[Peace] News notes 041205

[C. G. Estabrook]

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	Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism" [GWOT],
	for the AWARE meeting, Sunday, December 5, 2004.
	(Sources provided on request; a paragraph followed by a
	bracketed source is substantially verbatim.)
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On this day in 1965, a US aircraft loaded with a nuclear bomb rolled off
an aircraft carrier in the mid-Pacific. The plane, with the pilot and the
bomb, sank in 16,000 feet of water. It was never recovered.

[1. IRAQ] Insurgent violence in Iraq killed dozens of Iraqis yesterday in
several well-planned attacks. In Baghdad a suicide bomber drove a minibus
packed with explosives into a police station. Meanwhile, in Mosul, a
similar attack targeted buses of Kurdish militiamen. Gunfire, grenades,
and roadside bombs went off throughout the day, killing two American
soldiers. [SLATE]
	Insurgents launched two major attacks Friday against a Shiite
mosque and a police station in Baghdad, killing 30 people, including at
least 16 police officers, the deadliest insurgent attacks in weeks.
	Associated Press reports that the fortified Green Zone (US offices
and Iraqi government buildings) in Baghdad took heavy mortar fire on
Thursday. A car bomb wounded two US soldiers in Baiji. We only hear about
a fraction of such violence and attacks from such wire service reports, it
turns out, since the US military doesn't release full information about
security in the country. [Juan Cole]
	Journalists and residents who have fled Fallujah share accounts of
US troops killing unarmed and wounded people; Many refugees tell stories
of having witnessed US troops killing already injured people, including
former fighters and noncombatants alike. [NewStandard]
	In Iraq, the U.S. force is about to expand to its highest level of
the war -- even higher than the initial invading force in March 2003. The
force will grow from 138,000 today to about 150,000 by mid-January, the
Pentagon said Wednesday. [AP]
	The deaths resulting from the Fallujah offensive make up more than
half of the total number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq during November, the
second-deadliest month of the 20-month war. [Pentagon figures]

[2. TORTURE] The U.S. military has launched a criminal investigation into
photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs in Iraq sitting on hooded and
handcuffed detainees, and photos of what appear to be bloodied prisoners,
one with a gun to his head. Some of the photos have date stamps suggesting
they were taken in May 2003, which could make them the earliest evidence
of possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq. [AP]
	The International Committee of the Red Cross has told U.S.
officials that physical and psychological coercion of terror suspects
imprisoned at a U.S. Navy base in Cuba is "tantamount to torture," The New
York Times reported. Although the Red Cross, custodian of the Geneva
Conventions, would not confirm or deny the report, its chief spokeswoman,
Antonella Notari, repeated concerns about "significant problems regarding
the conditions of detention and the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo
(Bay) that still have not been addressed by U.S. authorities."
	The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed a
criminal complaint in Germany calling for an investigation of alleged war
crimes by the United States in the mistreatment of Iraqis at the Abu
Ghraib prison near Baghdad.  The organization said it is taking advantage
of a German law that allows the government there to prosecute human-rights
abuses or war crimes no matter where they took place.
	Evidence gained by torture can be used by the U.S. military in
deciding whether to imprison a foreigner indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, as an enemy combatant, the government says. Statements produced
under torture have been inadmissible in U.S. courts for about 70 years.
But the U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of 550 foreigners as
enemy combatants at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are allowed to use such
evidence, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle
acknowledged at a U.S. District Court hearing Thursday. [AP]
	Under detailed questioning by a federal judge, government lawyers
asserted Wednesday the U.S. military can hold foreigners indefinitely as
enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, even if they aided
terrorists unintentionally and never fought the United States. Could a
"little old lady in Switzerland" who sent a check to an orphanage in
Afghanistan be taken into custody if unbeknownst to her some of her
donation was passed to al-Qaida terrorists? asked U.S. District Judge
Joyce Hens Green.  "She could," replied Deputy Associate Attorney General
Brian Boyle. [AP]
	Chile's navy admits that torture took place on one of its training
ships soon after the 1973 military coup. [BBC]

[3. DEMOCRATS] Convened by Harvard University's schools of law and
government, a panel of current and former federal officials, judges and
lawyers has proposed new rules on assassinations, surveillance,
detentions, interrogations and military tribunals. The proposals will be
presented to members of Congress in coming weeks, said panel director
Juliette Kayyem, a scholar at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School
of Government ... and former adviser to then-Attorney General Janet Reno.
The Harvard panel included Rand Beers, counterterrorism adviser to every
president from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush; retired Brig. Gen. Joseph
Barnes, senior policy adviser to the Pentagon; Robert McNamara Jr., former
general counsel to the CIA; and federal Judge Michael Chertoff, who headed
the Justice Department's criminal division immediately after Sept. 11.
Panel members recommend authorizing the president to order the killing of
a foreigner outside the United States on showing Congress evidence that it
would prevent a greater, reasonably imminent danger to Americans. Panel
members would allow the president to order the "highly coercive
interrogation" of an individual with information that could prevent an
immediate threat. But they would end the use of military commissions, such
as those introduced at Guantanamo Bay, to try terror suspects. Kayyem said
the report attempts to balance concerns about national security with
protections for civil liberties. "The left won't be totally happy with
this; the right won't be totally happy with this," she said, "but we have
to figure out ways to compromise on this stuff." [KR]

[4. MILITARY] A US military psy-ops campaign against the guerrillas in
Fallujah in mid-October convinced CNN that an attack on the city was
imminent and got this "news" broadcast so as to observe how the guerrillas
in the city reacted to it.

[5. ECONOMY] Friday morning's U.S. employment report was pretty sucky. Not
disastrous, but 112k is a disappointing. Only a handful of sectors added
significant numbers. Manufacturing shrank for the third month in a row,
and retail fell. The average hourly wage was up just a penny, and it looks
like year-to-year real wages are down by more than 1% - the worst
performance since 1991. The survey of households looked better, but the
survey of employers is more reliable. We're now 9.7 million jobs below
where we'd be in a "normal" recovery. [Doug Henwood]
	Stronger consumer and business spending helped the U.S. economy
grow at an annual rate of 3.9 per cent in the third quarter, the U.S.
Commerce Department said Tuesday.
	The dollar falls to yet another record low against the euro and
slips to its lowest rate against the pound since 1992.

[6. RUSSIA] Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States on
Friday of pursuing a dictatorial foreign policy and said mounting violence
could derail progress toward bringing peace and democracy to Iraq ...
Unilateralism increased risks that weapons of mass destruction might fall
into the hands of terrorists, and would stoke regional conflicts, Putin
said in a hard-hitting speech to an invited audience in India. "Even if
dictatorship is packaged in beautiful pseudo-democratic phraseology, it
will not be able to solve systemic problems," Putin said. "It may even
make them worse."

[7. SECURITY] President Bush on Friday nominated former New York police
commissioner Bernard Kerik to replace Tom Ridge as Homeland Security
secretary. During his time in NY, Kerik was immortalized for the ages in a
7-pound sculpture bust. The NY Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization
that raises funds for programs to support NYPD officers, quietly spent
about $3,000 for 30 busts of Kerik in 2002. [DRUDGE]

[8. POLICE] The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday took legal
action to get documents the group says show the FBI, with the help of
local authorities that include Chicago police, is spying on faith-based
and activist organizations. The ACLU and the groups are also asking for
information about the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, which has a
local branch in each major American city. The Chicago task force is made
up of law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI's Chicago office and the
Illinois State Police ... The FBI posted a description on its Web site
Wednesday of what the joint terrorism task forces do and how they operate.
The task forces exist in 100 cities worldwide and employ 2,196 agents and
838 local law-enforcement officers, according to the Web site.

[9. MEDIA] Citing the Bush administration's proposal of a constitutional
amendment to ban gay marriage, CBS and UPN have refused to run a UCC
commercial that advertises the church's acceptance of all people,
including gays and lesbians. NBC also deemed the ad "too controversial" to
air (UCC.org, 11/30/04).  Because ABC has a policy against accepting any
religious advertising, UCC did not attempt to place an ad on the network
(San Francisco Chronicle, 12/2/04).  Several networks accepted the ad,
including ABC Family, Fox and TNT. [FAIR]

[10. IRAN] US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday Iran was
"making a lot of mistakes" but said any action to prevent it from
acquiring nuclear weapons was a call for President George W. Bush and
other leaders to make ... Earlier, he said Bush has decided to work
through the Europeans and the United Nations to put diplomatic pressure on
Iran to give up nuclear program ... Asked what the odds were that the
United States would have to confront Iran militarily, Rumsfeld said, "I
guess those are calls for the president ... or for other leaders of other
countries to make." He noted that Iran had a large population of young
people and women who were dissatisfied with Iran's clerical rule. "That is
not a stable situation," he said. "My hope is that over time we will see a
shift in that country, just as we saw a shift from the shah to the
ayatollah. It happened almost overnight," he said. [AFP]
	The United States said Monday it had the right to unilaterally
report Iran to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose economic
sanctions, for what it sees as Iran's atom bomb plans.  It also warned any
companies that helped Iran with what it said were weapons of mass
destruction that it "will impose economic burdens on them and brand them
as proliferators," the head of the U.S. delegation, Jackie Sanders, said
in the written text of a speech to the U.N. atomic agency. [Reuters]

[11. SPYING] The FBI subpoenaed four senior staffers at the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee to appear before a grand jury in late
December. The FBI on Wednesday searched the Washington office of the
pro-Israel lobby, seeking additional files related to two staffers who
were interviewed by the agency in August — Steve Rosen, director for
foreign policy issues, and Keith Weissman, deputy director for foreign
policy. [JTA]
	Former CIA Director George J. Tenet Wednesday called for new
security measures to guard against attacks on the United States that use
the Internet.  "I know that these actions will be controversial in this
age when we still think the Internet is a free and open society with no
control or accountability," he told an information-technology security
conference in Washington, "but ultimately the Wild West must give way to
governance and control." ... "Access to networks like the World Wide Web
might need to be limited to those who can show they take security
seriously,"he said.

[12. COLOMBIA] A controversial bill allowing Alvaro Uribe to stand again
for Colombia's presidency clears its final hurdle in Congress. [BBC]
	A Colombian official has rescinded earlier reports a Marxist rebel
group wanted to kill President George W. Bush during his stop in Colombia
last week. [UPI]

[13. DEMOS] Romania's opposition appeared to be following the lead of
neighbouring Ukraine, demanding presidential and parliamentary elections
be annulled over voter fraud.

[14. FAME] Tommy Douglas, the former Saskatchewan premier who is credited
with being the founding father of Canada's health-care system, was named
Monday night as the winner in the CBC's Greatest Canadian contest. The
socialist politician was chosen by CBC viewers as the Canadian who has had
the most profound impact on the country's history. [CBC] Labour's first
post-war prime minister, Clement Attlee, has been voted as the most
successful prime minister in the 20th century, according to a survey among
academics specialising in modern British history and politics. [BBC]

[15. CANADA] As many as 5,000 protesters thronged the streets around
Parliament Hill Tuesday, hundreds of them briefly scuffling with police as
they demonstrated against visiting U.S. President George W. Bush. [CBC]
	AFP reports that American reporters covering Bush's trip to Canada
used to opportunity to snag flu shots, making "the 10-minute walk from
their workspace in the Government Conference Center in downtown Ottawa to
the Appletree Medical Center, which charged just 20 dollars (17 dollars
US)" ... "It's enough to make you believe in socialized medicine."
[wonkette.com]

[16. YESMEN] The British Broadcasting Corporation admitted that it was the
victim of a hoax when it aired an interview with an alleged spokesman of
Dow Chemical who said the company was taking responsibility for a disaster
in India that killed thousands of people in 1984. In the end, the
perpetrator of the hoax claimed to represent a group called The Yes Men,
which specializes in impersonations. But the Yes Men don't impersonate
people for laughs or profit. Rather, according to their Web site, they
"impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them."

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  C. G. Estabrook
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466
  <www.newsfromneptune.com> <www.carlforcongress.org>
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  "...a devilish instrument...has been created and is nurtured
  by powerful modern states.  They have endowed their creature
  with the rights of persons -- and by now, rights far exceeding
  persons of flesh and blood -- but a person that is pathological
  by nature and by law, and systematically crushes democracy,
  freedom, rights, and the natural human instincts on which
  a decent life and even human survival depends: the modern
  corporation." --Noam Chomsky
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