani detainee documents

May 14, 2011 – The newly empowered New Democrats says there is no excuse to further delay the release of a huge batch of documents about Afghan detainees.

NDP MP Jack Harris, the party’s defence critic, said that with the election now finished and the documents ready to go, the thousands of pages of information about prison visits, interrogations and diplomatic overtures should be immediately turned over to the public.

The opposition parties suspect that somewhere in the cache of papers lies proof that the government knew or should have known that battlefield prisoners taken by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan would be abused in local prisons. That could implicate Canada in war crimes by violating international humanitarial laws.

A panel of judges tasked with reviewing and vetting the documents signalled during the five-week election that the first tranche of information was ready for release. But they said in a letter to party leaders that they would not do so until Parliament is reconvened because a committee made up of Conservative, Liberal and Bloc Quebeois members was disbanded with the election call.

The earliest that the committee could reconvene is the end of the month when Parliament comes back.

Harris called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to “show good faith” and immediately order the documents to be made public.

Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for the Prime Minister, said that the agreement signed between the three parties states that the process of releasing documents can resume when Parliament reconvenes.

“Given the changes to the composition of the House, discussions surrounding the process are best held after the House resumes sitting,” Soudas said in an email.

He noted that the Conservatives still support the release of the information even though its new majority status in the House of Commons means it could effectively block opposition measures designed to embarrass, shame or implicate Harper’s government in any wrongdoing.

Harris wouldn’t say whether his party, which leapfrogged the Liberals and Bloc to become the official opposition, will now try to obtain a seat on the detainee document committee. That way, it could have a more direct hand in vetting and pushing for information to be made public.

Harris said that his party still wants a public inquiry looking at whether suspected fighters captured by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were knowingly handed over to abuse at the hands of their Afghan jailors.

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Allan Woods – Ottawa

This article appeared first at – http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/990894–ndp-calls-for-immediate-release-afghan-detainee-documents

Allan Woods – Ottawa

Waiting for the Spark

This article appeared first at http://www.nader.org/index.php?/archives/2260-Waiting-for-the-Spark.html

Ralph Nader

May 14, 2011 -What could start a popular resurgence in this country against the abuses of concentrated, avaricious corporatism? Imagine the arrogance of passing on to already cheated working people and the jobless enormous corporate losses? This is achieved through government bailouts and tax escapes.

History teaches us that the spark usually is smaller than expected and of a nature that is wholly unpredictable or even unimaginable. But if the dry tinder is all around, as many deprivations and polls reveal, the spark, no matter how small, can turn into a raging inferno.

The Boston Tea Party lit up the American Revolution. Storming the hated Bastille (prison) by impoverished Parisians launched the French Revolution. More recently, in December 1997, an Israeli military vehicle rammed a civilian van in the West Bank killing seven occupants and igniting the first Intifada.

Last December, a young fruit vendor, abused by thieving police in a small Tunisian town, immolated himself in the local square. Seen by millions on Facebook, this self-sacrifice launched the Tunisian and Egyptian overthrow of their long-time dictators. Later, in Syria, after police arrested 13 youngsters in a southern border town for anti-government graffiti the place erupted in riots and rallies that are spreading to other cities.

A few weeks ago, many progressives and quite a few pundits believed that the recurrent, ever larger February-March rallies in Madison, Wisconsin by workers, students and others against the Governors’ and the Legislature’s attack on public employee unions and social services, following earlier blatant corporate welfare enactments, would be the long-awaited spark.

The Madison eruption spread briefly to Ohio and Indiana where Republican officials were moving in the same direction, punishing workers and families while leaving the corporate and wealthy to count their mounting privileges. There, the crowds were neither as large nor as frequent. In all these states, the Republicans got most of what they wanted, albeit with a possible, future political price to be paid. The rallies have subsided, not even culminating—as some organizers hoped—in a gigantic march on Washington, D.C.

Granted, rallying a long repressed people into losing their fear and demanding, as in Cairo’s huge Tahrir Square “out with the dictator”, is a simple, anthromorphic goal. In our country, the rallies are hardly as clearcut, though use of the citizen right of recall for Republican legislators, and later Governor Walker himself, may produce an interesting accountability election. But sparks are difficult to sustain.

In authoritarian regimes, there are few options for dissent or airing one’s grievances. So when the spark does occur, the climate is fertile for an explosion of outrages.

In the United States, there are largely myths such as “anyone can sue,” or “anyone can run,” or “anyone can directly tell off the President or the Mayor,” or “anyone can blow the whistle.” These combine with a few celebrated successes by rebels or an ordinary David taking on a Goliath for a win here and there, from a corporate-government ruling class that bends a little so that it doesn’t break.

Meanwhile, the inequality, gouging, political exclusions and overall gaps between the top one percent and the rest tighten the grip of the oligarchy and its draining, violent militarized empire.

Loss of control over almost everything that matters, including their children to daily direct corporate marketing of junk food and violent programming, is rampant. Over seventy percent of those polled told Business Week that they believed corporations had “too much control over their lives”—and that was in 2000 before conditions and controls—viz, the Wall Street collapse, severe recession and taxpayer bailouts—worsened.

The American people don’t see much they can do to counter the pressures of greed and power that tracks them daily from debt to debt, from lower standards of living to outright penury, from denial of critical healthcare to the iron collar of the cruel credit score, from inscrutable, computerized bills to fine-print contracts trapping their sense of unfairness into waves of frustrations, from being put on hold by the companies until they’re told no, no, no or penalty, penalty, penalty!

How do we break the cycle of despair, exclusion, powerlessness, and endless betrayal by those given the authority to bring down the exploiters and oppressors to lawful accountability?

The Empire rips up the Constitution and takes the reserve army of the young unemployed to kill and die in aggressive wars of the White House’s choice, with Congress watching from the sidelines; its only role to funnel trillions of tax dollars into the insatiable war machine’s unauditable budgets. President Eisenhower wanted us to control the “military-industrial complex”. Instead it grew much more out of control. Eisenhower’s grave warning as expressed in his farewell address in 1961 was prescient.

The spark can come from a recurrent sequence of abuses that strike a special chord of deeply felt injustice. Or it could be a unique episode or bullying that tolls the feeling “enough already” throughout the land. Such sparks cannot be manufactured; the power to arouse and break people’s routines is spontaneous.

When that moment comes, millions of Americans whose self-respect and keen sense of wrong will remind them precisely why our Constitution begins with “We the People” and not “We the Corporations”. They will realize the necessity for a Jeffersonian revolution.

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Ralph Nader will be in New Haven at Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine’s 20th anniversary public forum, 7-8:30 p.m. Saturday, May 14 at United Church on the Green, 270 Temple St, corner of Temple and Elm streets (Suggested donation: $10 advance. $15 at the door, cash or checks made to “The Global Center.” Advance tickets online and by phone only available until 12 noon Saturday. First come, first serve at the church.) Visit http://squeakywheel.net for more information.

Circular Logic for Idiots: 15 years of Liberal Party of Canada M.O.

Marie Pierre Guerin

May 7, 2011 – Guys, I leave you alone for 1 night, 1 night, and in that time, white haired middle aged men, in that short time span you’ve managed to resurrect Jean Chretien (who NO ONE under 40 remembers) who endorses Bob Rae (who’s another generic boring white haired middle aged man my grand-fathers age)  What? Are you for real? This is your big plan for saving your party? Do it again?

Clearly your war room logic is as follows:

“Hey, you know what’s not been working for us?

What we’ve been doing for the last 15 years?

Yup!

Wonderful! Lets do it again!

Yes, lets!

Yay!”

What?

This is your solution? Keep doing it? Over and over? What? Do you know how much alcohol I had to drink before your logic made sense to me?

Lots.

I had to drink lots of alcohol to follow your logic and even then your logic was a little fuzzy for my tastes but okay, give the horse a chance as dad says.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time.

Hey boys? I’m wearing a leather miniskirt with no underwear and come-fuck-me-heels.

Oh good, I have your attention.

YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!

So your master plan failed and your solution is to throw more of the same at it? Are you serious? This is it? Your great plan? Lets just do the same thing we’ve been doing that’s not made us win anything, what netted us the worst results in the history of our party and just, sorta, see where it goes?

Surely you must think the electorate are a bunch of massive fucktards.

Or maybe your plan is to just give up and make the stupidest choices possible in the hopes that people like me, people you should be worried about, people who would vote for you, just give up on the lot of you altogether? Because your logic, white haired middle aged men, makes as much sense as trying to catch a unicorn by throwing menstruating virgins doing the macarena at a wall. Over and over.

And over?

If you wanted to turn anyone under 45 right the hell off of ever voting Liberal in the history of Canadian politics FOR EVER, this would be the most perfect way to do it.

I just can’t figure out if you’re serious or not, white haired middle aged men. I have a hard time with circular logic and yours is the most circular I’ve been privy to in a long-ass time. So, white haired middle aged men, consider yourselves warned. I am going to hold each and everyone of you accountable for your vagrant disregard of logic. And common sense. And rationality.

And when shit goes all sorts of wrong for you, white haired middle aged men who think Canadians are stupid, I’ll make sure to make popcorn and catch a front row seat to your demise. And you can bet your white haired middle aged asses that I’ll be the first one to shout out “I told you so” and make smores for everyone. Mmmmm smores. Ew. I’m hung over. It’s so bright. It hurts ussssssss…..

Right.

In the meantime I’ll be over here, talking to real people, listening to real issues and trying to make a fucking dent in your My Dick Is Bigger Than Yours pissing match you boys so like to have with yourselves and we’ll just see who gets the most results. And since you couldn’t give a damn about what I have to say (and there’s a lot of me going around, do not be fooled boys) we’ll just see who garners more sympathy. Me, with my “lets listen to what real people have to say” or you with your  “well, after careful consideration and taking into account that we’ve been doing has been loosing for the last 15 years have decided to do it again”. Just cause?

Canadians, you contemptuous self-important overbearingly pompous asses, aren’t as stupid as you would make them out to be. And Canadians, my elitist no-you-can’t-play-in-our-yard-this-is-our-ball-and-we’re-going-home bunch of infantile immature irresponsible white haired middle aged men, can do anything, anything, when they get pissed off.

Just ask your buddies Michael and Stephane and Paul what Canadians are capable of doing when they decide they’ve had enough. Look at what happened to your lot not even 7 days ago. History…..

But hey, keep doing it again boys! Throw yourselves a nice shiny expensive diner next week while your at it to talk about how you’re going to do the same thing again. And again. And again?

Because hey, that’s been working out so well for you so far, right?

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Politics and communications junkie with a loud mouth and a start-up. Public and government relations specialist, part time person who writes things that other people happen not to hate, I am dedicated to humanitarian causes and the strenghtening of Ontario Quebec governmental relationships.  marie_pierre_guerin@hotmail.com

Canadian Boat “Tahrir” will sail to help end Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza

Canada Boat to Gaza – For immediate release:

May 5, 2011 – The Canadian Boat to Gaza campaign announces today the successful conclusion of arrangements to purchase and register a boat to carry the Canadian delegation to Gaza. The boat’s name Tahrir (Liberation in Arabic) has been chosen to honour the square in Cairo that was the focus of the democratic uprising that has spread hope across the Middle East.

 The Tahrir will sail with vessels from France, USA, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, and other countries, as part of the Freedom Flotilla II. This international movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people turns the spotlight on the blockade of Gaza and its 1.6 million residents whose access to resources and ability to travel has been unilaterally impeded by the illegal Israeli blockade.

 Fundraising for this campaign has been shared by thousands of Canadians from coast to coast to coast, and with the momentum building for this project we expect to secure the remaining amount needed over the next few weeks of fundraising. “We have been overwhelmed by the generosity of individuals and groups across the country” said Wendy Goldsmith of the Canadian Boat to Gaza Fundraising Committee, adding that “we are sure that with our boat now a reality, the community support will come through to raise the remaining funds needed.”

 The 25-metre Tahrir will carry approximately 45 people: delegates from across the country, high profile Canadians plus journalists. As well, the Canadian campaign has partnered with campaigns from other countries and will carry delegates from Australia, Belgium and Denmark. A new website tahrir.ca was launched today to coincide with news of the boat’s purchase and will be the site for online donations.

 Despite news that Egypt plans to open the Rafah border crossing, the maritime blockade by Israel remains a major obstacle to achieving normal life in Gaza. The Canadian Boat to Gaza and the Freedom Flotilla movement will continue our work until the Port of Gaza is opened to ensure free circulation of goods and people. “Gaza is the only port on the Mediterranean which is closed to shipping and the only coastal area in the world which cannot access its own territorial waters,” points out David Heap of the CBG steering committee. “Until the Palestinians of Gaza can travel freely and trade with the world, we will continue to challenge this illegal military blockade.”

 As the Israeli government continues to threaten the use of force against the Freedom Flotilla II, we call on all Canadians, including Members of Parliament from all parties, to join with us in demanding that the Canadian government take concrete steps to guarantee the safety of humanitarians headed to Gaza. “My heart is with the participants in the Canadian boat to Gaza in this important initiative for freedom and justice for Palestine. I urge the Canadian government to do all it can to prevent Israeli aggression against the flotilla and the activists aboard the boats,” said Jewish Holocaust survivor and Palestine rights activist Suzanne Weiss in Toronto.

 The world is watching: we will not be intimidated and we will not forget the Palestinians of Gaza.

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Interpreting the Election Results: Is Quebec Still a Part of Canada?

 Tariq Jeeroburkhan

May 5, 2011 – Despite four years of uninclusive and undemocratic decision making, or perhaps because of it, the Conservative Party now has a majority government and were the clear winners of Canada’s latest general election.

The night before the election every NDP and Green supporter vowed to prevent a Harper majority from happening – The day after the election Harper has his majority, and not one NDP or Green supporter cares because the NDP won over 100 ridings and Elizabeth May won her seat.

The election results keep everybody happy, and even the Liberals, who will be destined to fight amongst themselves to revive their party, have to be glad that at least they didn’t fare as poorly as the Bloc Quebecois.

The reality is that the Conservatives now have a majority government with a weaker opposition to their agenda. The leash has been removed from Harper while the opposition are either too caught up in personal victories or bemoaning their personal defeats to seem to care about the big picture future of this country.

The big picture indicates that a Conservative agenda dictating Canadian policy for the next five years will cause an even further decline in this country’s international reputation, while domestically; the rotation of the political landscape in Quebec represents a possible slide as well.

Basically, Quebec opposition to the Conservatives switched their vote from the Bloc Quebecois to the NDP – which accounted for the ‘orange wave’ in the province. Clearly, this had more to do with uniting to oppose a common enemy in conservative policy, rather than anything the NDP did to garner those votes themselves. In fact, it is precisely what the Bloc Quebecois refused to do – take a lead in the direction of Canadian policy as opposed to simply maintaining a Quebec status quo – which accounted for the change in Quebecers’ mentality within federal politics; the NDP being the main beneficiary of this switch as the Liberal party in Quebec is still feeling the negative effects from the corruption findings of the Gomery Commission in 2006.

Now the irony within Quebec is that despite Quebecers removing their support from a party with Nationalist/Separatist sentiment and placing our faith in a party with a proven Federalist track record, Quebec has never been more on the outside looking in. Even under the Liberal governments of Trudeau, the Canadian government in Ottawa has never been more under-represented from this province then the current majority Conservatives are today.

A friend of mine on facebook observed – we now have a Canadian majority government with 0 Quebec support. Quebec representation in the House will be comprised of Vegas vacationers, ‘des poteaux’, unilingual Anglos and McGill Daily writers.

Will it be much longer before we see a rebirth of Quebec nationalism? Separatist Pauline Marois will be here in 2 years, my facebook friend concludes.

There is also another possible direction for Quebec, which is a much more likely scenario if the NDP ‘orange wave’ does turn out to be comprised of nothing more than political opportunists and Vegas riff-raff looking for expense accounts. The NDP candidate in Berthier-Maskinonge, for example, doesn’t speak French and has been AWOL since she won the election by 6000 votes in a riding she had never been to. Apparently, she spent part of her campaign drumming up support on a Las Vegas vacation and hasn’t been seen since. Granted, a lot depends on the Liberal Party’s ability to re-configure and re-apply itself as a party of relevance within the province – however, Quebec can be a province where the Conservatives can add seats to their majority in the next election. The next five years will determine who will get Quebecers’ support in the next election, and if no one deserves it – Quebecers themselves will revive the Bloc!

The most important thing for Federal politicians to understand is that given the fact that Quebec ridings that were 60% francophone still voted for predominately English NDP candidates – Quebecers are currently prepared to prioritize a social agenda over language differences – 5 years of neglect from the Conservatives in Ottawa or from their own NDP representatives and the window for change that we have today may no longer be open.

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check out the livestream at www.livestream.com/montrealwhat

International court could probe possible Canadian war crimes in Afghanistan

this article appeared first at – http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/982371–international-court-could-probe-possible-canadian-war-crimes?bn=1

Michelle Shephard and Richard J. Brennan

April 29, 2011 – The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor says he will investigate war crime allegations against Canadians over the handling of Afghan detainees if Canada won’t.

Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo says in a documentary soon to be aired on TVO that Canadian officials are not immune to prosecution if there is evidence that crimes were committed by handing over detainees to face torture.

When Toronto filmmaker Barry Stevens asked Moreno-Ocampo in his film, Prosecutor, if the ICC would pursue a country like Canada over its role in Afghanistan, he replied:

“We’ll check if there are crimes and also we’ll check if a Canadian judge is doing a case or not . . . if they don’t, the court has to intervene. That’s the rule, that’s the system, one standard for everyone.”

Moreno-Ocampo could not be reached for further comment about the case Thursday when attempts were made by the Star.

Officials at the Department of Justice and Department of National Defence were unable to comment Thursday and said they had not seen the film.

Some legal experts have suggested the Canadian government’s dismissal of calls to launch a judicial probe into the allegations has left the door open for outside scrutiny.

“There is no question that there has been a deliberate refusal of our domestic judicial system to have it examined,” said Stuart Hendin, a University of Ottawa scholar specializing in armed conflict and human rights, noting that Canada is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention Against Torture.

Hendin argued there is “sufficient information” that Canadians, including senior military personnel authorizing and implementing the transfers of detainees, knew there was a substantial risk of torture and abuse.

“That being the case there is very real and credible exposure to prosecution,” he said.

Parliamentary hearings probing the allegations were shut down in 2009 after Conservative MPs boycotted the proceedings. Earlier this month, the justice department went to court in a bid to limit the findings of an independent report by the Military Police Complaints Commission, probing whether the military police knew that detainees transferred to Afghan custody faced a substantial risk of torture.

The government had refused to turn over military and other government documents dealing with the detainee case until threatened with contempt of Parliament. Those documents were subsequently vetted by a judicial panel and ad hoc committee of MPs, but still remain secret, their release on hold because of the election.

Parliamentary debate has at times been dominated or paralyzed by the Afghan detainee affair but discussed only in the abstract during the election campaign — usually to underscore criticism about the Conservative government’s indifference for parliamentary democracy.

“It’s clear that Canada is not dealing with the issue and the ICC can look at the issue on its own,” said Paul Champ, the lawyer representing Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Rights Association, which launched the complaint with the MPCC.

Stevens’ film made its debut at the Amsterdam documentary film festival last fall but will air for the first time in Canada on May 11. It’s an intimate portrayal of the somewhat maverick Moreno-Ocampo, tracing his path from Argentina’s Trial of the Juntas to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the ICC’s first prosecutor.

Moreno-Ocampo says in the film that he has been monitoring reports of alleged crimes in Afghanistan, including those committed by the Taliban.

Stevens said he raised the Canadian reference when confronting the prosecutor about criticism that the court is “white man’s justice,” concentrating only on African nations.

“Just from a personal filmmakers’ point of view, I didn’t like the kind of ivory tower human rights attitude in the West, where we look like countries like the Congo and fail to look critically at our own behaviour,” Stevens said in an interview.

There are three ways in which a case is referred to the ICC — by a member country directly (both Afghanistan and Canada are members), at the behest of the UN Security Council (as is the case with Libya), or if the prosecutor initiates the investigation after determining the host country has failed to the job.

Moreno-Ocampo has already taken that initiative, issuing summons last month for six Kenyan government officials accused of crimes against humanity during the country’s post-election violence in 2007-2008. But targeting NATO countries in Afghanistan would be politically fraught and few believe Moreno-Ocampo would go that far.

Stevens said that some of Moreno-Ocampo’s remarks could be viewed in the context that the prosecutor believes part of his job involves being a human rights promoter.

“Even if he doesn’t open an investigation into Afghanistan, and even if he never went after the Canadian issue, he still sees that as part of his job to remind Canadians that they are subject to the same law.”

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Canadian Values and the International Citizen

this article appeared first at – http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/04/25/LaytonSurge/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=250411

Murray Dobbin

April 27, 2010 – The flurry of poll-driven news like this and this last week, suggesting an unprecedented surge in support for the NDP, has stunned political commentators and given progressives something to cheer about for the first time in ages.

And paradoxically, it comes at a time in the election when it seems that no matter how many sleazy scandals hit the Conservatives, they stay right on the edge of majority territory.

If the NDP surge is real, it may represent the breaking of an historic contradiction in Canadian politics. One of the largely unspoken features of Canadian political culture is the gap between the majority’s stated social and community values and their voting patterns. The CBC’s fatally flawed Vote Compass notwithstanding (it’s virtually impossible to get a result suggesting your values line up with the NDP), years of polling and focus groups suggest that if there was a direct line between voting and values, the NDP would win every election, hands down.

Even though the NDP is skittish when it comes to talking about tax increases (rightfully anticipating a firestorm of media attacks), the fact is Canadians say they would support tax increases if they could be assured the money would be spent on things they want. And the things they want are, of course, essentially the list of things the NDP has always run on: Medicare, affordable post-secondary education, generous social assistance, human rights, genuine EI, eliminating poverty. You know the list — if you are part of the 70 per cent majority, it is your list, too.

But people not engaged in the political process — for whatever reason — are easily dissuaded from believing their values are practical and just as easily persuaded that you can’t trust government to act on their behalf. On the latter point, of course, there is a lot of evidence to back them up regarding governments in the past 20 years. Since the advent of “free trade”, our governments have become un-governments, dedicated more to dismantling the activist state than enhancing or even maintaining it.

But through all this and through the relentless propaganda of the right through its think tanks, academics, and corporate media, Canadians have maintained their progressive values. When the right set out in the 1980s to roll back the Canadian welfare state, they knew how difficult it was to change people’s values. So they didn’t really try. Instead they aimed at lowering their expectations. And that was a lot easier.

The first campaign was the fight over the FTA — the free trade deal between Canada and the U.S. The strategy was to convince Canadians that globalization, like the Borg, was so powerful that resistance was futile. The phrase (first coined by Margaret Thatcher) used to accomplish this propaganda goal was “there is no alternative.” It was repeated literally thousands of times and became an acronym: TINA. Its intent was clear: democracy was now restrained by a global reality, and from now on it would be limited. The implicit and sometimes explicit message was that we had to lower our expectations.

In the 1988 free trade election, the TINA campaign actually failed to convince a majority of Canadians — their values and expectations stayed in synch. But our cursed first-past-the-post system gave us free trade anyway — just as today it gives us Stephen Harper with 23 per cent of eligible voter support.

But then followed other campaigns: the deficit hysteria campaign railing on about the mythical “debt wall” and “spending like drunken sailors” and how we had to get “our fiscal house in order.” And in parallel, the campaign to demonize government — it was full of overpaid, underworked, “entitled” civil servants (all of whom were branded “bureaucrats”). 

Creating a cult of “efficiency”, the corporate propaganda machine hailed the private sector as the savior of the nation. The government, Preston Manning used to say, has its hand in your pocket — and because you know how to spend your money better than government, you should get your money back. Tax cut campaigns, led by the ubiquitous Canadian Taxpayers Federation, took the message and ran with it. And with no one on the left willing to counter their message — and make the connection between taxes and a civilized society — it worked.

The cynical practice of ‘micro-targeting’

That’s not the only barrier to democracy that has developed over the past 20 years. Voter identification and manipulation techniques are now so sophisticated and well-tested, that none but the most attentive citizen has a chance. Parties used to appeal to various communities of voters with their messages — an approach that at least lent itself to a politics of vision. Strategy and tactics followed. Not anymore — today they lead. According to a recent Globe article:

“What the parties are starting to do instead is called ‘micro-targeting,’ aiming their policies and messages at narrow bands of the population to shift just enough votes to win. The Conservatives are by far the most sophisticated in Canada at this technique, which tries to understand population in new ways. They use market research data on buying habits and combine it with census data, internal polling and focus groups to shape their campaign’s direction and rhetoric.” 

This is an explicit abandoning of community engagement in politics. Add to this the millions spent on TV advertising — much of it negative and outright vicious — repeating simple and simple-minded messages over and over again, and it is a wonder democracy produces any positive results. This is not voter engagement. It is precisely and deliberately the opposite and has been given a name by its perpetrators: voter suppression.

If we were serious about democracy some of this would simply be illegal; other aspects would be tightly regulated. In Scandinavian countries, TV advertising by political parties has either been virtually eliminated as in Norway and Sweden, or as in Denmark, restricted to public channels with time distributed equally to all parties. This tends to force political parties to actually engage citizens in more substantive and less manipulative ways.

Beyond pro-rep: civic literacy

Progressive groups in Canada, like Fair Vote Canada, have been pushing hard for a key democratic reform desperately needed in this country: proportional representation. I fully support this movement, but it does not go far enough. A fair voting system in a country with disengaged citizens is still not going to produce a democracy worthy of the name. It creates more favourable conditions, but civic literacy requires more.

What any genuine democracy needs is what I have called intentional citizens, people who take citizenship seriously enough to devote real time, preferably in co-operation with other citizens, in getting a grasp on the policy options put forward by parties and to understand the philosophical basis for different visions of the country.

In Sweden, they take the creation of intentional citizens and civic literacy seriously. In his 2002 book Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work, Canadian writer Henry Milner details the extraordinary efforts Swedish society and government make in this regard. There are 11 adult education associations in Sweden — mostly involving music, literature, etc. But the largest of them is the Workers Educational Association, affiliated with the Swedish Labour Federation and the Social Democratic Party. It organizes 100,000 study circles with over a million members. The study circles “seek to stimulate a critical attitude, to help clarify the differences between facts and opinions on crucial issues of the day.” Imagine that happening in Canada.

These study groups — and every political party in Sweden has them — are all eligible for special state funding. They exist not just at the national level for issues like public health and economic prosperity, but locally — focusing, for example, on threatened plant closures or urban planning. Their impact on civic literacy is greatest with those citizens with the least education, making them less dependent on mass media for their understanding of political issues.

Time will tell whether the surge in NDP support represents a true resistance by Canadians to the well-funded and continuing campaign to lower their expectations of what is possible. But if that resistance is to be meaningful and deeply-rooted, we are going to have to look at a model such as Sweden’s to create citizens who cannot be manipulated by advertising, voter suppression, or micro-targeting.

If, that is, we are to turn shoppers into intentional citizens.

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A multiracial revolt against slave labour practices

This article appeared first at – http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/?q=node/1603

Georgia prison strike the largest in US history

Mark Cook

April 20, 2011 – This was the message that inmates got on the fifth day of a strike that became the largest prison strike in U.S. history.

“On Monday morning, when the doors open, close them. Do not go to work. They cannot do anything to us that they haven’t already done.”

When it began on Thursday, Dec. 9, 2010, strike leaders planned a one-day peaceful, self-imposed lockdown in several Georgia state prisons. Their headline demand was an end to slave labor in the state, which by its own “law” compels state prisoners to work without pay. Fifty-four thousand inmates, the largest single workforce in the state, work for Prison Industries, a subsidiary of the Department of Correction — and get paid nothing.

The inmates’ intent was to mount a multiracial protest against a southern prison system infamous for violating human rights and practiced at pitting one group against another. To educate the public on the intolerable conditions of life for incarcerated people. To demand recognition by prison authorities that the U.S. is supposed to be a democracy, which minimally means the abolition of slavery, the right of everyone to vote — including ex-cons, and a voice in improving a rigged justice system.

Their work stoppage was a conscious labor rights offensive that demonstrates growing class-consciousness among the millions of people behind bars in this country.

Sit-down strike, not riot. All of the men were outraged at their slave conditions. They could have rioted. Instead, they organized a sit-down strike and prepared a list of demands. They used contraband cell phones purchased from guards to communicate between prisons. And because of certain retaliation, the identity of strike leaders remains a mystery.

The prisoners didn’t get violent. The guards did. They pepper sprayed, handcuffed and beat inmates with hammers, threw many into solitary confinement, turned off heat and light utilities, secretly transferred strike activists to other prisons, offered gang members money to attack other prisoners, and more.

“They want to break up the unity we have here,” said one inmate. “ We have the Crips and the Bloods, we have the Muslims, we have the head Mexicans, and we have the Aryans all with a peaceful understanding, all on common ground. We all want to be paid for our work, and we all want education in here. There’s people in here who can’t even read.” Black men are 61 percent of the state prison population, whites 36 percent.

What do they want? The public to understand that prisoners are a hidden labor force not counted in the employment statistics. They are workers, not animals and want to be treated fairly as working-class citizens. As a reporter with Black Agenda Report put it, “With one in twelve Georgia adults in jail or prison, on parole or probation, … prisoners are us.”

Workers halted the strike after the sixth day to counteract the brutal crackdowns on them and, as one said, “So we can go to the law library and start … the paperwork for a lawsuit.”

Although the mainstream press largely ignored this historic work stoppage, word got out through the independent press, community activists, prisoners and their families — all armed with cell phones.

The Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights formed, and was swamped with messages of solidarity. Meetings and marches took place in Oakland, Detroit, New York and Raleigh. Because of public pressure, seven prison guards were arrested on Feb. 21 for assaulting one of the many inmates beaten.

Similar conditions exist nationwide. Two and a half million adults are not allowed to vote because they are in prison. Five times that number — on parole, community supervision or probation — can’t vote and are blocked from employment and education opportunities, healthcare service, special housing, etc.

Basic demands. The Georgia strikers presented the following nine demands, which eloquently testify to the conditions of U.S. imprisonment and what’s needed to help inmates make it once released. The demands form the basis of ongoing negotiations between Georgia officials and the strikers.

A living wage for work: In violation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, the Department of Corrections (DOC) demands prisoners work for free.

Educational opportunities: For the great majority of prisoners, the DOC denies all opportunities for education beyond the GED, despite the benefit to both prisoners and society.

Decent health care: In violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishments, the DOC denies adequate medical care to prisoners, charges excessive fees for the most minimal care and is responsible for extraordinary pain and suffering.

An end to cruel and unusual punishments: In further violation of the Eighth Amendment, the DOC is responsible for cruel prisoner punishments for minor infractions of rules.

Decent living conditions: Georgia prisoners are confined in over-crowded, substandard conditions, with little heat in winter and oppressive heat in summer.

Nutritional meals: Vegetables and fruit are in short supply in DOC facilities while starches and fatty foods are plentiful.

Vocational and self-improvement opportunities: The DOC has stripped its facilities of all opportunities for skills training, self-improvement and proper exercise.

Access to families: The DOC has disconnected thousands of prisoners from their families by imposing excessive telephone charges and innumerable barriers to visitation.

Just parole decisions: The Parole Board capriciously and regularly denies parole to the majority of prisoners despite evidence of eligibility.

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For updates and how to help, see Black Agenda Report and San Francisco Bay View, and visit the Facebook page for Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights.

Mark Cook is a former Black Panther who spent 27 years behind bars. He can be reached at fsnews@mindspring.com.

Dorval mosque plagued by vandals again on Monday

 This article appeared first at: http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Dorval+mosque+plagued+vandals+past+targeted+again+Monday/4612085/story.html#ixzz1JWuGe1Qv

 

  

By KAREN SEIDMAN, The Gazette

 

April 14, 2011 – A Dorval mosque that has been plagued by vandalism in the past had two windows and several doors broken during an overnight break-in Monday.

“I’m not sure if it was thieves or vandals,” said Mehmet Deger, president of the Dorval Mosque. “But it’s very upsetting to our members when it happens.”

He said the culprits broke in through a fire exit door and stole a computer. But they also used some kind of slingshot to fire steel bolts through a couple of windows, including a large picture window.

“This is very frustrating,” said Deger, who was collecting estimates for repairs.

In 2009, the mosque was vandalized four times, usually with graffiti painted on walls. The last time it was vandalized was in September 2009.

At the time, Deger invited the culprits to talk to leaders of the mosque rather than using a can of spray paint to communicate. And he said there have been no incidents since that time.

The mosque has about 2,000 members and has been operating since 1994. It is at the corner of Neptune Boulevard and Nightingale Avenue.

Deger said the mosque’s video surveillance showed two men had been responsible for the break-in this week.

“These guys are a danger to the public,” he said.

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Morality Lessons in Canadian Torture

 Tariq Jeeroburkhan

April 15, 2011 – Abdullah Al Malki is a family man with a life story to tell, and based on this country’s present global reputation as indicated by the recent UN Security Council nomination fiasco, now more then ever is when all Canadians should be listening.

“…when the Canadian Government and security forces refer to protecting ‘national security’ what they are actually talking about is protecting their own job security”

-Abdullah Al-Malki was tortured in Syria based on CSIS and RCMP mis-information

Al Malki, a Canadian citizen and graduate of Carleton University, was incarcerated and tortured in Syria based on false and misleading information that the RCMP and CSIS – which went so far as to mislabel Al Malki “an imminent threat” in official correspondence – provided to the Syrian government. Dark days indeed.

Mr. Al Malki is currently on a 4-stop speaking tour at Quebec CEGEPS and will continue to bring the message of his experience to young Canadians, just upon the threshold of university, who will hopefully be the next generation to raise and return Canada’s moral and ethical standing in the world. The 60 or so young Canadians in the classroom-setting were hanging on Mr. Al Malki’s every word, especially when he provided the no-holds-barred details of his physical torture. It was especially interesting to note that the talk was occurring at the same time as the leader’s debate – but young Canadians, turned off by the ineffectiveness of political rhetoric, clearly showed their priorities.

“Governments and elections change the parties but these are the issues of justice that affect us all,” said one student in attendance. “Whoever wins the election will still have to deal with this issue.”

Canada’s reputation in cases like Al Malki, Maher Arar and far too many others is internationally established. Robert Fisk once summed up Abdullah’s situation and Canada’s complicity like this: “Snooped on by the Canadian secret service and then tortured in Syria while the Canadian authorities did nothing for him – save supplying his perverted torturers with questions. Western nations simply assisted the perverts by providing them with pages of questions while their citizens/residents lay in agony, wishing they had never been born”.

More then three years after Canadian government inquiries have identified the mistakes and sloppiness of Canada’s security forces in their treatment of Abdullah and other Canadian citizens, there still have been no corrections made to procedure, no apologies to the individuals like Abdullah who have been victimized by their own country, and the misleading information about these individuals is still circulating within the “intelligence” community even though it has been three years since it was identified as false.

Mr. Al Malki was held prisoner in a Syrian dungeon for 482 days, while the Canadian embassy to Syria and the diplomatic corps never even requested access or a consular visit. In fact, during 2008, the Canadian Department of Justice, in anticipation of the Iacobucci Commission and the O’Conner Report finding against the government and its security affiliates issued this statement:

 “Canada bares no responsibility for the torture, even through complicity, if the torture takes place outside of Canadian borders.”

 Guess what? Both the Iacobucci Commission and the O’Conner Report found Canada to be complicit in the torture of Canadian citizen Al Malki in Syria, but thanks to the Department of Justice predefinition of complicity versus responsibility before the findings against CSIS and the RCMP, no Canadian official to this day has been held accountable or even apologized for the torture of Abdullah Al Malki.

 Probably the saddest thing for Canadians in general, is the testimony of several witnesses representing the RCMP and CSIS, who at the various commissions between 2002 and 2008 testified “it was not the responsibility of intelligence or law enforcement officials to be concerned about the Human Rights of a Canadian detainee.” Huh? What? Isn’t that the basis of their very jobs?

 There’s more – and sadly it justifies the world’s and young Canadians’ lack of good faith that the RCMP and CSIS have brought upon themselves. On October 2, 2001 the RCMP issued a private memorandum to the intelligence agencies throughout the world which labeled Mr. Al Malki “an imminent threat” to Canada, conjuring up images and associations of suicide bombers. 

On the very same day the RCMP issued the worldwide security warning concerning Mr. Al Malki, an internal RCMP memo was issued and circulated which revealed that the Mounties had nothing on Mr. Al Malki except that he is an “Arab running around”.

 These are perhaps the double-standards and selective information releases that have led so many young Canadians to lose their faith in the Canadian government and its “intelligence” agencies. One young person asked Mr. Al Malki how he could not hate Canada after what they had done to him – Abdullah replied that one of the most important life lessons he has learned is to realize the difference between the governments, their actions and the people. Mr. Al Malki answered that the actions of the Canadian government, the RCMP and CSIS were a disgrace, but he could not hate Canada because the people of this country have given him nothing but their support.

 Hopefully, this country will see a day where those Canadian people supportive of justice and fairplay, will get their chance to represent themselves through the government. The young Canadians are ready.

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Tariq Jeeroburkhan is an independent content provider based in Montreal who can be reached at tjeero@hotmail.com . His blog is  www.jeeroburkhan.wordpress.com

 References-

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-the-west-should-feel-shame-over-its-collusion-with-torturers-1644918.html

Galloway launches $1.5 million legal action against Canadian government

Toronto Coalition to Stop the War Press Advisory

April 13, 2011 – George Galloway is suing the Canadian government for $1.5million.

The legal action alleges defamation, misfeasance of public office and claims general and exemplary damages amounting to $1.5million. The statement of claim was served today (Tuesday) on Immigration, Nationalities and Multiculturalism minister Jason Kenney and his assistant Alykhan Velshi.

The claim centres on allegations Kenney and Velshi made about Galloway, on the record and in inter-departmental communications, when he was banned from Canada in March 2009. Specifically that he was a member of a terrorist organisation and was threat to the national security of Canada. They also claimed that the security services had confirmed this. None of these allegations was true.

The claim alleges that Kenney and Velshi abused the power of their offices by banning Galloway from Canada in March 2009 to prevent him from appearing on a cross-country speaking tour on the false pretext that he was a threat to national security. In addition the claim alleges that both Kenney and Velshi made false statements to the media that have defamed Galloway.

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Status revoked for Mississauga charity with projects in West Bank

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/972484–status-revoked-for-mississauga-charity-with-projects-in-west-bank?bn=1

Allison Cross
Staff Reporter

Apr 10 2011 – A Mississauga-based charity that runs projects in the Palestinian territories is no longer allowed to give out tax receipts following a decision from the Canada Revenue Agency.

The agency announced its decision to revoke the licence of the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy Canada (IRFAN-Canada) in the government publication Canada Gazette.

The group had already received a one-year suspension in April 2010 for failing to keep proper records.

The decision follows several years of tax audits and litigation prompted by politicians’ claims the charity has links to Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Canada, the U.S., the European Union and Israel.

In 2004, Stockwell Day, at the time an Opposition MP, alleged in Parliament the group had ties to Hamas. He asked the Liberal government to investigate.

Day referenced a Privy Council report sent to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien in 2000 that listed four Canadian groups with possible links to terrorism, one of which was the Povrel Jerusalem Fund for Human Services.

Political action groups, including the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, claim the Povrel Jerusalem Fund, which is no longer operating, was taken over by IRFAN.

But Naseer Syed, a lawyer for IRFAN, said it was formed independently of the Povrel Jerusalem Fund by different people, although it did later acquire some of the Fund’s assets.

IRFAN denies having any ties to Hamas.

Organization officials have appealed the Canada Revenue Agency decision, and asked the Federal Court of Appeal to stay the licence revocation until the outcome of all their appeals, Syed said.

“Although no longer a registered charity, IRFAN . . . is still a legal not-for-profit organization permitted to collect donations and it will continue to provide humanitarian relief to those in need to the best of its ability,” Syed said in an email. “Although it has a number of projects, IRFAN is particularly concerned about the immediate welfare of approximately 4,000 orphans that are dependent on it for regular support from sponsors.”

Organization officials are also concerned about the completion of a girls’ school being built in Battir, a West Bank village, Syed said.

In 2009, IRFAN donated $1.2 million U.S. to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which works with Palestinian refugees, for construction of the school.

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“Boobs and losers,” I say? “These are the best and the brightest that Canada has to offer.”

This article appeared first at http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/04/04/mr-harper-are-you-on-your-meds/

Rick Mercer

April 5, 2011 – Week one of the campaign and I admit I am starting to side with my friends who occasionally question my sanity for following Canadian politics at all, let alone closely. “Why in God’s name would you pay any attention to that bunch of boobs and losers?” they ask. “Boobs and losers,” I say? “These are the best and the brightest that Canada has to offer.” Depression soon kicks in.

Being a political junkie in this country is a bit like being a diehard Leafs fan. Year in and year out you believe you will witness magic; year in and year out you experience the opposite. But yet, you continue to show up, cheer on the team, pay through the nose for a hot dog and it almost always ends in tears.

This election certainly started out with a bang. My prediction that the Liberals would at the last minute run away and hide behind the dumpsters on Parliament Hill, avoiding the vote they triggered, did not come to pass. The government was defeated on a confidence motion because they were in contempt of the Canadian Parliament—a vote that Stephen Harper immediately claimed did not occur. He didn’t argue about the semantics of the vote; he simply denied it happened at all, preferring instead to believe his government was defeated on the budget. There is evidence to the contrary: he was there and it was on TV, but still, as far as he is concerned, it didn’t happen. Some people might consider this inability to understand or admit to what is happening in one’s immediate surroundings systematic of a small stroke or a severe concussion, but in Ottawa it’s just a symptom of spending too much time around people in the PMO.

I like elections. Governments don’t just fall every day, but I understand why some people feel that they do. Three elections in five years is a lot. I have baking soda in the fridge that is older than the Harper government, and I still have Tabasco from the Paul Martin era.

But elections are important. We all know that $300 million is a lot of money—it is a sobering fact that $300 million could be used to purchase 1,000 MRI machines for rural Canada… or six gazebos in Tony Clement’s riding. But this is a democracy and this is the cost of doing business.

According to Stephen Harper, this election is about choices. We can elect a stable, majority Conservative government or a coalition of Liberals, socialists, separatists, criminals and child predators, and not in that particular order.

Michael Ignatieff also says this election is about choice. He says we have a choice between the Red Door and the Blue Door, blissfully unaware that it is not the doors that people are wary of, but the knobs out front.

Jack Layton says there is one choice: make him the next prime minister of Canada. He too may be suffering from a concussion.

That said, once the government fell, both Harper and Ignatieff showed they do things very differently. The choices are stark. Stephen Harper made a terse statement on the situation and refused to take questions. Michael Ignatieff made a terse statement on the situation, then took questions but refused to give answers.

How Michael Ignatieff could orchestrate the defeat of the government and launch himself into a campaign without an answer for the “coalition question” is beyond me. But that was what he did, dodging the question in both official languages. At one point he grabbed his man tits and declared for all to hear, “I am a democrat.” Still, the press was not sated, and he had no other choice but to go home and write a press release that said unequivocally he would not seek to form a coalition with any other political party.

Over at the Harper campaign, the celebration over the disaster that was Ignatieff’s first press conference was short-lived. Turns out Stephen Harper also dilly-dallied with separatist coalitions in the not-so-distant past; and there is proof, not in the form of a forgotten blue dress but in the form of a letter signed by Harper and Gilles Duceppe and sent to then-governor general Adrienne Clarkson.

Personally, I am shocked that Stephen Harper tried to get into bed with Gilles Duceppe. Experimentation of this kind in college is one thing, but at that late in life it probably means you’re hiding a part of yourself that will always be there. Namely a hidden desire to do anything and everything to stay in power.

Jack Layton’s post-vote press conference should have gone well. Jack is born for this type of work. Except instead of talking to Canadians about his version of events, he had to answer personal questions about his health, revealing his prostate-specific antigen numbers. That not being enough, he offered to remove his clothes right there on Parliament Hill to allow journalists to inspect his scars. Nobody took him up on the offer, Rosemary Barton having not been in attendance.

That said, Jack Layton didn’t reveal personal information about his health because the gallery wanted to know, he did it because, earlier that day, Conservatives had fanned out across the country and were practising the dark arts. The whisper campaign about Jack’s health they had been carrying on in the shadows was stepped up a notch.

Conservative Sen. Mike Duffy, who can perhaps kindly be described as the most amoral partisan hack to ever draw a breath, went on radio in Nova Scotia, a province of potential growth for the NDP, and in a hushed tone usually reserved for a palliative care unit told the radio audience that he personally saw Jack on the Hill and “up close it doesn’t look good, Jack doesn’t look good… he is a valiant man for carrying on.”

It takes a certain kind of man to gleefully trade on a man’s battle with cancer, and Mike Duffy is that man. It is why Stephen Harper appointed him to the chamber of sober second thought. Personally, if the Conservatives want Jack’s prostate to be an issue in the campaign, let all the leaders’ health be on the table. Prostate exams for all, weekly if need be, and, perhaps more importantly, let us finally know what medications our leaders are on, or, more importantly, what meds they happen to be off on any given week. Mr. Ignatieff, how is your prostate? Mr. Prime Minister, are you on your meds? Thanks, Senator Duffy.

As I write this, the campaign is in full swing. This time around the Liberals have a plane, chartered from an outfit in Alberta, that looks like everyone else’s plane so nobody is making fun of them. The Conservative plane is chartered from Air Canada so if you’re a journalist that’s the plane to be on. Unlike the Liberal plane, every flight with the Tories gives you Aeroplan travel miles. By the end of the campaign, the journalists will have so many travel miles they will have a card that says super elite on it, just like the one John Baird carries wherever he goes.

Harper’s plane also has the snazziest paint job. It has the words Harper and Canada emblazoned on the side. In an act of humility not seen since the release of James Cameron’s Avatar, Harper has star billing—his name appears above Canada’s and it is the same size and font. Rumour has it his agent demanded this or he refused to perform. Across the tarmac it looks like “Harper is Canada,” and I suppose that is the point.

We will be seeing these planes a lot over the next five weeks, as each leader, their various campaign workers, minions, sycophants and journalists spread out across the country. Like nomadic Bedouin tribes, they will visit every province, region and territory multiple times in an attempt to engage the electorate and not cause a nationwide bedbug epidemic.

There is much discussion in this country about whether this is an unnecessary election. The Prime Minister went so far as to call it a dangerous exercise. There is no such thing. There are many threats to democracy—voting isn’t one of them.

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Palestine and the Egyptian Revolution

[First published in the http://www.cmpalestine.org/]

By Mohamed Kamel

April 4, 2011 – For more than 64 years the Palestinian people have been living under the worst oppression.  They have been taking all roads that could lead them to their homeland and the establishment of their own country. They fought for the recognition of their right to exist and gain the recognition from the entire world, armed in their struggle by the well of great people and supported by Allah (SWT).

 The Arab people never deny their support and have lived all these years by their promise not to give up any Palestinian right.  On the other hand, the Arab governments were not at the same level of the people and they compromised the Palestinian rights in running after a false dream called the co-existent; a dream that has been sold to a portion of the people by tyrants who controlled their life and sold their future to the enemy.  They betrayed the Palestinian’s rights.

 On the top was Anwar Al Sadat, who accepted a title (Peace award) in exchange of selling the Palestinian rights, then, followed by the worst dictator in the human history, Mubarak.  He allowed his own family and friends to control everything in Egypt.  He also played the worst role in the future of a great country; corruption, torture, and participation in the biggest lie called “war on terrorism” by playing the bad guy on the rendition.

 If his regime did that to his own people, so betraying the Palestinian people was nothing strange to him.  He did everything to help Israel, as per Israeli analysts, “… Mubarak’s regime saved Israel 300 Billion US $ a year…”

 Could Israel be able to control Gaza and force illegal and immoral siege on Gaza without the help of this regime? Not for one day.

 All Arab people received the Egyptian revolution with happiness and hope for the return of the golden time of the Arabs.  But the Palestinian people have the most right to celebrate the Egyptian revolution, because it was the real hope that they might see the light at the end of the tunnel.

 But let us be sure not to sell a false dream.  Yes, this revolution will be the door to stop the humiliation of the Palestinians as well as all Arabs.  But not now!

 Yes, not now.  It is a long road and the Egyptian people have a lot to do to clean the mess created by Mubarak’s regime, and then it could turn and give a hand to its brothers and sisters in Palestine.

 But did the Palestinians gain from this revolution?

 Mubarak’s regime was acting negatively on the Palestinian cause.  The smallest example is the split between Gaza and the West Bank.  This was all orchestrated by Mubarak’s right hand man Omar Soliman, who played the main role in betraying Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Now, Egypt will be on the zero line, will not act negatively or positively. Tomorrow, we will see Egypt acting positively, but please be patient.    

The Great country is coming back, but the birth is tough and the road is full of obstacles, with the Palestinians’ patience and sensibility, we will cross it together.

All Egyptians know who taught them to revolt, the children of Palestine who are unarmed facing a strong war machine. These children taught us that when people revolt, it is a sign that people broke the siege of fear that had been built around them.  A broken fear can never be re-injected.

Now, Egyptians are asking Palestinians to accept our apology, for being late but we are coming back very…very soon. 

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Mohamed Kamel*

http://forafreeegypt.blogspot.com/2011/04/palestine-and-egyptian-revolution.html

 

Federal parties must respond to death threat against Canadian citizens

Canadian Boat to Gaza Press Advisory

April 4, 2011 – As the Canadian federal election campaign enters week two, the government of Israel has launched a campaign to slander, disrupt, and possibly attack the upcoming Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, which will have many Canadians aboard the Canadian Boat to Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has now threatened to “act firmly” using “force” against the flotilla in May.

The Canadian Boat to Gaza is calling on all of the federal parties to denounce these threats against Canadians by Israel, which has demonstrated its willingness to use lethal force against civilians, similar to its fatal attack on last year’s freedom flotilla.

“Netanyahu’s vow to use force is tantamount to a death threat against the Canadian and international participants in the flotilla,” says Wendy Goldsmith of the Canadian Boat to Gaza. “The question is, if elected, what will candidates running in this election do to ensure the safety and security of those on board the Canadian Boat to Gaza, in light of Israeli threats of violence?”

Prime Minister Netanyahu has falsely claimed that the Flotilla is being organized by “radical Islamists” intent on smuggling weapons into Gaza by sea. With support from coast to coast, the Canadian Boat to Gaza has raised over 80% of its fundraising goal of $300,000, and enjoys the endorsement of organizations representing hundreds of thousands of Canadians.  

Retired federal politicians – including Warren Allmand and Raymond Gravel – support the initiative, and the Canadian Boat to Gaza is calling on politicians seeking election to do the same.

“In the absence of federal leadership, Canadians are preparing to stand up for Palestinian human rights and international law by breaking the illegal siege of Gaza. We’re inviting the federal party leaders to join us on the boat and to be part of the peaceful solution to this crisis,” says Ehab Lotayef of the Canadian Boat to Gaza. “Candidates seeking office in this election have a responsibility to make it clear that it would be unacceptable for Israel to attack the Canadian Boat to Gaza or any other vessel in the upcoming flotilla.”

Many notable Canadian and international figures have already endorsed the Canadian Boat to Gaza, including Denis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Amir Khadir, Quebec MLA, Maher Arar and Monia Mazigh, writers Judy Rebick and Linda McQuaig, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, to name but a few. More than 100 civil society organizations – trade unions such as CSN in Quebec, Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups, campus and community organizations, as well as non-governmental organizations – have lent their support to the mission.

The international Freedom Flotilla II, coordinating the efforts of groups from all over the world (Canada, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, USA, UK, Greece, Turkey, France and others) is planning to sail to Gaza in the second half of May 2011.  Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also asked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to help him stop the Freedom Flotilla from arriving in Gaza in May. The Secretary General responded saying that Israel should end the blockade of Gaza.

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Freedom Flotilla II Announced with Canadian Boat for Gaza

Tariq Jeeroburkhan

March 25, 2011 – At a formal event announcement in Montreal on Thursday afternoon, Quebecers from all political, cultural, social and religious backgrounds launched a united call, on behalf of civil society groups, to join in a humanitarian relief effort to reach and support the Palestinian people of Gaza, whose access to resources have been unilaterally impeded by an Israeli blockade deemed as illegal by the world community.

Stephan Corriveau, coordinator for the Quebec branch of the project which will add a Canadian boat to the 15-ship flotilla bringing relief to the people of Gaza, announced that “The Israeli government wants to starve the people of Gaza and we must stop them; English and French, separatist and federalist, Jew, Muslim, Christian we all agree on the immorality of the Illegal Gaza Blockade.”

Corriveau added that the number of places available on the boat will be known once the boat has been selected, and shopping around is underway while the effort is simultaneously soliciting funds for the boat’s purchase.

Despite not being able to officially announce who would be going on the boat to Gaza until the number of spaces can be confirmed, there were an impressive number of candidates on the dais, representing Quebec and Canada’s participation in the Freedom Flotilla II.

Gil Courtemanche, the Quebec author and critical thinker, declared that “a blockade is an act of illegal war. It is a crime against dignity and a crime against humanity; it is more then just a crime against an enemy.”

Warren Allmand, former Solicitor-General of Canada under Trudeau and longtime-MP summed it up quite clearly. “When people are in distress we have an obligation to respond.”

Pascale Montpetit, a Quebec actress and winner of the Artist for Peace Prize pointed to the problem that “a lot of people don’t know how life works in Gaza. This has to stop and people have to be shown so they can learn and teach others.”

Dr.Bachar ElSohl, of the Canadian Muslim Federation, said “the degrading conditions for Gazans leave no one indifferent and was proud to be part of this civil action. Finally justice will be brought to the Palestinian people.”

Christian Martel, of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, explained how he had visited the West Bank village of Bi’lin 3 times, so had seen first hand the oppression of the Palestinian people. He also realized that the situation with the blockade in Gaza was even worse.

“It is unbelievable that in 2011 there are people who are treated like the Palestinians by the Israeli government,” he said.

Raymond Gravel, former Bloc Quebecois MP for Repentigny and a Catholic Priest said “the blockade is an attack against justice and dignity of the human being that has made of Gaza an open-air prison which contravenes all Christian values.”

Yakov Rabkin, representing Independent Jewish Voices, described how “Israel claims to talk and act in the name of all Judaism, yet the blockade of Gaza contravenes all Jewish traditions.”

Questioned as to how important Canadians should prioritize the Gaza Blockade Crisis, Rabkin responded in kind. “Just as we must not confuse Israeli values with Jewish values, this represents Canadian values and is important for all Canadians. Canada was the first government to boycott the Hamas government in Gaza after their election. It may not be the greatest injustice in the world but it is the most important injustice for Canadians to overcome because of the Harper government’s supporting the blockade and Israel.”

Ellen Gabriel, an experienced Indigenous representative of Kanesatake said that “when UN nations arbitrarily decide to whom and when the UN Charter applies it results in problems of colonization and assimilation. These are common struggles for not just the Indigenous, but all human beings.”

Brian Barton, a representative of AQOCI, a group of 65 NGOs in Quebec, said that “as representative of a group which distributes humanitarian aid worldwide, it enables recognition of global crisis which require our support and the Palestinian people require our support now because of their oppression by the Israeli State.”

Francoise David, of the Quebec Solidaire, concluded that “There is no other solution to the Middle East conflict other then good faith negotiations between supported and accepted representatives from two equally represented sides.”

Corriveau closed the meeting by explaining how Canadian “political parties don’t feel comfortable talking about this situation as they are still too afraid of being labeled “anti-semites”.”

So, while all the big French Canadian news outlets made sure to cover the announcement and were fully present, it appears as if the English news outlets in Montreal are living in the same paranoid fears as our politicians, because Rabble.ca was the only English media outlet on hand. Even the Montreal-located outlets from the English side didn’t make the effort.

Therefore while it will be up to the Canadian people to support the Freedom Flotilla II and spur on their politicians, it appears as if the Canadian people have been saddled with another responsibility as well: to wake the media up and out of their fear in dealing with this situation!  

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To make a donation for the Canadian Boat for Gaza project: www.bateaugaza.qc.ca

 

Young Arabs in Europe Support Revolution While Questioning Prospects for Success

This article appeared at : http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2052739,00.html

By Bruce Crumley / Paris

Readmore:http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2052739,00.html#ixzz1EiNAORmn                                                                                                                                           

                                              

Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011 – As the youth of Algeria, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries take to the streets to challenge autocratic regimes, hoping to reprise Tunisia’s success in dispatching President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, their cousins in Europe are avidly following their progress. And young Europeans with roots in North Africa warn that even if the protest movements are unlikely to produce similar results in all Arab countries — or to necessarily produce any results at all, millions of Arab expatriates around the world are still watching anxiously.

“This isn’t about each person only caring about how these movements apply to the countries they have ties to, but about seeing whether similar results materialize in Yemen, Bahrain, etc.,” says Esma Ben Saïd, 23, a Tunisian citizen who participated in her nation’s uprising before returning to France to pursue a masters degree in geo-economics and strategic intelligence.”Even if regimes across the Arab world don’t topple, people are keen to see whether this wind of change can at least provoke less radical, but still very real change populations elsewhere are demanding.”

So, even if demonstrators in Libya did manage to overcome the regime’s willingness to spill blood to stay in power and bring down Muammar Gaddafi, don’t expect regimes in Algeria and Morocco to fall like dominoes despite growing protest movements in those countries. Algeria has experienced mass marches and even clashes between youths and police since January — with more rallies planned. But the economic pain fueling the anger, and memories of earlier revolts that brought more death than lasting improvement, suggests that Algerians may settle for less than Tunisian-style revolution. And the country’s military-backed regime seems to understand that. In response to rising anger over food prices and limited civil liberties, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika this month said he’d repeal the 19-year state of emergency imposed to contain the Islamist challenge. Some people now hope he may divert some of the national riches pilfered by the regime to subsidize basic foodstuffs in the hope of calming unrest — as Ben Ali did, in vain. (See Pictures of the Rise of Libya’s Colonel Gaddfi)

“Algeria is a very rich country — far richer than Tunisia — and there is money to spend in the state coffers and in leaders’ bank accounts,” says a 33 year-old Algerian waiter in Paris who gives only his first name, Hocine. “Money is there to spend to address public complaints and reduce anger that has fueled recent protests. The question is how far those will have to go before the greed of leaders is offset by their desire to remain in power.”

Meanwhile, though widely hated for its brutality and corruption, Algeria’s regime has made it abundantly clear it’s ready to use its gigantic army and security forces to retain its hold on power — no matter how many of its own citizens it has to kill. That’s one reason why reform, not revolution, has been the main rallying cry in Algeria. The same is true in Morocco, where the monarchy remains sufficiently popular despite increasing economic unhappiness among the public that no one but the most radical opponents call for the royal family’s ouster. “The number of Moroccans hostile to King Mohammed VI is pretty small,” says Samia, a 38 year-old Dutch school administrator of Moroccan heritage who prefers not to give her last name. “People want improvement and change, but these events (elsewhere in the Arab world) seem fairly remote, and have little consequence for us, or Morocco.” (See TIME’s Photos of Protests Across the Middle East.)

Perhaps, but Sarra Grira, a 25 year-old Tunisian studying for a doctorate in Paris, says that the Egyptian and Tunisian precedents show that movements formed to demand relief from dire economic realities swiftly connect their grievances to demands for political change. “When you’ve got regimes like Ben Ali’s controlling everything, you realize their total political power — and complete incompetence — are entirely responsible for the economic situation,” Grira says. “One arises from the other, which is why economic demands quickly turn political.”

Still, it appears unlikely movements in Algeria or Morocco — much less Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia — will shift current calls for reform into full-fledged pushes towards revolution. But some feel the mere examples of Egypt and Tunisia will suffice to convince Arab publics, and warn their atrophic regimes, that change is on the way. (See: “Tunisia Pushes Out Its Strongman: Could Other Arab Countries Follow?”)

“The operating assumption for so long has been that Arab populations really can’t be trusted with democracy, and will somehow screw up freedom in a way that makes either dictatorships or Islamist revolutions inevitable,” says Bader Lejmi, a 25-year-old Franco-Tunisian, whose working to add a sociology diploma to his degree in business. “That’s built on a lie, and is a reputation all Arabs want to be rid of, since the assumption it’s built on applies just as well for Arabs in Europe as it does those in the Middle East and North Africa.”

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