These speeches start with Booker T. Washington and end with Barack Obama. They include Clarence Thomas who isn't on my list of great anythings. Missing conspicuously are W.E. B. DuBois, El Haj Malik Al Shabazz (Malcolm X), or any of the “Black Panthers.” It's a start, but it's far from comprehensive.
“The transcripts on this Web site were drawn from the accompanying recordings. In some cases, we were able to start with existing transcripts in the public domain and check them against the recordings. In other instances, we produced the transcripts ourselves with the help of dedicated colleagues.
On some occasions, the available text of a speech differed from the recording. Speakers commonly diverge from their written texts, which are sometimes speeches they give repeatedly, but no one takes the time to document the extemporaneous remarks. ”
Booker T Washington
A former slave and the most influential African American at the turn of the 20th century Listen to the speech
Marcus Garveys
A Jamaican immigrant who urged black Americans to form their own nation in Africa Listen to the speech
Mary McLeod Bethune
A prominent educator and leading civil rights figure in the New Deal era Listen to the speech
Dick Gregory
A popular comedian and activist in the 1960s involved in the 1963 marches in Birmingham Listen to the speech
Fannie Lou Hamer
Helped lead the fight for black voting rights in Mississippi Listen to the speech
Stokely Carmichael
A young civil rights organizer who popularized the slogan, "Black Power" Listen to the speech
Martin Luther King Jr.
The most prominent leader of the non-violent civil rights movement in the 20th century Listen to the speech
Shirley Chisholm
The first African American woman to be elected to Congress Listen to the speech
Barbera Jordan
U.S. Representative who made a historic speech during the 1974 Watergate hearings Listen to the speech
Jesse Jackson
A civil rights leader, disciple of Martin Luther King, Jr., and two-time presidential candidate Listen to the speech
Clarence Thomas
A Supreme Court Justice appointed by President George H. W. Bush Listen to the speech
Barack Obama
U.S. Democratic Senator from Illinois Listen to the speech
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Is There No Shame
“Rambling about truth, justice and Bush ”
…to be continued …
http://www.archive.org/download/Is_There_No_Shame/Is_There_NoShame.mp3
Monday, May 23, 2005
An Iraqi Police Officer's Death, a Soldier's Varying Accounts
“The American soldier and the Iraqi police officer were on patrol together outside a flea market south of Baghdad, chatting from time to time, when one of them suddenly started shooting.
What prompted the gunfire is a matter of dispute, but one thing is not: The soldier, Cpl. Dustin M. Berg, fired three times at his Iraqi partner, Hussein Kamel Hadi Dawood al-Zubeidi, and killed him. As Corporal Berg ran away, he picked up Mr. Zubeidi's AK-47 and shot himself in the side.
In the days that followed, Corporal Berg lied about what happened, saying Mr. Zubeidi was the one who had shot him. And for months he went right on lying, after he recovered from his wound, after he left Iraq, even after he received a Purple Heart he did not deserve with his parents watching at a solemn ceremony back home in Indiana.…”
Unlike the prisoner abuses that have alarmed and riveted the public, these lesser-known cases have created divisions over the definition of murder in a fluid war zone. In Iraq, these stories have caused bitter resentment and distrust of the troops. Among Americans, they have strained units, leaving some Army supervisors saying troops seem reluctant to carry out their duties, and have led to an outpouring of anger in hometowns across the United States.
"These guys go out and do what their country asks them to do, and now they're being told they did it wrong?" said Rich Hendrix, a Vietnam-era veteran who spent a recent afternoon inside the American Legion Hall in Ferdinand, Corporal Berg's hometown of 2,300 in Southern Indiana, where residents overwhelmingly say they support him. "I say they're doing the best they can. You can't even be sure who's your friend and who's your enemy over there, so what are they supposed to do?"
Since the war in Iraq began more than two years ago, more than 20 American soldiers and marines have been accused of crimes in connection with the deaths of Iraqis, including the small number of cases in which service members have claimed self-defense. Navy personnel are also being investigated in the deaths of two detainees, though no charges have been filed. At least 10 service members have been convicted, but in most cases on less serious charges than those they originally faced.
No two wars are alike, making it impossible to compare these cases with those of past conflicts, and some people with military experience disagree over whether anything is different in the Iraq prosecutions.
In Vietnam, after a much longer involvement, 95 American soldiers and 27 marines were convicted of killing noncombatants. Gary D. Solis, who teaches law at the United States Military Academy at West Point, said many of those cases are similar to descriptions of killings in Iraq now being prosecuted.
"Look, there are guys who go out and for whatever reason murder defenseless people," Mr. Solis said. "They're crimes. And we're hearing the same arguments now that we heard then: that in the fog of war, you have to make instantaneous decisions. We heard exactly the same thing back then."
In some of the 20 cases, prosecutors allege that flagrant acts led to death. One soldier was convicted of murder in the death of a 17-year-old Iraqi whom he allegedly had sex with in a guard tower. Four others are accused of suffocating a detainee in a sleeping bag during an interrogation. Another was accused of shooting an unarmed Iraqi as he ran from a truck and, some witnesses said, waved a white cloth.
In other cases, service members have admitted their roles in the deaths, but have claimed that their actions were akin to "mercy killings," striking final blows to wounded Iraqis who were suffering.
But perhaps the most contentious cases are those of the handful of service members like Corporal Berg, who claim that they acted only to protect themselves from what they considered threats to their lives, as allowed by military rules. Some witnesses, however, say they saw something else entirely.
A marine from New York says he shot and killed two Iraqis he had just captured in a house raid because they made a hostile move in his direction; but why, then, did he empty his weapon, reload and shoot some more? A private from Louisiana said an Iraqi cowherd lunged toward another soldier in a field, so he shot and killed him; but the unarmed cowherd was in handcuffs, a fact, the soldier insisted, that he did not notice at first.
Jack B. Zimmermann, a Texas lawyer who has defended service members in similar cases and who also was a prosecutor and criminal judge in the Marine Corps, said he considers these cases "the closer questions - the troublesome ones."
And some military lawyers say they believe that those cases are being investigated more often in this war. Perhaps, they say, round-the-clock news media coverage of the fighting in Iraq has also meant increased scrutiny. Perhaps such cases are simply more likely to arise in a war complicated by urban combat and the fear of suicide bombers, hidden explosives and an uncertain enemy.…
Patterns of Abuse
President Bush said the other day that the world should see his administration's handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as a model of transparency and accountability. He said those responsible were being systematically punished, regardless of rank. It made for a nice Oval Office photo-op on a Friday morning. Unfortunately, none of it is true.
The administration has provided nothing remotely like a full and honest accounting of the extent of the abuses at American prison camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It has withheld internal reports and stonewalled external inquiries, while clinging to the fiction that the abuse was confined to isolated acts, like the sadistic behavior of one night crew in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib. The administration has prevented any serious investigation of policy makers at the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon by orchestrating official probes so that none could come even close to the central question of how the prison policies were formulated and how they led to the abuses.
When we lieWe set up our frontline troops for exactly the kind of prblems we're beginning to see. We lie about the reasons for war. Like the rest of our population most soldiers believe ther was Iraqi involvement in 9-11. they think Iraqis were on the planes. They believe that there were and are weapons of mass destruction. Their leaders rally them, encourage them in disrespecting the ‘ragheads’, the ‘hajis.’ Above all we don't even count Iraqi dead unless there are cameras rolling.
The same behavior can get a soldier a medal or a court martial, and if they're guilty what about those who sent them there, armed with lies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/23/national/23soldier.html?ei=5088&en=69ff18fde681150a&ex=1274500800&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Decoding Health Insurance
"Where are all the touted breakthroughs, the miracle drugs and diagnostic tests, predicted five years ago? Finding out that humans have about the same number and some of the same genes as a worm may be interesting to somebody, but it's hardly a health care revolution, much less worth the more than $3 billion that have so far been spent on decoding."
| The genomic case for universal health coverage. |
Of course, people can perhaps be forgiven for not wanting to recognize that they don't have many more genes than round worms or fruit flies - a blow to humanity's ego that's about as powerful as Copernicus's discovery that the earth revolved around the sun instead of vice versa.
As a doctor schooled to some degree in science, I believed (and still do) that decoding the human genome might be the most important milestone in the history of medical science. To borrow Mr. Clinton's metaphor, the full genome offers researchers the sequence of all the letters of the human book of life, a monumental resource despite our imperfect understanding of the book's overarching, mind-boggling complexity. As decoding gathers speed, it promises to change just about everything we know about medicine in the form of understanding, prediction, prevention, diagnosis and the treatment of disease. And in so doing, it also offers us a remarkable opportunity to solve the huge and nettlesome problem of paying for health care in the United States.…”
Knowledge of the genome has greatly improved our ability to predict an individual's predilection for a host of diseases. Thousands upon thousands of markers have been identified throughout the genome and linked to particular mutated, deleterious genes associated with specific medical problems. The presence of these markers can be determined by placing a single drop of blood onto a particular type of slide called a microarray. Microarrays, in turn, are read automatically by laser scanners and the results, thanks to bioinformatics, can be analyzed instantly by computers armed with appropriate software and statistical data.
The importance of a rapid increase in prognostic ability is underlined by the growing understanding that every disease has a greater or lesser genetic component. Patients can now avail themselves of preventive measures or treatment even before symptoms occur. But there is a down side. First of all, we can predict more and more diseases that are associated with progressive disability and death and which have, as of yet, no treatment. Finding a marker linked to such an illness is thus the cruel equivalent of an extended death sentence. Understandably many people would not want such a test and would hardly classify having one as a positive health care breakthrough.
Another, and possibly more important, negative consequence of this new ability to predict illness is the potential for discrimination in one form or another if confidential health information is released. Unfortunately the chances of such a breach of privacy occurring, despite lip service by politicians to prevent it legislatively, are probably inevitable. Not only is microarray technology easily accessible, but for-profit private insurance companies have strong incentives to use it to protect their bottom lines by denying service, claims or even coverage.
It is precisely this danger, however, that may lead to a great breakthrough: the inevitable movement to universal health care. In this dawning era of genomic medicine, the result may be that the concept of private health insurance, which is based on actuarially pooling risk within specified, fragmented groups, will become obsolete since risk cannot be pooled if it can be determined for individual policyholders. Genetically determined predilection for disease will become the modern equivalent of the "pre-existing condition" that private insurers have stringently avoided.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/opinion/22cook.html?ex=1274414400&en=247cc5098b0bd558&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rssSaturday, May 21, 2005
Do We Expect to Reap What We've Sown?
We need to stop worrying about the whether or not Newsweek was right. We need to worry about the desecration of the American soul.…
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
“The prisoner, a slight, 22-year-old taxi driver known only as Dilawar, was hauled from his cell at the detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, at around 2 a.m. to answer questions about a rocket attack on an American base. When he arrived in the interrogation room, an interpreter who was present said, his legs were bouncing uncontrollably in the plastic chair and his hands were numb. He had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days.
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, Specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the interpreter said, so as the prisoner fumbled weakly with the cap, the water poured out over his orange prison scrubs. The soldier then grabbed the bottle back and began squirting the water forcefully into Mr. Dilawar's face.
"Come on, drink!" the interpreter said Specialist Claus had shouted, as the prisoner gagged on the spray. "Drink!"
At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.
"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.
Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.…”
Guantánamo Comes to Define U.S. to Muslims“In one of Pakistan's most exclusive private schools for boys, the annual play this year was "Guantánamo," a docudrama based on testimonies of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, the United States naval base in Cuba.
The cast was made up of students between 16 and 18 years old, each playing the role of a prisoner being held on suspicion of terrorism. To deepen their understanding of their characters, the boys pored through articles in Pakistani newspapers, studied the international press and surfed Web sites, including one that described itself as a nonsectarian Islamic human rights portal and is called cageprisoners.com.
It didn't matter that the boys at the Lahore Grammar School, an elite academy that has sent many of its graduates to study in American universities, lived in a world quite removed from that known by most prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The more they explored, the more the play resonated, the director of the school's production, Omair Rana, recalled Friday in a telephone interview. The detainees were Muslim, many were Pakistani and one had been arrested in Islamabad, the country's capital.
"It was something we all could relate to," Mr. Rana said of "Guantánamo," a play created "from spoken evidence" by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, a Briton and a South African, that was staged in London and in New York last year. "All that seemed very relevant, very nearby - in fact, too close for comfort."
Accounts of abuses at the actual American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, including Newsweek magazine's now-retracted article on the desecration of the Koran, ricochet around the world, instilling ideas about American power and justice, and sowing distrust of the United States. Even more than the written accounts are the images that flash on television screens throughout the Muslim world: caged men, in orange prison jumpsuits, on their knees. On Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, two satellite networks, images of the prisoners appear in station promos.
For many Muslims, Guantánamo stands as a confirmation of the low regard in which they believe the United States holds them. For many non-Muslims, regardless of their feelings toward the United States, it has emerged as a symbol of American hypocrisy.…”
In India, a secular country by law whose people and government are growing increasingly close to the United States, a cartoon appeared in Midday, an afternoon tabloid, on Friday showing a panic-stricken Uncle Sam flushing copies of Newsweek magazine down a toilet.
To the cartoonist, Hemant Morparia, it appeared as though the Bush administration's answer to the problem was to bury the truth.
"People suspect American intentions," Mr. Morparia, a Mumbai-based radiologist who doubles as a cartoonist, said. "It has nothing to do with being Muslim."
From Mumbai, India, to Amman, Jordan, to London, Guantánamo is a continuing subject for discussion, from television talk shows to sermons to everyday conversations. In countries like Afghanistan, Britain and Pakistan, released detainees often return home and relate their experiences on television news programs. Accusations of egregious abuse sometimes prompt violence, as in last week's demonstrations in Afghanistan.
Guantánamo provides rhetorical fodder for politicians seeking to bring down United States-allied rulers in their own countries, and it offers a ready rallying point against American dominance, even in countries whose own police and military have been known for severe violations of human rights.
…In Europe, accusations of abuse at Guantánamo, as much as the war in Iraq, have become a symbol of what many see as America's dangerous drift away from the ideals that made it a moral beacon in the post-World War II era. There is a persistent and uneasy sense that the United States fundamentally changed after September 11, and not for the better.
"The simple truth is that America's leaders have constructed at Guantánamo Bay a legal monster," the French daily, Le Monde, said in a January editorial.…
"People already expect the U.S. to deny it, because it already has no credibility in the region," said Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies Program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "So the initial story will have an impact, and the response simply will not."
Or as a Jordanian pharmacist, Farouk Shoubaki, said of the original report, "It is something the Americans would do."
As Mr. Shoubaki's remark reflects, Guantánamo offers disconcerting testimony that for many Muslims, the America they used to admire has sunk to the level of their own repressive governments.…
Doesn't one definition of insanity require repeating the same experiment over and over again, always expecting a different result?
We need to stop worrying about the whether or not Newsweek was right.
We need to worry about the desecration of the American soul.…
Al Ingram
Friday, May 20, 2005
Red Cross told U.S. of Koran incidents
“The International Committee of the Red Cross documented what it called credible information about U.S. personnel disrespecting or mishandling Korans at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and pointed it out to the Pentagon in confidential reports during 2002 and early 2003, an ICRC spokesman said Wednesday.
Representatives of the ICRC, who have played a key role in investigating abuse allegations at the facility in Cuba and other U.S. military prisons, never witnessed such incidents firsthand during on-site visits, said Simon Schorno, an ICRC spokesman in Washington.
But ICRC delegates, who have been granted access to the secretive camp since January 2002, gathered and corroborated enough similar, independent reports from detainees to raise the issue multiple times with Guantanamo commanders and with Pentagon officials, Schorno said in an interview Wednesday.…”
Following the ICRC's reports, the Defense Department command in Guantanamo issued almost three pages of detailed, written guidelines for treatment of Korans. Schorno said ICRC representatives did not receive any other complaints or document similar incidents following the issuance of the guidelines on Jan. 19, 2003.
The issue of how Korans are handled by American personnel guarding Muslim detainees moved into the spotlight after protests in Muslim nations, including deadly riots in Afghanistan, that followed a now-retracted report in Newsweek magazine. That story said U.S. investigators had confirmed that interrogators had flushed a Koran down a toilet.
The Koran is Islam's holiest book, and mistreating it is seen as an offense against God.
Following the firestorm over the report and the riots, the ICRC declined Wednesday to discuss what kind of alleged incidents were involved, how many there were or how often it reported them to American officials prior to the release of the 2003 Koran guidelines.
"We don't want to comment specifically on specific instances of desecration, only on the general level of how the Koran was disrespected," Schorno said.
Schorno did say, however, that there were "multiple" instances involved and that the ICRC made confidential reports about such incidents "multiple" times to Guantanamo and Pentagon officials.…
I was asked, “What about Muslims desecrating the Bible?” The truth is simply that the Old and New Testament are part of Muslim Holy Scripture too. They disagree with our interpretation. Since they would never desecrate them, they are all the more offended when we disrespect theirs. Al Ingram
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0505190306may19.story
Friday, May 13, 2005
Angry Protests Rage Across the Muslim world
“The United States' reputation had already been damaged by photographs released last year of physical and sexual abuse of Muslim prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.Governments demanded investigations and thousands took to the streets in outrage over a Newsweek magazine report that interrogators at a U.S. military prison in Cuba had put the Muslim holy book on toilets, in at least one case flushing it down.
Washington's allies demanded action and an investigation. Indonesia said those responsible must receive a ``deserved punishment'' for their ``immoral action.'' Pakistan also called for a U.S. probe, and Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, said it was following the issue with ``deep indignation.''
Sentiments ran higher in the streets.…”
By REUTERSI recommend you read Chain of Command : The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersch.
“Newsweek, in its May 9 edition, quoted sources as saying that investigators probing abuses at the military prison had found that interrogators ``had placed Korans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet.''
Washington is holding more than 500 prisoners from its war on terrorism at the naval base on Cuba, many of them detained in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The report prompted the worst anti-U.S. protests across that fragmented country since Americans invaded to topple Kabul's Islamist Taliban rulers for harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.
On Friday, Islamic clerics in Afghanistan told worshipers at weekly prayers that protests over the reported desecration of the holy book were justified.
They urged Muslims to shun violence, but their words fell on deaf ears as clashes erupted in different parts of the country, claiming at least nine lives, most those of protesters shot by police.…”
Once again the US government claims tht this is an isolated incident, when the evidence says that this is Bush and Rumsfeld's interrogation policy brought to light. I recommend you read Chain of Command : The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour HerschForeign Affairs - Book Review - Chain of Command: The Road From 9 ...
| ... Transition 2005. Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. Seymour M. Hersh. New York: HarperCollins, 2004, 416 pp. $25.95 ... www.foreignaffairs.org/.../seymour-m-hersh/ chain-of-command-the-road-from-9-11-to-abu-ghraib.html - |
| ... by SEYMOUR M. HERSH. American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go? Issue of 2004-05-10 Posted 2004-04-30 ... www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact - 68k - May 11, 2005 - |
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Rear Echelon Mother @!'s Day
A high school student was suspended for 10 days for refusing to end a cell phone call with his mother. The ten day suspension was given to Kevin Francois for being ‘defiant and disorderly’ and was imposed in lieu of arrest according to Spencer High school's assistant Principal Alfred Parham.
The problem began Wednesday when the 17 year old junior got a lunchtime call from his mother, Sgt. 1st Class Monique Bates, serving a one year tour with the 203rd Forward support Battallion.
Cell phones are allowed on campus, but may not be used during school hours. When a teacher told him to hang up, he refused. He said he told the teacher ‘This is my mom in Iraq. I'm not about to hang up on my mom.’
The assistant Principal said the suspension was based on the teen's reaction to the teacher's request. He said the teen used profanity when taken to the office.”
I think what we have here is another example of zero intelligence, zero tolerance.
Given the situation in Iraq, any call from a loved one might be the last time you ever hear their voice. Refusing to take the circumstances into account is not only unreasonable, it's just plain mean and stupid. Of course the kid got “defiant and disorderly.” Under the same circumstances I guarantee I would have physically hurt someone.
What's really going on here is not a matter of discipline, but a matter of a teacher, a school administration showing who is boss.
The message is simply, “We don't have to be reasonable, we're in charge. No matter how much it hurts you, we're in charge. Yield to us, or else.”
Muscogee County School District:Spencer High
4340 Victory Dr
Columbus, GA 31903
(706) 685-7652
http://www.mcsdga.net/schools/high/spencer.html
Ignorance is Strength?
Op-Ed Columnist: From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'In World War II we went out of our way to make sure our enlisted men has some respect for the people whose countries we invaded. They were told the basics of the languages, cultures, and acceptable behavior, even for Japan which had attacked us.
In Iraq, our troops, like the rest of America are allowed to believe that Iraqis attacked us in 2001. No basics of Iraqi or Arab culture are taught, at least not respect for their customs and culture. Not even the fact that an upraised hand doesn't mean stop.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html?ex=1115697600&en=145c406a42c43a77&ei=5070
By BOB HERBERT
A soldier talks about his time in Iraq and the amount of gratuitous violence that was routinely inflicted by American soldiers on civilians.
Inquiry Finds Abuses at Guantánamo Bay
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/national/nationalspecial3/01gitmo.html?ex=1115611200&en=e4ccbf6c2d7c4daa&ei=5070
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
An investigation into allegations of detainee abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has concluded that several prisoners were mistreated or humiliated, perhaps illegally.
When Soldiers Mistreat Iraqis (3 Letters)
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/opinion/l05herbert.html?ex=1115956800&en=d38c22172a5ebde9&ei=5070
Op-Ed Columnist: Lifting the Censor's Veil on the Shame of Iraq http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/opinion/05herbert.html?ex=1115956800&en=b39978d3179e4f26&ei=5070
By BOB HERBERT
Photographs from the Iraq war show the extreme horrors of warfare.
Is it any surprise that abuse happens. Especially when policy dictates secrecy, and mandates ghost detainees.…
U.S. Tells U.N. That It Continues to Oppose Torture in Any Situation
By DAVID STOUT
The United States told the United Nations that despite the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, it continued to oppose torture.
The United States told the United Nations that despite the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, it continued to oppose torture.
Now there's a laugher…, it's right up there with “extraordinary rendition.”
But, it hardly matters…, nobody in a position to do anything is listening.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
War Is Peace, Failure Is Accomplishment…
This is Progress? Really?
World Terror Attacks Tripled in 2004 by U.S. Count
By REUTERS
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. count of major world terrorist attacks more than tripled in 2004, a rise that may revive debate on whether the Bush administration is winning the war on terrorism, congressional aides said on Tuesday.
Rights Group Condemns U.S. Over Guantanamo
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
STRASBOURG, France (AP) -- Europe's human rights body condemned the United States on Tuesday for using what it termed ''torture'' on terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and it called on European countries not to cooperate in interrogating Guantanamo detainees.
OPINION April 26, 2005
Op-Ed Contributor: Terror in the Past And Future Tense
By ROBERT WRIGHT
We need to put our safety ahead of American sovereignty, and address the technology of a terrorist threat, or we won't be secure.
In New Manual, Army Limits Tactics in Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT
The revised guidelines will specifically prohibit practices like stripping prisoners, imposing dietary restrictions and using dogs.
Exactly when is enough, enough?Op-Ed Columnist: On Abu Ghraib, the Big Shots Walk
By BOB HERBERT
Under Commander in Chief George W. Bush, the notion of command accountability has been discarded.
Ex-Official Describes Dispute With Bolton Over Intelligence
A former senior intelligence official, who was responsible for coordinating American intelligence assessments, directed his staff in 2003 to strongly resist assertions that John R. Bolton sought to make about Syria's weapons programs in Congressional testimony, the official, Robert L. Hutchings, said in an interview on Wednesday.
3 Ex-Officials Describe Bullying by Bolton
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Three former senior government officials described John R. Bolton, nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, as unwilling to listen to alternative views.
Army Recruiters Say They Feel Pressure to Bend Rules
By DAMIEN CAVE Army statistics that show an increase in cheating by recruiters is disturbing many of the men and women charged with the uphill task of refilling the ranks.
How many isolated incidents make a pattern?
How widespread does something need to be, to be systemic?
Why is it that the guys who trow the party are always missing when it's time to clean up?
Friday, May 06, 2005
Darfur Drawn Through the Eyes of Children
On a research mission along the border of Chad and Darfur, HumanRights Watch researchers Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault gave children notebooks and crayons to keep them occupied while they spoke with the children's parents. Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur. See their drawings here, as featured in the New York Times Magazine.
the attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.
The government of Sudan is responsible for "ethnic cleansing" and crimes against humanity in the context of an internal conflict in Darfur, one of the world's poorest and most inaccessible regions, on Sudan's western border with Chad. Since 2003, the Sudanese government and the ethnic "Janjaweed" militias it arms and supports have committed numerous attacks on the civilian populations of the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and other ethnic groups perceived to support the rebel insurgency. Government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians—including women and children—burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land long inhabited by the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa. The Janjaweed militias, Muslim like the groups they attack, have destroyed mosques, killed Muslim religious leaders, and desecrated Qurans belonging to their enemies.
Countless women and girls have been raped. Hundreds of villages have been bombed and burned; water sources and food stocks have been destroyed, property and livestock looted. Mosques, schools and hospitals have been burnt to the ground.
The United Nations estimates that more than 2 million people have been left homeless in the fighting. There are almost a quarter of a million refugees in neighboring Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa. Abandoned villages have been destroyed. Even when the villages are left intact, many refugees are unwilling to return to Darfur unless their security is protected. "If we return," one refugee told Human Rights Watch, "we will be killed."Estimates of how many people have died as a result of the conflict in Darfur vary widely. It is likely that at least 100,000 people have died from violence, disease and other conditions related to forced displacement and insufficient access to humanitarian assistance. The toll of death and displacement continues to rise. Those left homeless are still at risk: camps are poorly protected, and women and girls are frequently the targets of sexual attacks when they venture from the camp to find firewood and food for their animals.
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Driver Ignored Warning, U.S. Says
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ROBERT F. WORTH
“The car carrying the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena that was struck with a deadly hail of gunfire as it sped toward Baghdad International Airport on March 4 ignored warnings from American soldiers who used a spotlight, a green laser pointer and warning shots to try to stop it as it approached a checkpoint, the American military said in a report released Saturday evening.While finding that the soldiers were not culpable, the report recommended taking steps to better inform Iraqis and other drivers about how to approach checkpoints, echoing calls made by critics since the incident. The report also recommended that the military use more signs and enhanced lighting to warn drivers that they are approaching a checkpoint.
The gunfire killed Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent who was in the back seat with Ms. Sgrena. The driver and Ms. Sgrena were wounded. Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the ground commander in Iraq, has approved a recommendation that soldiers involved in the shooting not be disciplined, the military said.
The report's exoneration of the soldiers, which was made public last week, angered Italian officials and threatened to further inflame relations between the United States and Italy, one of its staunchest allies in the war in Iraq. The findings have created a political problem for the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who faces a public upset by the incident at a time when his own fortunes are sagging.
…Italian officials have disputed preliminary accounts of the shooting, provided last month by the United States, and Italy is pressing its own investigation. Ms. Sgrena has also challenged the United States' account, saying the car approached the checkpoint at a moderate speed and was not given any warnings.
Ms. Sgrena, a reporter for the left-wing daily newspaper Il Manifesto, was abducted Feb. 4 in Baghdad and released March 4, less than one hour before she and her rescuers made their trip to the airport. American officials have said the checkpoint was established temporarily to help provide security for the United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte, who was meeting with the top military commander in Iraq. Mr. Negroponte has since been appointed director of national intelligence.
The incident helped focus attention on the risks that Iraqis face at American checkpoints, where human rights groups say many Iraqis have been accidentally wounded or killed.
The report, which had many blacked-out parts, is the American military's first detailed account of the events. It asserts that the Italians ignored repeated warnings from American soldiers as they sped onto a part of the Baghdad airport road where soldiers are on a constant state of high alert because of the extraordinary risk of suicide car bombs and other insurgent attacks.…”
You can put any nationality in front of “Driver Ignored Warning,” and the results will be the same, either no investigation at all or an exoneration of the living at the expense of the dead. War is frightening and our troops are, rightfully, scared. It has become obvious to everyone but the chain of command military or political that our soldiers are stressed out and sometimes fire Chicago warning shots. ‘Bang!…Halt!’http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/international/middleeast/01italian.html?ex=1115611200&en=1bfecddd2e18d6e7&ei=5070
Political Identity
They could decide what causes they support and then sell, of give, information to just those causes. This gives Amazon disproportional political leverage.
“On the heels of the 2004 election, one of the things that candidates want is email addresses. Not just any email addresses, but email addresses of likely voters with particular persuasions in their district. Broken down by precinct, if you please.
The fact that they want them isn’t surprising. The Internet was shown to be a powerful way to connect to voters during the last election cycle and any tech-savvy political operative knows that its only going to be more so in the next.
We could talk about whether we want to start getting political Spam, but that’s not as interesting to me as to think about who has those addresses right now. For example, Amazon, has them, or at least a lot of them. They know your address and they know your email address. What’s more, they could even provide a profile of you based on books you read.
Again, we could talk about whether Amazon should sell this information to anyone, political or not, but what’s more interesting is the possibility that they could selectively sell the information.…”
I don't think it's just Amazon, in fact it's any bookseller or source for videos, or even online discussion lists. When that laptop at Berkeley was lost with 100,000 social security numbers of grad students, I'll bet it also had what courses they took, and info about their other activities. Schools just love to record things like that.
The real danger isn't that the capability exists, it's the capability plus the inclination to monetize our personal data. It's the lax manner in which our information is secured. It's the fact that once our business leaves our posession, it's everybody's business, except ours. Add the PATRIOT act to this and all bets are off.
Al Ingram
http://conceptual.blogspot.com/2005/04/american-you-dont-own-your-personal.htmlhttp://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1315
Monday, April 25, 2005
war
The Company Six Months in Ramadi: Bloodied Marines Sound Off About Want of Armor and Men
By MICHAEL MOSS
Marine leaders and infantrymen of a unit that sustained heavy losses say a lack of armor and manpower hampered their efforts.
Saga of Echo Company
“On May 29, 2004, a station wagon that Iraqi insurgents had packed with C-4 explosives blew up on a highway in Ramadi, killing four American marines who died for lack of a few inches of steel.
The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top.
"The steel was not high enough," said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit's commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. "Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads."In returning home, the leaders and Marine infantrymen have chosen to break an institutional code of silence and tell their story, one they say was punctuated not only by a lack of armor, but also by a shortage of men and planning that further hampered their efforts in battle, destroyed morale and ruined the careers of some of their fiercest warriors.
The saga of Company E, part of a lionized battalion nicknamed the Magnificent Bastards, is also one of fortitude and ingenuity. The marines, based at Camp Pendleton in southern California, had been asked to rid the provincial capital of one of the most persistent insurgencies, and in enduring 26 firefights, 90 mortar attacks and more than 90 homemade bombs, they shipped their dead home and powered on. Their tour has become legendary among other Marine units now serving in Iraq and facing some of the same problems.
"As marines, we are always taught that we do more with less," said Sgt. James S. King, a platoon sergeant who lost his left leg when he was blown out of the Humvee that Saturday afternoon last May. "And get the job done no matter what it takes."
The experiences of Company E's marines, pieced together through interviews at Camp Pendleton and by phone, company records and dozens of photographs taken by the marines, show they often did just that. The unit had less than half the troops who are now doing its job in Ramadi, and resorted to making dummy marines from cardboard cutouts and camouflage shirts to place in observation posts on the highway when it ran out of men. During one of its deadliest firefights, it came up short on both vehicles and troops. Marines who were stranded at their camp tried in vain to hot-wire a dump truck to help rescue their falling brothers. That day, 10 men in the unit died.…”
Sergeant Valerio and others had to scrounge for metal scraps to strengthen the Humvees they inherited from the National Guard, which occupied Ramadi before the marines arrived. Among other problems, the armor the marines slapped together included heavier doors that could not be latched, so they "chicken winged it" by holding them shut with their arms as they traveled.
"We were sitting out in the open, an easy target for everybody," Cpl. Toby G. Winn of Centerville, Tex., said of the shortages. "We complained about it every day, to anybody we could. They told us they were listening, but we didn't see it."
The company leaders say it is impossible to know how many lives may have been saved through better protection, since the insurgents became adept at overcoming improved defenses with more powerful weapons. Likewise, Pentagon officials say they do not know how many of the more than 1,500 American troops who have died in the war had insufficient protective gear.…
Op-Ed Columnist: The Agony of WarBy BOB HERBERT
As a nation we can wage war, but we don't want the public to be too upset by it. Marla Ruzicka tried to change that in her quest to document the suffering of Iraqi civilians.
Supreme Court Declines to Hear POWs' Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider whether U.S. prisoners of war who say they were tortured during the 1991 Gulf War should collect a $959 million judgment from Iraq.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Human Rights Watch Cites Rumsfeld and Tenet in Report on Abuse
"This pattern of abuse across several countries did not result from the acts of individual soldiers who broke the rules," said a statement by Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch. "It resulted from decisions made by senior U.S. officials to bend, ignore or cast the rules aside."
“Drawing largely on news reports and publicly available military reviews, the group, Human Rights Watch, concluded that there was "overwhelming evidence that U.S. mistreatment and torture of Muslim prisoners took place not merely at Abu Ghraib, but at facilities throughout Afghanistan and Iraq as well as at Guantánamo and at 'secret locations' around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention and the laws against torture."
The report, Getting Away with Torture? Command Responsibility for the U.S. Abuse of Detainees, found no indication that Mr. Rumsfeld warned those under his command to halt abusive treatment of detainees and said that he should be investigated for abuses under a doctrine of "command responsibility." Mr. Rumsfeld has said he made it clear to subordinates that he did not condone mistreatment.
The report found that Mr. Tenet had been responsible for policies that sent detainees to countries where they were tortured, which made him potentially liable as an accomplice to torture. Mr. Tenet has not addressed the issue publicly, but C.I.A. officials have long said that Mr. Tenet insisted that agency personnel carefully follow the law.
A special prosecutor was needed to investigate these matters, the report said, because Alberto R. Gonzales, the attorney general, had a conflict of interest because he ‘was himself deeply involved in the policies leading to these alleged crimes.…’”
From the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq, top U.S. government officials have been aware of allegations of abuse. Yet, until the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs forced action, many Bush administration officials took at best a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to all reports of detainee mistreatment, including those described above, while others were ordering or acquiescing in the abuses.
While reports of abuse had already been coming in for a year, it was a seminal article in The Washington Post on December 26, 2002 that provided a wake-up call on U.S. tactics in the “global war on terror.”41 Citing unnamed U.S. officials, it reported that detainees in Afghanistan were subject to “awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights — subject to what are known as ‘stress and duress’ techniques.” The Post also reported being told by U.S. officials that “[t]housands have been arrested and held with U.S. assistance in countries known for brutal treatment of prisoners” and described the rendition of captured al-Qaeda suspects from U.S. custody to other countries where they are tortured or otherwise mistreated. One official was quoted as saying, “We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”42
The report said that of seven investigations by the Pentagon, none had critically examined the role of the civilian leaders with ultimate authority over detainee policy. Investigations into case-by-case abuses have largely focused on lower-level personnel. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that the government's policies prohibit civilian and military personnel from engaging in torture and that anyone found to have used abusive procedures would be held accountable and would face possible prosecution.
So far, the government has shown no interest in an independent inquiry. Republicans in Congress have blocked requests by Democrats to examine allegations of detainee abuse. At the same time, the Justice Department has ignored requests to appoint a special prosecutor.
An Army investigation has cleared all but one of the five most senior Army officers who were responsible for detainee policies in Iraq.…
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us0405/http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/international/middleeast/24detain.html
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Bush's War on the Press
“Make no mistake: The Bush Administration and its ideological allies are employing every means available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First Amendment function to hold power accountable. In fact, the Administration recognizes no such constitutional role for the press. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has insisted that the media ‘don't represent the public any more than other people do.... I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function.’
Bush himself, on more than one occasion, has told reporters he does not read their work and prefers to live inside the information bubble blown by his loyal minions. Vice President Cheney feels free to kick the New York Times off his press plane, and John Ashcroft can refuse to speak with any print reporters during his Patriot-Act-a-palooza publicity tour, just to compliant local TV. As an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind, ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ For those who didn't like it, another Bush adviser explained, ‘Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read the New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times.’
But the White House and its supporters are doing more than just talking trash--when they talk at all. They are taking aggressive action: preventing journalists from doing their job by withholding routine information; deliberately releasing deceptive information on a regular basis; bribing friendly journalists to report the news in a favorable context; producing their own ‘news reports’ and distributing these free of charge to resource-starved
broadcasters; creating and crediting their own political activists as ‘journalists’ working for partisan operations masquerading as news organizations.
In addition, an Administration-appointed special prosecutor, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, is now threatening two journalists with jail for refusing to disclose the nature of conversations they had regarding stories they never wrote, opening up a new frontier of potential prosecution. All this has come in the wake of a decades-long effort by the right and its corporate allies to subvert journalists' ability to report fairly on power and its abuse by attaching the label "liberal bias" to even the most routine forms of information gathering and reportage (for a transparent example in today's papers, see under ‘DeLay, Tom’). Some of these tactics have been used by previous administrations too, but the Bush team and its supporters have invested in and deployed them to a degree that marks a categorical shift from the past.…”
The right wing's media "decertification" effort, as the journalism scholar and blogger Jay Rosen calls it, has its roots in forty years of conservative fury at the consistent condescension it experienced from the once-liberal elite media and the cosmopolitan establishment for whom its members have spoken. Fueled by this sense of outrage, the right launched a multifaceted effort to fight back with institutions of its own, including think tanks, advocacy organizations, media pressure groups, church groups, big-business lobbies and, eventually, its own television, talk-radio, cable and radio networks (to be augmented, later, by a vast array of Internet sites).Today this triumphant movement has captured not only much of the media and the public discourse on ideas but both the presidency and Congress (and soon, undoubtedly, the Supreme Court as well); it can wage its war on so many fronts simultaneously that it becomes nearly impossible to see that almost all these efforts are aimed at a single goal: the destruction of democratic accountability and the media's role in insuring it.
The Bush attack on the press has three primary components--Secrecy, Lies and Fake News. Consider these examples:
All Presidents try to keep secrets; it comes with the job description. Following 9/11, the need for secrecy increased significantly. Bush, however, has taken advantage of this new environment to shut down the natural flow of information between the governing and the governed in ways that have little or nothing to do with the terrorist threat.As Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity points out, "The country has seen a historic, regressive shift in public accountability. Open-records laws nationwide have been rolled back more than 300 times--all in the name of national security." Federation of American Scientists secrecy specialist Steven Aftergood adds, "Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent.... His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004."
Some of these efforts may be justified as prudent preparation in the face of genuine threats, but this is hard to credit, given the contempt the Administration has demonstrated for the public's right to information in non-security-related matters.
Upon entering office, Bush attempted to shield his Texas gubernatorial records by shuttling them into his father's presidential library. That was followed by an executive fiat designed to hide his father's presidential records, as well as those of the Reagan/Bush Administration, by blocking the scheduled release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and issuing a replacement presidential order that allowed not only Presidents but also their wives and children to keep their records secret. (The records had
already been scrubbed for national security implications.)
In the aftermath of 9/11, Administration efforts to prevent accountability accelerated to warp speed. Attorney General Ashcroft reversed a Clinton Administration-issued policy governing FOIA requests that allowed documents to be withheld only when "foreseeable harm" would likely result, to one in which merely a "sound legal basis" could be found. And that was just the beginning. Even when documents were not withheld de jure, Administration officials often withheld them de facto.
When People for the American Way sought documents on prisoners' cases being litigated in secret, the Justice Department required it to pay $373,000 in search fees before officials would even look. "It's become much, much harder to get responses to FOIA requests, and it's taking much, much longer," David Schulz, the attorney who helps the Associated Press with FOIA requests, explained to a reporter.
"Agencies seem to view their role as coming up with techniques to keep information secret rather than the other way around. That's completely contrary to the goal of the act."
In addition, as Aftergood notes, "an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, websites and official databases." These sources were once freely available but are now being withdrawn from view under the classification "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." They include: the Pentagon telephone directory, the Los Alamos technical report library, historical records at the National Archives and the Energy Department intelligence budget, among many others.
Even more alarming is the web of secrecy surrounding the operations of what has become the equivalent of a police state at Guantánamo Bay and other military prisons around the world, where the accused are routinely denied due process and traditional rules of evidence are deemed irrelevant. Exactly two members of Congress, both sworn to secrecy, are being briefed by the CIA on these programs. The rest of Congress, the media and the public are given no information to judge the legality, morality or effectiveness of these extralegal
machinations, some of which have already resulted in officially sanctioned torture and possibly even murder.
The issue of "lies" has been the most consistently clouded by the Administration's supporters in the conservative media, who refuse to report facts when they conflict with White House spin. It's true, as I show in my book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, that many presidents have demonstrated an almost allergic reaction to accuracy. Still, the Bush Administration manages to set a new standard here as well, reducing reality to a series of inconvenient obstacles to be ignored in favor of ideological prejudices and political imperatives--and it has done so virtually across the entire executive branch. As Michael Kinsley noted way back in April 2002,
"What's going on here is something like lying by reflex.... Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven't bothered. If telling the truth was less bother, they'd try that too."
Rather than regurgitate that fruitless debate over the war--the deliberate untruths told by the Administration have been delineated ad nauseam--consider just two recent examples of its deception on matters relating to scientific and medical evidence:
§Mercury emissions: When the EPA unveiled a rule to limit mercury emissions from power plants, Bush officials argued that anything more stringent than the EPA's proposed regulations would cost the industry far in excess of any conceivable benefit to public health. They hid the fact, however, that a Harvard study paid for by the EPA, co-written by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists, found exactly the opposite, estimating health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did. Even more shocking, according to a GAO investigation, the EPA had failed to "quantify the human health benefits of decreased exposure to mercury, such as reduced incidence of developmental delays, learning disabilities, and neurological disorders."
§Nuclear materials: The Los Angeles Times recently reported that government scientists apparently submitted phony data to demonstrate that a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada's Yucca Mountain would be safe. As with the EPA and mercury emissions, the Interior Department found unsatisfactory the results of a study from the Los Alamos National Laboratory concluding that rainwater moved through the mountain sufficiently quickly for radioactive isotopes to penetrate the ground in a few decades, so it just pretended it hadn't happened.…
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050509&s=altermanTrees, Fruit, Evidence, Knowledge
Questioning Eziba's Decisions
By BOB TEDESCHI
Which creditors should a financially troubled company pay first, Rwandan widows or its bank?
“When Eziba, an online retailer, declared bankruptcy last year, it left behind more than the usual amount of financial pain.
The privately held company had built a considerable business by selling hand-made goods from local artisans around the world through catalogs, stores and its own Web site. But hundreds of those suppliers were left unpaid when Eziba encountered financial trouble. Some of the company's critics, including those at Overstock.com, which later bought the company's assets, are now questioning Eziba's decision to forgo payments.
Since its debut in 1999, Eziba was never shy about publicizing the benefits it bestowed on vendors around the world. The company said it paid a total of $10 million to groups like Rwandan basket weavers, many of them widows of that country's war, and South African papier mâché artists.But when Eziba's financial fortunes soured late last year, the company paid off a $500,000 bank loan instead of paying hundreds of artisans more than $100,000 it owed them.
Eziba said that paying off the loan was the best business practice - a contention disputed by some bankruptcy law specialists.Shortly after paying the loan, the company entered a voluntary liquidation process in hopes of paying off creditors like the New York public relations firm Ruder Finn, among others. (According to Emmanuel Tchividjian, a Ruder Finn senior vice president, his company, which was owed $11,000, was more concerned with protecting the interests of the Rwandan artisans, whose work Ruder Finn publicized, than recovering its money.) The bankruptcy proceedings are continuing.
But the creditors then petitioned for Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings after a liquidation attorney told them that a bankruptcy trustee might be able to recover the $500,000 payment - which it subsequently did - and thereby increase the amount available to pay themselves and the artisans.
Overstock.com, the publicly held online seller of discount merchandise, bought Eziba's assets from the bankruptcy trustee for $500,000, a price unrelated to the bank loan, and announced that it would pay the artisans in full, even though it is not legally obliged to do so. Overstock further said that it would try to revive their businesses by selling their goods on Worldstock.com, an Overstock division with a mission similar to Eziba's.…
Patrick Byrne, Overstock's chief executive, said last week that Overstock had already begun identifying and paying artisans, although he welcomed Eziba's help. Earlier this month, for instance, Overstock paid a debt of $23,000 that Eziba owed to the Rwandan widows. But Mr. Byrne also said he felt that Mr. Sabot and Eziba committed grave ethical lapses by not paying its artisans when it had the money to do so.
‘I smell skunk,’ Mr. Byrne said. ‘Even if Eziba really did have to repay the bank loan when it did, which I don't believe, the fact remains that they had eight months to pay the Rwandan widows $23,000 and they chose not to.’ ”
…Elizabeth Warren, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a bankruptcy law specialist, said Eziba was not legally obligated to pay the bank first.
"Until it filed for bankruptcy, company management decided the order of payment," she said in an interview. "They preferred the bank, while the artisans were shut out. They may have had business or personal reasons for doing that, but they didn't have legal reasons."
The bankruptcy trustee handling Eziba's case, Jack E. Houghton Jr., did not return calls seeking comment. Mr. Sabot said he could not fully account for the fact that Eziba had not paid the Rwandan widows for baskets that had been shipped in May. He referred questions to Mr. Miller, who, through last fall, was engaged in a last-ditch effort to engineer a holiday sales season big enough to keep the company afloat.
"I was operating a company under very difficult circumstances," Mr. Miller said. "And we were operating under the assumption that there was another round of financing coming in so we could keep the company going and pay off everyone. Unfortunately, that didn't happen." He added that the widows, among others, had been paid about $100,000 to that point for baskets they had produced starting in 2003.
The delinquent $23,000 in payments still represented a considerable hardship for the widows, according to Kaliza Karuretwa, the counselor for trade at the Rwandan Embassy in Washington, who has been in contact with the artisans. For every basket they sold to Eziba for $18 (which was in turn priced at $55 by the company), the widows could feed a family of six for two weeks, Ms. Karuretwa said.
Also left unpaid was a cooperative of South African artisans called the African Art Factory, which was owed $80,000, according Janet Pillai, the Art Factory's chief executive. Artisans in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Bosnia and the Middle East were also owed thousands of dollars.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/18/technology/18ecom.htmlFriday, April 22, 2005
American RadioWorks - Power Trips
“Reforms in recent years have made many of the lush perks once enjoyed by Congress disappear. But not all, certainly not travel. That's the conclusion of an investigation by Marketplace, American RadioWorks, and a team of graduate students from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, who cataloged every privately sponsored trip taken by members of the House or Senate since 2000. The result: Over $14 million spent by corporations, universities, and other outside interests, sending representatives around the world, for sometimes questionable reasons.
Part 1 - Rules of the Road
London. Antigua. Golf trips. Spas. Congress travels in style when outsiders foot the bill. Reporter Steve Henn explores the concern that free travel is a widely abused perk.
Part 2 - King of Travel conceptual@hotmail.comSen. John Breaux (D-La.) is a legendary dealmaker on Capitol Hill. He's also the king of congressional travel, with 56 trips in less than five years, paid for by industry groups, lobbyists, and universities.…”
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Thursday, April 21, 2005
It Isn't Just Political Appointments
Jim Rapoza
Of course, the Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee is an advisory group, and advisory committees shouldn't exclude people with extreme viewpoints. But when I look at the list of committee members (at www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interapp/editorial/editorial_0598.xml ), I don't see the extreme pro-privacy counterparts to some of these committee members.
“So here I am, head of a large corporation, and it's time for me to pick a few top people to help run the company. But who should I pick for key positions such as CFO and CIO?
My first pick is Marty, a person who can't track or control his spending, who is completely clueless and unorganized about his finances. The next time he saves a dollar will be the first time he saves a dollar. I'm going to make him chief financial officer.
And then there's Gail, who avoids using e-mail, a PC or anything technology-related and who in a company meeting famously stated that all technology is bad and that the company should return to pencil, paper and Day-Timers. She is, of course, the perfect candidate for chief information officer.
OK, I know you think I may be nuts with these decisions, but I'm just following the example of one of the biggest organizations around—namely, the U.S. government. Lately it seems as if the main qualification to get a top position in a government agency is to be completely opposed to the stated goal of that agency.
From a technology and, especially, an Internet business perspective, some of the most disconcerting agency appointments have been in the Department of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, a group that advises the department's chief privacy officer and has the potential to shape government policies for individuals, corporations and technology as a whole.
The first interesting decision was when the committee membership was announced in February and it included D. Reed Freeman, chief privacy officer at Claria, which was formerly known as Gator. Of course, this caused a great deal of consternation in the privacy community because Claria/Gator is one of the biggest players in spyware—I mean adware, PUPs, um, "super-keen-ware that you may have unknowingly installed." Many were surprised that a group meant to advise on privacy would include someone from an industry that is all about breaking down individual privacy on the Web.
Then this month, the chairman of this committee was named, and it turned out to be a Heritage Foundation fellow named Paul Rosenzweig, who, in privacy and government circles, is well-known for his advocacy of the proposed Total Information Awareness program, which was shot down in Congress because of its many potential privacy abuses.…
So, no, it's not just Bolton and the UN. Or Cheney and energy. It's policy. No child left with a mind
There is a good number of clear moderates from the corporate and government sectors, even some who are clearly privacy advocates. But there are no hard-core consumer privacy advocates—say, on the Richard Smith level—to balance the committee.
And when the chairman is a person who has been described as seeing privacy as something to be worked around, rather than someone more from the center, it is easy to understand why some have said that the committee's goal is not to prevent invasions of privacy but to prevent privacy from invading government policies.…”
…So, no, it's not just Bolton and the UN. Or Cheney and energy. It's policy. No child left with a mind.…
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1784963,00.asp“constructive ambiguity”
Israel's Ariel Sharon has had an amiable meeting with George Bush. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, badly needs the same thing
From The Economist print edition
“DIPLOMATS call it “constructive ambiguity”: wording an agreement—or a disagreement—so as to disguise the fact that there wasn't one. This week George Bush and Ariel Sharon showed their mastery of the technique. At a chummy confab at his Texas ranch, Mr Bush appeared to rebuke Israel's prime minister for not stopping settlement-building in the West Bank. Much has been made of the fact that Mr Sharon appeared to ignore him. But in reality there was little to ignore.
The meeting was important for Mr Sharon. Both he and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the Palestinian president, were due this month to visit Mr Bush and seek his blessing for their efforts since their own summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in February. Mr Sharon went to Texas with a black mark in his book: the “E-1 Plan”, which his government revived last month, and which calls for the building of 3,500 new houses between East Jerusalem and Maale Adumim (one of the largest settlements, a few minutes' drive to the east of the capital), to consolidate Israel's hold on that block of West Bank settlements. Notwithstanding Israel's reassurances that the plan is still on paper, several others, in other settlements, are already far more advanced.
But Mr Sharon also had something to show since Sharm: success in steering his Gaza withdrawal plan through Israel's parliament, the Knesset, and keeping his governing coalition alive, despite stiff opposition both in his party and outside it. Now, belatedly but energetically, the government is forging ahead with the preparations for the withdrawal, approving compensation payments to the settlers and looking for new lands for them to move to. That is starting to distil the reluctantly acquiescent majority of them from the hardcore opponents, who have staged noisy but notably small protests in the last few days; the zealots who blocked a highway with burning tyres and tried to disrupt Muslim prayers on Temple Mount in Jerusalem at the start of this week numbered mere dozens.
In other words, Mr Sharon is so far achieving exactly what he promised. At the president's Prairie Chapel Ranch, he got his reward. Mr Bush praised the Gaza pullout, expressed his “concern” at the settlement-building and reminded Israel that it must stick to the international “road map” peace plan. That meant “no expansion of settlements”, he said three times, pointedly failing to note that the road map actually stipulates no construction of any kind; according to Israel, building within existing settlement boundaries, themselves broad and sometimes fuzzy, is not “expansion”. In the same breath, he repeated his support for Israel's holding on to the main settlement blocks, where three-quarters of the West Bank settlers live.…”‘’
…Packs of media watchdogs scrutinise every news item, providing daily reams of proof that the world's media are both riddled with Israel-haters and controlled by a Zionist conspiracy. For the former view, subscribe to the mailing lists of Independent Media Review Analysis or Palestinian Media Watch—just don't confuse it with Palestine Media Watch, which (along with others) dishes out similar vitriol for anything that seems too pro-Israel.
However, in informational as well as military terms, the Palestinians are far outgunned. Israel has press officers in every ministry and embassy and an annual PR-training course in Washington, DC, for selected spokespeople. The foreign ministry has a 24-hour monitoring centre which analyses coverage in several languages, counts the airtime given to Israeli and Palestinian spokespeople down to the last second, and sends out real-time electronic reports on it to officials. Even so, says Mr Meir, he is pushing to make things more systematic, to get his colleagues to weigh up how every decision will play in the media, especially the foreign media.
The Israeli army, too, has learned lessons during the second intifada (which began in 2000), according to Ruth Yaron, its chief spokeswoman. Soldiers are trained on how to act around cameras. Press officers take part in planning operations—helping, for instance, to time them to match media deadlines—and army camera teams go along on them, providing footage (eg, of arms-smuggling tunnels and would-be suicide bombers caught at checkpoints) that goes out to the media.
As the occupied underdog, the Palestinians should have a natural advantage. But, says a Palestinian official, “The Israelis have a horrible product but they spend a lot of time in marketing, and they succeed, whereas the Palestinians have a really good product, but we invest nothing in selling it.”
As a legacy of Yasser Arafat's one-man domination of power, there is no government press office (there is an information ministry, but nobody is quite sure what it does); no co-ordinated message; no systematic media monitoring. Public statements mostly come either from officials who do not have media training or from public personalities who do but are not in the government. One result has been an inability to capitalise on things that should have been huge PR victories, such as last year's International Court of Justice ruling against Israel's West Bank barrier.
“I don't think many of our officials understand the importance of the media,” says Hanan Ashrawi, one of those public personalities, “and those who do want to be [in the media] themselves.” Some of the PA's more enlightened leaders are pushing for a better strategy, “but it's difficult”, says Ghassan Khatib, the planning minister, “when you take into consideration the nature of the people involved, the lack of a system and lack of discipline.”
Even Hamas, the Islamist party that will challenge the ruling Fatah for legislative and municipal seats this year, is more media-savvy, grumbles the Palestinian official. Earlier this month it announced its decision to run in English, a sign that it realises its shift into politics is as important a message to the West as it is to Palestinians.…
http://economist.com/World/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3798515
http://economist.com/World/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3873079
