Monthly Archive for October, 2006

James Bovard’s op-ed, �Every Day is 1956″: The Hungarian Revolution Today, is generating some interesting comments, including that the Hungarian government is misrepresenting the majority of protesters as being right winged extremists. Craig Smith for the New York Times seems to disagree.

Backlash to ‘velvet’ revolutions
By Craig S. Smith
30 October 2006 The New York Times

BUDAPEST: Skinheads rioting in the streets of Budapest, populist twins running Poland and a far-right party that once made Western Europe shudder now a part of the Slovakian government. What is happening to central Europe?

Well into their second decade since the collapse of communism, many of Europe’s newest democracies are struggling with weak governments and polarized societies and worrying their Western neighbors that they may become the problem children of the European Union.

“For 10 years, all of these countries had to go through very radical reforms and natural conflicts were suppressed because there was an overriding objective to join the European Union,” said Jiri Pehe, a political analyst and a past adviser to the Czech Republic’s former president, Vaclav Havel, in Prague. “Some of the things that should have played out are now coming to the surface.”

That pattern was on full display last week when rightist, nationalist demonstrators clashed with the police, hijacking what was to have been a solemn commemoration of Hungary’s failed 1956 uprising against Soviet domination a half century ago.
Continue reading ‘Fascism on the rise in central Europe?’

By Chris Bellamy
28 October 2006 The Independent

The initial tests on samples taken from the site of the Israeli strike on Khiam present an enigma which will only be solved when the people who produced and deployed the weapon explain themselves. Speculation that the device was some form of “dirty bomb” or micro-yield nuclear weapon can probably be dismissed. The radiation levels and the amount of Uranium-235 in the sample clearly indicate that it was not a nuclear fission weapon.

Uranium has been widely used in conventional weapons – and on the battlefield – for the past 30 years, for three reasons. Firstly, uranium is very dense – 70 per cent denser than lead. Therefore, a smaller projectile delivers more kinetic energy, making it ideal for armour-piercing shot. Secondly, it is pyrophoric, which means that when slammed into a target at high speed it liquefies and ignites spontaneously. Thirdly, the type of uranium most widely used in weapons, depleted uranium (DU), is plentiful. It is a by-product of uranium enrichment, which produces the fuel for nuclear power stations and nuclear weapons. Because there is so much of it about, it makes sense for those who have it to turn DU into armour-piercing munitions.
Continue reading ‘Chris Bellamy: An enigma that only the Israelis can fully explain’

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release

October 28, 2006, 12:40 a.m. Contact:
Beka Economopoulos, (917) 202-5479
Brandon Jourdan, (646) 342-8169
Eric Laursen, (917) 806-6452

WILLIAM BRADLEY ROLAND, U.S. JOURNALIST/CAMERMAN, KILLED BY OAXACA
PARAMILITARIES � KILLER ID’D – ACTIONS BEING PLANNED IN U.S.

William Bradley Roland, aka Brad Will, a U.S. journalist and camerman, was shot and killed yesterday in Oaxaca, Mexico, by paramiliaries affiliated with the PRI, the former Mexican ruling party. Will was in Oaxaca covering the continued resistance of teachers and other workers against the PRI-controlled government of the State of Oaxaca. According to reports from New York City Independent Media Center and La Jornada, Will, 36, was shot at the Santa Lucia Barricade from a distance of 30-40 meters in the pit of the stomach by plainclothes paramilitaries and died while enroute to the Red Cross.

Centro de Medias Libres (http://vientos.info/cml) in Mexico City reports that from Will’s recovered videiotapes, they have identified his killer as a paramilitary named Pedro Carmona, ex-president of Felipe Carrillo Puerto de Santa Lucia del Camino, a colonia in Oaxaca.

At last report, Will was one of five people who died in the last day, along with 17 wounded, as paramilitaries and federal police poured in to retake the city, according to Centro de Medias Libres. The city had been in the hands of the workers for five months. Will is the first American to be killed in the months-long confrontation. A longtime journalist and activist, he covered land occupations in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., direct actions and rebellions in Argentina and Ecuador, land occupations in Brazil, and anti-privatization struggles in Bolivia. He was a much-beloved figure in the global justice movement in the U.S. and leaves behind many grieving friends.

Friends of Brad in the U.S. will be calling actions in the next day to demand that the U.S. State Department press the Mexican government to investigate Brad’s murder and address the terroristic regime that made it possible. Additionally, they will press for solidarity in the U.S. with the Mexican movement for social justice that Brad gave his life to document in Oaxaca.
Continue reading ‘Brad Will, US Journalist and cameraman, killed’

The Good Soldier
By Joseph Lelyveld

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell
by Karen DeYoung
Knopf, 610 pp., $28.95

Sometimes, while still at the State Department, he’d rail against a “broken” apparatus for policymaking; on other occasions, he’d blame his frustration on Cheney, who had practically unlimited access to Bush. (Again, here’s DeYoung paraphrasing her subject: “The president tended to pay most attention to the last person to whisper in his ear, Powell thought, and that person was usually Cheney.”) The Cheney he’d thought he knew, thought he could handle, was now under the influence of what Powell derided as “the JINSA crowd,” a reference to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a Washington think tank that saw Israel as a key military ally rather than a party to a dispute that the United States had a responsibility to broker. (Cheney, in fact, had served on the institute’s advisory board along with Douglas Feith, the number-three man in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.)

The recurring thump of the Vice President’s sharp elbows becomes a leitmotif. On one occasion, when Powell called over to Bush’s staff to say he was hastening to the White House to write some diplomatic language into a letter on the Kyoto treaty that was about to be dispatched to Capitol Hill, Cheney hand-carried the letter himself up to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue before the secretary could go to work on it. On another, Cheney dictated an ultimatum to Turkey to a desk officer at State, ordering him to transmit it without showing it to his boss. Another time he and Bush drafted new instructions to the ambassador at the North Korea talks without bothering to tell their top diplomat that they’d substituted their directive for his. Powell had to assume these slights were intended to put him in his place.

Three times in the space of fifteen months the President declared his commitment to finding a path to peace for Israel and the Palestinians. “I expect results,” he said in April 2002, having just called on Israel to freeze its settlements and halt incursions into Palestinian territory. Three months later he promised that the United States would “actively lead” an effort to get a “final status agreement” between the two sides by 2005. A year later, at Sharm-el-Sheik, he offered what he termed “my commitment that I will expend the effort and energy necessary to move the process forward.” Each time the words were hardly out of his mouth before the effort faltered, leaving his secretary of state in the embarrassing position of having to explain why. The first round was humiliating for Powell. Bush gave him a Rose Garden send-off to Israel, then changed his marching orders. Almost daily Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, was on the phone, passing along White House objections to something he’d said, telling him what he could not say. They were “ten of the most miserable days of my life,” Powell tells DeYoung.

Mission Statement

The Human Rights Committee of United Teachers Los Angeles promotes social justice and the peaceful resolution of conflict for its members, other office staff, students, parents, the community, the nation, and the global community. It advocates that UTLA and its state and national affiliates work for public policies that reduce violence, promote diversity, increase awareness of basic human and civil rights, support the rights of all workers, protect the environment, oppose the privatization and militarization of schools and society, reduce the military budget, and increase funding for education and other social programs.

The UTLA Human Rights Committee agreed to provide a room in their building to approximately 30 people intending to discuss possible boycotts, divestiture and sanctions of Israel, a meeting that was open to supporters and critics, and was sponsored by the LA chapter of the Movement for a Democratic Society.

When pro-Zionist groups became aware of it they pressured UTLA President A.J. Duffy to shut it down. He not only cancelled the meeting but Duffy closed the Committee’s website. It will operate under new guidelines for “handling requests” like that of LA’s MDS when it is allowed to resume online activities.

Open Letter to UTLA President A.J. Duffy
by Labor Against War
12 October 2006

New York City Labor Against the War (NYCLAW) is deeply concerned that the leadership of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) has buckled to Zionist pressure by canceling its Human Rights Committee’s forum in support of Palestinian rights.

Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese people are well documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and many other organizations. These crimes are carried out with U.S.-made F-16s, Apache helicopters, and cluster bombs — part of $5 billion that Israel gets each year from the United States government.

The U.S. does not arm Israel to “promote democracy” or for “self-defense.” Even Zionist historians now admit that Israel’s origins are rooted in dispossession of the Palestinian people — whose labor then built the Israeli economy — through an unrelenting campaign of ethnic cleansing: exile, squalid refugee camps, imprisonment, torture and murder.

Rather, it supports this racism and state terrorism because, along with dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel is a cornerstone for U.S. domination over the world’s most important oil-producing region.

Clearly, these grave injustices are not in the interest of Palestinian or U.S. workers. Yet, most U.S. labor bodies have a shameful record of complicity with U.S./Israeli crimes.
Continue reading ‘A lesson in democracy’