Organizations covering a wide ideological spectrum representing a myriad of issues protested the NATO Summit May 20 and 21, decrying a behemoth military industrial complex that has grown with NATO’s transformation into the world’s police.

“We want to bring an end to the war machine,” said John Beacham coordinator of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition in Chicago, “It’s causing so much destruction around the world,” he added.

NATO is being used to protect the same financial interests of many nations involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade who used profits from slavery to become members of the powerful global elite. A swarm of activist groups came to protest, believing those global financial interests, and determination of military targets to be related.

“NATO is a colonial operation. I think it’s very directly related and the U.S. is the most powerful colonial or neo-colonial country to ever exist,” Mr. Beacham told The Final Call. “The European powers of NATO really can’t do anything without the U.S. All the strings are being pulled here, all the decisions are being made here about which country to attack next, and whether it is possible.”

With their own countries facing severe economic woes and still reeling from the effects of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, The United States and the United Kingdom rank first and second in terms of NATO financing. There are nearly 40 other nations—though not actually a part of the Alliance—that work with NATO, on a variety of issues of common interest, such as the development of more lethal military weapons systems, and Western Europe’s relationship with East Asia, the South Pacific and North Africa.

British Prime Minister David Cameron having just left Camp David after attending the G8 Summit was among those in town for the NATO summit. Newly-elected French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian PM Mario Monti were also with Pres. Obama at the G8 Summit and joined him for the NATO Summit. Although Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was present at the G8 Summit, a tense relationship exists between NATO and Russia, therefore no Russian representatives attended the NATO Summit.

Robert G. Bell, Senior Civilian Representative of the Secretary of Defense in Europe and the Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, was very clear regarding what he thought was most important during the weekend summit. “When we talk about capabilities in a military alliance like NATO, we are talking about the hardware that make up a military: the fighter jets, helicopters, ships, and other systems,” wrote Mr. Bell on the U.S. State Department’s official blog. “The United States and our 27 NATO Allies make up the most effective alliance in human history,” he continued, adding summit topics included “discussion of the Alliance Ground Surveillance system, an Alliance Missile Defense capability.”

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen addressed the Chicago Young Atlanticist Summit May 19, which ran parallel with the NATO Summit. Organized by the United States Atlantic Council and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the “Atlanticists Summit” included students from NATO member nations, high-level NATO officials, scholars and think-tank analysts.

“We face a wide range of security challenges,” Mr. Fogh Rasmussen told the students. “And we will take the necessary decisions to ensure that our alliance can meet those challenges.”

Then, sounding a paranoid alarm that could have been spoken verbatim by any Israeli right-winger or American neo-con, the NATO Secretary General said, “In today’s world, threats know no borders and respect no country’s sovereignty.”

Mr. Fogh Rasmussen’s words ignore NATO’s continued global military actions, which impinge upon the sovereignty of other nations. It is precisely the type of rhetoric causing NATO’s critics to label them “warmongers.”

A May 14 Human Rights Watch report titled “Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties in NATO’s Air Campaign in Libya,” was highly critical of NATO’s air strikes in Libya which were responsible for dozens of civilian deaths, including women, children and other non-combatants in the externally instigated civil conflict. HRW charges NATO with failure to investigate unlawful attacks, and ignoring those civilian deaths.

In a June 2011 press conference, Minister Louis Farrakhan sharply condemned the NATO-led “coalition of demons” as they unleashed brutal bombing raids during their regime change operation in Libya. NATO’s punishing air assault decimated the Libyan cities of Tripoli, Sirte, and ultimately led to the assassination of long-time Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadhafi.

Many observers believe had it not been for the American government’s outside interference and NATO acting as the de facto Air Force for the Libyan opposition, Col. Gadhafi and Libya’s Bedouin tribal leaders could have resolved amongst themselves whatever disagreements existed prior.

Numerous anti-war groups have ramped up calls for NATO leaders to be charged with sponsoring and carrying out war crimes. In his writings, Gerald Perreira, who served as an executive member of the World Mathaba based in Tripoli, refers to NATO as the “North Atlantic Terrorist Organization” describing them as neo-colonial enforcers on a global crusade.

“Originally created to check the spread of Soviet Communism into Western Europe, this European organization has now reinvented itself as an enforcer and defender of White supremacy,” writes Mr. Perreira. “Since the onset of colonialism, hundreds of years ago, West Europeans have carried out a policy of genocide and plunder throughout the world. NATO comprises these same old tribes of Europe organized under a modern day umbrella.”

Rev. Jesse Jackson echoed the concerns of many protesters regarding NATO’s growing reach.

“NATO is going to be challenged to change its policies,” said Rev. Jackson. “Bombing Libya was just wrong, and they are going to other African countries and they shouldn’t,” he added.

Brock Macintosh, 23, and a veteran of the Afghanistan War is a vocal opponent of the growing military actions of NATO and the war profiteers.

“It’s a shame that because 3,000 civilians died in New York City, the response was to go to war in Afghanistan where now 33,000 civilians have died,” he said. Afghanistan exit?

Also present in Chicago at the NATO Summit for high-level talks was embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai. U.S. President Barack Obama said by 2014, Afghans would largely be in charge of their own security. American troop withdrawal has already begun.

“Our mission will change from combat to support,” the president said in a recent speech dealing with Afghanistan’s future. “By 2014, this process of transition will be complete, and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security.”

Mr. Fogh Rasmussen echoed his sentiments stating, “By the end of 2014, Afghans will be fully in charge of their own security. That is when our ISAF mission will come to an end. This does not mean the end of our commitment,” he said. NATO’s only goal is aiding in the establishment of “freedom, democracy and the rule of law,” he added.

President Obama came to Chicago for the NATO summit after hosting the Group of Eight (G8) Summit at Camp David May 18, and 19. Originally, the G8 Summit was also scheduled for Chicago, however, in a surprise move, the president announced in March his decision to change its location. Talks surrounding the financial crisis gripping the eurozone dominated G8 discussions, along with the continued pressure apparently designed to instigate military aggression directed at the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While the president maintains his decision to change locations was not based on security concerns, the switch caused considerable embarrassment for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

Supt. McCarthy, who leads the country’s second largest police force, is also the city’s highest paid employee with an annual salary of $260,000. He was seen throughout the weekend walking amongst the protesters, freely accessible, and directly delivering commands to the officers on post throughout the downtown area.

“This is an international city people came here to protest,” Supt. McCarthy told reporters. “I expect that the organizers are going to be true to their word and I expect that other people are going to engage in spontaneous protests and that’s okay. We’ve prepared for it, we’ve drilled for it, we’ve paid for it, we’re ready for it, we just have to go and execute it.”

Several days before and during the NATO Summit, heavy parking and traffic flow restrictions were put in place. Chicago residents experienced numerous traffic problems and disruptions in the public transportation system, which carries on an average weekday 1.64 million riders to various destinations in the Chicago metropolitan area. Bomb-squad units were also called upon to detonate a suspicious package on one of the rail lines.

Angered by NATO’s continued involvement in Afghanistan and subsequent destabilization of Libya, organizers with the ANSWER Coalition maintain the movement towards war with Iran and military intervention in Syria should be vociferously and vehemently opposed. For months, anti-war organizers stated they planned to “hit the streets to protest the warmongers at the NATO summit in Chicago” and they backed up their words with actions.

Numerous protests broke out on the days leading up to the NATO Summit, the largest taking place May 20, the day of the official beginning of the summit. Several smaller protests were also held in front of the home of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Snipers were perched on rooftops around the site of the NATO Summit to secure that area, as well as Soldier Field, the location where the NATO leaders posed for their group photograph.

When asked if he would continue working to facilitate the protests, specifically the planned veteran’s protest in which they sought to return their medals to NATO leaders, he said the CPD would continue to assist the law-abiding protesters to the best of their ability.

“I have incredible respect for anybody who served this country on that level and I think we have an obligation to do that for John Q. Citizen and certainly in the case of veterans, we owe them probably a little bit more,” said Supt. McCarthy.

In a particularly moving demonstration, over 40 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq returned their “War on Terror” medals and other commendations as they denounced NATO, the United States government, and the military industrial complex that sent them to fight war. Many protesters could be seen crying as one by one, the soldiers told their stories then hurled their medals into the street.

All remained spirited and generally peaceful until a group of protesters described by other protesters as Anarchists began to surge towards police in an attempt to gain access to the main area surrounding McCormick Place, where the high-level government officials were meeting.

A tense hour-long standoff began. Waves of riot police in full armor with helmets, batons and shields moved towards the crowd. Additionally, two sonic weapons called “sound cannons” were moved into position, as the protesters were surrounded. According to CPD officials, they are capable of emitting pain-inducing sonic output of up to 150 decibels, protesters and journalists quickly scrambled to grab earplugs, however, the sound cannons were not used.

At one point, officers removed their helmets and briefly placed their gas masks on, presumably in preparation for chemical dispersants to be released in efforts to disperse the crowd. None were used however, the stalemate did end in violence with several protesters being beaten bloody, arrested, and carried off. After about two hours, the crowd had largely dissipated.

Although they would not reveal their identities, masked members of the so-called Black Bloc told The Final Call they believed that it was time to “take the next step” since in their view, the protest were not getting the results they desired. When asked what results were sought, they were unclear, repeating criticism of capitalism and the “NATO-led war machine.”

Later that evening, another protest was held on Michigan Avenue in front of the Art Institute of Chicago where First Lady Michelle Obama held an exclusive dinner and tour for NATO officials. More arrests occurred with officers reportedly being doused with urine and feces by protesters. Four police officers were wounded in various melees.

Mr. Beacham told The Final Call that by having NATO in Chicago, President Obama and U.S. officials were solidifying the relationship with the European “junior partners” in global gangsterdom, and the heavily armed police units brought in to maintain order are supporting them.

“These are the real gangsters there’s no doubt about that,” said Mr. Beacham pointing in the direction of the NATO Summit’s meeting place. “The real gangsters are meeting right there—NATO—and they are protected by tens of thousands of gangsters in blue.”

May in Georgia…In this age of climate chaos, the local flora comes to bloom a full month earlier than in decades past. This season, magnolias and hydrangeas blossomed in early May. Their petals opened to the world as my father’s life is fading. The magnolia petals have grown heavy; his body is shrinking. Soon he will drift from this world…carried by the scent of late spring blossoms.

In our once laboring class neighborhood, McMansions blot out the late spring sun. In the arrogant shadow of these shoddily constructed, bloated emblems of late capitalism, the neighborhood’s remaining 1950′s single level, brick homes seem to recede…fading like memory before the hurtling indifference of passing eras.

In late spring, veils of pollen merge with shrouds of Atlanta traffic exhaust. Timeless nature has awakened as the noxious capitalist certainties underpinning the aberration known as the New South are dying.

Hospice has arrived in the home of my father.

A death vigil has begun, as well, for our culture.

Lost, starving, wailing into a void of paternal abandonment, my father, left on the doorstep of a Baptist church adjacent to an Indian Reservation in rural Missouri, arrived into this keening world. Now, he is refusing to eat and is wailing, once again, into an abyss of helplessness…His bones, eaten by cancer, and his bowels seized up by the side effects of opiates, he is starving himself to death.

He now lies in his bedroom; his sight…set on the undiscovered realm of death. This world denied him succor; now Death offers the embrace that he was denied (and later) refused, as he proceeded through this life in a resentful fury, his wounds cauterized by rage-lit flames.

Now, I must comfort him…as he did me, when I was a child, seized by night terrors…that he both placated and caused.

He whimpers into the air of the small home that he once shook with rage. Now, betrayed by his body, and again orphaned by fate, he will soon leave this world — a place from which he was perpetually estranged.

I hope the womb of night will bestow a peace upon him that was denied to him by this world. I hope whatever dawn he meets will hold him in an embrace so all encompassing and gentle that he will shed his compulsion to bristle and retreat. I hope he will, at long last, know he was loved.

My father was born on an Indian reservation and abandoned on the doorsteps of a Baptist church in rural Missouri in the early years of the Great Depression. A Jewish mother and Protestant father adopted him. In those days, it was a standard practice of adoption agencies to offer up for adoption children of so-called mixed ancestry to interdenominational couples. Caucasian babies, the conventional wisdom of the time presumed, would carry a stigma for life from being raised in a home headed by such social deviants.

My mother escaped Hitler’s Germany (barely) on a Kindertransport. My wife is from the rural South Carolina Low Country. She’s a flat-lander, a swamp bunny. As for myself, I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I’m an accidental Hillbilly…The lay of the land endowed me with a hill country perception of existence, yet I appreciate the mode of being evinced in places like Charleston and New Orleans…the humidity slowing down the pace of life…the mind as a gnat flurry.

My blood, as is the case with all of us, is composed of ancient oceans that long to know land and sky. On a personal basis, my atavistic blood is a sea of diverse ethnic consanguinity that meets the shore of a global polis. The waves of this body of water are changeable…sometimes, caressing the shoreline… placid, at ease in the world; sometimes, agitated and enraged by what I witness…becoming a series of antagonistic waves crashing against the insensate rocks of the mindless social circumstances that damaged my father so.

Soon, my father will return to the vast ocean of eternity. I consider it my duty to sing the song of my blood…to compose and give voice to sacred hymns, both of the personal and the collective.

This is my poet’s prayer: Life rose from ancient oceans so that mollusks could gaze upon the evening sky. Likewise, we emerged from the cosmic brine to know physical embrace…made resonate because of its finite nature — the loving limits imposed by Time. Accordingly, the immaterial longs for the caress of the summer breeze and to rage into a winter wind. Spiritus Mundi is dependent on us to cultivate our individual souls…to have our blood sing biographical ballads to audiences gathered in Eternity.

My father’s song is almost at its end.

The endless song continues.

A song of tribute to the life of my father (or, for that matter, any human life) must combine elements of a fight song and a love song. One must love life enough to take a stand in its behalf.

During the Great Depression, my father was (again) left fatherless when his adopted father suffered a debilitating stroke, resulting in a protracted decline that left their small family penniless and homeless. Consequently, my father, along with his nearly incapacitated father and his mother managed to make their way from rural Missouri to Cleveland, Ohio, and then went on to find lodging with members of his mother’s family who had settled in Birmingham, Alabama, where shortly thereafter his father died.

In the Deep South, the dark hue of my father’s Native American skin marked him for abuse by belligerent locals. Although he had been deprived of detailed knowledge of his ancestry, his Comanche blood resisted intimidation. His tormentors wounded him deeply, but they also succeeded in opening deep reservoirs of ancestral rage.

My father harbored an abiding animus to bullies — a trait he bequeathed to me by both blood and circumstance.

Apropos: At the foot of Broadway, on May Day, I stood near a bristling array of NYPD officers who were tasked with the crucial mission of protecting the statue of Wall Street’s iconic “Charging Bull” — where I heard one of the witless, uniformed thugs, through a smirk, opine, “These rich, lazy bums go to college and study women’s studies and the history of Negroes — then come out here in the real world and whine that they can’t get a job…These brats should have thought about what they’re going to do in life when they were in school.”

I turned to face him and averred, “I guess they could follow your example and they could stand here on Wall Street…stroking a billy club…protecting ultra-wealthy criminals and their ill-gotten riches.”

Of course, he responded by calling me a socialist.

Even though that was, most likely, the first accurate statement he posited all day, I replied, “As opposed to following your noble example: choosing to spend your days as a mindless fascist bully?”

His smirk still in place, he spat, “As if you even know what a fascist is!”

I replied, “As a matter of fact, I do, and you, being posed as you are in front of that bull [with its bronze form cast to crouch in a stance of impending aggression; its form, permanently locked in a position of myopic fury] will serve as a perfect backdrop for me to illustrate the situation. Mussolini, who knew a bit about the subject, proclaimed fascism to be the merger of the corporation and the state. Therefore, since it follows that the state pays your salary, and you spend your days protecting the corporate order… that you, to a jackboot, fit the profile of a fascist…Don’t you now?”

At that, his smirk solidified into a mask of belligerent stupid. He slapped his truncheon into his meaty palm, and told me that if I knew what was good for me I better move along.

I told him that he was probably right, due to the fact, I suspect, he could very accurately and with much relish impart to me the true nature of fascism with that nightstick of his.

His lipless, reptilian grin indicated he would be more than happy to take a personal interest in tutoring me on the subject.

The ghetto that you built for me is the one you’re living in.

— Bob Dylan, Dead Man, Dead Man

But the fight is not with this individual enforcer of the present, doomed order. The encounter is emblematic of what those who devote themselves to the unfolding struggle are up against: an armed and fortified wall of sneering arrogance — a violent, human torrent of surging ignorance.

For us, the living, breaching Death’s wall, possessed of the intention of changing its implacable order, is, of course, impossible — but challenging the present, calcified order — a death-addicted arrangement, created and maintained by mortal men that has existed well past its given and rightful time — has become imperative.

For my father, the struggle is nearly at its end; for those of us who remain in this breathing world, the struggle has just begun.

Amnesty International, in its damning report of the Ethiopian government, Ethiopia: Dismantling Dissent (DDE),states that from March to November 2011 “at least 108 opposition party members and six journalists have been arrested for alleged involvement with various proscribed terrorist groups.” By November they were all charged with crimes under the internationally criticised Anti Terrorist Proclamation. In addition, Amnesty continues, “six journalists, two opposition party members and one human rights defender, all living in exile, were charged in absentia.”

The ‘T’ word, as former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan called terrorism, is the umbrella term used by the Ethiopian government (amongst others) to justify the unjust, the dishonest and the criminal. If there is a terrorist organisation flourishing in Ethiopia, committing crimes against humanity and violating the human rights of the people, it is State terrorism delivered by the EPRDF government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as this UN definition of terrorism makes clear:

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable.

Fear of the government, fear of reprisal, of violence and [false] imprisonment casts a deep shadow across the people of Ethiopia, whose human rights are being ignored by the Meles regime that seized power twenty years ago and has brutalised and systematically restricted the people’s freedom and human rights ever since.

Lawless Lawmakers

In 2009 the Ethiopian government passed legislation on the highly controversial Anti Terrorism Proclamation. Human Rights Watch (HRW) that year looked closely at what was then the proposed law and amongst other recommendations, stated:

If implemented this law could provide the Ethiopian government with a potent instrument to crack down on political dissent, including peaceful political demonstrations and public criticisms of government policy and … it would permit long-term imprisonment and even the death penalty for “crimes” that bear no resemblance, under any credible definition, to terrorism. It would in certain cases deprive defendants of the right to be presumed innocent, and of protections against use of evidence obtained through torture.

Needless to say, the law was passed almost entirely as drafted, duly implemented and has since been used solely to silence dissent. Amnesty International, in its report, found that:

The prolonged series of arrests and prosecutions indicates a systematic use of the law and the pretext of counter-terrorism by the Ethiopian government to silence people who criticise or question their actions and policies, especially opposition politicians and the independent media.

It is the utilisation and enforcement of this law that is enabling the Ethiopian government to quash opposition and free speech within the country and intimidate those voices for fairness and justice abroad. The legislation allows the government to ban free association and to arrest and imprison anyone who has the courage to speak out against the government and their many human rights violations. The police, who were already commonly acting outside of the law, with little or no knowledge of human rights, were given new powers. HRW, in its analysis, reported:

The draft Proclamation grants the police the power to make arrests without a warrant, so long as the officer reasonably suspects that the person is committing or has committed a terrorist act. The Ethiopian constitution requires that a person taken into custody must be brought before a court within 48 hours and informed of the reasons for their arrest — a protection that is already systematically violated.

This constitutional requirement is dutifully ignored. Arrested under the Anti Terrorist Proclamation, individuals are held in confinement for weeks, sometimes months, without charge and denied legal support. Even before this draconian legislation was enforced, according to HRW,  “Ethiopian police routinely detain people without charge for months, and sometimes ignore judicial orders for release.”

Five From Many

In January five more people were convicted in the Ethiopian Federal High Court of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, and money laundering. Evidence against the three journalists, an opposition leader, and a woman, Hirut Kifle Woldeyesus, was made up primarily of online criticism of the government and plans to stage peaceful political protest, none of which constitute acts of terrorism. This is common as Amnesty found in the 114 cases they investigated in their detailed report:

Much of the evidence against those charged involves items that do not appear to amount to terrorism or criminal wrongdoing. Rather many items of evidence cited appear to be illustrations of individuals exercising their right to freedom of expression, acting peacefully and legitimately.

Two of the journalists tried in January were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment while Elias Kifle (tried in absentia), editor of the web-based journal Ethiopian Review, received his second life sentence [emphasis mine]. These cases are simply the most recent in a long line of miscarriages of justice, where the government has exercised an abuse of power and in the name of justice imprisoned the innocent. A further 24 journalists and opposition party members are awaiting trial, many of whom could face the death penalty, for trumped up charges which amount to nothing more than journalists exercising their constitutional and moral right to freedom of speech.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, stated in a meeting of UN human rights investigators in February:

Journalists, bloggers and others advocating for increased respect for human rights should not be subject to pressure for the mere fact that their views are not in alignment with those of the Government.

Journalists must be free to speak out against the government, to criticise policies of persecution, to highlight the suffering of the people and to draw attention to the multiple human rights abuses taking place within Ethiopia. UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, declared:

Journalists play a crucial role in promoting accountability of public officials by investigating and informing the public about human rights violations, they should not face criminal proceedings for carrying out their legitimate work, let alone be severely punished.

However,  all those speaking out against the EPRDF’s criminality and repression are subject not simply to “pressure”, or “criminal proceedings”, but violent arrest, torture and false imprisonment or, indeed, death.

Free the Innocent

These five men and women, who were mistreated in custody, falsely imprisoned and like others, including the celebrated writer Eskinder Nega (imprisoned for life in September for writing an on-line blog), denied their liberty, must be released immediately and an independent enquiry instigated to investigate their cases, their treatment whilst in jail and their hollow convictions. During their three-month imprisonment at the Maikelawi detention center before the trial and in violation of Ethiopian and international law, the defendants were denied access to legal counsel and family members, and claim they were beaten and tortured. This is the experience of a great many whilst held in Maikelawi as Amnesty reveals in its report:

Many of the [114] detainees were forced to sign confessions and to acknowledge ownership or association by signing items of seemingly incriminating evidence.

The Ethiopian courts have not investigated any of these claims.  They are, it seems, nothing more than servants of the Government, and are as HRW states “complicit in this political witch hunt.”

This collusion of the courts contravenes the Ethiopian constitution that states in Article 78/1: “An independent judiciary is established by this Constitution.” Article 79/1: “Judicial Powers, both at Federal and State levels, are vested in the courts.”

Furthermore, 3: “Judges shall exercise their functions in full independence and shall be directed solely by the law.” The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, “deplored the reported failure to ensure the defendants’ right to a fair trial,” reports the UN News Centre.

Amnesty International, in its report, calls “on the representatives of the international community in Addis Ababa to take up the role of monitoring trials.” This would be an important initial act in placing the EPRDF under international scrutiny and accountability. It is time the international community, acting through the UN, undertook its responsibility and role as advocate for justice, self-determination, “the suppression of acts of aggression” (Article 1) and freedom for the people of the world, in accordance with its Charter.

A Blind Eye to Torture

In addition to the suppression of free speech, the use of the death penalty and withdrawing the legal right of presumption of innocence, torture is allowed under the Anti Terrorism Proclamation and information gathered whilst under such duress is admissible in court. HRW reports that::

The draft Proclamation deems confessions admissible without a restriction on the use of statements made under torture.

This is illegal under international law, The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does not allow the use of any statements made in a court of law, that were elicited under torture. The use of such information is also prohibited under the Ethiopian Constitution. Article 19 states:

Persons arrested shall not be compelled to make confessions or admissions which could be used in evidence against them. Any evidence obtained under coercion shall not be admissible.

The much-trumpeted constitution  means little or nothing to the people and even less to the EPRDF who ignore its charter.

Known Unknowables

It is an acknowledged fact within the corridors of the UN and Ethiopia’s donor countries that human rights abuses are occurring daily within the country under Prime Minister Meles and his ministerial menagerie. How do we as a world community, responsible and alert to the needs of our brothers and sisters, respond to such men, to such injustice and tyranny? Fight fire with fire many would advocate and in the face of such cruelty many of us would perhaps gladly fuel a furnace.  However, as Mahatma Ghandi said, “I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can teach you not to bow your heads before anyone even at the cost of your life.”

To be silent in the sight of injustice and persecution is to allow tyrants like Meles to maintain their stranglehold over the innocent. It is time intense political pressure from those providing and delivering the much-needed financial and developmental aid, was applied to put an end to the current regime’s human rights violations and abuse of the people, including freezing of personal assets and targeted sanctions.

The British government gives £315 million a year to Ethiopia, a spokesperson from The Department for International Development (DFID) told the Guardian (3/02/2012):

The prime minister, the foreign secretary and the secretary of state for international development have all raised concerns with Prime Minister Meles over the recent arrests of opposition leaders and journalists.

“Concern” is all well and good, but all too easy for the arrogant to shrug off, outrage and horror a more apt response from Westminster and more in keeping with the offences being committed. Criticism alone, however, will not bring change within the abysmal regime and justice to the long-suffering people.

Repeal and Release

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi presides over a dictatorship that restricts all freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the media in Ethiopia. Peaceful dissent is met with violence and false imprisonment. Intimidation and fear are the key tools in such repression.  This must end, and we, the international community, must ensure it is so.

The Anti-Terrorist Proclamation is an unjust piece of legislation designed and implemented by a corrupt and violent regime who is in breach of international law and their own constitution. It must be repealed immediately, the many innocent good men and women falsely imprisoned released and those supporting Ethiopia through development aid should insist on the implementation of these legitimate and morally right demands. Sit not in silent appeasement, but raise your bowed heads and act.

One Quebec student organization has come up with four proposals to reduce spending on post-secondary education, so that students are not burdened by rising education costs. Gabrielle Nadeau Dubois, a Quebec student organizer and co-spokesman with CLASSE, calls for a capital tax on Canadian banking transactions, which he proffered would lead gradually to free post-secondary education in Quebec by 2016.

Reforms in Myanmar have made the past experience just described less dangerous. However, from time to time these days I find myself feeling like a hypocrite when speaking about American ideals and Democracy. Democracy in the United States, seen from abroad, looks more like Communism in China. American foreign policy looks more like mafia thuggery. I’ve begun feeling like I’m misleading my students who deeply believe in American political policy and projected principles solely for the reason that the United States government is – rightly so for a change of pace – Aung San Suu Kyi’s greatest ally.

My students aren’t absent any ideas about what Democracy means. All of them were ex-political prisoners or family members of political prisoners. The youngest among them was detained just six months ago after supporting her father’s single-person protest against an obscure land-seizure case that left his family farm in the hands of a corrupt government crony. The father was arrested and the daughter went to the police station to demand his release. She was arrested when she did so. Three or four years ago they would both have been sentenced to several years in prison.

These days, as Myanmar eases into sort of becoming a fledgling democracy in its earliest stages, reforms have opened doors and minds and after nearly a week, both father and daughter were set free without any pending charges — absent their land. Human rights abuses and injustices still occur wholesale in Myanmar, yet with less frequency except in the frontier regions where westerners are banned from entering. In the United States, human rights abuses and injustices still occur, yet more frequently every day.

When I see video’s of American police brutality against Occupy protesters, people being evicted from their homes, TSA security hacks accosting four-year old children at airports and calling the child “a suspect”, TSA searches of innocent American citizens travelling on buses, trains and sidewalks, police busting down the door of an African American Vietnam Veterans home in white Plains, New York and electrocuting him, then shooting him to death, and when I read the news of the madness of war zone atrocities of murderous drones flying over half of Arabia, bombing and killing at random, American soldiers pissing on corpses, raping and rampaging death and destruction on to impoverished uneducated people with no electricity in their villages, I wonder, what the hell is Democracy?

What is the United States anymore? I hardly can recognize it from the days long ago when I had Civics class in seventh grade; the American military had just finished slaughtering 3 million people in Vietnam, untold numbers more in Laos and was unquestionably responsible for the genocide of 3 million more in Cambodia. Didn’t Nazi Germany in Europe and Imperial Japan in Asia behave this way long before Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II? No country dared, then or now, to stand up to American militarism abroad and now that it’s come home to roost in the styles of fascism on American streets and in American homes. Few Americans actually can resist the police state without their lives and livelihoods being  destroyed more than they’ve become.

When the world finally stood up to the spread of fascism in the 1940’s it was too late to save the so-called civilized world from total destruction. That the United States was the only power left not destroyed was because of geography, not superiority. Can the rest of the world stand up to the United States military and security complex?  The BRICS nations are succeeding at bringing imperial American economic might down by devaluing the dollar to 65% of the world’s currency reserve from 85% a few years ago. But as our  politicians have caved like lemmings jumping over a cliff to the security industrial complex, more and more money is being wasted to reap death, destruction, and surveillance over the world and in the United States. American militarism is out of control. Americans collectively have  become like the solitary young man standing in front of the huge tank during the Tiananmen Square protests in China in 1979.

What has become of the United States? The nation’s police departments behave as if they are occupying army’s hell bent on subduing the populace that pays them, even to the point of a citizen being subjected to being stripped searched not once, but twice, for failing to pay for a traffic violation. That means if your spouse, grandparents or children forget or fail to pay a parking ticket, for whatever reason, they can be arrested, strip searched and stored away in a jail and possibly even left there out of professional  neglect such as the kid in California who was doomed to spend four days in prison cell by the DEA, forced to drink his urine to survive, he was never charged with a crime.

America imprisons close to 2.5 million people at a time, year in and year out. African Americans are  disproportionately jailed per capita more than are white people. Where is the democracy? What on earth could 2.5 million Americans be doing so badly that all of them deserve to be in prison? Millions more each year are subjected to the legal system of parole and probation.  Corporations run the prisons in the United States. They lobby for tougher laws in all areas of law in order to arrest and detain more and more American citizens, because they make profits from having people in their prisons. Police and judges have been exposed as being corrupted with kickbacks and payoffs in some places in America as they’ve been caught arresting and sentencing with abandon while getting paid commissions in the form of cash. It’s probable many more have not been caught.

I tell my students to go on YouTube and search “police taser” and watch the many, many videos of American police electrocuting its citizens. They report back to me in shock and horror. They proclaim, “This never even happen in Burma!” It’s hard to teach Democracy when you come from a country where Democracy doesn’t really exist anymore.  Where the police state is the enemy of its citizens, where every form of communication is captured and stored, analyzed and used for advertising or – who knows – future blackmail? American citizens are all “suspects” to the police state. They are now subjected to drones hovering in their air space. No more laying out topless in the back yard on a sunny day or going for a romantic walk in a cornfield or forest and finding a nice cozy place to snuggle. If seen by a police drone, the police will arrive to arrest, strip search, and imprison the couple and they will inevitably be labeled sex-offenders and have their lives forever ruined. All for being in love under the clear blue sky on a pleasant summer day. Clear except for the police watching.

What does Democracy mean regarding the upcoming presidential election? There’s a choice between two people for president who swear they will give more money to the security state, cut social safety nets, privatize public education, cut taxes on the wealthy, spend more money on drug prohibition, continue to kill, torture and destroy more in Afghanistan, and in many other countries in the middle east – for what? Oil? The minority of Israel’s leaders and their insane but wealthy American supporters who are extreme warmongers and zealots hell bent of attacking Iran and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral lands? Most Israelis and Jewish Americans oppose these warmongers among them. The American corporate media is complicit in fueling the airwaves with propaganda against Iran and Islam, immigrants, and any idea left of what was once considered fascism. In today’s bizarre political world Richard Nixon would be called a  progressive.

What are Americans doing about the injustices and high-crimes and misdemeanors of American government and its Wall Street puppeteers? Mitt Romney has a car lift in his home. He’s the Republican nominee – thankfully since all of his opponents were nearly intellectually catatonic  evangelical non-Christ-like Christians. He’s a hedge fund financier – or whatever they call such crooks these days. Call them anything except guilty as charged. Barack Obama is a traitorous liar who sold himself to the American people as a new deal liberal peace-loving reformer who would ends wars, curtail the security state, and fight Wall Street – hahaha. Last time I looked, Guantanamo was still operating full steam ahead.  Americans will be at war in Afghanistan until 2024. (Hasn’t the bloodthirsty response to the September 11, 2001 tragedy been satisfied enough?) Wall Street crooks are still robbing the nation with ease. Terrorism of all kinds rules the world around us.

I want to be clear. I fear terrorism. Make no question about it. I fear police drones watching me from above, being tracked electronically and fondled by the TSA, being  harassed by police at roadblocks – but I fear it coming from Americans in America. I fear it from a psychotic night watchman like Mr. Zimmerman who murdered Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie. I fear it from a policeman wanting to arrest me in case my auto insurance payment is late and my insurance lapses. Or maybe I might forget to put the little sticker on my license plate that says I paid for the auto registration. I don’t deserve to be arrested, strip-searched and put in prison where I or anyone one, male or female, could be raped by other prisoners or abused by under-educated, unskilled, under-paid power tripping prison guards working for a corporation.

Maybe we should lobby local towns and cities to blood test and strip search people who want to run for office. I can’t imagine why a person who is not criminally inclined would want to do so. Call it a pre-emptive test of character. If one is willing to be blood tested and strip searched in order to be an elected politician, then they are either going to be guilty of something or they are insane. In either case, they will not be fit for office. Maybe that way we can keep the criminals and crazies out of politics. And then we can keep politics out of American society and return America to the rule of law and not the rule of the wealthy corporatists and the police. Call it the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. What a dream it was to think it could last. What a nightmare American Democracy has become.

Dan Freeman-Maloy: In your book, you describe the determination of Israeli planners to develop closer ties with the European Union. Has Israel’s traditional policy of trying to limit European diplomatic involvement in the Middle East changed?

David Cronin: Yes and no.

In recent years, there has been quite a bit of strategic thinking undertaken by the Israeli foreign ministry. This was particularly the case when Tzipi Livni was in charge of that ministry.

One of the conclusions of that thinking was that Israel should not rely entirely on the US to defend its indefensible actions. There was a realisation that while the US remains the only superpower at the moment, other powers are emerging. The decision to “reach out” more to the EU was taken in that context. Israel is similarly seeking to engage more with China, India and Brazil, particularly with regard to sales of weaponry and surveillance technology.

There is a perception in some circles that European diplomats are hostile to Israel. In the first few months of this year, a series of leaked reports from EU representatives in East Jerusalem and Ramallah expressed frustration with the expansion of Israeli settlements. Yet it’s significant that these reports were drawn up by people who witness the results of Israel’s activities “on the ground”. The EU also has representatives in Tel Aviv and Brussels, who see things very differently and have been beavering away to increase cooperation between Israel and the Union.

We occasionally see newspaper articles in which Israeli ministers accuse the EU of meddling in Israel’s affairs or suggesting that the EU is biased towards the Palestinians. Yet if you dig even a tiny bit beneath the surface, you will see that this apparent tension is at odds with the real picture. The real picture is one where the EU has become so close to Israel that, I would argue, it has become complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

DF: Not long after Operation Cast Lead, then NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made a cordial visit to Israel (where his hosts drew a parallel between Israeli operations in Gaza and NATO operations in Afghanistan). You report that NATO-Israel relations may be set to deepen.

DC: We should never forget that in 2010, Israel killed eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American in international waters, while these activists were taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. I’m not an expert on these matters but my understanding is that this attack was tantamount to an act of war against Turkey, a member of NATO.

I think it’s fair to say that if Iran had done something comparable, NATO would have reacted forcefully. Yet Israel has a so-called “individual cooperation programme” with NATO since 2006, under which both sides share sensitive information; the scope of the programme was extended in 2008. Israel’s relationship with NATO has remained strong despite how the alliance condemned the flotilla attack. Shortly before Gabi Ashkenazi stepped down as head of the Israeli military last year, he was treated to a farewell dinner by senior NATO officers in Brussels. He also was called in to give NATO advice on how to fight the war in Afghanistan.

And Israel is taking part in a NATO operation in the Mediterranean called Active Endeavour. Originally, this was supposed to be an “anti-terrorism” initiative in response to the 11 September 2001 atrocities. But it has subsequently been broadened to cover immigration. What this means is that Israel is helping Western governments, especially Greece, to prevent vulnerable people fleeing poverty and persecution from reaching Europe’s shores. It’s quite disgusting.

DF: Turning back to the EU specifically, where does the recent Conformity Assessment and Acceptance of Industrial Products (ACAA) agreement fit in the broader struggle around Europe’s preferential trade ties with Israel?

DC: ACAA sounds dull and technical. But it is deeply political.

This is an agreement reached between the EU and Israel, whereby quality checks carried out by the Israeli authorities on manufactured goods would have the same status as similar checks carried out by authorities within the EU. At the moment, it’s limited to pharmaceutical products but it could easily be extended to other goods.

This agreement is a top priority for the Israelis because once it enters into force, Israel would take an important step towards being integrated into the EU’s single market.

To their credit, some members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been asking difficult questions about ACAA for a few years. And this has meant that the Parliament has not yet approved the agreement. It’s not clear when the Parliament will make a final decision about the matter. There was a discussion at the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee in the past couple of weeks, where it was decided to delay holding a vote on the dossier until legal assurances are provided on the question of whether or not the agreement would apply to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

It’s significant that the Israelis have hired a top public relations firm, Kreab Gavin Anderson, to help with their efforts to break the deadlock on ACAA. Kreab’s Brussels office is headed by a guy who used to be the chief adviser to MEPs with the Swedish Conservative Party. It cannot be a coincidence that one of the MEPs most vocal in supporting ACAA, Christoffer Fjellner, belongs to that party. He is arguing that if the agreement is not approved, Europeans will have less access to medicines. This is scaremongering, in my view, and is hypocritical because Fjellner is very supportive of the big players in the global pharmaceutical industry, who are actively seeking to use intellectual property issues to prevent the poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America from having access to affordable medicines.

DF: Even people writing for quasi-official EU publications have felt compelled to question ‘the sincerity of repeated declarations encouraging Palestinian unity’ from official spokespeople. How have EU donor and diplomatic policies contributed to fragmenting Palestinian politics?

DC: Those declarations have zero credibility.

The EU always claims that it wishes to promote democracy around the world. In 2006, an election took place in Palestine. The EU’s own observation team found the election to be free and fair and something of a model for the Arab world. And then the EU decided to ignore that election because in its eyes the “wrong” party – namely Hamas – won.

I’m personally not a fan of either Hamas nor Fatah but if Hamas won a democratic mandate, that should be respected.

It’s a classical colonial attitude for an imperial power to show preference for one side in an occupied territory over another. Divide and rule. That’s exactly what’s been happening in recent years. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, and Salam Fayyad, the so-called prime minister, lack any democratic mandate. Yet they are treated as real darlings by the EU and US. Why? Because rather than resisting the occupation, they accommodate it.

In particular, they are also happy to pursue the kind of neo-liberal economic policies that are treated as sacrosanct in Brussels and Washington. Salam Fayyad used to work for the International Monetary Fund and has clearly been inculcated with its ideology.

DF: Can you describe the EUPOL COPPS programme and its relationship to the US training of PA forces in the West Bank?

DC: This is another “divide and rule” case.

The EU’s police mission for Palestine (COPPS) was originally supposed to apply to both the West Bank and Gaza. But in practice it only applies to the West Bank because the Union refuses to deal with the Hamas administration in Gaza.

What has happened is that the EU is in charge of training civil police and the US has been charged of training more militarised police units in areas under control of the Palestinian Authority. We are told that this is helping the Palestinian Authority get ready to assume the responsibilities of statehood. This is nonsense. One of the key aims of the these training missions is to boost cooperation between the PA police and Israeli forces. So the EU is really helping Palestinians to police their own occupation.

Worse again, it has been documented that police loyal to Fatah have used brutal methods – including torture – against their political rivals. Even though these police are trained by the EU, the Union says nothing about these human rights abuses. This silence is shameful.

DF: Germany is reportedly in the process of selling Israel a sixth partially subsidized ‘Dolphin’ submarine. What’s the significance of these sales?

DC: I’d put these sales in the context of wider military cooperation between the EU and Israel.

As well as helping to arm Israel, Europe is helping Israel to sell its weaponry abroad. The British Army has been using Israeli unmanned warplanes, or drones as they are generally called, in Afghanistan, for example. The ethical question of using weapons that have been “battle-tested” in an obscene manner isn’t even broached in “polite society”. Drones were used extensively to kill and maim innocent civilians during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.

What’s also significant is that Israeli arms companies are receiving scientific research grants from the Union. These include Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the two suppliers of drones used in Cast Lead. At the moment, Israel is taking part in 800 EU-financed research projects, which have a total value of 4 billion euros. This means that my tax is helping to subsidise Israel’s war industry.

DF: Historically, France has been seen as the European power most likely to challenge the US monopoly on diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. Is this reputation still deserved?

DC: Definitely not.

Jacques Chirac demonstrated occasionally that he could be independent of the US when he was president. But Nicolas Sarkozy has been much more of an “Atlanticist” – for example, he decided that France should participate more fully in NATO than it has for a number of decades.

I’m answering this question a few days before the second round of voting in France’s presidential election. If Francois Hollande wins, then I don’t predict any major changes in terms of France’s policy on Israel-Palestine. I hope, however, that I am proved wrong.

Hollande has been quite happy to pander to the Zionist lobby in France. Both he and Sarkozy turned up at the annual dinner of CRIF, the biggest pro-Israel lobby group in Paris, earlier this year. It was clear that Hollande wasn’t there to denounce Israel’s crimes.

DF: The Greek government brazenly cooperated with Israel in blocking the ‘Freedom Flotilla II’ from challenging the Gaza blockade last summer. You’ve suggested that specific US-Israeli pressure (‘possibly even financial blackmail’) was at work, but that the incident was also a ‘logical consequence of a process that was already underway’.

DC: Yeah. This is quite closely connected to the question you asked about NATO. Greece and Israel have been working together in NATO operations a lot recently.

George Papandreou, the former Greek prime minister, was quite happy to court Israel. When it became clear that relations between Israel and Turkey had soured, Papandreou sniffed an opportunity for Greece to replace Turkey as Israel’s key ally in the Mediterranean.

Even though Greece has been going through an economic nightmare, the Athens authorities have decided to take part in a series of military operations with Israel over the past few years. Let’s not forget that Greece has been spending more on the military as a proportion of national income than most countries in Europe. You can see why the Israeli arms industry would be interested in cultivating stronger links with Greece because, even though Greece is in the doldrums financially, it’s still spending much more than it should be on weapons, while cutting back drastically on essential services like healthcare.

DF: One of your recent articles notes that many of the British officers deployed in post-WWI Palestine were veterans of the Black and Tans, the colonial force infamous for its brutality in Ireland. How has the Irish anti-colonial experience affected Irish politics on the Palestine question?

DC: Among the Irish public, there is a huge amount of sympathy for the Palestinians. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been described by some Zionist watchdogs as the best organised Palestine solidarity group in the world. That’s very interesting because the IPSC relies almost entirely on volunteers.

The Dublin government is a different story. In the current Irish government, there are at least three strong supporters of Israel. These include the ministers for defence and education.

Last year, a number of Irish activists were abducted by Israel as they tried to sail to Gaza. The response of the Dublin government was extremely weak. The Irish foreign minister, Eamon Gilmore, even attended a ceremony film festival sponsored by the Israeli government soon after that incident. He appears to regard avoiding or minimising tension with Israel as a priority.

Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that it’s Ireland’s representative at the European Commission, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, who is administering the research grants to Israeli arms companies I mentioned earlier. She won’t even acknowledge that giving money to firms profiting from human rights abuses is problematic.

DF: In 2010, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights issued a report criticizing EU maintenance of ‘anti-terrorist’ blacklists that effectively function ‘as ideological and political tools for undermining the right to popular resistance and self-determination.’ How do these lists constrain European politics on Palestine, and are there active campaigns to get them overturned?

DC: This is an important issue.

Israel has lobbied successfully over the past decade to have both the political and military wings of Hamas placed on the EU’s “anti-terrorist” blacklist. EU officials and governments have, as a result, been able to say “we don’t talk to terrorists”, even when the “terrorists” have a democratic mandate. I note, however, that there have been press reports lately indicating that Hamas has had some contacts with European governments. So perhaps this is changing a little bit. But in general, there is an enormous double standard, when the EU is happy to embrace Israel, a state that uses violence and intimidation against civilians on a daily basis, yet brands those who resist Israeli oppression as “terrorists”.

DF: Finally, in recent years the gap between European government support for Israel and public opinion has sometimes been so wide that the EU leadership has issued official apologies to Israel for polling results. What opportunities does this gap provide for strategic Palestine solidarity?

DC: The European public is way more critical of Israel than our governments are. This offers real hope.

The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was only launched in 2005. And it has made enormous progress. Veolia, the major French corporation, has ignominiously lost a number of major contracts around the world, for example. Why? Because of public outrage at how Veolia is involved in constructing a tramway that would effectively be reserved for Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. This illustrates how supporting Israeli apartheid can prove bad for business if ordinary people monitor what corporations get up to and protest.

The BDS campaign is often compared to the one undertaken against South Africa. As it happens, the call for boycott was originally made by South African political activists in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that it had a major impact internationally. So the Palestinian BDS campaign has achieved in seven years what it took the South African campaign three decades to achieve.

The challenge now is to maintain the momentum – and intensify the pressure on Israel and its “corporate sponsors”.

1. Cronin maintains a blog.

From the moment of the King car chase that led to the application of 50 directed blows, the round up of looters, the deaths of 53 people, and $1 billion worth of damage, law had been suspended.  In full retreat, juridical processes were regarded with suspicion, mocked, and abandoned.  The verdict of the jury in the predominantly white suburb of Simi Valley on the officers beating of King was given a racial lacing. The law itself became the problem, the justification for its own violence.

The enthusiastic looters, in a sense, were liberated by the excuse of law’s absence.  If King’s rights could be violated, then damn well everybody else’s could be.  And they were.  Whether it was the near fatal attack on the white truck driver Reginald Denny, or the gun-bearing Koreans who, with vigilante-styled determination, protected their property against pillage, the legal authorities had been subverted.  To this day, 22 homicides remain unsolved, a permanent legal purgatory

There are still those who prefer to see the trial as a case where the four police officers were hard done by, maligned for doing their duty in a way that was only slightly ‘off.’  Then President George W H Bush himself stated that, ‘viewed from outside the trial, it was hard to understand how the verdict could possibly square with the video. Those civil rights leaders with whom I met were stunned.  And so was I and so was Barbara and so were my kids.’

What is easy to forget is that the LAPD has had various incarnations and identities.  Created on a reformist platform, the city was the product of white, middle class progressivism with an allergy towards party politics, a nirvana devised without such machinery.  The police forces were no exception.  The generation of August Vollmer, William Worton, and William H. Parker had much to recommend it, but the blight set in around 1923, when the Chief of police Louis Oak, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, oversaw a department that descended (some might say ascended) into bootlegging enthusiasm and corrupt delights.  To this day, the mayor remains weak while the chief remains independent, sometimes irritatingly so.

The veteran reporter Lou Cannon came up with a term to describe the bloody consequences of the King case: official negligence.  Mayor Bradley and Chief Gates took it upon themselves to abandon policing models with a focus on the community.  Could it be, speculated Canon, that such designs would have vested too much power with the police?

One of the responses to the riots was to bring in that curious beast of community policing, an imperfect and unsatisfactory system that has, nonetheless, seen a reduction of fatalities in certain parts of LA.  The 77th Street Division that covers Watts and Inglewood is taken as an example of how an improvement has been made, if one thinks that a drop from 143 homicides in 1992 to 32 homicides in 2011 is an improvement.  The LAPD doesn’t quite have the same taint to it, though dissatisfaction remains.  At the junction of Florence and Normandie avenues, a protest, albeit small, featured an assortment of irate commentary against the fuzz – ‘fuck the police’, exclaimed an unnamed female rapper.

Official negligence can creep in at any point in time, a type of institutional indifference that borders on recklessness.  The various groups who have trumpeted the line of unity, be it the Korean American Coalition, the Anti-Defamation League, or the LA Urban League show at least some awareness of it.  Even King himself had to concede that there was ‘always going to be some type of racism.’  Getting along remains a mystique and idyllic promise.

Born in Mexico, Hernández Rojas arrived in the United States at the age of 16. For more than 27 years, he lived and labored here, where he married and had five children. In May 2010, after losing his construction job, he was arrested for shoplifting. When a background check showed that he was in the country without official sanction, the police turned him over to federal authorities, who deported him to Mexico. Not willing to accept exile from his wife and children, Hernández Rojas quickly crossed back into the United States, but Border Patrol agents intercepted him in a remote area as he tried to head home.

At the detention facility, an agent allegedly assaulted and injured Hernández Rojas, which led him to express a desire to file a complaint. That same agent reportedly was one of two who drove him back—alone—to the port of entry in San Ysidro (the southernmost portion of San Diego) to deport him again. It was there, just a few feet from the actual boundary with Mexico, where the night-time, deadly assault took place, one involving over a dozen agents.

A San Diego County Medical Examiner’s report concluded that Hernández Rojas’s death was a case of homicide. It was due to a heart attack—one induced by the shocks from the taser. (According to an Amnesty International report, 334 people died in the United States after being shocked with a taser, a supposedly non-lethal device, or a similar conducted-energy weapons between June 2001 and August 2008.) The 42-year-old father also sustained broken ribs; several loosened teeth; bruises all over his body and head, and injury to his spine.

What allowed the beating and electrocution to go legally unchallenged was the uncritical acceptance of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) account of events by authorities at various levels. According to the agency’s official story, agents did what they did because an un-handcuffed Hernández Rojas “became combative,” and the use of batons and the taser was necessary to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety.”

The blatant nature of the brutality, the cover-up of what transpired, and what appear to be clear violations of the law have helped to provoke widespread outcry. From press conferences, to an online petition and myriad news reports, pressure is mounting on federal authorities to conduct a far-reaching investigation of Hernández Rojas’s death.

More broadly, advocates—such as John Carlos Frey, a documentary filmmaker and an investigative reporter involved with the making of Crossing the Line at the Border—point to an institutional culture of impunity that allows killings by Border Patrol agents to go virtually unexamined outside the agency. Frey also highlights the rush to recruit ever-more agents in the aftermath of 9-11, and lowered standards of recruitment and training, in trying to explain “at least eight documented cases of extreme use of force against unarmed and non-combative migrants resulting in death” at the hands of the Border Patrol since May 2010.

Whether or not relatively new agents recruited and trained under less rigorous criteria are responsible for the deaths is not known as the CBP hasn’t even released the names of the agents involved. But, perhaps more importantly, the effect of such a line of argument is to suggest that better qualified agents are the answer to the problem.

No doubt, rigorous screening of applicants and good training, and some sort of public oversight mechanism, are very preferable to the lack thereof. But in privileging such factors, what gets obscured is the every day violence—and death and suffering—that federal boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus brings about through its normal practices.

Over the last couple of decades, many thousands of migrants have lost their lives trying to traverse the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and enter the United States—in order to find work, or rejoin loved ones. U.S. authorities have also sent millions into exile abroad, many of them long-standing U.S. residents with almost non-existent ties to their countries of birth. In the process they have separated hundreds of thousands of children from parents. They have also reduced the life spans of many deportees: in a particularly egregious case, one of the first individuals “removed” to Haiti after the Obama administration resumed deportations to the earthquake-ravaged country in 2011 lost his life to cholera soon after his arrival.

The law and the institutionalized nature of the practices that produce these outcomes help to obscure the violence they embody—and the related death and suffering. But just because many do not see the violence for what it is—as death-producing—does not mean it is anything less.

From the very establishment of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, killing people and denying life has been central to what the international divide is all about. After all, its foundation necessitated a war of conquest and the dispossession of the Native and Mexicano populations in the borderlands. And, in the face of so many who refuse to accept the original injustice, its maintenance has required various forms of violence on a regular basis ever since. More broadly, in a world of profound inequality, one predicated on the production of differences such as those based on race, class, and nation, the boundary reflects and helps reproduce who gets what in terms of rights and resources, and the very nature of life and death—and the various states in between.

Anastasio Hernández Rojas was born on the wrong side of the boundary dividing people and places of privilege from those of disadvantage. Like countless others in the eyes of the U.S. ruling class, he thus became disposable. When U.S. authorities deported Hernández Rojas to Mexico and deprived him of his right to be with his family, they effectively denied his right to live. And when they beat and tased him to death, they did so as well.

Realizing justice—achieving true accountability—for Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s murder requires that we go far beyond the parameters of his particular case. It necessitates that we contest the very socio-territorial arrangement that made him disposable in the first place. Otherwise, we will end up affirming and strengthening a boundary that grants life to some, and consigns others to death.

The real-deal occupation of Wall Street is an outgrowth of the Union Square occupation where occupiers recently conducted a teach-in aimed at the New York Police Department (NYPD). David Graeber read off from an enlarged copy of the 2000 federal court ruling to the NYPD (you know the country is in trouble when anarchists are schooling cops on court rulings), occupiers showed the NYPD a large map of the Union Square area, explained where they intended to lawfully sleep, and did so without evictions or mass arrests.

Turns out that Clay Claiborne of Occupy LA was right to insist on using existing laws against state repression is the way to go.

With this in mind, Occupy Wall Street decided to occupy Wall Street, minus the tents and the baggage that came with them. Occupation 2.0 is lighter and more mobile, able to move off the sidewalk when necessary and back on when the danger of arrest passes. The People’s Library is back and a makeshift kitchen will probably soon follow.

The Spring of Assemblies, the weekly marches on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) starting in Zuccotti Park on Fridays at 2 p.m., and the new and improved Wall Street occupation are part of the American Spring grand strategy building up to the May 1 general strike.

If this occupation reaches critical mass, with hundreds or even one thousand to join the re-occupation of Wall Street with sleeping bags, the sidewalks around the New York Stock Exchange and the New York Federal Reserve will be lined with people from all walks of life, creating a dramatic visual contrast between the well-dressed con men who work there and the http://www.nycga.net/springtraining/ who are literally sleeping on cardboard to make their voices heard just in time for May 1. “A day without the 99%” could mean the 1% and 99% staring each other down in the Financial District. Luckly for them, we don’t have torches or pitchforks.

Yet.

So if you spent any time in Zuccotti Park during its glory days, come down to Wall Street and Nassau or join the Friday marches on the NYSE.

Welcome to the post-post-eviction phase of Occupy.

In addition to retaining President George W. Bush’s many excesses, such as the Patriot Act,  new information about the erosion of civil liberties emerges repeatedly during the era of President Barack Obama from the federal government, the courts and various police forces.

The Supreme Court added judicial insult to personal injury April 2 when it ruled 5-4 that jail officials may strip-search anyone arrested for any offense, even a trifle, as they are being incarcerated, even if they are awaiting a hearing or trial. The four ultraconservative judges were joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

According to the ACLU’s Steven R. Shapiro, the “decision jeopardizes the privacy rights of millions of people who are arrested each year and brought to jail, often for minor offenses. Being forced to strip naked is a humiliating experience that no one should have to endure absent reasonable suspicion.”

A day before the strip-search outrage, the New York Times reported that “law enforcement tracking of cellphones… has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show…. One police training manual describes cellphones as ‘the virtual biographer of our daily activities,’ providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.”

Other abuses of civil liberties are taking place with increasing frequency, but the public outcry has mainly been muted, an enticement for the authorities to go even further.  On March 23, the American Civil Liberties Union reported:

The Obama administration has extended the time the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) can collect and hold on to records on U.S. citizens and residents from 180 days to five years, even where those people have no suspected ties to terrorism. The new NCTC guidelines, which were approved by Attorney General Eric Holder, will give the intelligence community much broader access to information about Americans retained in various government databases….

Authorizing the ‘temporary’ retention of non-terrorism-related citizens and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny. Such unfettered collection risks reviving the Bush administration’s Total Information Awareness program, which Congress killed in 2003.

The news, evidently, was underwhelming. Tom Engelhardt wrote April 4:

For most Americans, it was just life as we’ve known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years — or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence thinks it’s even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part — and it hardly made a ripple.

A week earlier, new information was uncovered about Washington’s clandestine interpretation of the Patriot Act. Most Americans are only aware of the public version of the Bush Administration’s perfidious law passed by Congress in a virtual panic soon after 9/11. But the White House and leaders of Congress and the Justice department have a secret understanding of the Patriot Act’s wider purposes and uses.

Alex Abdo of the ACLU’s National Security Project revealed March 16:

The government has just officially confirmed what we’ve long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over ‘any tangible things.’ Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.

Late last night we received the first batch of documents from the government in response to our Freedom of Information Act request for any files on its legal interpretation of Section 215. The release coincided with the latest in a string of strong warnings from two senators about how the government has secretly interpreted the law. According to them both, the interpretation would shock not just ordinary Americans, but even their fellow lawmakers not on the intelligence committees.

Although we’re still reviewing the documents, we’re not holding our breath for any meaningful explanation from the government about its secret take on the Patriot Act.

The Senators involved were not identified, but they were Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both of whom went public about the secret Patriot Act last May. Wyden declared at the time: “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Udall echoed, “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.”

The Obama Administration has not sought to mitigate much less abandon the Patriot Act. Indeed, in the 10 ½ years since the act was passed the law has only become stronger, paving the way for other laws assaulting civil liberties and increasing government surveillance.

Three months ago, for example, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) containing a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention law allowing the U.S. military to jail foreigners and U.S. citizens without charge or trial.

Just last month, Wired magazine revealed details about how the National Security Agency “is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah.”

Investigative reporter James Bamford  wrote that the NSA established listening posts throughout the U.S. to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within America or overseas.  The Utah surveillance center will contain enormous databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. The NSA previously denied domestic spying was taking place.

In his article Bamford quoted a former NSA official who “held his thumb and forefinger close together” and said: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

The Associated Press has been dogging the New York City police department for several months to uncover its domestic spying activities. On March 23 it reported that “Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations [for years] and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities.” Some of these snooping activities took place far from New York — in New Orleans in one case.

Commenting on the new guidelines allowing Washington “to retain your private information for 5 years,” the satirical ironic Times commented March 26:

If you’re guilty of no crimes, never owed money, don’t have a name similar to that of someone who has been in trouble or owed money and there are absolutely no computer glitches in the government’s ancient computer system during the next five years, then you have nothing to worry about.

The American people, of course, have a lot to worry about since both ruling political parties are united in favor of deeper penetration into the private lives and political interests of U.S. citizens.  The only recourse for the people is much intensified activism on behalf of civil liberties.

The military has encroached into all areas of our lives. Our cops are more like soldiers, and battle fatigued soldiers are routinely seen on our streets, restaurants and shopping malls. They also show up regularly on sport broadcasts, and even star in a Hollywood blockbuster. Armored vehicles menace July 4th Parades, and camouflaged trucks deliver Toys for Tots. All this has to be by design, obviously, to drum into our heads that we are a nation at war, and that we are threatened constantly by terrorists that may blow us up at any moment anywhere, but especially transport hubs, necessitating the rough caresses of your grunting TSA agents, when they are not stealing from your luggage. Ah, what’s a missing Ipod or a few thousand bucks compared to the increased security that we’re all enjoying?

If even preschoolers or wheel-chaired farts on their last legs must be frisked for underwear bombs, box cutters and ninja stars, not to mention contraband copies of the Constitution, is it any wonder that our cops are becoming more trigger happy? Post 9/11, the United States has entered a permanent state of psychotic paranoia, all to justify our endless war (profiteering) for oil, and with a host of new laws enabling the state to harass, eavesdrop, strip search, arrest or even kill you without charge; that is, without presumption of innocence before proven guilty, supposedly a bedrock of our democracy and what separates us from all the other nightmare states we’ve always been warned about.

As we sleep, America has become one of those nightmares, I’m afraid, although all still seems relatively normal, for now. The home runs still fly, and the inane commercials still sing. All is normal until you find yourself on the wrong side of an increasingly brutal and arbitrary set of laws, or none at all, just whatever our President, local cop or security guard decides is right, for him, at that moment. You see, a nightmare is when you’re at the total mercy of another man, without recourses to remedy whatever wrong he may inflict on you, without the law or your fellow humans ever coming to your aid. Our tortured foreign detainees have long been acquainted with this evil, but we have looked the other way, because we are not them, you see, at least not yet.

It’s always The Other that is demonized and deserves to be retaliated against and punished. With the Trayvon Martin case, racism has again come to the fore, but what is racism but the most literal and narrow manifestation of self-love, in itself merely a survival instinct, and as natural as air or lust? A racist will defend and cherish only what is most like him, and nothing else, but one must mature from this, and I think many of us have, if only partially.

When one thinks in terms of blacks vs. whites, non-Muslims vs. Muslims, North vs. South or even conservatives vs. liberals, one becomes distracted from the real crisis at hand, because there is only one real battle, and it is waged by the Military Banking Complex against us all. With its gargantuan corruption, systematic looting, here and abroad, and routine mass murder, this is the 1% that the Occupy Movement was trying to identify.

This Obama presidency has been a brilliant move by our ruling class, for this black, personable decoy has managed to pacify vast swaths of an otherwise restless constituency, while enraging others for the wrong reason. Although Obama’s blackness is irrelevant, it has become a fixation to both his detractors and supporters, so that it has become a point of honor to defend or depose this man for his blackness alone, when, in truth, his race does not factor at all in any of his decisions. One should not care that he is black because Obama does not care that he is black, and not in a good way either. Obama is not here to rectify whatever ails the black or any other community. He is only here to facilitate the wishes of the Military Banking Complex, and he’s willing to trample on you all, black, white, brown or yellow, to achieve their goals.

In Chicago recently, I was dismayed and disgusted to see an Obama poster as I entered the Heartland Café, a bastion of progressive politics in that city, but my mood was improved, however, at a Trayvon Martin rally downtown, when I encountered a man with this sign, “OBAMA—IMPERIALIST COMMANDER IN CHIEF.” Of course, he was only stating the obvious, because how can a US President be otherwise under this current setup?

(1) The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more.  WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world.  Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.

(2) The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) has more than 1.5 billion government and private sector records about US citizens collected from commercial databases, government information, and criminal probes.

(3) The American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times recently reported that cell phones of private individuals in the US are being tracked without warrants by state and local law enforcement all across the country.  With more than 300 million cell phones in the US connected to more than 200,000 cell phone towers, cell phone tracking software can pinpoint the location of a phone and document the places the cell phone user visits over the course of a day, week, month or longer.

(4) More than 62 million people in the US have their fingerprints on file with the FBI, state and local governments.  This system, called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), shares information with 43 states and 5 federal agencies.   This system conducts more than 168,000 checks each day.

(5) Over 126 million people have their fingerprints, photographs and biographical information accessible on the US Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT).  This system conducts about 250,000 biometric transactions each day.  The goal of this system is to provide information for national security, law enforcement, immigration, intelligence and other Homeland Security Functions.

(6) More than 110 million people have their visas and more than 90 million have their photographs entered into the US Department of State Consular Consolidated Database (CCD).   This system grows by adding about 35,000 people a day.  This system serves as a gateway to the Department of State Facial Recognition system, IDENT and IAFSIS.

(7) DNA profiles on more than 10 million people are available in the FBI coordinated Combined DNA index System (CODIS) National DNA Index.

(8) Information on more than 2 million people is kept in the Intelligence Community Security Clearance Repository, commonly known as Scattered Castles.  Most of the people in this database are employees of the Department of Defense (DOD) and other intelligence agencies.

(9) The DOD also has an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) to support military operations overseas.  This database incorporates fingerprint, palm print, face and iris matching on 6 million people and is adding 20,000 more people each day.

(10) Information on over 740,000 people is included in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) of the National Counterterrorism Center.  TIDE is the US government central repository of information on international terrorist identities.  The government says that less than 2 percent of the people on file are US citizens or legal permanent residents.  They were just given permission to keep their non-terrorism information on US citizens for a period of five years, up from 180 days.

(11) Tens of thousands of people are subjects of facial recognition software.  The FBI has been working with North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles and other state and local law enforcement on facial recognition software in a project called “Face Mask.”  For example, the FBI has provided thousands of photos and names to the North Carolina DMV which runs those against their photos of North Carolina drivers.  The Maricopa Arizona County Sheriff’s Office alone records 9,000 biometric mug shots a month.

(12) The FBI operates the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR) that collects and analyzes observations or reports of suspicious activities by local law enforcement.   With over 160,000 suspicious activity files, SAR stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime but who are alleged to have acted suspiciously.

(13) The FBI admits it has about 3,000 GPS tracking devices on cars of unsuspecting people in the US right now, even after the US Supreme Court decision authorizing these only after a warrant for probable cause has been issued.

The Future

The technology for tracking and identifying people is exploding as is the government appetite for it.

Soon, police everywhere will be equipped with handheld devices to collect fingerprint, face, iris and even DNA information on the spot and have it instantly sent to national databases for comparison and storage.

Bloomberg News reports the newest surveillance products “can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices,” change the contents of written emails mid-transmission, and use voice recognition to scan phone networks.

The advanced technology of the war on terrorism, combined with deferential courts and legislators, have endangered both the right to privacy and the right of people to be free from government snooping and tracking.  Only the people can stop this.

The innocence of childhood is a precious jewel to be gently cared for and nurtured, allowing the child, whose future we are building, to develop happily and safely in an atmosphere of love and peace. For many Palestinian children their childhood is lived under a cloak of fear, and the threat of violence and abuse at the hands of an armed force that stalks the streets of their homeland.

In the eleven years since 2000 Israeli forces have killed 1,471 children in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the bulk of which are aged between 13 and 17 years old. The children of Gaza have been, and continue to be, at greatest risk, with almost a thousand murdered in the last twelve years — on the streets of their city, on their way to and from school, whilst playing with friends, shopping for their family or simply relaxing in their homes. Most are shot randomly, indiscriminately, or killed as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks. Around 50 were taken prematurely from their families by unexploded ordnance.

This latest attack on the people of Gaza began on Friday March 9, killing 25 Palestinians. According to the Palestine Monitor the Israeli air force fired missiles from the comfort of their warplanes at civilians arbitrarily, shooting onto the streets of Gaza and into peoples homes in the Jabaliya refugee camp that were mostly full of women and children, The faceless attackers even shot at mourners attending a funeral. Such is the callous, vicious nature of the Israeli security forces, that kills, injures and intimidates innocent women and children, destroying all hope of living peaceful decent lives, and all in the name of “security”.

Nonsense! This is criminal violence, nothing more or less. These most recent atrocities come on the back of the massacre that took place in December ‘08/January’09, when, according to If America Knew, a total of 1417 Palestinians were murdered, of which 318 were children and 116 women. Fresh in the children’s young memories lie the echo of that horrendous time, the constant bombardment, the loss of loved ones, and the shootings. In addition to the deaths, around 1000 children were injured in the three-week assault.  Many children were left with severe physical disabilities and deep psychological wounds, the mental/emotional effects more difficult to see and/or to treat than broken bones and scarred flesh.

The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half of Gaza’s  children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is staggering but unsurprising, and the attacks this March on unarmed civilians will serve to intensify the mental suffering and anguish that these children are living with. Occupied Palestine states:  “Both parents and psychologist fear that Gaza children could be affected psychologically in the long run.”

Children make up around 45% of the four million or so total Palestinian population, a fact that terrifies an aging Israel.  What impact does living under the brutal Israeli occupation have on them? Are they inclined towards peace and brotherhood? Is tolerance fostered in their hearts and minds or are the seeds of hate and the desire for revenge being carefully sown? Does violence ever bring peace, or does it perpetuate conflict? Violence we see begets not harmony, but further violence.

Colonel Desmond Travers, one of the co-authors of the UN’s Goldstone Report, in a July 2011 interview with Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss, stated that:

We spoke to a psychiatrist in Gaza,  who said ‘we already see in our schools in Gaza the next generation of Hamas revolutionaries, children exposed to so much violence, they have no option but to terminate their childhood and move into a different frame, and the likelihood is that they will never stabilize. In order to justify the unjustifiable, the unjust Israel needs to instil hate into another generation of Palestinians – to maintain Israel’s position as the ‘enemy within’, thereby excusing in some perverted distortion of the facts, their continued aggression, violence and violation of international laws, too many to count.

Intimidation and Torture

Palestinian children living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under the illegal Israeli occupation are subjected to brutal treatment, illegal imprisonment, torture and intimidation by Israeli security forces. In its 2012 report “Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted”, the Defence for Children International states that a pattern of systematic ill-treatment [of Palestinian children] emerges, much of which amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, as defined in the UN Convention against Torture, and in some cases, torture – both of which are absolutely prohibited.

Since 1967 Palestinian children, as well as adults, have been subjected to Israeli Military Law, a legal system based on prejudice and short on justice. In the time since this emergency system was instigated 726,000 Palestinians have been arrested and detained. The numbers of children arrested and taken from their homes is shocking. According to Defence of Children International:

In the past 11 years alone, around 7,500 children, some as young as 12 years, are estimated to have been detained, interrogated, and imprisoned within this system. This averages out at between 500-700 children per year, or nearly two children, each and every day.

The  DCI report adds that mostly the arrested children live in villages in areas of tension, “friction points, namely, settlements built in violation of international law, and roads used by the Israeli army or settlers.” The situation appears to be escalating particularly in certain areas of the West Bank.

The International Solidaritary Movement (ISM) reports:

The extreme Golani Unit of the Israeli military is escalating its arrests of Palestinian children in Al Khalil (Hebron), targeting boys between the ages of 12 to15 years old with at least 10 reported cases of child arrests made (in early February 2012) just in the span of one week.

As well as arrests, incarceration in solitary confinement has also increased, with almost a quarter of all children arrested being held in isolation. Children, mainly boys, aged from 12 to 17 years old, are forcefully taken from their families, often at night, imprisoned in a tiny, dank cell, illegally beaten and tortured, intimidated and, on occasion, subjected to electronic shock treatment. Most children are detained for the terrible crime of throwing stones at soldiers armed with M16 rifles and tear gas, all courtesy of the American arms industry.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem described the ordeal of Yahia, aged 15 years, who together with four of his friends, was arrested and taken to the illegal Israeli settlement of Zuffin. They had their “hands tied behind their backs, they were blindfolded, before being forced to kneel on the ground for several hours”. The boys were then taken to a police station and interrogated.

The interrogator grabbed the boy’s head and slammed it against the wall, slapping him twice. A short time later he returned holding a small electric shock device [Taser]. Yahia says: “He placed the device on my body and I felt a great powerful shock and my body started shivering. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs and I felt extreme pain in my head. I felt I was going to be paralysed, so I decided to confess.”

The process of arrests, intimidation and violence is common practice by the Israeli occupation authorities. The kneeling on the ground, the isolation and the use of hand ties and blindfolds are also used extensively against Palestinians.

In 2010 the UN, in its study “Developments in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel”, documented 90 cases of “ill treatment” of Palestinian children in Israeli detention, of which 75 had their hands tied behind their backs and were also blindfolded. Almost a third of the children were under 15 years of age. Of the 90 detained, “62 children reported being beaten, 35 children reported position abuse and 16 children were kept in solitary confinement. In three cases, children reported the use of electric shocks on their bodies. Particularly concerning was the fact that there was an increase in documented cases of sexual violence.” All of which contravenes international law and conventions signed and ratified by Israel and the democratic principles Israel so loudly proclaims.

Mark Regev, the chief Israeli purveyor of propaganda and deceit, and Spokesman for Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, stated in The Guardian, “The test of a democracy is how you treat people incarcerated, in jail, and especially so with minors.” Democracy damned by words of duplicity. Much of the mistreatment exercised towards Palestinian children not only contravenes international law, but also violates Israel’s own domestic laws.

When in Israeli custody children are violently interrogated; they are shackled, blindfolded and bound to a chair whilst being questioned. In the B’Tselem report entitled “No Minor Matter: Violation of the Rights of Palestinian Minors Arrested by Israel on Suspicion of Stone-Throwing”, according to Israeli Law, interrogation of a minor may be conducted only by an interrogator who is trained as a youth interrogator. A parent is allowed to be present at all times, and minors have the right to consult with the parent before the interrogation.

According to Margaret Sherwood’s January 22, 2012 report in the Guardian, when in Israeli custody Palestinian children’s rights are ignored and they are verbally insulted. “You’re a dog” and “son of a whore” are common insults. Eventually the majority of children sign confessions that they later state were coerced,

Defence for Children International notes that children under interrogation unsurprisingly eventually admit to the “crimes”, and B’Tselem found that “in the end at least 90 percent will plead guilty, as this is the quickest way out of a system that denies children bail in 87 percent of cases”. According to The Guardian, accusations of crimes justifying these illegal detentions are commonly throwing stones or occasionally Molotov cocktails at soldiers or settlers – both of whom, let us remember. are illegally present upon Palestinian land. A few are arrested for “more serious offences such as links to militant organisations or using weapons. ”

Major Violation, Minor Insecurity

And what “national security information” is being elicited from the interrogation of these children who the Israelis are abusing? According to  The Guardian report,  “They are pumped for information about the activities and sympathies of their classmates, relatives and neighbours.” Within walls of intimidation a child can be forced to betray their friends and families.  Eliciting the names of other stone throwers is a primary aim of the torturer.

B’Tselem points out:

One method the police use to identify juvenile stone throwers is incrimination: the police arrest one or more youths, they are required to give names of other youths whom they saw throwing stones, and these youths are then arrested and required to provide the names of others, and so on.

The children under interrogation in a frightening isolated place, far from the sanctity of home, are under great emotional stress and inevitably give up the names of friends.  The experience is then compounded by the added trauma of guilt.

Children are mostly held inside Israel itself, which restricts access to legal support and excludes family members from visiting. Their freedom of movement is constrained under the occupation, and the necessary permit to visit the prisons is often impossible to obtain. Families are therefore unable to support their children through the ordeal of confinement. Holding children in prisons inside Israel is in violation of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits such transfers. According to DCI, “testimonies [from 310 children] reveal that the majority of children are taken away to an unknown location for interrogation.” This process of arrests, detention and torture operating inside Israel and outside international and national law, offers the victims no legal recourse, and as DCI points out, “there is a general absence of effective complaint mechanisms.”

Legally Binding, Illegally Bound

The Israeli judicial system, as it currently pertains to Palestinian children, allows illegal practices to take place within the walled settlements — themselves illegal — inside police stations and Israeli prisons. International law on the rights of the child, to which Israel is bound, is clear and extensive. As the B’t Selem report points out, “The main document establishing the rights of children is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN in November 1989. Israel signed the Convention in July 1990 and ratified it in August 1991.

In the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, it states that:

Condemning the targeting of children in situations of armed conflict and direct attacks on objects protected under international law, including places that generally have a significant presence of children, such as schools and hospitals.

Schools are repeatedly targeted by Israeli security forces.  According to the UN in 2010:

There was an increase in the number of attacks on education institutions.  These attacks resulted in damage to schools or interruption of education, placing the safety of the children in Gaza and the West Bank at risk. The majority of cases involved the presence of Israeli security forces within school compounds following raids, forceful entry, and search and arrest operations, including the use of tear gas on students.

All international treatise and conventions signed by the lawbreaker, Israel, safeguard children in conflict, and Israel ignores them all.  As Defence for Children International points out:

These treaties relevantly provide that: in all actions concerning children their best interests shall be a primary consideration; children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.

Being held for 17 days in solitary as Mohammed was is neither short nor appropriate; indeed it is illegal. It is one example within a catalogue of atrocities that sees Israel contravening another convention, breaking yet another international law and doing so with impunity. This must stop.  Urgent action is required to safeguard the children of Palestine and protect them from the tyranny that is Israeli policy in the OPT’s.

In order to fuel what is a furnace of legal standards raging around Israel, let us add The Fourth Geneva Convention, which If America Knew says “grants special protections to minors” and provides 146 articles that protect in law the lives of all Palestinians living under the illegal Israeli occupation. Israel is in breach of them all. Indeed, grave breaches which, in itself, constitutes war crimes.  Israel is guilty of “grave breaches” of the convention and the more serious offense of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’, which is the “legal precursor to the international crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The argument that Israel is committing, or has, in fact, already committed the crime of genocide is powerful and to many indisputable.

Genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, crimes against humanity; titles that all fit Israel bespoke. Call it what you will, the actions of Israel in the OPTs are vile, murderous, calculated and illegal. It is for the international community acting in unity, and led by the UN, to finally stand up and act to protect the lives of the innocent men, women and children of Palestine, lifting the shadow of constant fear, intimidation and aggression from their lives. Humanity is one. Together we must stand in the face of injustice, violence and hate to safeguard the lives of the innocent, the oppressed, the defenseless.

The case in point is the death of Trayvon Martin, the teenager killed with a gun by a vigilante posing as a ‘citizen patrol’ in a gated community in Florida. The event has triggered a firestorm of protests, as well it should.

We tend to think we have no responsibility for the George Zimmermans of the world – broken humans who feel their hatred is justified and grants them the right to all sorts of abominable behavior. We know that it’s crazy. But do we see how every time we allow ‘little’ racist remarks to go unchecked, whether from a friend or co-worker, a TV show or article, we contribute to horrific situations such as Trayvon must have faced in that Florida gated ‘community’.

George Zimmerman typifies many emotionally-wounded Americans who are off-kilter, over-influenced by Fox News, the NRA and even our government(s), which creates laws like ‘Stand Your Ground’ at the behest of the gun lobby and other extremists. I suspect that Mr. Zimmerman also has trouble with a black president, social services and evolution. The pattern is pretty common among hard-line fundamentalists, even as they name themselves Christians..

It’s worth noting that in spite of a past assault charge on a police officer, Mr. Zimmerman seems extra cozy with his local law enforcement officials. Without that coziness, he likely doesn’t commit this egregious crime. Their little hater’s club allowed his racism to be considered okay, maybe even cool. We know there was some level of tolerance for his actions, as he was not charged with a crime at the scene. [And as of this writing has not been charged yet.]

But how many of us find ourselves in similar, if not so obviously racist, situations at times? Most all of us. And how do we react to such comments and behaviors? Sadly, most of us have been too afraid of confrontation or too disinterested in civil society to take action. If this were not the case, racism would have been long since abandoned by even the most raging haters. We’ve not stood up to it in the past. Now that we’re awakening, it’s time for a change.

We do not need to be aggressive or hostile to racists – they have plenty of that already. Our methodology needs to be one of gentleness, of peace and of love. “Wow, George, it kind of surprises me to hear you say that. He seems like a fine/pretty average/typical kid to me.” or perhaps “You know George, except for an accident of birth you could be him and he could be you. Funny.” or again “George, remarks like that are unacceptable. We are all children under God’s light, and such talk is not at all Christian.” This last version is a little more challenging, but cast in the context of Christianity we can perhaps be a bit more firm.

No matter how peacefully we approach our ‘George,’ the possibility exists that they will react against you. It may be abusive, perhaps even violent. That potential outcome doesn’t relieve us of our personal responsibility to end racism. If the situation is too flammable, we may not be able to express ourselves fully. But most of all, we cannot let such situations continue due to our indifference. We owe it to each other as brothers and sisters, here together in Life on Earth to take a stand against racism.

As we know, racism and the hater mentality are not aimed solely toward those of African descent. Such vindictiveness can be hurled at other races and other creed-holders as well. Other minority communities have felt the unjustified wrath, the violence and the bullets. Muslims and the LGBT community know the feeling. The citizens of Haiti, Darfur and Palestine – they know that feeling. We must be vigilant for them as well.

The simple truth is that Mr. Zimmerman and those of a similar ilk, in a healthy society, are controlled by ethical systems and the vast majority of citizens who are healthy. Of course, in a healthy society, we do not have endless war, food and energy systems controlled by corporations, too big to fail banks, or an utterly dysfunctional federal government.

Nor do we have a gun lobby with no respect for human life. A justice system with no respect for justice. A police system in Florida where a violent attacker is not tested for drugs or placed in jail to await trial. There might be another hoodie who suffers the ultimate injustice.

In this broken and dysfunctional society of America, 2012 – we clearly need substantial change. We need a new cultural operating system based on ethics – principles like peace and love – instead of this broken system of globalization built by and for the 1%. Fortunately, such an idea already exists. It’s called World 5.0. It reminds us how a new, ethical system is critical. But like any other system, it will only be as effective as the people who are engaged within it.

The U.S. military created Project Agile in Vietnam in 1961, to apply data processing techniques to the task of measuring the allegiances of every individual in the numerous hamlets of South Vietnam. Files were maintained on every aspect of every person’s life. Every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the Saigon government and carry ID cards. Those apprehended without cards were imprisoned or worse. At the time of registration, a full set of fingerprints was obtained, and the individual’s political beliefs were recorded. ²  By 1966, the U.S. military began studying the potential applicability of this program to cities and communities inside the U.S.

Although the LEAA was abolished in 1982, it had already begun to introduce military hardware and tactics into the daily programs of domestic law enforcement. LEAA’s emphasis included surveillance equipment and computer systems that compiled information on individuals such as criminal activity, biographical and physical data (scars, deformities, etc.), identifying numbers, social security numbers, operators licenses, skin tones, addresses and occupations. In addition, enormous amounts of money went toward police hardware including products such as infrared equipment, anti-sniper vans, helicopters, communication systems that enabled the police to write messages through their radios, lightweight portable video tape recorders, short landing and take-off planes, and filing systems.

LEAA was not merely designed to bolster the reputation of right-wing “law n’ order” forces inside the U.S. at a time during the 60s when there was little respect for law enforcement, but rather was empowered to create a completely new law enforcement infrastructure inside our own communities. Programs created by LEAA ranged from prison and community-based halfway houses to “Watch Your Neighbor” programs on our streets. The infrastructure was designed to render law enforcement needs a responsibility of our own communities – to make us all responsible for dealing with the prevention of crimes. Virtually nothing LEAA sponsored dealt with the root causes of crime, but rather, made the citizenry part of the detain, arrest and imprison aspects of law enforcement.

Today, while the U.S. military is building and maintaining bases throughout the world, it is providing an updated armamentarium of warfare hardware to our local “law enforcement” communities. Over the last two decades, for example, San Francisco has acquired “infrared scanning devices, combat helmets, chemical protective gloves, vehicles and even a boat as discarded hand-me-downs free of charge from the Department of Defense.” The Alameda County Sheriff’s department got an 85-foot patrol boat as well as a grenade launcher. Police departments are equipping themselves with 8 and 1/2-ton bulletproof tactical vehicles. Santa Barbara Sheriffs have taken four helicopters, and the San Joaquin County Sheriffs picked up a full-tracked tank last year even though it had previously received a mobile-command vehicle that it bought with federal grant money.³ The newest additions to this stockpile of hard-core weapons will be be surveillance drones.  The Federal Data Center in Utah has been designated as the information-gathering center of the U.S. surveillance empire: it will be responsible for gathering, maintaining and disseminating information nationwide.

Military infringement into domestic law enforcement has become an essential part of our border control policies, especially in the Southwest. “During the 1978-1992 period, U.S. immigration and drug enforcement policies and practices in the U.S.-Mexico border region became increasingly militarized. Developed during the 1980s for use in Central America and elsewhere, this doctrine is characterized by broad-ranging provisions for establishing social control over specific civilian populations, and its implementation has often been accompanied by widespread human rights violations.”⁴

Author Joey LeMay points out that “Counter-terrorism efforts abroad have expanded to include counter-terrorism efforts domestically” and that military-style tactics within the police force[s] have taken root since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.  “In September 2006, the U.S. issued the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, an overview of the practices and goals that were to be implemented and accomplished to curb terroristic efforts. The document details the ideological shift of combating attacks against the U.S.:

The paradigm for combating terrorism now involves the application of all elements of our national power and influence. Not only do we employ military power, we use diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement activities to protect the Homeland and extend our Defenses, disrupt terrorist operations, and deprive our enemies of what they need to operate and survive. We have broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain.

Today’s favorite police toys include sound cannons (LRAD) to SWAT Teams, pepper gas, shotgun-style Taser projectors, and focused, invisible beams of waves that cause a severe burning sensation in the skin (AIS), the list goes on and on.

Only a police force that earns the people’s trust and respect can be effective. This is certainly the case in Afghanistan where the accelerated rate of U.S. militarization of the Afghani police force resulted in the contempt and antagonism of the entire Afghan people. As a result, the U.S. was forced to modify its strategy from containment to one of counter-insurgency.

The major problem with integrating military tactics into domestic police departments is that it transforms community participation in law enforcement into acts more common to warfare: renditions; torture; isolation cells; strip searches; racial profiling; and, the numerous excesses that identify U.S. imperial actions throughout the world. To the extent that police attempt to control the American people with drones and batons, rather than with cooperation and protection, they they are doomed to failure.

Once again in our communities, there is little credibility among community members for the legitimacy of police forces, Border Patrol, Homeland Security forces, etc. Many people fear the unleashed power of the police and react strongly to the implications of greater police power. The disrespect that the American people have for law enforcement is paralleled by the public’s contempt for Congress, the so-called Supreme Court and the Presidency. Our national preoccupation with arresting and imprisoning the largest domestic population in the world is a reflection of our murderous foreign policy.  Only when democracy is restored in the U.S. will we see an end to our ever-expanding, immune, and unaccountable police force.

1. “For fiscal year 1973, LEAA was allocated $841 million in crime-fighting funds, bringing the total funds awarded to LEAA to $2.43 billion. 85% of LEAA’s funding is directed to State Planning groups, which then turn over most of it to local law enforcement application. The remaining 15% is distributed by LEAA as it wishes.” (Hiken, Marti, Ed., “A Primer on LEAA,” October 1974, Published by the National Lawyers Guild, Seattle Chapter; officially presented to the community of Seattle and the city council
2. ibid.,  “Primer on LEAA” and Wikipedia
3. Schulz, G.W. and Becker, Andrew, California Watch, “If U.S. military doesn’t want it, cops will take it,” 3-31-12, p. 1A
4. Dunn, Timothy J., “Militarization of the US-Mexico Border, 1978-1992.  “Dunn demonstrates that U.S. immigration and drug enforcement practices in the southwestern border region have coincided with many key features of low-intensity conflict doctrine. His findings are supported extensively by material from U.S. government documents, investigative reports from mainstream and alternative presses, interviews with federal law enforcement personnel in South Texas, and reports from human rights advocacy organizations. The study reflects a concern for human rights conditions in the U.S.-Mexico border region and is informed by the belief that the ‘official’ story is usually but one version of events and should not be accepted uncritically.”

State repression is used most clearly against the peaceful Arab Spring protestors; the use of police force in US cities where Occupy Wall Street has taken root; against the workers resistance and the “indignados” in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy, France…; against students struggling for democracy and against gays in Chile.

In Denmark, some unionists, traditional left organizations, and young anti-racists remind us how German Nazis and Italian Fascists used the race card against Jews to divide and conquer the world. These groups and individuals see history repeating itself in much of Europe with anti-Islamism and are determined to check its growth.

On March 31, some 5000 Danes and a couple hundred like-minded anti-racists from other Scandinavian countries and England marched in Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city) to stop the spread of racist/fascist groupings popping up around Europe. Some have ties in the United States.

Their march was a counter-demonstration to the first all-Europe rally against Muslims. The English Defence League (EDL) succeeded, however, in holding a rally of between 100 and 150 members from ten countries (15 members from England; one or two from Italy, France, Bulgaria, Poland; one or two handfuls from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Germany; most from Denmark).

Counter-demonstrators marched under the banner of multi-cultural societies. They moved spiritedly through many of the cities wide and narrow streets. Hip hop and reggae music accompanied anti-racist chants. About one thousand marchers had traveled from many Danish cities, including 11 buses from Copenhagen, a four-hour drive.

Police had marked a route far enough away from the racist rally so that we could not see or hear one another. Police called out more forces than in decades to prevent clashes. Local city council members, and municipal institutional leaders accompanied by the mass media sought to downplay the multi-cultural vision by characterizing the demonstrations as two “extremist groups”. City council members even called upon people to stay home and light candles. And some Imans encouraged their congregations to stay clear.

While most of the activists were students and other youths, there were some families with children and a good number of elder people with backgrounds in struggles against racism, fascism, war. Some hold pro-socialist or pro-communist visions. Union banners were most prominent as the major unions, including the national coalition of unions represented in Aarhus, endorsed the anti-racist action.

Signs read: “Crush the system that creates fascism”; “Black and White, Unite and Fight”; “United Against Racism”; “Make Love not War”.

Few apparent Muslims were present throughout most of the march. I asked three elder men separately why this was so. One replied that he had been to a mosque where the Iman had warned members not to participate, because police were saying that if Muslims marched they would see to it that their associations were closed down. Two others said only that their Iman told them to stay away to avoid being caught up in violence, which would mostly go against them.

At the end of the march from city hall to a large square, scores of young Muslims joined in. They walked in strong strides and sent anger glances at police who pulled their paddy wagons closer.

During the two-hour rally, there was lively music and a few speeches. The most well received speech was by Englishman Martin Smith representing “Unite against Fascism”.

He caused sustained cheering when he said:

I am proud to be here with you but am sorry that this scum from England has come to your land. These racists are fascists, make no mistake about it. And they won’t go away by ignoring them or by lighting candles.

At their first demonstration in England, this passive attitude prevailed. As their rally met no opposition, they beat up people whose skin color they didn’t like, and declared that when they demonstrated again no opposition would be allowed. Then many of us woke up.

European politicians are playing the race card once again. Every time fascists meet publicly we must be there. No racism in our countries!

Fascistic Rally

At the park designated for the racists, police outnumbered demonstrators as did curious bystanders. There were 12 paddy wagons blocking the possibility of anti-racists entering the area. A few, however, did manage to break through. In all, 89 people (mostly anti-racists) were arrested. Most were soon released. Five were brought to court the next day on charges of assaulting police with rocks and bottles.

Many arrested were ethnic Danes, Swedes and Norwegians. Others have backgrounds from Arabic lands. They were appalled to hear from the platform that the racists spoke of themselves as “patriots” and “freedom fighters”, and used the slogans: “Stop Islamizing Europe”, “No Muslims in our country”.

The Guardian wrote “EDL summit in Denmark humiliated by low attendance” (March 31). It quoted one Norwegian racist as saying that the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik has “some good points. There are some people who share his thinking if not his methods.”

(Breivik murdered 77 people, most all young Social Democrats. Yet the Social Democratic party here did not endorse the march. Young Social Democrats came, however.)

The EDL was started in London in 2009. The BBC reported that Breivik participated in some demonstrations. The Danish Defence League (DDL) was started in the summer of 2010 by Gary Hoope, a member of the EDL. The DDL has posted graffiti and anti-Muhammad cartoons on Muslim mosques. Its leader, Philip Traulsen, had been charged with possession of an illegal weapon, in 2007, when he and other Nazis beat up anti-racist youths.

Although the racist gathering was a “humiliation”, there were many counter-demonstrators who wished that they had not been able to meet at all. They recalled what happened the first time that EDL attempted to form an all-Europe organization in Amsterdam, in 2010. Dutch anti-racists, including AJAX soccer fans, prevented the 60 racists who came to their city from meeting. They were forcefully beaten back out of town.

When the Egyptian people began to gather in Tahrir Square in January 2011, the embers of the immolation that consumed Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi had already sparked the prairie fire that overthrew the dictatorial ruler Ben Ali. The protest in Tahrir Square was the first manifestation of that fire in Egypt but certainly not the last. As everyone must know by now, the fires of protest in Egypt tossed out their dictator less than two months after Mr. Ben Ali was deposed. The feat of that overthrow was not only momentous within the borders of Egypt itself; its repercussions were felt in the halls of Arabia, Asia, Africa and the Americas. In Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome and on Wall Street, there was plenty of catching up to do. Neither the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency or the black ops mangers of the Central Intelligence Agency predicted the end of the Mubarak regime. Indeed, it wasn’t until the bitter end that the political powers in the aforementioned capitals began to side with (and subvert) the popular uprising in the streets of Egypt.

After Mubarak’s fall, the revolutionary fire spread like flames whipped by warm Santa Ana winds. Bahrain to Libya. Yemen to Syria. London and New York. Athens and Oakland. The insurrectionary wave was in motion and nowhere was it more powerful than in the Arab world. Also, nowhere was it met with more determined (and murderous) resistance from the powers that be, internally and externally. Underlying the insurrectionary tide were the economic facts of neoliberalism’s struggle to maintain its global dominance. When it became apparent that this goal could not always be accomplished by continuing to support the old regimes, the capitols of capitalism inserted their agents into the opposition and did their best to manipulate the rebellion into serving the agencies of those capitols. The IMF, World Bank and the rest of the usual suspects saw their moments in each instance and made their moves. As I write, the entire insurrectionary wave is at a stalemate between the forces of popular social justice and just another new face for western imperialism.

Naturally, very little has been written about this aspect of the revolutionary upsurge of 2011-2012 in the organs of neoliberalism. Instead, the fact of IMF arrangements with the post-Mubarak Egypt and the new Tunisia are interspersed with superficial analyses of the rebellions that would have the reader believe that it was social media that provoked them. Even more revealing of the mainstream media’s allegiance to the imperial regime in the insurrection is its lack of coverage of the continuing popular resistance in the Pentagon’s shipyard Bahrain. Instead, we are presented with an ongoing litany of unconfirmed atrocities committed by the Syrian military and a portrayal of the resistance there as essentially untainted by its affiliation with outside governments and militaries.

Fortunately, we have Vijay Prashad. His latest book, titled Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, attacks the western interpretation of the transitions in Egypt and Libya and explores the actual events from a perspective that explains the players in terms of their allegiances, holdings and politics. In Prashad’s work, the differences between the fighters on the ground and the suits on television are not only acknowledged, they are examined in terms of their meaning to the future. In discussing Egypt, Prashad describes the conflagration of Washington’s imperial needs, Tel Aviv’s paranoiac perception of its security, and the Mubarak clique’s desire to maintain power. He gives lie to the West’s claim that it was interested in democracy (a relatively simple task to be sure), explaining that in the western mindset democracy doesn’t mean democracy, it means a guarantee that the interests and holdings of capital will not be upset. The common term one hears, states Prashad, is stability.

Most of this book is about the battle for Libya. Prashad’s text provides the most detailed description of the events both on the ground and in the office suites. He exposes the humanitarian intervention by NATO for what it was. That is, a means for the western powers to regain unfettered access to Libyan oil and rid themselves of an at best erratic client—Muammar Gaddafi. Unlike many on the Left, Prashad does not take sides for or against the rebellion. Instead, he explains the uprising as a popular and positive thing that was manipulated by the forces of the G7 and NATO. Simultaneously, he discusses Gaddafi’s reign as one that began with many positive changes yet ultimately was a victim of its own excess and greed. If there are any good guys in his narrative, it would be the masses that risked their lives to overthrow the autocracy that had Gaddafi at its helm. Their opposite would be the men on both sides of the battle whose only real interest was in keeping their bank accounts plush while serving their masters in the stock exchanges of the neoliberal world.

Interesting, and as yet not very closely examined, is the role of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Jordan and Morocco. Prashad makes note of the fact that the western capitals have said very little about the harsh repression visited on the Bahraini uprising or the Saudi intervention there. He also explores the military role played by Qatar in Libya, its current role in Syria, and the inclusion of some GCC states in a NATO adjunct. Perhaps, writes Prashad, this adjunct of NATO will be able to stand in for NATO in future operations in the Arab world, thereby creating another shadow in the workings of modern imperialism.

Despite the (probably) millions of words written about the Libyan uprising and the NATO intervention, nothing written in English has come near the truth. After reading Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, it seems that when all is said and done, Prashad’s work will come the closest.

In February 2012 authorities in Florida found no fault in a man fatally shooting a black teen after confronting that teen about his being on a public road.

How authorities in Sanford, Florida have handled the fatal February 26th shooting of 17-year-old black teen Trayvon Martin by a town watch operative is, however, sparking outrage nationwide, including among many whites.

The slaying also raises the issue of race-tainted inequities that have roiled through American society since before the formal inception of the United States.

Police in Sanford, outside Orlando, quickly accepted the claim of George Zimmerman, 28, that he shot Martin in self-defense while he was allegedly losing a fight with the younger, physically smaller teen. (Zimmerman is a three inches taller and is nearly 100-pounds heavier than his victim, the young Martin).

The record, pried lose from reluctant police, shows that Zimmerman called 911 telling police he saw Martin acting suspiciously. Police, who initially refused to release the 911 tapes, told Zimmerman not to confront Martin, but he rejected the police orders. A scuffle ensued where Zimmerman shot Martin with a 9mm pistol he was carrying.

Zimmerman, initially described as having no police record, is a self-appointed town watch captain and wannabe policeman with a checkered past. Neighbors have reportedly complained about his aggressive behaviors. He had called police 46 times in the past year alon in his town watch capacity. In 2005 police charged Zimmerman with assaulting an officer, but later dropped charges.

Federal authorities are now investigating the fatal shooting of Martin by Zimmerman, whom Sanford police cleared without doing any background check (it turns out he was once arrested for assault on a policeman) and without conducting tests to see if Zimmerman was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the shooting. Some people who have heard the 911 tapes contend he was under the influence of some substance, based on the sound of his voice on those recordings.

Martin, when killed by Zimmerman, was walking back to a relative’s home in the integrated neighborhood after buying a bag of candy and a can of ice tea from a local convenience store. Martin, a well-respected high school student, had no criminal record.

The shooting of Martin, however, raises an issue as contentious as racism – the propriety of Florida’s controversial 2005 “Stand Your Ground” law which turned self-defense law on its head by removing the duty to retreat before using deadly force against an alleged attacker.

That law additionally allows the use of deadly force against unarmed persons.

In May 2010 a Florida man successfully cited the “Stand Your Ground” law following his shooting of another man during a fight at a beach where he shot a man in the back of the head as his victim was getting out of the water.

Since this law’s approval, Florida authorities have cited it in finding legal justification in an astonishing 400 slayings according to media accounts. Almost two dozen other states have adopted similar laws.

This law, backed by the National Rifle Association, allows the use of deadly force under the loose standard of a person “reasonably” believing their life to be in danger.

Police and prosecutors in Florida have opposed changing traditional self-defense standards, warning that the looser “Stand Your Ground” standards were ripe for abuse and create what critics term a shoot-first/ask-questions-later environment.

In the Trayvon Martin incident legal experts are wrangling over whether Zimmerman surrendered the immunity protections in the “Stand Your Ground” law because he was the aggressor by his refusal to follow police orders to not confront Martin.

What riles many is the Sanford Police Department’s refusal to arrest Zimmerman and the decision by the department to let the courts sort out his self-defense claim during a trial. Some shooters who have raised self-defense claims under the “Stand Your Ground” rule hve faced trials, while police and prosecutors have simply accepted some claims, eliminating the need for a trial.

By quickly accepting Zimmerman’s self-defense claim, the Sanford Police raise concerns about the race-tainted stereotype of the dangerous black brute that reflexively causes many whites to fear for their lives.

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee embraced Zimmerman’s claim that he was forced to fire on Martin because Martin was beating him badly and no one was responding to his cries for help.

Lee contends Zimmerman’s injuries are “consistent with” his story, apparently finding no fault in Zimmerman’s having disregarded police orders and continuing to confront the smaller Martin, who was apparently doing nothing wrong.

Lee’s police are drawing verbal fire for reportedly badgering witnesses to alter their accounts in favor of Zimmerman’s version.

Martin’s father and the local NAACP head are among many voicing the sentiment that Sanford Police would have reacted differently if Martin had shot Zimmerman under the same circumstances.

Florida, like many places in America, particularly the South, has a sordid history of race-based inequities.

Incidents in Florida are mentioned frequently in the 1951 petition an interracial group of Americans sent to the United Nations charging the federal government with committing “Genocide” on African-Americans.

The “New Acts of Genocide” addendum to that 1951 petition lists racist incidents from Florida more than any other single state.

Those incidents include a Florida sheriff fatally shooting one black prisoner and wounding another, and “racist terrorists” killing a NAACP leader and his wife by bombing their house. That petition decried federal and Florida state officials for failing to act in those murders.

That “New Acts” section also cited whites legally excluding blacks from one Seminole County, FL town located about 15-miles from Sanford, “to prevent Negroes there from voting and from receiving fire, sanitary and public health services.”

Sanford absorbed the all-black town of Goldsboro in 1911, quickly renaming streets bearing the names of black pioneers, according to historic accounts.

The mass disenfranchisement of thousands of blacks by Florida election officials during the 2000 presidential election allegely won but actually stolen by George W. Bush remains a stinging point among blacks.

Florida’s then Governor Jeb Bush, George’s brother, later acknowledged his role in the voter suppression that handed the White House to his brother. Jeb Bush enthusiastically backed passage of the “Stand Your Ground” law, calling it a “good, common-sense anti-crime” measure.

The murder of Trayvon Martin shares similarities with the 1799 North Carolina shooting. Both incidents involved the killing of blacks on questionable provocation and white authorities loosely applying laws to clear the murderers.

In the 1799 incident the Supreme Court of North Carolina acquitted the teen who had confronted a black man on a public road. The teen told that man to get off the road or he would shoot him with a shotgun.

That man walked to the other side of the road where the teen blocked him again.

The teen shot the man after “the negro shoved him with some violence to the other side of the road” according to the court record…that exhibited shades of the black brute stereotype.

NC’s Supreme Court ruled the shooting manslaughter not murder – a crucial ruling for the teen because NC law barred punishment for manslaughter in the “malicious killing of a slave.” Incidentally, NC law at that time deprived free blacks of rights as it did slaves.

“There is enough evidence of probable cause here to arrest Zimmerman,” said Benjamin Crump, the attorney for Trayvon Martin’s family, adding, “Race is the elephant in this room.”

In a press conference held on March 15, 2012, Gascon announced that he was “deeply concerned” that Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi might have plead guilty to a crime he did not truly believe he had committed. He explained that his office “is not in the habit of taking a guilty plea from somebody who is not guilty.” He continued: “If the defendant in this case believes he is not guilty then we should go to trial and let a jury decide.”

Anybody who has ever been within two miles of a courtroom would immediately recognize the utter hypocrisy of this statement. Gascon heads an office that accepts pleas from literally hundreds  of criminal defendants every day who are admitting guilt to offenses they did not commit so that they do not run the risk of going to prison for the rest of their lives for crimes they  also did not commit. Gascon’s office so over-charges most criminal defendants and conjures up accusations that are nothing short of ludicrous for the sole purpose of raising the stakes so high that the accused cannot afford to risk trial. Our judicial system not only acknowledges that this is a daily occurrence, but depends upon this coercive process in order to function. If even 10% of those who are arrested demanded a jury trial, the entire judicial system would come to a screeching halt. Courtrooms would be backed up for years within a month or two of the entry of defendants’ not guilty pleas.

That Gascon would dare to make such a disingenuous comment only underscores the daily unspoken collusion between trial courts and prosecutors to assure that innocent people go to prison, rather than fight their unjust arrests and prosecutions.

A few examples should suffice to demonstrate how obvious this is:

1.  In 1991, Franky Carrillo was convicted of murder, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.  His conviction was based upon the testimony of numerous witnesses, who had been coerced by the police, and coached by the District Attorney into giving false testimony to convict Carrillo. After 20 years in prison,  producing a letter from the actual perpetrator of the crime admitting to its commission, and presenting evidence from every witness who testified against him that their testimony was false and coerced, Carrillo’s conviction was overturned, and he was released from prison. The important lesson from this case is that not one police officer was prosecuted for coercing witnesses into testifying against an innocent man, not one District Attorney was disbarred or even disciplined for suborning perjury, and the trial judge who sentenced Carrillo to two life terms in prison has never been questioned as to why and how he could allow such a shameful process to take place in his courtroom.

Has any District Attorney been prosecuted for over-charging a defendant, for cooperating with the police in fabricating false evidence against an individual or for sending obviously mentally ill or innocent defendants to jail? Gascon’s shameful posturing about District Attorneys never accepting guilty pleas from innocent people scrapes the bottom of the bucket!

It would have been impossible for the witnesses who initially testified against Carrillo to get their stories straight in front of the jury unless the D.A. had coached them and worked with them in convicting an innocent man. This is par for the course, not an aberration.

2. Dennis Lawley spent 23 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He thought he was the Beast of Revelations from the Bible, and suffered from raging mental illness. He then killed himself in his cell this year. The trial judge allowed Lawley to represent himself at trial in spite of Lawley’s open and obvious psychosis.

During trial, the District Attorney presented the case to the jury, arguing that Lawley shot his victim with his own .357 gun and was the sole perpetrator of the crime. Lawley explained that the gun he was accused of using in the crime was not the one that killed the victim and was never used in the crime. He explained that his gun was actually buried in a field in Modesto in the Central Valley of California. The D.A. mocked Lawley’s argument, and ultimately obtained a  conviction for the crime. 20 years later, Lawley’s appellate attorney and a series of investigators went to the field and located the missing gun, which was right where Lawley had said it was.

Did the D.A. admit his error, and work to have Lawley released? Of course not, he changed his theory of the case to suggest that there were two guns used in the crime, and that Lawley was guilty under his new explanation for the crime.

Was the D.A., or the Attorney General who fought to keep Lawley in prison until he killed himself punished in any way for their blatant lies and fabrications? Certainly not – our city and state attorneys never are held accountable for their manipulation of the legal system.

Did the trial judge who upheld the jury’s sentence of death ever publicly acknowledge his shameful actions in allowing Lawley to represent himself in spite of his obvious mental illness. Unheard of!

3.  Ross Mirkarimi was elected sheriff of San Francisco County in 2011. He was to be sworn in as sheriff in 2012. But prior to assuming the role of sheriff, Mirkarimi was arrested for having assaulted his wife, an immigrant who swore that he had not abused her, and for intimidating their  two-year old child (Mirkirami, himself, was a serious candidate for the “Hypocrite Award” due to his dual role as S.F. County Sheriff as well as a suspected wife abuser.)

Mirkarimi plead not guilty to the charges, and demanded a jury trial. After weeks of reading about every aspect of the case in the local media, as presented to them by D.A. Gascon, Mirkarimi plead guilty to the misdemeanor offense of false imprisonment. For weeks before the pending trial, the people of San Francisco, from which the jury to try the case would be chosen, were treated to videos and pictures of the victim of the crime, to alleged testimony from numerous other victims of Mirkarimi’s misconduct, and to a daily barrage of information provided by Gascon’s office to assure a conviction in the case. Was this appropriate behavior on the part of the District Attorney? Did he get away with trying the case in the press insead of in the courtroom? Ah, but the District Attorney is an honorable man, who would NEVER accept a plea from an innocent person.

The Mirkirimi case has gone off the charts. District Attorney Gascon graciously shared with the city of San Fancisco, prior to Mirkarimi’s trial, the chronological history of every woman Mirkarimi had dated since the age of eight, along with a description of the inappropriate conduct he engaged in with each of them. The descriptions were bolstered by pictures, declarations and videos of each of his prior transgressions.

4. When Oscar Grant was murdered in cold blood by the BART police in Oakland in the early hours of New Yearve 2009, it was months before anybody could even hear what murderer Mehserle’s defense was. The District Attorney explained that an ongoing investigation was in process, and that it would be “unfair” for Mehserle’s to be tried in the press prematurely. How considerate of the D.A. in that case.

5.  In the case of the Davis police officers who blithely and openly pepper-sprayed non-violent demonstrators sitting on a sidewalk on campus, the District Attorney worked long and hard to protect the privacy rights of the police while an interminable investigation was pursued. Were the policeman’s actions discussed publicly by the D.A. prior to trial or was the case tried in the press? No. Are criminal charges even pending against the offending police officers? No.

When a police officer is the potential defendant, privacy rights come to the fore and foreshadow all other considerations; yet, when a poor person or someone the D.A. dislikes commits a crime, the person is so lambasted in the press that (s)he does not stand a chance if the case were ever to go to court.

The double standard that exists in this country regarding the forces of law ‘n order versus the citizenry, especially for minorities, is so blatant and outrageous as to bring chills to any law-abiding citizen. Gascon’s abuse of the system is only the tip of the iceberg.

The members of Veterans for Peace, East Bay Chapter 162, have been watching the increasing repression against the Occupy Movement here in Oakland, CA, which has included repeated use of chemical agents, concussion grenades, and other “less lethal” weapons, as well as beatings. Several persons, including military veterans, have been seriously injured by the police. There have also been mass arrests: on October 25, 2011 of about seventy Occupiers, and on January 28, 2012 of over four hundred Occupiers.

This repression sounds chillingly like those occurring in so many 3rd world dictatorships which our government routinely castigates for human rights abuse. Incredibly, it’s happening here in Oakland, a city where we either live, work and shop, or at least attend movies & cultural events. Among the arrestees are friends and neighbors, people we know personally. Some are veterans.

We note that the supposedly “unbiased” mainstream media have chosen to spin these events into a propaganda attack against Occupy Oakland. For many Vietnam Era veterans this is déjà vu, recalling that antiwar veterans who protested during the 1960s and 1970s were likewise often subjected to grossly distorted media reportage.

Occupy Oakland deserves respect. By empowering the powerless, the movement has restored dignity to the downtrodden. That was made clear on Nov 2nd, the first general strike in the US since 1946, which strike also took place in Oakland, and again during the West Coast Port Shutdown of Dec 12th. Those actions inspired rank-and-file trade unionists in other cities, notably in Longview, WA, where dockworkers who’d been on the picket line for half a year were energized to continue their struggle. This month we received news that the Longview dockworkers have won; Occupy Oakland, along with other Occupys, played a significant role in that victory.

Any movement as ambitious as Occupy is certain to make mistakes and go to excesses. Examples would be the breaking of windows on Nov 2nd and the burning of the flag on Jan 28th. Fortunately, it is the nature of Occupy to be self-correcting, by continuing to discuss tactics and strategies both at the General Assembly and in small informal groups. We’re confident that an ever increasingly effective Occupy movement will emerge from these ongoing discussions.

We strongly express our support for Occupy Oakland, as we have in the past. The men and women of Occupy represent our hope for the future, a well placed hope, we believe, and we commend them on their firm stand in the face of brutal repression and their courageous defense of our First Amendment rights.

Veterans for Peace
East Bay Chapter #162
The chapter meets on the 2nd Saturday each month, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., at the Niebyl Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Oakland, CA 94609