Revolution in Tunisia: News Round-Up
January 16, 2011, 10:22 am
Filed under:
activism,
Africa,
alternatives,
collapse,
colonialism,
community,
infowar,
International news,
news,
politics,
protest,
resistance The citizens of Tunisia rise up, burning banks and the mansions of the presidents’ corrupt family
The long and short of it is that long-time President and dictator, Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, has been run out of the country by the violent protests that have been going on over the last few days, and the military has taken charge of Tunisia, with no end to the riots in sight.
Bowing to the continuing uprising, the prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, an ally of the ousted president, ceded authority to the speaker of the Tunisian Parliament.
How the State Handles Dissent: Violence and Oppression in the US and Around the World
November 10, 2010, 9:06 pm
Filed under:
activism,
Africa,
community,
empire,
fascism,
imperialism,
news,
police brutality,
politics,
protest,
resistance,
spying,
surveillance,
wiretapping Moscow authorities sanction 1,000 people for opposition protest
UNITED STATES
New bill allows U.S. citizens to be kidnapped and detained without trial indefinitely based on “suspected activity”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has forced the Pentagon to release over 800 pages of classified material documenting “possibly illegal” spying during the Bush administration. The heavily redacted documents include details of a spying program against Planned Parenthood and white supremacist groups in the runup to the Atlanta Olympics, as well as spying on Alaskans for Peace and Justice, an anti-recruiting group, civilian cell phone conversations, and other breaches of spying laws.
Fourteen anti-war activists may have made history today in a Las Vegas courtroom when they turned a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America’s newfound taste for remote-controlled warfare. The so-called Creech 14, a group of peace activists from across the country, went on trial this morning for allegedly trespassing onto Creech Air Force Base in April 2009. From the start of today’s trial, prosecutors did their best to keep the focus on whether the activists were guilty of allegations they illegally entered the base and refused to leave as a way to protest the base’s role as the little-known headquarters for U.S. military operations involving unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, over Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. But a funny thing happened on the way to prosecutors’ hope for a quick decision. Appearing as witnesses for the Creech 14 today were some of the biggest names in the modern anti-war movement: Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson; Ann Wright, a retired U.S. Army colonel and one of three former U.S. State Department officials who resigned on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and Bill Quigley, legal director for the New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
Ken Hayes, Father Louis Vitale and Nancy Gwin, the three human rights advocates who were arrested together with Michael Walli, were each sentenced in January 2010 to six months in prison as well – the maximum allowed for the charge of tresspass. The extremely harsh sentences are intended to deter others from following the example of the ‘SOAW 4.’
“Those who speak out for justice are facing prison time while SOA-trained torturers and assassins are operating with impunity,” said SOA Watch founder Father Roy Bourgeois.
Beyond Deepwater Horizon: Multiple Leaks in Gulf, Additional Spills Around World, and the Next Catastrophes
July 14, 2010, 5:39 pm
Filed under:
Africa,
business,
corporate corruption,
cover-up,
domestic news,
ecology,
environment,
Gulf Oil Spill,
International news,
New Orleans,
news,
oil spill,
politics,
pollution GULF OF MEXICO
As the oil continues to flow, some are charging that another BP operation in the Gulf is an even bigger disaster in the making.
For six months, Ken Abbott managed BP’s engineering documents for “Atlantis,” BP’s deep water platform nearly 200 miles south of New Orleans. He turned into a BP whistle-blower in February 2009 after finding what he says were thousands of Atlantis engineering documents and drawings that were neither complete nor reviewed properly by BP. That, Sawyer now says, was a serious safety violation.
Abbott and his lawyer quickly hired Mike Sawyer, a safety engineer consultant, who examined the BP documents in question. Sawyer tells CNN that oil rig “engineering drawings and specification are the primary means that workers use to ensure that they can operate the platform safely, and can ensure that they can shut it down or at least control any unsafe event.” Atlantis’ engineering documents and drawings, says Sawyer, were so incomplete that he fears another environmental disaster from BP.
The evidence is growing stronger and stronger that there is substantial damage beneath the sea floor. Indeed, it appears that BP officials themselves have admitted to such damage. This has enormous impacts on both the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, and the prospects for quickly stopping the leak this summer.
AROUND THE WORLD
On May 10th, 2010 ExxonMobile had an oil spill in Nigeria Delta. It is somewhere around the 16th worst oil spill in [wikipedia reported] world history, at 95,000 tonnes (696,350 barrels or 214,475,800 gallons). Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it. Oil spills are a regular occurrence in Nigeria, about 300 a year, it is estimated over the past 50 years about 1.5 million tons have been dumped in the Delta, equivalent to the Gulf War oil spill (the largest spill on record) or 50+ Exxon Valdez.
If 5,000 feet is deep enough to make it very hard to fix any problems with an oil well, it would seem that 8,530 feet would deep enough to warrant extraordinary precautions (if you’re going to be drilling at all, not something I’m in favor of). But Chevron, who’s drilling a well at this depth off the coast of Newfoundland says that a relief well isn’t necessary (even though a relief well could probably have avoided the Deepwater Horizon disaster)
In one case, BP’s CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe’s tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP’s acts were “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”
Nearly 5,000 miles from the oil-spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, BP and its culture of cost-cutting are contributing to another environmental mess in the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s north shore, according to internal BP documents and more than a dozen employees interviewed over the past month.
After two serious oil spills and other mishaps at the remote site, the BP employees fingered a long list of safety issues that have not been adequately addressed, making the Prudhoe Bay oilfield vulnerable to a devastating accident that potentially could rival the havoc in the Gulf.
Chevron Corporation has been trying for weeks to locate the source of a “historic” leak from its Burnaby oil and gas refinery — a leak that has been seeping still-unknown amounts of oil, gas and diesel fuel into the Burrard Inlet since at least April 21.
As the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to dominate headlines around the world, public outrage is being focused more intensely upon BP and its gaffe-prone CEO Tony Hayward. But amidst this crisis, the public should not forget the atrocities committed by other massive oil companies. For example, Royal Dutch Shell‘s drilling operations have been spilling oil into the Niger Delta in Nigeria since 1958. Because Nigeria is an impoverished nation and oil revenues fund a majority of government operations, Shell and other companies have been able to drill and pollute without serious oversight for all these years. It is estimated that 13 million barrels of oil have spilled into the delta, making life even more difficult for the region’s destitute residents. Shell blames the constant spills on attacks from “rebels,” who are in fact minority ethnic groups who feel they have been exploited and displaced by foreign oil companies. But Shell would never consider pulling out of the region or finding ways to avoid ethnic strife. Instead, Shell has proceeded with business as usual, and spilled a record 14,000 tons of crude oil into the delta last year.
US IMPERIALISM UPDATE: Global War of Terror Continues Under Obama
February 3, 2010, 7:03 am
Filed under:
Afghanistan,
Africa,
Barack Obama,
Bush,
business,
colonialism,
crimes against humanity,
death,
Democrats,
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International news,
Iran,
Iraq,
Israel,
Joseph Biden,
Latin America,
Middle East,
news,
obama,
Pakistan,
politics,
Republicans,
troops,
war,
war atrocities,
war crimes Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.
More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels or radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found.
Areas in and near Iraq’s largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years. The joint study by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionising radiation, which is thought to be a legacy of depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion.
“The United States’ collapse is evident in economic aspects and in military dimensions too it is on the verge of a collapse, given its failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine,” Commander of Khatam ol-Anbia Air Defense Base Brigadier General Ahmad Miqani said.
Miqani further cited views of the western theoreticians, and said they also believe the fall-in of the US is for sure and imminent.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found.
Models for a Different Society: Food, Water, Land & Housing
December 29, 2009, 11:35 am
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Uncategorized A rain-starved community in Peru collects hundreds of gallons of water a day using special fog-catching nets.
In what is sometimes called “daylighting,” cities from San Antonio to Singapore are resuscitating waterways that once lay buried under rivers of concrete
Two brothers plan to return a muddy river in northern Louisiana to its ancient floodplain by removing miles of levees.
The poor of Bolivia drove out the neoliberal model of water management. Now, they are fighting for equitable community control.
How to turn a lawn into lunch, swap preserves, glean, boost your food security and live the good life.
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate, widely used as evidence of hunger, by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts? Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.
Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”-the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or education-quality food for all is a public good.”… “I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.” Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.
News of a large group of landless young people invading a farm tends to bring images of revolution. And NC-based Crop Mob does indeed have revolution in mind, but the group’s methods are more about giving than taking. As I noted in my original post on Crop Mob, the organization is part of a wider resurgence of young people taking up farming. It was borne out of a discussion group on the problems facing young farmers, but rather than sit around talking about challenges, the group decided it was better off getting things done. So, armed with hoes, shovels, wheelbarrows, and bucket-loads of good will, the Mob has been descending on local farms to offer a helping hand. And after a full year of Mobbing, the idea is spreading.
A cynic might look at a program like the Edible Schoolyard — the much-lauded school garden initiative launched by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters — and wonder if such a thing would be possible outside the favorable growing climes (and foodie sensibilities) of California, and without the support of a famous chef. But as a moving article by a young teacher in rural Arizona shows, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
The Transition Handbook should be helpful to you if you are a proponent of planned energy descent and independence from fossil fuels and would like to start a Transition Town of your own. The transition model emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye and unleash the collective genius of their own people to find the answers to this big question: for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive
News Round-Up: American Imperialism Around the World
December 26, 2009, 9:43 am
Filed under:
Africa,
Asia,
Barack Obama,
biowarfare,
Bush,
Canada,
China,
collapse,
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crimes against humanity,
death,
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ecology,
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fascism,
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International news,
Iran,
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Latin America,
mercenaries,
Miscellaneous,
news,
nuclear war,
obama,
Pakistan,
Palestine,
politics,
pollution,
Private Military Corporations,
torture,
troops,
war,
war atrocities,
war crimes,
war profiteering With the infrequent exception of year off now and again, we have been at war continuously since 1798.
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on December 10 the president of the United States appropriated for his country the title of “the world’s sole military superpower” and for himself “the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.”
This may well have been the first time that an American – and of course any – head of state in history boasted of his nation being the only uncontested military power on the planet and unquestionably the only time a Nobel Peace Prize recipient identified himself as presiding over not only a war but two wars simultaneously.
Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.
A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.
“The war is a threat to our national security. We’ll spend over one $100 billion next year to bomb a nation of poor people while we reenergize the Taliban, destabilize Pakistan, deplete our army and put more of our soldiers’ lives on the line. Meanwhile, back here in the USA, 15 million people are out of work. People are losing their jobs, their health care, their savings, their investments, and their retirement security. $13 trillion in bailouts for Wall Street, trillions for war; when are we going to start taking care of things here at home?”
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the TV watcher to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US . . .” — Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook
“The first and foremost important achievement during the Chávez administration is the 1999 Constitution, which, although not written nor decreed by Chávez himself, was created through his vision of change for Venezuela. The 1999 Constitution was, in fact, drafted – written – by the people of Venezuela in one of the most participatory examples of nation building, and then was ratified through popular national referendum by 75% of Venezuelans.
The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. A full report on the can be seen on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson tonight.
The Indian press is abuzz with news that Indian Home Ministry officials are investigating whether a terror suspect in the Mumbai attacks, David Headley from Chicago, was working as a ‘double agent’ with the US.
The extensive use of terrorist tradecraft by Pakistani American terror suspect David Headley makes it evident that he “was not merely a low-level cannon fodder-type operative”, according to US strategic think tank Stratfor.
RELATED:
International News Round-Up: Usual Mix of Creeping Fascism, Empire Building, War Crimes and War Posturing
October 26, 2009, 6:20 pm
Filed under:
Africa,
Asia,
Barack Obama,
Canada,
colonialism,
fascism,
International news,
Iran,
Israel,
news,
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politics,
spying,
surveillance,
technology,
Turkey,
war,
wiretapping This man, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is a major U.S. Power Broker. Either he is giving us a clandestine warning or he has made a howling error. In either case he should be questioned under oath about these comments and their implications. What he says here is basically an admission of State-Sponsored False-Flag Terrorism being practiced within the U.S.A
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who promised a lengthy battle to “delegitimize” the findings of the United Nations commission, also instructed government officials to draft proposals for changing international laws of war.
For two years, the FBI has suspected AIPAC of spying for a foreign country, and for those two years (and for decades before) that group suspected of spying for Israel has been reshaping the US Congress for the benefit of a foreign government.
And THAT is the mother of all scandals.
Think about that as billions of your tax dollars flow to Israel while your roads and schools crumble and decay and services are cut.
Think about that as the coffins come home with your loved ones inside.
Think about that when you and a million of your fellow citizens march down the streets of America opposing wars built on lies and deceptions and wonder why the government just doesn’t want to listen to you any more.
I am not sure that most people understand the meaning of the name “Operation Cast Lead” chosen by Israel for its murderous and criminal attack on Gaza. The name is borrowed from a Hebrew nursery rhyme which was (and may still be) very popular among Israeli children in the 1950s. In this song, a father promises to his child a special Hannukah gift: “a cast lead sevivon.” Sevivon, in Hebrew (A dreidel in Yiddish) is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Somebody, in the Israeli army, who apparently feels nostalgic about his childhood, decided that if Israeli kids would enjoy a sevivon cast from lead there is no reason why Palestinian children would not appreciate it too.
In sworn testimony to attorneys on Aug. 8, Sibel Edmonds described a Pentagon where key personnel helped pass defense secrets to foreign agents or provided them names of knowledgeable officials who were vulnerable to blackmail or co-option.
And firmly rooted in this espionage program in the 1990s, according to Edmonds’ deposition, were two men who, with the election of George W. Bush as president in 2000, found themselves in the Pentagon: Douglas Feith, who would head the Office of Special Plans, and Richard Perle, who would become chairman of the Defense Advisory Board.
“They were 100 percent directly involved,” Edmonds told Military.com. “They were not in the Pentagon [in the late 1990s] but they had their people inside the Pentagon.” One of those people, she said, was Larry Franklin, an Air Force officer assigned to the Office of Special Plans who, in 2003, passed classified information to representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Office, or AIPAC. By then Feith was leading the OSP.
