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HONDURAN CIVIL SOCIETY AND IMMIGRANT LEADERS TO VISIT WASHINGTON DC, NEW YORK, BOSTON, CHICAGO

One month after the interruption of constitutional order in Honduras through a military coup d’etat and in the wake of widespread reports of human rights violations harkening back to events of the 1980s, the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC) is bringing a delegation of civil society representatives from that country to the U.S. to participate in a speaking tour and to advocate for the restoration of constitutional order and respect for human rights.

The tour will start in Washington D.C. with visits to Congressional offices and will be followed by press and speaking events in various U.S. cities, including New York, Boston, and Chicago.

TOUR SCHEDULE:
Wednesday to Friday, July 29-31: Washington D.C.
Saturday to Tuesday, Aug.1-4: New York City, NY
Wednesday and Thursday, August 5-6: Boston, MA
Friday and Saturday, August 7-8: Chicago, IL

MEMBERS OF DELEGATION:

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Tariq Ali | LRB | 23 July 2009

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’.

[Read the article]

Maliki walks a tightrope in Washington
By Sami Moubayed, Asia Times Online, 29 July 2009

Maliki is walking a tightrope these days, trying to balance the interests of Iran, the US, and his Arab neighborhood. One of the objectives of his Washington trip, his first meeting with Obama since US troops withdrew from Iraqi towns and cities on June 30, 2009, was to show the Arabs that he is now being treated as an equal by the US, not as a stooge, as was the case under George W Bush. Obama wants a real leader in Iraq, who can shoulder responsibility for security, not a side-kick, and nobody understands that better than Maliki.

Obama does not have political benchmarks for Maliki to meet, and is not going to carry a big stick and threaten to remove him from office if he does not abide by the American agenda. The Iraqi leader believes that contrary to what many people believe, Obama is not interested in Iraq, as Bush was.

[Read the article]

Was Sami Moubayed snickering when he wrote those lines?

US Patrols Regarded With Suspicion by Iraqi Forces, Civilians
by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, 28 July 2009

Since its June 30 pullout from Iraq’s cities, US troops have found it increasingly difficult to conduct patrols in the cities. All such patrols will have to be joint, but Iraqi forces have declined to allow them access to many cities, including Baghdad. Patrols that have gone without accompanying Iraqi forces have been publicly condemned.

But now, though violence hasn’t really gotten any worse since the pullback, the US is redoubling its efforts to secure the joint patrols, particularly in Mosul. The new excuse is monitoring reconstruction projects, monitoring which they claim is vital for the Iraqi economy.

[Read the report]

How Henry Louis Gates Got Ordained as the Nation’s “Leading Black Intellectual”

By Ishmael Reed, Counterpunch, 27 July 2009

Now that Henry Louis Gates’ Jr. has gotten a tiny taste of what “the underclass” undergo each day, do you think that he will go easier on them? Lighten up on the tough love lectures? Even during his encounter with the police, he was given some slack. If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!

Given the position that Gates has pronounced since the late eighties, if I had been the arresting officer and post-race spokesperson Gates accused me of racism, I would have given him a sample of his own medicine. I would have replied that “race is a social construct”– the line that he and his friends have been pushing over the last couple of decades.

[Read the article]