Populist Lopez Obrador Demands Full Vote Recount in Mexico's Closest-Ever Presidential Race
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006
Courtesy of Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/05/1329233
Populist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and conservative Felipe Calderon both claim victory in Mexico's closest-ever presidential race. Lopez Obrador is now calling for a full recount after charges of voter fraud and manipulation. We go to Mexico City to get a report and host a roundtable discussion on the election.
The party of populist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is demanding a full, vote-by-vote recount in Mexico's closest-ever presidential race.
A preliminary count of the votes cast in Sunday's election gave a slim lead to conservative candidate Felipe Calderon. But federal election officials acknowledged Tuesday that more than three million ballots - or eight percent of the total - remain uncounted. In the latest tally, Calderon leads Lopez Obrador by just over 0.6 of a percentage point, meaning the race is still too close to call.
On election night, both of Mexico's major television networks said their exit polls showed a statistical tie. Two hours later both candidates claimed victory in Mexico City.
The new election results were released on Tuesday after Lopez Obrador made charges of fraud and manipulation of the vote. His party is calling for a full recount of all 41 million votes claiming that some voting places were counted twice while others weren't counted at all. Although a formal recount will begin today, electoral authorities will only be required to re-check tallies from each ballot box.
Lopez Obrador has been running on a progressive platform calling for greater aid to the poor; free medical care and food subsidies for the elderly; the rewriting of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the end to the further privatization of the country's oil and gas industries. Meanwhile Felipe Calderon has received the strong backing of the business community.
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Democracy Now! Guest Were the Following:
-David Brooks, U.S. Bureau Chief for Mexican Daily newspaper La Jornada.
-Gilberto López Rivas, anthropologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. He is also a frequent contributor to La Jornada.
-John Ross, a regular contributor to the Nation, Counterpunch and La Jornada. He has also written three books chronicling the Zapitista movement in Mexico. His latest is "Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicle 2000-2006" to be published by Nation Books in October 2006. His most recent article about the Mexico elections is on the Nation.com website and is titled "Disputed Election Raises Tensions in Mexico."
-George Grayson, professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He also writes a regular column for "Milenio Semanal,"
a weekly magazine in Mexico. Professor Grayson's latest book is about presidential contender, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and is titled "Mesías Mexicano," - in English, "Mexican Messiah."
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AMY GOODMAN: On election night, both of Mexico’s major television networks said their exit polls showed a statistical tie. Two hours later, both candidates claimed victory. This is Lopez Obrador speaking in Mexico City.
ANDRES MANUEL LOPEZ OBRADOR: [translated] I want to tell the Mexican people that, according to our data, we won the presidency of the republic.
AMY GOODMAN: Felipe Calderon also claimed victory on Sunday night.
FELIPE CALDERON: [translated] We have won the presidential elections, and that data will be confirmed by the Federal Electoral Institute.
AMY GOODMAN: The new election results were released on Tuesday after Lopez Obrador made charges of fraud and manipulation of the vote. His party is calling for a full recount of all 41 million votes, claiming that some voting places were counted twice, while others weren't counted at all. Although a formal recount will begin today, electoral authorities will only be required to recheck tallies from each ballot box.
Lopez Obrador has been running on a progressive platform calling for greater aid to the poor; free medical care and food subsidies for the elderly; the rewriting of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the end to the further privatization of the country's oil and gas industries. Meanwhile, Felipe Calderon has received the strong backing of the business community.
We're joined now in our Firehouse studio by David Brooks, the U.S. Bureau Chief for the Mexican daily newspaper La Jornada. On the phone from Mexico, we're joined by Gilberto Lopez Rivas. He’s with the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, frequent contributor to La Jornada. We're also joined on the line by John Ross, a journalist and author who has written three books chronicling the Zapatista movement in Mexico. His latest book is called Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicle 2000-2006. And we're joined by Professor George Grayson, Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary. He also writes a regular column for a weekly magazine in Mexico. We welcome you all to Democracy Now!
David Brooks, let's begin with you. Were you surprised by the vote?
DAVID BROOKS: The election had been neck-and-neck for the last couple months, although Lopez Obrador's people had expected to win by 2, 3, 4 percentage points, so everybody was a bit upset about this tie. And the question is now that nobody quite knows what the result is in Mexico. And that uncertainty and that doubt that has been brought upon the electoral institution for not being clear about what happened with these three million votes, what's happened with the preliminary results, has led for more uncertainty, and so now we’re in uncharted terrain in Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: George Grayson, you're with the College of William and Mary, a professor who writes a weekly column in Mexico. Can you talk about your reaction to the vote?
GEORGE GRAYSON: I agree with David. I was out on election day as an observer visiting various precincts, and I found it to be a relatively calm, orderly process, except their so-called special precincts, casillas especiales, where if you happen to be a tourist from another part of Mexico, you can cast your vote. Regrettably, the election law only allows these special precincts to have 750 ballots. And I was in the neighborhood of the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, where there are just thousands and thousands of tourists on the weekend. And in the five special precincts around the Basilica or in that particular borough of the city, all of them ran out of ballots, and they were looking for another place to vote. I think that was probably more bureaucratic incompetence and the failure of the legislature here to update a law that's about 11 years old. But otherwise, the voting seemed to go smoothly.
AMY GOODMAN: John Ross, you've been writing extensively, well, for years and in the lead-up to the election and now afterwards. Your assessment today of what the numbers mean that have so far been revealed and how this reverberates with the past?
JOHN ROSS: I think I'd like first to say that we need to put this in context. This is the most important election that Mexico has had perhaps since the Mexican Revolution. This is an election which will tell us whether Mexico is part of North America or is, in fact, in alignment with the left democracies in Latin America that have developped. This is an election that's been based on the class war. Lopez Obrador represents the poor people in this country. This is poor versus rich, brown versus white, worker versus boss. This is, in fact, an electoral class war, and in fact, if the election isn't straightened out real quickly it's not only going to be an electoral class war.
My assessment is that, in relation to what Professor Grayson said, that you can't tell anything from what happens in the poles on election day, elections here are stolen before, during and after the election, and so now we’re in the aftermath, and we saw the disappearance of 3 million votes from the PREP, from the preliminary totals. Only 2.5 million have been put back in there. There's still 600,000 votes out there. I personally believe that those votes were not counted on Sunday night to give the impression that Felipe Calderon had won the election. The PREP, of course, can't determine who won the election, but if we look at the news media, particularly the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, they're all giving it to Calderon on the basis of this PREP, from which the Federal Electoral Institute withdrew 3 million votes, in order to give the impression that Calderon had won, and I think that’s a measure of how the Federal Electoral Institute is active throughout this entire electoral process.
Way before the campaigns began in January, when Luis Carlos Ugalde was appointed president of the IFE, we began to see a pronounced bias against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and in favor of Felipe Calderon in the decisions that the IFE and Ugalde were making. This latest event where three million votes disappeared and then were placed back in after Ugalde was called on it, and he only on a television interview yesterday morning admitted that these votes had been taken out.
The other thing, Amy, that we really have to look at is that there's an enormous disparity between the numbers of votes that have been cast for senators and deputies and those for the president. And interestingly enough, in those states in which the PRD, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's party, has won the elections, there are much many fewer votes for the president than there are for the senators and deputies, whereas in the states that the PAN now controls, there are many more votes for the president than there are for the senators and the deputies.
And the state that’s most, I think, blaring here is the state of Tabasco. There were 13% more votes for the president than there are for senators and congressmen. And I say that Tabasco is an interesting case, because both the candidate from the PRI, Roberto Madrazo, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador are natives of Tabasco, and of course there would be a much higher vote for president than there would be for senators or deputies. So, that’s where we are.
Today, they begin to tally up the districts. There's going to be a huge fight about whether or not you get to open up the ballot box, open up the bags in which the ballots are counted, and recount those things. What we're seeing here is a replay of the 1988 election, which was stolen from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas by an electoral authority that was then part of the government. The IFE is supposed to be autonomous.
But we're seeing a replay right down to the fact that on Saturday night two poll-watchers [inaudible] were shot, were killed. After the 1988 election was stolen from Cardenas, hundreds and hundreds of his supporters were killed in political violence here.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Professor George Grayson? You, too, are in Mexico City right now.
GEORGE GRAYSON: I think it's been a public relations nightmare for the Federal Electoral Institute because Lopez Obrador was asserting that there were several million votes that hadn't been tallied, and the head of the institute did recognize that yesterday. I think it's too early to say that the fix is in. And one of the problems was when they constituted the political council of IFE, which, as John Ross said so accurately, supervises the election, issues credentials and gives a preliminary tally, Lopez Obrador's party wasn't included on that nine-member council. And I think it was a mistake by the main political forces here not to just lock the various party leaders' room and insist that they have someone from Lopez Obrador's party. Now, his party can be feisty, sometimes downright cantankerous, but it was a major error, I think, of Congress and of the government secretary not to include his party in the race.
Before we get to the point of painting him as some kind of a Franklin Roosevelt, I wrote a book about him that was published two months ago; followed him for three years and went to his hometown of Tepetitan in rural Tabasco, and I think he's done a service to the nation in that he's focused on the plight of the poor here, because 10% of the elite control 45% of the wealth. And it's especially -- these disparities are especially notable in the south. And if you look at a map of the vote on Sunday, it's virtually the north versus the south, the north being the more developed and more U.S.-oriented part of the country, the south being less developed, lots of natural resources but mal-distribution of income and larger indigenous populations.
But Lopez Obrador, for his genuine commitment to poor people, does have messianic tendencies. He would lead marches from Tabasco to Mexico City, which he called “exodus” marches. When he became mayor of Mexico City, he rechristened the city the “City of Hope,” La Ciudad de la Esperanza. He calls himself the little ray of hope. And during his first three years as mayor, he regularly distorted or perverted actions of the city council. They passed a bill, for example, requiring all motorists to have auto insurance. He simply told the Secretary of Transportation not to enforce that. The city council passed legislation saying we want a transparency council, so we can have a local Freedom of Information Act. He tied that initiative up in knots, and so now it has become a toothless tabby cat. So he has a strong commitment to the poor, but he also has a belief that law is the will of the people, not actions of elected officials.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor George Grayson, we'll get response after break. Professor Grayson speaking to us from Mexico City; John Ross also there; independent journalist David Brooks in studio here in New York, of La Jornada, Mexican newspaper. When we come back we'll also speak to an Gilberto Lopez Rivas, who is an anthropologist in Mexico City.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm Amy Goodman, as we talk about the elections right now in Mexico. The PRD candidate, Lopez Obrador, has called for a recount, with the officials saying it's too close to call, though many are calling it for the PAN candidate. We have a roundtable of people to speak. In addition to John Ross, independent journalist in Mexico City, we're speaking with Professor Grayson there, David Brooks of La Jornada in our New York studio, and we're now joined by Gilberto Lopez Rivas, anthropologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. Can you first share your reaction to this election -- they say the closest in history -- and this latest news of the three million votes that have not yet been counted?
GILBERTO LOPEZ RIVAS: Well, I think that we have the phantom of the fraud election and state election appearing now in the public opinion and letters. Hundreds of letters in electronic means of communication are counting the irregularities and the forms in which this fraud is carried on by the Institute of Federal Elections. And I think that the counting of the votes could clear this fraud or could confirm that there is complicity between Ugalde, who is the head of the Institute of Federal Elections, and the President Fox. So now we have, as the other professor said, a nation divided by the vote but united in the clarification process that is needed to accept any president in the future. So I think that we are in the middle of a big conflict that is going to explode in these days. The counting, you have to finish at the end of the week. But I think that the people is not so happy with what is happening now.
AMY GOODMAN: In terms of history, going back to Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, 1988, afterwards there was terrible violence. A number of people were killed. Lopez Obrador being one of the top aides to Cardenas at the time. Do you see this being repeated today?
GILBERTO LOPEZ RIVAS: Yes, but with the difference that we have a society more clear, with more consciousness of what is happening. And if we have a modernization of fraud by the means of the electronic counting, we have also the democratization of what is happening by the means of the electronic mail. So what is happening now is that I receive hundreds of mails that are calling to demonstrations. As a matter of fact, today we have several demonstrations in front of the electoral body counting. So, I think that the society, Mexican society, cannot afford another fraud and especially with this officially difference that today appears in only 0.63% of difference between one and the other candidate. So I think that there are more forces, political and social forces, that are going to oppose to this kind of result.
AMY GOODMAN: The Los Angeles Times is reporting today suspicion among Lopez Obrador's supporters was heightened Monday when the investigative magazine Proceso, citing police intelligence sources, reported that senior Interior Ministry officials had attempted to shape media coverage on election night. Ministry officials called the news directors at Mexico’s two leading television networks and requested that they not broadcast the results of their exit polls, Proceso reported, those exit polls, of course, showing that Lopez Obrador was in the lead.
GILBERTO LOPEZ RIVAS: Yeah. It’s completely -- the behavior of the means of communication -- the television, especially -- is completely in the side of the government, because, well, we have a legislative reform that gave them the complete monopoly of the media. So I believe that the behavior during the night of the election was completely suspicious, and nobody explains why they don't give the election exit polls that in another occasion was kind of something natural. And everybody's talking about that there is a big complicity between the big means of the media and the electoral body and the power. So, this belief is going to thousands and thousands of citizens that are very, very angry at what is happening. So I think that we are going to have days and weeks and probably months, and I think that we are not going to have a president in several weeks that is going to be accepted for the Mexicans.
AMY GOODMAN: David Brooks, can you talk about the role of U.S. consultants in Mexico, specifically Dick Morris?
DAVID BROOKS: I mean, the campaign of Felipe Calderon became much more successful once it went negative and it started borrowing U.S.-style fear campaign tactics and negative campaigning. Dick Morris was one of the informal consultants. He claims that he was never hired and wasn't full-time, but that he has said and admitted that he did have informal consultations with the Calderon campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Dick Morris being the former --
DAVID BROOKS: Strategist for Bill Clinton, who then had to leave the public scene in disgrace and now is a Rupert Murdoch columnist, for Rupert Murdoch media. Part of what he contributed, as well as what operatives from the Aznar government, the ex-Prime Minister of Spain, Aznar, and other people to the campaign was to create a sense of fear about the possible -- because, actually projecting Lopez Obrador as a danger to Mexico, as a danger to the United States, as somebody who would be akin to a Hugo Chavez on our border.
AMY GOODMAN: Not only akin, I was looking at a magazine from Mexico that had a chessboard with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro beings the players and they’re holding the pawn, who is Lopez Obrador.
DAVID BROOKS: And the campaign also projected him as somebody who violates the law, who disregards the laws.
AMY GOODMAN: As Professor Grayson was saying.
DAVID BROOKS: Right, and part of that became the media campaign of saying this person is dangerous, doesn't respect the law, is willing to go to the streets and provoke violence and confront things. And all this -- up to the end of the campaign people were getting messages on their phones, as well as emails from the Calderon campaign, saying that if Lopez Obrador won you might lose your car, you might lose your business and you might lose even the right to practice your Catholic religion. And so, it intensified.
This did have an effect and did close the polls and did polarize the election to a point, and that media campaign is now proceeding after the election, where most of Mexico's mainstream media, as well as the two monopoly television stations, have been projecting Calderon and giving a sense that he has won. There is no official result. The Federal Electoral Institute has said that the preliminary vote cannot be an indicator of who won or who lost, etc., etc.
That media campaign has now crossed the border. And just yesterday, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, all published editorials basically repeating some of the claims of Lopez Obrador as a danger, basically proclaiming that, in their view, Calderon has won the election, and saying that that's a good thing for Mexico and for the United States. Because, again, as the L.A. Times editorial subtitle says, editorial standoff reveals a populous candidate with undemocratic leanings. And they make this accusation because he proclaimed victory late Sunday night, but they failed to mention that the PAN was the first to proclaim victory and that Felipe Calderon, a few minutes after Andres Manuel said this, he said the same thing. So essentially what we have is this whole media campaign, very similar to what we've seen in this country, where the fight now is to use the media and use all the tools possible to proclaim yourself a winner without a basis in any of the facts.
So what's happening, as well, and what I think the key is in Mexico is not what the fight is between Lopez Obrador and Felipe Calderon, but what about the people? And supposedly they're supposed to be the protagonists of this great democratic expression, and that's what's being violated right now. And that's what the fury is and the ire and the anger of people. Neither of these two candidates can claim to now represent the majority of Mexico. And so one of the questions is how is Mexico going to define how to proceed, and the protagonist can’t be the candidates. The protagonist has to be the popular will. At least that's what we're told in a democracy.
And the other factor there is, of course, that the U.S. has been very careful, the U.S. government has been very careful not to openly participate in this election, which is a wise thing to do. But it's no secret that the Bush administration, that Wall Street and, of course, the major media in this country favor Felipe Calderon, and that is also creating an issue of be careful what you read in the editorials, although the reports in most of these papers contradict the editorial.
AMY GOODMAN: John Ross, from your vantage point in Mexico City and your years of writing on this issue, the Zapatistas, where does the whole movement fit into this? This week, Subcomandante Marcos was in a radio studio also alleging fraud.
JOHN ROSS: Yeah. I -- you know, I've written a lot on the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas are in the middle of what is called the Other Campaign. I haven’t been real happy with the Other Campaign. I think Gilberto is probably a better person to talk about the Other Campaign than I am. At this particular point, I think that the campaign has kind of -- it's kind of like a bicycle. When it doesn't go forward, it falls over, and it's kind of fallen over here in Mexico City. It pretty much limited its constituency to many young people, very much out of the mainstream of Mexican politics at this point and indeed is a contributor to the fact that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has had difficulty here, and there's been constant attacks on him by Subcomandante Marcos since the very beginning of this campaign.
I wanted to take up another thing, because I think it's important, and also to respond to Professor Grayson, who wrote a hit piece, a book that was a hit piece on Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador: this question of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as being a violator of the law. We see statements in the New York Times by Ginger Thompson that he led violent demonstrations in Tabasco in 1996. I was with Lopez Obrador at those demonstrations in front of the PEMEX platforms. They were, in fact, nonviolent demonstrations. Just another example of how the U.S. press has turned this thing around. And, you know, here in Mexico City was accused of breaking the law because he tried to build an access road to a hospital out in Cuajimalpa in violation of a court order. They tried to bar him from the ballot. Major parties and Vicente Fox tried to bar him from the ballot. He put 1.2 million people in the streets. I was happy to march in that demonstration, the largest political demonstration in Mexico’s history, last April. And they dropped the charges right away.
The other thing is that, you know, when we say that the media has been very bad in this campaign, we have to understand that they're operating with the permission of the IFE. These hit pieces spots that ran for months and months that compared Lopez Obrador, inter-cut his face Hugo Chavez, Subcomandante Marcos, riots, lynchings, whatever you want, all these inter-cut his face, ran for months and months and months despite the objections of the PRD and of Lopez Obrador. It was only when there was a court order to have them removed that the IFE moved to remove those from the air just at the beginning of June.
Time and time again -- I think the most -- one of the most egregious errors, maybe a deliberate error, that the IFE committed during this campaign was to disenfranchise millions and millions of Mexicans north of the border by setting up a procedure where it was impossible for people, undocumented workers, in the United States to cast a ballot, although there is a law now that says they're allowed to cast that ballot. Indeed on Sunday when thousands of people caravanned out of Los Angeles down to Tijuana to vote -- and the PRD is extremely strong in Los Angeles -- they were denied to vote because there were not enough special polling places and because, as Mr. Grayson has indicated, there's only 750 ballots in each. So at every step -- and again, the bulk of those voters, millions of voters in the United States who are thought to be Lopez Obrador supporters were denied the ballot because of IFE procedures.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Grayson, your response?
GEORGE GRAYSON: First of all, IFE wasn't enthusiastic about having the vote abroad. It was legislation passed by the Mexican Congress, which is elected, and I agree that the Mexican Congress is no model of efficiency. It does much better at blocking bills than passing them. But IFE simply had to abide by the guidelines, and the guidelines required expatriates to have to register in January, and so that meant that you were going to have a very small registration, only about 41,000 sought ballots, and maybe 32 or 33 thousand actually voted. Turns out, the overwhelming number of people who voted from abroad voted for Calderon, although one can assume that was a largely middle-class vote.
With regard to the 1988 election, I was here for that one also, and undoubtedly the fraud was ubiquitous. But there wasn't much violence after that election, mainly because the loser, Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, who's run three times for president of Mexico unsuccessfully and is kind of an icon of the Mexican left and who did not support Lopez Obrador in this campaign, the election was in early July, I think July 6, as I recall, and about two months later he went into the Zocalo and made a speech in which he criticized the outcome of the election. He said he had been defrauded of the presidency, although, of course, the ballots were impounded, later burned, but he did not call the people to violence. There was a major split within what became the PRD at that time, and Cuahtémoc Cardenas acted in a -- I think a patriotic fashion, because he could have had a class warfare at that time.
With regard to the spots, the negative campaigning here is really rather mild compared to what it is in the United States. It's just for 71 years one party controlled the system. And the candidates didn't have to -- at least the candidates of the official party didn't have to beat up on their opponents because they were going to win anyway. And Lopez Obrador does make intemperate statements on the stump.
AMY GOODMAN: I'm going to give the last word to Gilberto Lopez Rivas. Your response and final comment.
GILBERTO LOPEZ RIVAS: I agree with a lot of commentaries that make my colleagues. And what, for me, is important is what is going to be the reaction of the people, before the fraud that is carrying out by the federal institute. That is the main questions. And we have to go into what the people is thinking and what the majority of the people is thinking. Mexico was a specialist in electoral fraud, but we believe that we have been overcome this kind of situation, and now we return again to 12 years ago, and that is very dangerous today. It’s completely dangerous. I think that if the tribunal, the electoral tribunal, that is the body that has to say who is the next president, doesn't take in account what is happening in the federal institute, this is going to be kind of riot in Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: We'll leave it there, and we’ll certainly continue to follow the story of the Mexico elections. I want to thank you, Gilberto Lopez Rivas, for joining us, anthropologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City; David Brooks here in New York, of La Jornada; John Ross who writes for The Nation and writes independently, a number of books, among them Rebellion from the Roots and The Annexation of Mexico; and Professor George Grayson of the College of William and Mary. I want to thank you all for being with us.
http://www.democracynow.org
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Caribbean Canadian Heritage Month?
Caribbean Canadian Heritage Month?
By Norman (Otis) Richmond
Why is multi-cultural Canada always tailing the U.S. on racial affairs?
Why did U.S. president George W. Bush sign into law making June Caribbean American Heritage Month? Why didn’t the forward thinking Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin not think of doing this before the president of the country known as:” the land of the tree and the home of the slave?”
These were some of the questions that ran though my mind as I read Colin Rickards’ column, “Caribbean Heritage Month?” The Caribbean Camera, June 22, 2006. Rickards wrote, “The U. S. Bill, authored by Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, was designed to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of Caribbean Americans to the growth and development of the United States.”
The Texas-born, Lee's willingness to stand on principle earned her
international attention when she was the only member of Congress to vote against the resolution authorizing President Bush to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons ."
In addition to being one of Congress' most vocal opponents to the war in Iraq, Congresswoman Lee has been a leader in promoting policies that foster Pan-Africanism, international peace, security and human rights.
The anti-war Lee must have had Harry Belafonte in mind when she authored this call for legislation in support of Caribbean American Heritage Month. In my judgement Belafonte ranks a very close second to his idol Paul Robeson as an example of a role model for an artist.
Belafonte, like Robeson, is not an “art for art sake “type. Belafonte like Robeson feels that art must serve the world’s oppressed and not the world’s multi-national corporations. It must be mentioned that the “pretty boy” Belafonte has consistently called out U.S. president after president as well as former secretary of state Colin Powell.
Rickards maintains that Black History Month (February), South Asian Month (May) and Black Music Month (June) should continue as they are. He correctly points out, “It may also be worth remarking that the February and June celebrations focus on Black people – those of African descent – with which I have no problem. Nor do I with May highlighting those of Indian descent. However, as Share used to say years ago, in a little box which ran in every issue: “Not all Black people are West Indians and not all West Indians are Black…”
Many years ago, broadcaster Milton Blake and I who helped popularize Black Music Month in this city. We followed the lead of African Americans such as Kenny Gamble of Philadelphia International Records, Dick Griffey of Solar Records and Ed Wright, ex-prez of the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers.
However, we never followed the U.S. leadership blindly. We had our own agenda that included plugging African Canadian music maker into the international music market and making our contribution to Pan-Africanism. We led delegations of African Canadian musicians to conventions in New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Miami Beach where Toronto music makers rubbed shoulders with Betty Wright, who recorded with Peter Tosh and toured with Bob Marley and the Wailers, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Ashford and Simpson and others.
Moreover, the biggest coup that the BMA was involved in was bringing Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder together at one of their first conventions. Carol Cooper captured this moment in Pan African musical history. Said Cooper, “DURING A DEFINITIVE rendition of "Exodus" which capped an hour-long show by the Wailers, Stevie Wonder joined Bob Marley on stage and moved 2,000 members of the Philadelphia-based Black Music Association to their feet in a visceral optimism so strong that for a palpable moment all the tensions and doubts provoked during last week's conference seemed resolved. Music has been known to do that.”
This took place in 1979.
I can site one other concrete example of how the BMA/Toronto Chapter helped promote African Internationalism with music. On Johnny “Guitar “Watson’s 1980 release, Love Jones, he included a song "Asante Sana".
“Asanta Sana” is Swahili for "Thank you very much". This song came about as a result of a meeting that I arranged between the Houston, Texas born Watson and Eduardo Mondlane, Jr. Mondlane , Jr.is the son of Eduardo Mondale founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), an organization that led the fight against Portuguese colonialism. I was introduced to Mondlane during a visit to my family in Los Angeles.
Mondlane was interested in guitarists and was impressed by Eric Clapton and other UK artists. When I attempted to tell him that Clapton and the others were all copying African American blues men he dismissed me as a ”Black American racist” . I’d heard that many times before.
As it happened, I had an interview with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and asked Mondale if he wanted to roll with me. He agreed. Not only was Watson a top shelf vocalist and guitarist but he mastered piano and many other instruments.
When I introduced Watson to Mondlane, it was love at first sight. The
legendary Watson was impressed to meet the son of a leader of a liberation movement.
“This brother is the son of the chief, right?” I laughed and said, “Sure,
your right”. Watson explained to Mondlane that T-Bone Walker, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Guitar Slim were his influences. Jimi Hendrix, who had gone to England and blown the minds of Clapton and others, was influenced by Watson.
This lesson convinced Mondlane that I was not the “racist” he thought. That was one of my favourite hook ups. When Watson passed ten years ago on stage during a tour of Japan I thought about Mondlane.
The history of the links between the politics and music of Africa and the Western Hemisphere is dying to be written. Hopefully, I can make my contribution to this chapter of the history Africans at home and aboard.
Norman (Otis) Richmond can be contacted by email at: Norman@ckln.fm
By Norman (Otis) Richmond
Why is multi-cultural Canada always tailing the U.S. on racial affairs?
Why did U.S. president George W. Bush sign into law making June Caribbean American Heritage Month? Why didn’t the forward thinking Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien or Paul Martin not think of doing this before the president of the country known as:” the land of the tree and the home of the slave?”
These were some of the questions that ran though my mind as I read Colin Rickards’ column, “Caribbean Heritage Month?” The Caribbean Camera, June 22, 2006. Rickards wrote, “The U. S. Bill, authored by Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, was designed to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of Caribbean Americans to the growth and development of the United States.”
The Texas-born, Lee's willingness to stand on principle earned her
international attention when she was the only member of Congress to vote against the resolution authorizing President Bush to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons ."
In addition to being one of Congress' most vocal opponents to the war in Iraq, Congresswoman Lee has been a leader in promoting policies that foster Pan-Africanism, international peace, security and human rights.
The anti-war Lee must have had Harry Belafonte in mind when she authored this call for legislation in support of Caribbean American Heritage Month. In my judgement Belafonte ranks a very close second to his idol Paul Robeson as an example of a role model for an artist.
Belafonte, like Robeson, is not an “art for art sake “type. Belafonte like Robeson feels that art must serve the world’s oppressed and not the world’s multi-national corporations. It must be mentioned that the “pretty boy” Belafonte has consistently called out U.S. president after president as well as former secretary of state Colin Powell.
Rickards maintains that Black History Month (February), South Asian Month (May) and Black Music Month (June) should continue as they are. He correctly points out, “It may also be worth remarking that the February and June celebrations focus on Black people – those of African descent – with which I have no problem. Nor do I with May highlighting those of Indian descent. However, as Share used to say years ago, in a little box which ran in every issue: “Not all Black people are West Indians and not all West Indians are Black…”
Many years ago, broadcaster Milton Blake and I who helped popularize Black Music Month in this city. We followed the lead of African Americans such as Kenny Gamble of Philadelphia International Records, Dick Griffey of Solar Records and Ed Wright, ex-prez of the National Association of Television and Radio Announcers.
However, we never followed the U.S. leadership blindly. We had our own agenda that included plugging African Canadian music maker into the international music market and making our contribution to Pan-Africanism. We led delegations of African Canadian musicians to conventions in New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Miami Beach where Toronto music makers rubbed shoulders with Betty Wright, who recorded with Peter Tosh and toured with Bob Marley and the Wailers, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Ashford and Simpson and others.
Moreover, the biggest coup that the BMA was involved in was bringing Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder together at one of their first conventions. Carol Cooper captured this moment in Pan African musical history. Said Cooper, “DURING A DEFINITIVE rendition of "Exodus" which capped an hour-long show by the Wailers, Stevie Wonder joined Bob Marley on stage and moved 2,000 members of the Philadelphia-based Black Music Association to their feet in a visceral optimism so strong that for a palpable moment all the tensions and doubts provoked during last week's conference seemed resolved. Music has been known to do that.”
This took place in 1979.
I can site one other concrete example of how the BMA/Toronto Chapter helped promote African Internationalism with music. On Johnny “Guitar “Watson’s 1980 release, Love Jones, he included a song "Asante Sana".
“Asanta Sana” is Swahili for "Thank you very much". This song came about as a result of a meeting that I arranged between the Houston, Texas born Watson and Eduardo Mondlane, Jr. Mondlane , Jr.is the son of Eduardo Mondale founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), an organization that led the fight against Portuguese colonialism. I was introduced to Mondlane during a visit to my family in Los Angeles.
Mondlane was interested in guitarists and was impressed by Eric Clapton and other UK artists. When I attempted to tell him that Clapton and the others were all copying African American blues men he dismissed me as a ”Black American racist” . I’d heard that many times before.
As it happened, I had an interview with Johnny “Guitar” Watson and asked Mondale if he wanted to roll with me. He agreed. Not only was Watson a top shelf vocalist and guitarist but he mastered piano and many other instruments.
When I introduced Watson to Mondlane, it was love at first sight. The
legendary Watson was impressed to meet the son of a leader of a liberation movement.
“This brother is the son of the chief, right?” I laughed and said, “Sure,
your right”. Watson explained to Mondlane that T-Bone Walker, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Guitar Slim were his influences. Jimi Hendrix, who had gone to England and blown the minds of Clapton and others, was influenced by Watson.
This lesson convinced Mondlane that I was not the “racist” he thought. That was one of my favourite hook ups. When Watson passed ten years ago on stage during a tour of Japan I thought about Mondlane.
The history of the links between the politics and music of Africa and the Western Hemisphere is dying to be written. Hopefully, I can make my contribution to this chapter of the history Africans at home and aboard.
Norman (Otis) Richmond can be contacted by email at: Norman@ckln.fm
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Venezuela Offers Help to Detroit During Ambassador Alvarez's Visit
Abayomi Azikiwe, Editor of the Pan-African News Wire at Ambassador Alvarez Speech
Originally uploaded by panafnewswire.
By Bankole Thompson
The Michigan Citizen
DETROIT — Ambassador Bernado Alvarez Herrera, Venezuela’s envoy to the United States, said his country wants to provide heating assistance and free eye surgery to needy Detroiters.
During a June 14 visit to Detroit, Alvarez met with several city officials, including council members JoAnn Watson, Brenda Jones, Kwame Kenyatta and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to discuss how to expand his country’s programs that help the poor.
The visit, facilitated by State Rep. Lamar Lemmons III, provided Alvarez a platform to discuss recent developments within Venezuela and its relationship with Washington.
“Our priority is to fight against poverty and social exclusion,” Alvarez said during a presentation at city council. “We have so many ties that we better start to have a protracted dialogue.”
Alvarez said the government in Caracas may have disagreements with Washington but his country, under President Hugo Chavez, is committed to helping African American communities.
“We gave assistance to more than 200,000 families in the U.S.,” Alvarez said. “We want Detroit to start working with our people, looking at the needs you have here. I don’t know how [much] heating oil you have here. I would like you to look at the numbers and we would help.”
Recently several African American civil rights leaders, including Harry Belafonte and Dr. Cornel West, visited Caracas saying they want to see for themselves firsthand what is happening in Venezuela instead of relying on mainstream media reports.
Alvarez said visits such as those are integral. They provide a catalyst to the assistance his country is now offering to low-income families and help foster the relationship it wants to build with Blacks in America.
“Thank you for broadening our international connection,” said Watson, who presented the Spirit of Detroit award to Alvarez.
Kenyatta added, “We are a city on a waterfront. We are interested in broadening our perspective.”
“We have unimaginable ties with African American leaders like [Harry Belafonte],” Alvarez said. “We now have started a very important dialogue. We really need to connect on the humanitarian side because that helps to solve very complicated political problems.”
Alvarez said the government in Caracas stands ready to provide help to Detroit.
One of those offers is free eye surgery to Detroiters with no healthcare insurance, Alvarez told the mayor during a brief meeting. He told Kilpatrick to put together a team that will work on the eye surgery project in terms of identifying patients with cataracts to undergo surgery in Caracas.
“We have a plan to operate [on] people with eye problem[s] for free,” Alvarez said. “We will start with Chicago and Milwaukee and come here to Detroit.”
Alvarez said nearly 2,300 Venezuelans undergo eye surgery daily.
“This is just a pilot program. We need to partner with [Detroit] health systems to identify a place where people can be diagnosed with eye problems like cataract[s].”
He said the Venezuelan government will bear the cost of transporting the patients.
“Forty-eight percent of our people have no health insurance,” Kilpatrick said in response to the health offer. “We would love to see what you are doing. The problem we have here is that doctors don’t want to go into the neighborhood.”
Kilpatrick said Lucius Vassar, the city’s chief administrative officer, will work with the ambassador’s office to see such projects come to fruition.
“We are serious,” Kilpatrick said. “We want to engage with your country.”
Maureen Taylor, head of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, hosted a community reception for Alvarez, during which members of activist groups talked about the need for Detroit to begin to connect its struggles to what is happening in other countries.
Many at the reception said Venezuela is a paragon of what democracy means, where the government uses its resources for the welfare of its people. Venezuela is the second largest importer of U.S. goods in Latin America and one of America’s major oil suppliers.
“Venezuela is an important trading partner,” said African American business mogul John James, who runs and operates the OJ Group on Fort street.
Alvarez said he was happy to see Black business executives like James whose transportation company does business with Venezuela.
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Free Eye Surgery, Heating-oil for Detroiter Venezuela Ambassador Announces
By Kenneth Snodgrass
Yes, this is what Venezuela Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez Herrera and his Consulate said when visiting Detroit recently, thank to the efforts of Reps. LaMar Lemmons III.
Why would they do this, you may ask? President Chavez felt he wanted to help the victim of Katrina and the victims of poverty in the U.S., and President Chavez said “he was committed to helping the African community in the USA.”
These fuel programs are a part of Venezuela’s social actions program to help the U.S. cope with energy crisis created by Katrina and the poverty. Ambassador Alvarez said their “priority was to fight against poverty and social discrimination.”
Have you ever ran into an old friend you haven’t seen in years and just find yourself having a tremendous discussion with them? This is how I felt meeting the Ambassador and his Consulate General Martin E. Sanchez of Chicago. They came right into the meeting place and just started talking to me, and everyone as if they had known us for years.
They talk of helping the elderly, the poor so to renewed there spirit and commitment to struggling, to empower themselves, people around the world, and to struggle to rid the world of oppression, and neo-liberalism.
The Ambassador and his Consulate met with the Legislative Black Caucus in Lansing, with City Council members, JoAnn Watson, welcome the Consulate to Detroit, Kwame Kenyatta, Brenda Jones, and Martha Reeves, some local businessman, and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Finally, they went to a very impressive community reception hosted by Michigan Welfare Right Organization where over 150 people came.
Since the election of Hugo Chavez, Venezuelans have taken their state own oil company and used its profits to benefit all of the people of Venezuela including the 54 percent of the Venezuela population that is poor.
To do this, they started over 7,000 state-financed cooperatives employing over 200,000 people. They carried out literacy complains to end illiteracy. Because of their eye campaign, they now carry out 2,300 cataract operations a day, and have completed over 230,000 surgeries so far. They pointed out that African American leaders like Harry Belafonte had come to Caracas to see the progress their country had made in reorganizing itself to fight social poverty.
They have builder hospitals, clinics for the poor, and homes for their citizens and created jobs. There was also an area where they developed special jobs training, specifically for women who had never worked, were pregnant, and or had children. They developed co-op grocery stores, radio stations, neighborhoods, factory, etc.
And with the greatness of the Venezuela peoples and their Constitution, they were able to overturn a USA, CIA coupdetat (take over)!
Then they started eye care program including cataract operations in 24 Latin American countries and now they’re expanding the program into the U.S.
Already CITGO oil has seven US communities it’s working with: Massachusetts, New York Harlem and Queens, Chicago, Connecticut, Maine, Philadelphia, Delaware, Vermont, which they have already helped over 200,000 families. For example, in Delaware their goal was to aid 5,000 families by distributing subsidized oil at a discount and free fuel to 20 homeless shelters. Basically these programs are being carried out by community organization. CITGO has already started subsidizing 1.15 million gallons of fuel for the poor communities. Now they want to work with Detroiters. Philadelphia has received 19 million liters of fuel oil for heating costing some $50 million. They are targeting the poor communities, and in Maine the Indian reservations. In Chicago they work out an exchange of the use of diesel fuel with the Transit Authority for a lower price fare for low-income family.
All of the discussion with the City Counsel, the Mayor, and the committee prove to be very positive and promising. During the discussion with the Mayor, Mayor Kilpatrick said, “there was a high lever of Detroiters who had no health insurance, 48%, and we could use the help”. He also said he saw “Caracas as an sister city to the city of Detroit, and his mother U.S. Rep. Carolyn C. Kilpatrick had visit Venezuela.
Also, Ambassador Alvarez, after seeing the photos I had took in Venezuela in January, asked me if I could arrange to display them in the embassy in Washington D.C., and I said, I would be very happy to do so.
Meeting the Ambassador, and his Consulate has been a powerful experience, and I felt a need to share this awesome experience to help empowerment others.
If you would like to travel to Venezuela, There are trips being organized by the US/Cuba Labor Exchange email contact: laborexchange@aol.com.
In Struggle, Kenneth Snodgrass
Kenneth Snodgrass is a writer, NNPA correspondent, activist from Detroit MI.
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DETROIT
Venezuelan ambassador discusses ‘offensive against poverty’
By Cheryl LaBash
Detroit
Published Jun 30, 2006 6:35 AM
Standing ovations greeted Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez at a Community Meet and Greet Reception in Detroit June 14. Organized by Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, the packed grassroots potluck was supported by U.S./ Cuba Labor Exchange, Justice for Cuba Coalition, Latinos Unidos, International Action Center, Call ‘em Out and more.
The community reception capped a daylong visit to Michigan by the ambassador and representatives from the Venezuelan Consulate in Chicago facilitated by Michigan State Rep. LaMar Lemmons III.
Ambassador Alvarez explained how the home heating oil program that assisted 200,000 people in nine U.S. states last winter grew from needs exposed by the Katrina hurricane disaster. Bolivarian Venezuela organized immediate aid, including opening CITGO’s Lake Charles oil refinery for emergency shelter, funding housing for evacuees in Houston and even bringing buses from Miami to transport stranded people to safety. But Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez predicted that the skyrocketing oil prices from the hurricanes compounding the invasion of Iraq would create even more hardships in poor communities inside the United States.
“Then we started thinking that the most vulnerable, the weak sectors of society were the low-income families who use heating oil,” Alvarez said.
The crowd, many of whom are veteran fighters for affordable water, erupted in applause when Alvarez quoted President Chávez: “You know that we always talk about the North and the South. He said what is key here for me is that the South exists in the North. All these struggles we have had against neoliberalism and this idea of an inhuman form of capitalism is not only affecting us, it is affecting people in the U.S.”
In addition to the social exclusion of the African American communities exposed by Katrina, Alvarez observed personally through heating oil deliveries that in Vermont and other Northeastern states many white people are also very poor. Alvarez described the condition of one oil recipient on a fixed income whose husband is unemployed and suffering from severe diabetes: “For her it is as simple as whether she heats her house or pays for medicine. As simple as that! It is incredible.”
Alvarez commented that perhaps the most advanced societies are in Africa and among the indigenous in Latin America because although there is poverty no one is left behind.
As many in Detroit fear anti-immigrant deportation raids, a special note hit home with the crowd. Alvarez described how the Bolivarian government found 3 million people in Venezuela with no official identification documents. Nearly 1 million of them were immigrants from Haiti, Colom bia, Ecuador and other countries. All have received Venezuelan citizenship and the right to maintain dual citizenship.
Alvarez announced a new program to extend the free eye surgery program begun by Cuba to the U.S. Midwest. He also told of plans to transform the value of the oil discount into a social development fund.
Alvarez summed up his message saying: “The only way to fight poverty is through empowering the poor people. Be part of this offensive against poverty and exclusion.
Again, we are not going to solve all the problems. But together we can show that another world is possible, with a little resources and a lot of solidarity.”
While in Michigan, Ambassador Alvarez and the Chicago Consulate delegation met with the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus in Lansing, and in Detroit with city council members and the mayor.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php
Attempted Frame-up of Seven Black Men in Fake Terror Plot
Methods questioned leading up to Sears Tower arrests
06/29/2006, 1:35 pm
Filed by Jennifer Van Bergen
Critics are voicing concern about the FBI’s use of informants, methodology, and alleged pattern of entrapment in relation to the arrests last week of seven Miami men for having allegedly plotted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and federal buildings in other cities, RAW STORY has learned.
The Liberty Seven case, named after the Miami area in which they were arrested, shows a striking resemblance to the California McDavid case, in which an independent confidential informant was also used, a woman by the name of Anna.
As previously reported by RAW STORY, Anna had infiltrated a group that, by all accounts, was non-violent prior to her arrival:
“In January 2006, Eric McDavid, Lauren Weiner, and Zachary Jenson were arrested in California and charged with knowingly conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage property. Their arrest was the direct result of work by Anna, who was 'deeply embedded within the subjects' cell,' according to FBI documents.”
However, McDavid's attorney, Mark Reichel, states that "Anna was always pushing McDavid to do something criminal, taught the three how to make the bombs, supervised their activities, and repeatedly threatened to leave them if they didn't start doing 'something.'"
In the Liberty City/Miami case, an undercover operative was also used, although this person was purportedly with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. Nonetheless, the case has raised similar concerns in the community about the propriety of such law enforcement actions.
Defense attorney Nathan Clark of Miami, appointed by the court to represent Rotschild Augustine, one of the “Liberty City Seven” defendants, states: “On the face of the indictment alone, this is a classic case of entrapment. Every activity deemed criminal in this case was written, directed, and produced by the government.”
Homegrown Terrorism or Made-for-TV Event?
Upon the arrests of the seven men, Federal officials claimed a victory against homegrown terrorism. The suspects are all black men from “Liberty City,” part of a community called “Little Haiti” in Miami. Five of the men are American citizens, one is a Haitian resident alien, and the seventh is an illegal Haitian immigrant.
The Liberty City men are charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Under conspiracy law, no actual crime needs to have been committed for the defendants to be found guilty of conspiring to commit the underlying crime. Only an agreement to commit the crime is necessary for conviction. The government alleges that the suspects agreed to “provide personnel, including themselves, to work under al Qaeda’s direction and control.”
Yet prior to the arrival of the FBI informant, the group allegedly had no plan or interest in attacking anyone or anything.
Max Rameau, spokesperson for the group CopWatch, notes that “Top brass in the FBI itself think these guys were not much more than amateur wannabes who posed no real danger to anyone, except themselves. The raid made a big media splash while taking attention away from other developments,” such as recent revelations that the Administration had been spying on financial records using a Belgian-based company not subject to U.S. privacy laws.
Rameau says that the Liberty City Seven coverage has upstaged other important news. In a conversation with RAW STORY earlier this week, he said that on the day of the Liberty City arrests, “a former director of the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) admitted to planning terrorist acts against Cuba.”
Yet this “failed either to draw national attention or merit ‘above the fold’ coverage on the front page of the Miami Herald,” said Rameau.
The CANF conspirators were charged and acquitted by a Puerto Rican jury in 1997, after a federal judge threw out one of the defendants' self-incriminating statements. No charges have ever been brought against the individuals on the U.S. mainland.
Rameau notes that while the government has taken action against "men with little to no demonstrable capacity to advance their plans beyond the discussion stage,” it has refused to extradite – or prosecute – Luis Posada, suspected mastermind of the bombing of a Cuban airliner “full of human beings” in 1976.
The arrests also came at a time when reports of a covert U.S. program to search bank records of citizens have created blowback for the Administration.
The government’s actions, Rameau claims, exhibit “a double standard in the war on terror, characterized by the selective prosecution of groups with minimal social and political value.”
Rameau further notes that the raid “was timed to happen at the exact same time that FBI Director Robert Mueller was on the Larry King Show. It was a made-for-TV event.”
Legal scholars and civil liberties advocates also have criticized the Liberty City Seven case. In general, the material support provision – conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization – has been widely challenged by lawyers and several courts have found portions of it unconstitutional.
Federal attorneys, however, cite the war on terror as having changed how the Department of Justice handles such cases.
“Terrorism is a whole different ballgame,” the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Guy Lewis, told the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel in discussing the arrests: “The Justice Department’s mission went from being reactive . . . to being proactive. Prevention is now the number one priority.”
But former Miami ACLU chapter chair Lida Rodriguez-Taseff sees this case much differently, telling the Sun Sentinel that “These men look like a bunch of fools doing God-knows-what. They’re certainly not the picture of the homegrown terrorist that Timothy McVeigh was.”
Jack Lieberman – a Miami activist, a member of South Florida Peace and Justice Network (a coalition of roughly twenty separate South Florida peace and justice groups), and a member of a Haiti democratic support group called Haiti Solidarity – told RAW STORY: “For the government to infiltrate a small ineffectual group that was involved in little more than ‘trash talk,’ provide it with money, leadership (the agent's claim to be Al Qaeda), and a plan, and then claim it has caught dangerous ‘domestic terrorists,’ is a sham designed to sucker the American people into supporting them.”
Both the South Florida Peace and Justice Network and Haiti Solidarity plan to protest the arrests of the Liberty City men.
Informant Methods Questioned
As with the infamous Anna, whose methods were described as using seduction and "identifying 'radical' young men and women and 'getting them' to fall in love with her," the methods used by the informant in the Liberty City seven case are also in question.
According to the indictment, “an individual known to the Grand Jury who was purporting to be a member of a foreign terrorist organization later identified as al Qaeda” infiltrated the ragtag group.
The individual was not otherwise identified in the indictment, but a Justice Department press release stated that the South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) was responsible for the arrests.
While the JTTF is comprised of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, joint operations such as the Liberty City one, are conducted under guidelines issued by the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, for the FBI.
The indictment states that the seven men swore oaths of loyalty to al Qaeda – whether at the behest of the “al Qaeda representative” or spontaneously is unclear – ordered various supplies from him, revealed to him their “mission” to build an “Islamic Army,” and plotted to destroy the Sears Tower, bomb FBI buildings, and wage a “full ground war” against the United States in order to “kill all the devils we can.”
In the opinion of Bob Moss, an independent researcher who has been investigating and cataloging government terrorist cases, the FBI infiltrator “spoon-fed” the men “every step.” Moss tells RAW STORY that the informant gave the alleged ring-leader, Narseal Batiste, a video camera, with which Batiste promised to obtain “good footage.” A week later, Batiste asked the “al Qaeda representative” for a van so he could get the footage. Moss concluded that it was “more likely that the impatient informant pressed Batiste for the ‘good footage,’ and Batiste replied by saying he needed a van.”
The next day, the informant accompanied Batiste and another individual to purchase a memory chip for their camera. Moss states cynically, “Either the plotters couldn’t buy a memory chip unsupervised or they just didn’t do anything without being pushed by the informant.”
Moss found it laughable that the “only actual act” done to further the alleged Sears Tower attack was to “’take possession’ of an unspecified number of military boots from the informant.” While the indictment lists twenty-six overt acts, involving mostly planning meetings and trips, Rameau – noting there were no explosives or supplies which could be used to make explosives – asks “What were they going to do, kick the FBI building down with their new boots?”
Nathan Clark tells RAW STORY that the defendants “never had the manner or means to do anything.”
FBI Violating the Guidelines for Undercover Operations?
According to the Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Undercover Operations (UO Guidelines), because undercover techniques “inherently involve an element of deception and may require cooperation with persons whose motivation and conduct are open to question,” they “should be carefully considered and monitored.”
Undercover operations may be used to prevent crimes as well as to solve or prosecute crimes, according to the UO Guidelines. But the Guidelines clearly prohibit entrapment: “Entrapment must be scrupulously avoided. Entrapment occurs when the Government implants in the mind of a person who is not otherwise disposed to commit the offense the disposition to commit the offense and then induces the commission of that offense in order to prosecute.”
Even more specifically, the UO Guidelines state: “The undercover employee shall be instructed in the law of entrapment.”
“In Britain, the King can do no wrong,” say Clark, “but here the King can do wrong. The Guidelines are frequently broken.”
A spokesperson for the FBI told RAW STORY: “We are not saying anything not already said at our press conference or in our press release.” Justice Department officials had not returned calls by press time. U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta states in the DOJ press release that the group “had the intent and took several steps toward fulfilling their plan” but “the South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force successfully performed its mission to prevent terrorism by identifying, disrupting and prosecuting these individuals before they posted an immediate threat to our nation.”
FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole remarked in the same press release that the arrests marked “yet another important victory in the war on terrorism,” underscoring “the need for continued vigilance and cooperation.”
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Jennifer Van Bergen is a freelance journalist and an attorney.
Her book “The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America” is available on Amazon. She can be reached at jvbxyz@earthlink.net.
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06/29/2006, 1:35 pm
Filed by Jennifer Van Bergen
Critics are voicing concern about the FBI’s use of informants, methodology, and alleged pattern of entrapment in relation to the arrests last week of seven Miami men for having allegedly plotted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and federal buildings in other cities, RAW STORY has learned.
The Liberty Seven case, named after the Miami area in which they were arrested, shows a striking resemblance to the California McDavid case, in which an independent confidential informant was also used, a woman by the name of Anna.
As previously reported by RAW STORY, Anna had infiltrated a group that, by all accounts, was non-violent prior to her arrival:
“In January 2006, Eric McDavid, Lauren Weiner, and Zachary Jenson were arrested in California and charged with knowingly conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage property. Their arrest was the direct result of work by Anna, who was 'deeply embedded within the subjects' cell,' according to FBI documents.”
However, McDavid's attorney, Mark Reichel, states that "Anna was always pushing McDavid to do something criminal, taught the three how to make the bombs, supervised their activities, and repeatedly threatened to leave them if they didn't start doing 'something.'"
In the Liberty City/Miami case, an undercover operative was also used, although this person was purportedly with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. Nonetheless, the case has raised similar concerns in the community about the propriety of such law enforcement actions.
Defense attorney Nathan Clark of Miami, appointed by the court to represent Rotschild Augustine, one of the “Liberty City Seven” defendants, states: “On the face of the indictment alone, this is a classic case of entrapment. Every activity deemed criminal in this case was written, directed, and produced by the government.”
Homegrown Terrorism or Made-for-TV Event?
Upon the arrests of the seven men, Federal officials claimed a victory against homegrown terrorism. The suspects are all black men from “Liberty City,” part of a community called “Little Haiti” in Miami. Five of the men are American citizens, one is a Haitian resident alien, and the seventh is an illegal Haitian immigrant.
The Liberty City men are charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Under conspiracy law, no actual crime needs to have been committed for the defendants to be found guilty of conspiring to commit the underlying crime. Only an agreement to commit the crime is necessary for conviction. The government alleges that the suspects agreed to “provide personnel, including themselves, to work under al Qaeda’s direction and control.”
Yet prior to the arrival of the FBI informant, the group allegedly had no plan or interest in attacking anyone or anything.
Max Rameau, spokesperson for the group CopWatch, notes that “Top brass in the FBI itself think these guys were not much more than amateur wannabes who posed no real danger to anyone, except themselves. The raid made a big media splash while taking attention away from other developments,” such as recent revelations that the Administration had been spying on financial records using a Belgian-based company not subject to U.S. privacy laws.
Rameau says that the Liberty City Seven coverage has upstaged other important news. In a conversation with RAW STORY earlier this week, he said that on the day of the Liberty City arrests, “a former director of the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) admitted to planning terrorist acts against Cuba.”
Yet this “failed either to draw national attention or merit ‘above the fold’ coverage on the front page of the Miami Herald,” said Rameau.
The CANF conspirators were charged and acquitted by a Puerto Rican jury in 1997, after a federal judge threw out one of the defendants' self-incriminating statements. No charges have ever been brought against the individuals on the U.S. mainland.
Rameau notes that while the government has taken action against "men with little to no demonstrable capacity to advance their plans beyond the discussion stage,” it has refused to extradite – or prosecute – Luis Posada, suspected mastermind of the bombing of a Cuban airliner “full of human beings” in 1976.
The arrests also came at a time when reports of a covert U.S. program to search bank records of citizens have created blowback for the Administration.
The government’s actions, Rameau claims, exhibit “a double standard in the war on terror, characterized by the selective prosecution of groups with minimal social and political value.”
Rameau further notes that the raid “was timed to happen at the exact same time that FBI Director Robert Mueller was on the Larry King Show. It was a made-for-TV event.”
Legal scholars and civil liberties advocates also have criticized the Liberty City Seven case. In general, the material support provision – conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization – has been widely challenged by lawyers and several courts have found portions of it unconstitutional.
Federal attorneys, however, cite the war on terror as having changed how the Department of Justice handles such cases.
“Terrorism is a whole different ballgame,” the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Guy Lewis, told the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel in discussing the arrests: “The Justice Department’s mission went from being reactive . . . to being proactive. Prevention is now the number one priority.”
But former Miami ACLU chapter chair Lida Rodriguez-Taseff sees this case much differently, telling the Sun Sentinel that “These men look like a bunch of fools doing God-knows-what. They’re certainly not the picture of the homegrown terrorist that Timothy McVeigh was.”
Jack Lieberman – a Miami activist, a member of South Florida Peace and Justice Network (a coalition of roughly twenty separate South Florida peace and justice groups), and a member of a Haiti democratic support group called Haiti Solidarity – told RAW STORY: “For the government to infiltrate a small ineffectual group that was involved in little more than ‘trash talk,’ provide it with money, leadership (the agent's claim to be Al Qaeda), and a plan, and then claim it has caught dangerous ‘domestic terrorists,’ is a sham designed to sucker the American people into supporting them.”
Both the South Florida Peace and Justice Network and Haiti Solidarity plan to protest the arrests of the Liberty City men.
Informant Methods Questioned
As with the infamous Anna, whose methods were described as using seduction and "identifying 'radical' young men and women and 'getting them' to fall in love with her," the methods used by the informant in the Liberty City seven case are also in question.
According to the indictment, “an individual known to the Grand Jury who was purporting to be a member of a foreign terrorist organization later identified as al Qaeda” infiltrated the ragtag group.
The individual was not otherwise identified in the indictment, but a Justice Department press release stated that the South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) was responsible for the arrests.
While the JTTF is comprised of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, joint operations such as the Liberty City one, are conducted under guidelines issued by the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, for the FBI.
The indictment states that the seven men swore oaths of loyalty to al Qaeda – whether at the behest of the “al Qaeda representative” or spontaneously is unclear – ordered various supplies from him, revealed to him their “mission” to build an “Islamic Army,” and plotted to destroy the Sears Tower, bomb FBI buildings, and wage a “full ground war” against the United States in order to “kill all the devils we can.”
In the opinion of Bob Moss, an independent researcher who has been investigating and cataloging government terrorist cases, the FBI infiltrator “spoon-fed” the men “every step.” Moss tells RAW STORY that the informant gave the alleged ring-leader, Narseal Batiste, a video camera, with which Batiste promised to obtain “good footage.” A week later, Batiste asked the “al Qaeda representative” for a van so he could get the footage. Moss concluded that it was “more likely that the impatient informant pressed Batiste for the ‘good footage,’ and Batiste replied by saying he needed a van.”
The next day, the informant accompanied Batiste and another individual to purchase a memory chip for their camera. Moss states cynically, “Either the plotters couldn’t buy a memory chip unsupervised or they just didn’t do anything without being pushed by the informant.”
Moss found it laughable that the “only actual act” done to further the alleged Sears Tower attack was to “’take possession’ of an unspecified number of military boots from the informant.” While the indictment lists twenty-six overt acts, involving mostly planning meetings and trips, Rameau – noting there were no explosives or supplies which could be used to make explosives – asks “What were they going to do, kick the FBI building down with their new boots?”
Nathan Clark tells RAW STORY that the defendants “never had the manner or means to do anything.”
FBI Violating the Guidelines for Undercover Operations?
According to the Attorney General Guidelines for FBI Undercover Operations (UO Guidelines), because undercover techniques “inherently involve an element of deception and may require cooperation with persons whose motivation and conduct are open to question,” they “should be carefully considered and monitored.”
Undercover operations may be used to prevent crimes as well as to solve or prosecute crimes, according to the UO Guidelines. But the Guidelines clearly prohibit entrapment: “Entrapment must be scrupulously avoided. Entrapment occurs when the Government implants in the mind of a person who is not otherwise disposed to commit the offense the disposition to commit the offense and then induces the commission of that offense in order to prosecute.”
Even more specifically, the UO Guidelines state: “The undercover employee shall be instructed in the law of entrapment.”
“In Britain, the King can do no wrong,” say Clark, “but here the King can do wrong. The Guidelines are frequently broken.”
A spokesperson for the FBI told RAW STORY: “We are not saying anything not already said at our press conference or in our press release.” Justice Department officials had not returned calls by press time. U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta states in the DOJ press release that the group “had the intent and took several steps toward fulfilling their plan” but “the South Florida Joint Terrorism Task Force successfully performed its mission to prevent terrorism by identifying, disrupting and prosecuting these individuals before they posted an immediate threat to our nation.”
FBI Deputy Director John S. Pistole remarked in the same press release that the arrests marked “yet another important victory in the war on terrorism,” underscoring “the need for continued vigilance and cooperation.”
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Jennifer Van Bergen is a freelance journalist and an attorney.
Her book “The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America” is available on Amazon. She can be reached at jvbxyz@earthlink.net.
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Sunday, July 02, 2006
The Role of Media in the Promotion of Global Apartheid
Role of media in the promotion of global apartheid
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Reprinted From the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail
IT has been our major preoccupation in this column to wonder whether journalists, activists and politicians engaged in the humanitarian crusade against Zimbabwe in the last 10 years actually read and understand their own messages, especially as these messages are exhibited and orchestrated through the global mass media.
Two issues of the magazine Index on Censorship (November-December 1994 and January 1996) attempted briefly to deal with this question.
In the January 1996 issue, Caroline Moorehead and Ursula Owen contributed an article "Time to think again: Why is an ever-growing group of articulate, dedicated people achieving so little (in the field of human rights and humanitarian intervention)?"
In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the collapse of the Somali government and the genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans, the two women attended a big seminar for human rights organisations and experts in July 1995 at Oxford University and wrote: "No one any longer denies that human rights violations are occurring today at an overwhelming rate . . . nor does anyone deny that knowledge of these events has never been greater. No other generation has ever known so much, so quickly, so graphically. There have never been so many reports, on every violation and every country, so well written and so accessibly presented . . . Why then, as a group of human rights experts asked themselves at a seminar in Oxford in July, is all this knowledge having so very little effect?"
What the writers contributing to Index on Censorship, like some of our journalists, failed to appreciate is the fact that the idea of a small minority of specialists at a remote retreat in a racist country believing that they can find the answer to human rights violations and humanitarian suffering on the globe — that idea alone is part of the problem, part of the reason why humanitarian intervention exhibits itself as terror. That idea is the basis for apartheid and the imperialist dis-selection of the different "other" which produces a selective and racist conscience masquerading as universal humanity itself. For Zimbabwe, for instance, Oxford University in England is associated with Cecil John Rhodes and the terrorising and looting of Southern Africa. It cannot suddenly hold the answer to the protection of human dignity everywhere.
In the same issue of Index on Censorship, Stanley Cohen also wondered about the problem: "The human rights movement is one of the few survivors of the Enlightenment project. It not only upholds the ideal of universal values and standards (as opposed to the reality of global apartheid and selective conscience), but it also assumes that information about their (alleged) violation will (also) produce universal moral and emotional responses . . . It is just this faith that is contradicted by the daily practice of human rights work . . . (Human rights) information circulates in a closed circuit made up of other like-minded organisations, governments, United Nations and other inter-governmental agencies, lawyers and academics . . . Much human rights information remains in this loop, endlessly circulating in reports, self-referential official documents, fact-finding missions, commissions, inquiries, UN and legal texts."
As we have observed many times in this column and, as Professor Edward S. Herman demonstrated in The Real Terror Network, the problem is that the real owners and movers of the human rights industry are key players in the real terror network who are motivated to finance and orchestrate human rights crusades in order to cover up their own role in the global terror network.
By concluding that human rights work was failing only because the experts lacked media expertise, the Oxford seminar in July 1995 played into the hands of the real movers of the global apartheid network. The real terror network is sophisticated at manipulating the mass media and it welcomes those who believe universal human dignity can be protected through media noise precisely because the network is quite capable of buying and using the mass media as much as it is capable of organising, sponsoring or bribing the noisiest human rights agencies, making sure that Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland land in Harare, Zimbabwe, and never ever refer to Fallujah, Iraq, or dare to visit it.
Those in the "loop" of global apartheid, those compromised by "the real terror network" end up asking diversionary questions to mystify the debate or they have to despair. In their 1996 intervention, Moorehead and Owen wrote: "As the fiftieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights approaches, there is a sense of crisis in the human rights world, for, as with humanitarian aid, no one, any longer, knows where to go next."
They were not referring to the whole world when they said "no one". They were referring to the experts and journalists locked in the real terror network masquerading as a human rights industry; they were referring to the activists and journalists circulating within the loop of global apartheid re-baptised as the humanitarian community.
It hurts the individual specialists, activists and journalists to be told this truth and the only way to assure our readers that this is the truth is to do analysis of humanitarian reportage, that is to hear some representatives of the experts, activists and journalists confessing innocently.
Let us look at one example of an African country where the foreign agitation for "regime change" succeeded and the humanitarian community got its wish, unlike in Zimbabwe where the people have so far refused to be fooled.
Alex de Waal felt uncomfortable about the role which human rights and humanitarian NGOs came to play in Somalia after the collapse of President Siad Barre’s government in 1991. De Waal would have felt even more embarrassed if he had gone into the causes of the "regime change" before discussing the contradictions of so-called humanitarian intervention. Nevertheless, some of what he acknowledged is significant for our consideration of the role of humanitarian rhetoric in promoting or worsening terror and aggression. Global apartheid makes it difficult for the human rights activist or expert to put herself or himself in the place of the dis-selected "other". While criticising the humanitarian NGOs, De Wall still identified with them rather than with the Somali people.
After the much-prayed-for "regime change", the actual change differed from what anyone had imagined. So many of the foreign NGOs and agitators left the country, to escape the breakdown of law and order. De Waal observed: "A handful of international NGOs stayed . . . In the absence of a police force, they had to provide their own security. Without a ministry of health, they could formulate their own medical policies . . . Aid workers . . . had to take on the jobs of diplomats, security experts, news agencies, policy advisers, as well as administering their own programmes."
In other words, "regime change" in Somalia was exciting for the foreign NGOs who proceeded to invite their governments to occupy the country. But it was terror for the people of Somalia.
The media policy of Somalia also came to be controlled by NGOs. Still, we have not come to the fullest extent of the consequences of the regime change which these media and their "civil society" often demand. De Waal reveals that Somalia was the first time in the 21st century that NGOs "successfully called for Western military intervention".
He also admits that the humanitarian benefits of the massive external intervention in Somalia were questionable at best.
Philip Johnson of CARE (US) responded to Alex de Waal in the February 1995 issue of Index on Censorship; and his biggest concern was over De Waal’s description of the dependency of so-called humanitarian NGOs on Western military intervention (the real terror network) which, depending on the side one is on, can be characterised as a form of wholesale terrorist aggression.
In the January 1996 issue of the same Index on Censorship, Stanley Cohen questioned the kind of "knowledge" gathered, organised and deployed by so-called human rights organisations. He observed that it was not self-evident who the audiences of human rights communication were, what use they made of human rights information and what improvements in the real-world conditions of real people this information made.
The experts and NGOs rarely consult those at the receiving end of humanitarian propaganda.
For the last 10 years or more, Zimbabwe has experienced first hand the direct and indirect effects of this "humanitarian" information and reportage.
In order to put in context the examples of media terror used against Zimbabwe in the last 10 to 15 years, it is important to provide a global imperial context. On August 17 1984, Garry Wills, a writer who lectured at Johns Hopkins and North Western universities in the US, published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the problem of self-fulfilling prophecies in history. The article was called "From missile gap to terror gap: Self-fulfilling prophecies".
The author said that US politicians, including the late president John F. Kennedy, were responsible for creating the myth of the missile gap, the fiction that the US had fallen so woefully behind the Soviet Union in the development of nuclear missiles that it needed to develop a crash programme to catch up quickly. "We frightened ourselves by casting a shadow — then the shadow came alive and chased US." A nuclear missiles production race between the USSR and the US was fuelled from a 1960 election campaign gimmick.
But for our purpose here, the critical points to remember are that the myths of the missile gap and terror gap were developed and popularised through the media. In order to develop both myths, it was necessary for the drivers of global apartheid to devalue the lives of "those people over there" while selecting themselves and their allies as the only ones who deserve human rights, human dignity and international protection against terror. That is the essence of global apartheid which explains Guatanamo, Abu Graib, and the illegal occupation and looting of Iraq at the height of the "human rights" crusade. In a world based on dis-selection and discrimination against the different "other" over there, humanitarian intervention quickly becomes terror against that "other" who must be devalued and dehumanised in order to justify apartheid and its terror policies.
In order to make the world believe that a real terror gap exists between the imperialist powers and the rest of the world, atrocities over there have to be concocted and pictures doctored in order to create the humanitarian crisis over there which helps to avert attention from Vietnam, Abu Graib, Fallujah, Guantanamo and other hell-holes.
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Reprinted From the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail
IT has been our major preoccupation in this column to wonder whether journalists, activists and politicians engaged in the humanitarian crusade against Zimbabwe in the last 10 years actually read and understand their own messages, especially as these messages are exhibited and orchestrated through the global mass media.
Two issues of the magazine Index on Censorship (November-December 1994 and January 1996) attempted briefly to deal with this question.
In the January 1996 issue, Caroline Moorehead and Ursula Owen contributed an article "Time to think again: Why is an ever-growing group of articulate, dedicated people achieving so little (in the field of human rights and humanitarian intervention)?"
In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, the collapse of the Somali government and the genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans, the two women attended a big seminar for human rights organisations and experts in July 1995 at Oxford University and wrote: "No one any longer denies that human rights violations are occurring today at an overwhelming rate . . . nor does anyone deny that knowledge of these events has never been greater. No other generation has ever known so much, so quickly, so graphically. There have never been so many reports, on every violation and every country, so well written and so accessibly presented . . . Why then, as a group of human rights experts asked themselves at a seminar in Oxford in July, is all this knowledge having so very little effect?"
What the writers contributing to Index on Censorship, like some of our journalists, failed to appreciate is the fact that the idea of a small minority of specialists at a remote retreat in a racist country believing that they can find the answer to human rights violations and humanitarian suffering on the globe — that idea alone is part of the problem, part of the reason why humanitarian intervention exhibits itself as terror. That idea is the basis for apartheid and the imperialist dis-selection of the different "other" which produces a selective and racist conscience masquerading as universal humanity itself. For Zimbabwe, for instance, Oxford University in England is associated with Cecil John Rhodes and the terrorising and looting of Southern Africa. It cannot suddenly hold the answer to the protection of human dignity everywhere.
In the same issue of Index on Censorship, Stanley Cohen also wondered about the problem: "The human rights movement is one of the few survivors of the Enlightenment project. It not only upholds the ideal of universal values and standards (as opposed to the reality of global apartheid and selective conscience), but it also assumes that information about their (alleged) violation will (also) produce universal moral and emotional responses . . . It is just this faith that is contradicted by the daily practice of human rights work . . . (Human rights) information circulates in a closed circuit made up of other like-minded organisations, governments, United Nations and other inter-governmental agencies, lawyers and academics . . . Much human rights information remains in this loop, endlessly circulating in reports, self-referential official documents, fact-finding missions, commissions, inquiries, UN and legal texts."
As we have observed many times in this column and, as Professor Edward S. Herman demonstrated in The Real Terror Network, the problem is that the real owners and movers of the human rights industry are key players in the real terror network who are motivated to finance and orchestrate human rights crusades in order to cover up their own role in the global terror network.
By concluding that human rights work was failing only because the experts lacked media expertise, the Oxford seminar in July 1995 played into the hands of the real movers of the global apartheid network. The real terror network is sophisticated at manipulating the mass media and it welcomes those who believe universal human dignity can be protected through media noise precisely because the network is quite capable of buying and using the mass media as much as it is capable of organising, sponsoring or bribing the noisiest human rights agencies, making sure that Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka and Jan Egeland land in Harare, Zimbabwe, and never ever refer to Fallujah, Iraq, or dare to visit it.
Those in the "loop" of global apartheid, those compromised by "the real terror network" end up asking diversionary questions to mystify the debate or they have to despair. In their 1996 intervention, Moorehead and Owen wrote: "As the fiftieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights approaches, there is a sense of crisis in the human rights world, for, as with humanitarian aid, no one, any longer, knows where to go next."
They were not referring to the whole world when they said "no one". They were referring to the experts and journalists locked in the real terror network masquerading as a human rights industry; they were referring to the activists and journalists circulating within the loop of global apartheid re-baptised as the humanitarian community.
It hurts the individual specialists, activists and journalists to be told this truth and the only way to assure our readers that this is the truth is to do analysis of humanitarian reportage, that is to hear some representatives of the experts, activists and journalists confessing innocently.
Let us look at one example of an African country where the foreign agitation for "regime change" succeeded and the humanitarian community got its wish, unlike in Zimbabwe where the people have so far refused to be fooled.
Alex de Waal felt uncomfortable about the role which human rights and humanitarian NGOs came to play in Somalia after the collapse of President Siad Barre’s government in 1991. De Waal would have felt even more embarrassed if he had gone into the causes of the "regime change" before discussing the contradictions of so-called humanitarian intervention. Nevertheless, some of what he acknowledged is significant for our consideration of the role of humanitarian rhetoric in promoting or worsening terror and aggression. Global apartheid makes it difficult for the human rights activist or expert to put herself or himself in the place of the dis-selected "other". While criticising the humanitarian NGOs, De Wall still identified with them rather than with the Somali people.
After the much-prayed-for "regime change", the actual change differed from what anyone had imagined. So many of the foreign NGOs and agitators left the country, to escape the breakdown of law and order. De Waal observed: "A handful of international NGOs stayed . . . In the absence of a police force, they had to provide their own security. Without a ministry of health, they could formulate their own medical policies . . . Aid workers . . . had to take on the jobs of diplomats, security experts, news agencies, policy advisers, as well as administering their own programmes."
In other words, "regime change" in Somalia was exciting for the foreign NGOs who proceeded to invite their governments to occupy the country. But it was terror for the people of Somalia.
The media policy of Somalia also came to be controlled by NGOs. Still, we have not come to the fullest extent of the consequences of the regime change which these media and their "civil society" often demand. De Waal reveals that Somalia was the first time in the 21st century that NGOs "successfully called for Western military intervention".
He also admits that the humanitarian benefits of the massive external intervention in Somalia were questionable at best.
Philip Johnson of CARE (US) responded to Alex de Waal in the February 1995 issue of Index on Censorship; and his biggest concern was over De Waal’s description of the dependency of so-called humanitarian NGOs on Western military intervention (the real terror network) which, depending on the side one is on, can be characterised as a form of wholesale terrorist aggression.
In the January 1996 issue of the same Index on Censorship, Stanley Cohen questioned the kind of "knowledge" gathered, organised and deployed by so-called human rights organisations. He observed that it was not self-evident who the audiences of human rights communication were, what use they made of human rights information and what improvements in the real-world conditions of real people this information made.
The experts and NGOs rarely consult those at the receiving end of humanitarian propaganda.
For the last 10 years or more, Zimbabwe has experienced first hand the direct and indirect effects of this "humanitarian" information and reportage.
In order to put in context the examples of media terror used against Zimbabwe in the last 10 to 15 years, it is important to provide a global imperial context. On August 17 1984, Garry Wills, a writer who lectured at Johns Hopkins and North Western universities in the US, published an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer on the problem of self-fulfilling prophecies in history. The article was called "From missile gap to terror gap: Self-fulfilling prophecies".
The author said that US politicians, including the late president John F. Kennedy, were responsible for creating the myth of the missile gap, the fiction that the US had fallen so woefully behind the Soviet Union in the development of nuclear missiles that it needed to develop a crash programme to catch up quickly. "We frightened ourselves by casting a shadow — then the shadow came alive and chased US." A nuclear missiles production race between the USSR and the US was fuelled from a 1960 election campaign gimmick.
But for our purpose here, the critical points to remember are that the myths of the missile gap and terror gap were developed and popularised through the media. In order to develop both myths, it was necessary for the drivers of global apartheid to devalue the lives of "those people over there" while selecting themselves and their allies as the only ones who deserve human rights, human dignity and international protection against terror. That is the essence of global apartheid which explains Guatanamo, Abu Graib, and the illegal occupation and looting of Iraq at the height of the "human rights" crusade. In a world based on dis-selection and discrimination against the different "other" over there, humanitarian intervention quickly becomes terror against that "other" who must be devalued and dehumanised in order to justify apartheid and its terror policies.
In order to make the world believe that a real terror gap exists between the imperialist powers and the rest of the world, atrocities over there have to be concocted and pictures doctored in order to create the humanitarian crisis over there which helps to avert attention from Vietnam, Abu Graib, Fallujah, Guantanamo and other hell-holes.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Cuba Highlights Importance of Non-Aligned Movement
Last night, Cuban television ran a feature film about South Africa
in the post-Apartheid period, staring Samuel L. Jackson and Juliete Binoche, COUNTRY OF MY SKULL. Over the past year there's been quite a campaign to commemorate the anniversary of Cuba's participation beginning thirty years ago in the libration struggle in Angola, which had a critical impact on defeating the U.S.-backed apartheid regime in South Africa, which helped lead to its overthrow.)
=====================================================
GRANMA
July 1, 2006
Cuba Highlights Importance of Non-Aligned Movement
Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Felipe Perez Roque, addressing the
special ministerial session of a summit of the African Union,
highlighted the importance and relevance of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). He stressed the significance of the movement in today's world marked by unilateral and aggressive policies and disrespect by powerful countries for the most basic standards of international law and the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter.
During his speech delivered to the representatives of the 53 nations
which make up the African Union, Minister Perez Roque said these were the reasons which show "the urgency for maintaining a united front in the defense of the rights of peoples to self-determination, independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The Cuban official also added that it was necessary to work together
to demand the right of people to peace and development, something
which is as important as ever because it is essential that "the South
-united in solidarity- struggle for the democratization of
international relations and the restructuring of the international
economic and financial system."
Referring to the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement Summit to take place this September in Havana, Perez Roque stated that Cuba will make all possible efforts to ensure this meeting results in the strengthening and further development of movement.
The Cuban foreign minister reiterated Cuba's long standing solidarity
with the peoples and governments of Africa in their struggle against
poverty and underdevelopment inherited from centuries of slavery,
wars fought for natural resources, colonialism and an international
economic order which is deeply unjust and elitist.
Perez Roque told the audience that thousands of African students have been trained in Cuba over the course of Cuba's ongoing revolution, and that today more than 2,000 young Africans are studying in that island-nation's universities, while tens of thousands of Cuban medical doctors, engineers, and construction specialists are working in Africa.
"More that 2,000 Cuban soldiers gave their lives during the African struggles against apartheid and for independence. We Cubans only took from Africa the remains of our fallen comrades. Cuba doesn't own any mines or oil wells in Africa; Cuba possesses only affection and admiration for the peoples of Africa," Minister Perez Roque emphasized.
Prior to taking part in the African Union summit, Minister Perez Roque visited Burkina Faso, Mali, Cape Verde, Senegal and the Gambia, where he held meetings with senior government officials in those nations.
In those meetings, the Cuban minister reported on the preparations in progress for the upcoming Non-Aligned Nations Summit and dealt with aspects of bilateral interest - particularly the assistance Cuba offers to those nations in the area of health care.
In each of the nations which he visited, the Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister met with groups of Cuban professionals who are providing assistance in those countries. He was able to verify the excellent spirits and good moods of those work collectives, which have as their main goal to help save lives and to fulfill their commitment to the revolution and their president.
in the post-Apartheid period, staring Samuel L. Jackson and Juliete Binoche, COUNTRY OF MY SKULL. Over the past year there's been quite a campaign to commemorate the anniversary of Cuba's participation beginning thirty years ago in the libration struggle in Angola, which had a critical impact on defeating the U.S.-backed apartheid regime in South Africa, which helped lead to its overthrow.)
=====================================================
GRANMA
July 1, 2006
Cuba Highlights Importance of Non-Aligned Movement
Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Felipe Perez Roque, addressing the
special ministerial session of a summit of the African Union,
highlighted the importance and relevance of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). He stressed the significance of the movement in today's world marked by unilateral and aggressive policies and disrespect by powerful countries for the most basic standards of international law and the principles and purposes of the United Nations Charter.
During his speech delivered to the representatives of the 53 nations
which make up the African Union, Minister Perez Roque said these were the reasons which show "the urgency for maintaining a united front in the defense of the rights of peoples to self-determination, independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The Cuban official also added that it was necessary to work together
to demand the right of people to peace and development, something
which is as important as ever because it is essential that "the South
-united in solidarity- struggle for the democratization of
international relations and the restructuring of the international
economic and financial system."
Referring to the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement Summit to take place this September in Havana, Perez Roque stated that Cuba will make all possible efforts to ensure this meeting results in the strengthening and further development of movement.
The Cuban foreign minister reiterated Cuba's long standing solidarity
with the peoples and governments of Africa in their struggle against
poverty and underdevelopment inherited from centuries of slavery,
wars fought for natural resources, colonialism and an international
economic order which is deeply unjust and elitist.
Perez Roque told the audience that thousands of African students have been trained in Cuba over the course of Cuba's ongoing revolution, and that today more than 2,000 young Africans are studying in that island-nation's universities, while tens of thousands of Cuban medical doctors, engineers, and construction specialists are working in Africa.
"More that 2,000 Cuban soldiers gave their lives during the African struggles against apartheid and for independence. We Cubans only took from Africa the remains of our fallen comrades. Cuba doesn't own any mines or oil wells in Africa; Cuba possesses only affection and admiration for the peoples of Africa," Minister Perez Roque emphasized.
Prior to taking part in the African Union summit, Minister Perez Roque visited Burkina Faso, Mali, Cape Verde, Senegal and the Gambia, where he held meetings with senior government officials in those nations.
In those meetings, the Cuban minister reported on the preparations in progress for the upcoming Non-Aligned Nations Summit and dealt with aspects of bilateral interest - particularly the assistance Cuba offers to those nations in the area of health care.
In each of the nations which he visited, the Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister met with groups of Cuban professionals who are providing assistance in those countries. He was able to verify the excellent spirits and good moods of those work collectives, which have as their main goal to help save lives and to fulfill their commitment to the revolution and their president.
Israeli Airstrike on Palestinian Prime Minister's Office
Air strike on Palestinian PM's HQ
Israeli aircraft have launched an attack on Gaza City, hitting the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.
The attack comes during an Israeli incursion into Gaza after one of their soldiers was abducted last week.
Witnesses said two missiles hit the south side of the offices of the Hamas-led cabinet, starting a fire.
Three security guards were reportedly injured in the attack, and at least one Hamas member died in a separate strike.
The attack on the cabinet offices took place at 0145 local time (2245 GMT). The prime minister was not there at the time.
Mr Haniya visited the scene of the attack later, saying: "They have targeted a symbol for the Palestinian people."
"We ask the international community and the Arab League to take its responsibilities towards our people and intervene to bring an end to this aggression."
The BBC's Alan Johnston in Gaza says he heard the sound of helicopters, and that witnesses said one rocket struck Mr Haniya's second floor office, setting the building ablaze.
Another explosion was heard shortly after.
Abbas hopeful
The attack follows a strike on the office of the interior ministry on Thursday.
Our correspondent says the attacks on ministers' offices were a clear sign the Israelis regarded them as personally responsible for the soldier's fate.
Israeli forces have also moved into the south of Gaza as part of efforts to free the soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, captured by militants during a raid on an Israeli army post last week.
Speaking before the latest strikes, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said he was still hopeful of a peaceful resolution over the capture of the soldier.
He said that the door to an agreement had not been closed and that negotiations would continue but he indicated that there were limits to his optimism, said our correspondent.
The three groups believed to be holding the Israeli have demanded the release of 1,000 prisoners held in Israeli prisons, and an end to the offensive. Israel is refusing to consider a prisoner swap.
Egyptian mediators have so far failed to secure the soldier's release.
An official close to the negotiations told AFP news agency: "Our efforts to release the soldier have reached a dead end.
"We could not do any more to release him because there are too many demands interfering with our efforts."
The UN's special Middle East envoy, Alvero de Soto, is expected to travel to Gaza on Sunday for talks with Mr Abbas.
Israel has rejected conditions set for information on, or the freeing of, the tank gunner who was seized in a raid on his border post last Sunday in which two other soldiers and two of the attackers died.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GAZA CRISIS TIMELINE
Sun 25 June: Cpl Gilad Shalit captured in cross-border attack
Mon 26 June: Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees demand prisoner releases in exchange for Shalit
Weds 28 June: Israeli military enters southern strip after launching air strikes on Gaza
Thurs 29 June: Israel detains dozens of Hamas officials
Sat 1 July: Groups believed to be holding Cpl Shalit demand 1,000 prisoners be released
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A large Israeli force remains poised on Gaza's northern edge as mediators make last-ditch attempts to reach a solution.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers crossing the border near Khan Younis ran into gunfire and grenades on Saturday.
It was the first sustained encounter between the two sides since the incursion was launched, our correspondent said.
However, casualties in Gaza have been relatively light since the incursion began, with the deaths of two militants reported before Sunday's air strikes.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5137768.stm
Published: 2006/07/02 00:45:10 GMT
Israeli aircraft have launched an attack on Gaza City, hitting the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.
The attack comes during an Israeli incursion into Gaza after one of their soldiers was abducted last week.
Witnesses said two missiles hit the south side of the offices of the Hamas-led cabinet, starting a fire.
Three security guards were reportedly injured in the attack, and at least one Hamas member died in a separate strike.
The attack on the cabinet offices took place at 0145 local time (2245 GMT). The prime minister was not there at the time.
Mr Haniya visited the scene of the attack later, saying: "They have targeted a symbol for the Palestinian people."
"We ask the international community and the Arab League to take its responsibilities towards our people and intervene to bring an end to this aggression."
The BBC's Alan Johnston in Gaza says he heard the sound of helicopters, and that witnesses said one rocket struck Mr Haniya's second floor office, setting the building ablaze.
Another explosion was heard shortly after.
Abbas hopeful
The attack follows a strike on the office of the interior ministry on Thursday.
Our correspondent says the attacks on ministers' offices were a clear sign the Israelis regarded them as personally responsible for the soldier's fate.
Israeli forces have also moved into the south of Gaza as part of efforts to free the soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, 19, captured by militants during a raid on an Israeli army post last week.
Speaking before the latest strikes, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said he was still hopeful of a peaceful resolution over the capture of the soldier.
He said that the door to an agreement had not been closed and that negotiations would continue but he indicated that there were limits to his optimism, said our correspondent.
The three groups believed to be holding the Israeli have demanded the release of 1,000 prisoners held in Israeli prisons, and an end to the offensive. Israel is refusing to consider a prisoner swap.
Egyptian mediators have so far failed to secure the soldier's release.
An official close to the negotiations told AFP news agency: "Our efforts to release the soldier have reached a dead end.
"We could not do any more to release him because there are too many demands interfering with our efforts."
The UN's special Middle East envoy, Alvero de Soto, is expected to travel to Gaza on Sunday for talks with Mr Abbas.
Israel has rejected conditions set for information on, or the freeing of, the tank gunner who was seized in a raid on his border post last Sunday in which two other soldiers and two of the attackers died.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GAZA CRISIS TIMELINE
Sun 25 June: Cpl Gilad Shalit captured in cross-border attack
Mon 26 June: Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees demand prisoner releases in exchange for Shalit
Weds 28 June: Israeli military enters southern strip after launching air strikes on Gaza
Thurs 29 June: Israel detains dozens of Hamas officials
Sat 1 July: Groups believed to be holding Cpl Shalit demand 1,000 prisoners be released
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A large Israeli force remains poised on Gaza's northern edge as mediators make last-ditch attempts to reach a solution.
Israeli tanks and bulldozers crossing the border near Khan Younis ran into gunfire and grenades on Saturday.
It was the first sustained encounter between the two sides since the incursion was launched, our correspondent said.
However, casualties in Gaza have been relatively light since the incursion began, with the deaths of two militants reported before Sunday's air strikes.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/5137768.stm
Published: 2006/07/02 00:45:10 GMT
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Palestinians Resist Israeli Seige of Gaza
Support the Palestinian People!
June 29, 2006
Let us get straight to the point. The world has become shamelessly accustomed to scenes of Israeli forces at will brutalizing Palestinians.
During this latest case, however, the situation has become that much more painful. The attacks are taking place at the peak of a US-Israeli imposed international starvation and strangulation campaign that not even Arab states dared to challenge. Israeli heavy artillery and high explosive missiles have been raining from US-fighter jets on bridges, power plants and water supply facilities in the Gaza Strip on a population denied even its daily bread and the most basic of medications.
To add insult to injury, as of writing this statement, 64 Palestinian governmental ministers, democratically- elected members of the legislative council (the Palestinian parliament), and mayors of various cities have been kidnapped from their homes, with various assassinations by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) promised to come, including of the Palestinian prime minister himself.
Where else is this travesty allowed to occur?
The Israeli government claims to be "searching" for one occupying soldier - what about the nearly 9,000 current Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prison camps? Under its illegal occupation, the Israeli government continues to imprison over 9,000 Palestinians, all systematically jailed, tortured or held hostage - the majority without even a farce of a trial. Since 1967 alone, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained, amounting to 40% of the male population of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. Who in the international community is searching for them?
The Israeli government, a nuclear power with an unmatched US-supplied arsenal, is claiming to seek "security". From whom, we ask? The population under attack is the most impoverished in the region. Nearly all were made refugees at least once as a result of their expulsion by Zionist forces from their homes in 1948, when 75% of the Palestinians were made homeless and Zionist colonists occupied 78% of Palestine. Many are refugees twice, the second time when they were dispossessed in 1967. Some are three and four times refugees, as they are made homeless by U.S.-supplied and sanctioned bulldozers time and time again, up to this very day as they continue to face the Zionist colonial occupation of their land.
The Role of Arab and International Solidarity and the US Peace Movement
The NCA affirms that without Arab depth and without an international solidarity movement that squarely realizes the significance of the Palestinian struggle and supports their movement for liberation, the victimization of the Palestinian Arab people will continue unabated.
Furthermore, the U.S. peace movement has the moral duty to take a consistent position in solidarity with the Palestinian people to prevent the wanton destruction that is currently taking place with the explicit support and reinforcement of the U.S. government. Our community should not have to argue for the inclusion of Palestine in the anti-war movement, nor should we be subjected to the disgraceful removal of Palestinian symbolism from any anti-war protest stage. To place Palestine aside to please any of the US political parties is morally corrupt and helps to produce the sort of isolation that enables such destruction in Palestine to take place.
The Arab American and the Palestinian community cannot stand silent as some of our own organizations malign the struggle of the Palestinian Arab people and systematically introduce the notions of defeat into our young. Such organizations seek an obedient position at the doorstep of the US State Department and stand outside the Arab consensus. They must not and can not speak on our behalf.
Take Action
The NCA calls on our community to stand together at this difficult time. We call on all to join the planned protests in their various cities across the US and to express their views in media outlets.
NCA National Office
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
email: nationaloffice@arab-american.net
phone: 530.756.5548
web: http://www.arab-american.net
June 29, 2006
Let us get straight to the point. The world has become shamelessly accustomed to scenes of Israeli forces at will brutalizing Palestinians.
During this latest case, however, the situation has become that much more painful. The attacks are taking place at the peak of a US-Israeli imposed international starvation and strangulation campaign that not even Arab states dared to challenge. Israeli heavy artillery and high explosive missiles have been raining from US-fighter jets on bridges, power plants and water supply facilities in the Gaza Strip on a population denied even its daily bread and the most basic of medications.
To add insult to injury, as of writing this statement, 64 Palestinian governmental ministers, democratically- elected members of the legislative council (the Palestinian parliament), and mayors of various cities have been kidnapped from their homes, with various assassinations by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) promised to come, including of the Palestinian prime minister himself.
Where else is this travesty allowed to occur?
The Israeli government claims to be "searching" for one occupying soldier - what about the nearly 9,000 current Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prison camps? Under its illegal occupation, the Israeli government continues to imprison over 9,000 Palestinians, all systematically jailed, tortured or held hostage - the majority without even a farce of a trial. Since 1967 alone, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained, amounting to 40% of the male population of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. Who in the international community is searching for them?
The Israeli government, a nuclear power with an unmatched US-supplied arsenal, is claiming to seek "security". From whom, we ask? The population under attack is the most impoverished in the region. Nearly all were made refugees at least once as a result of their expulsion by Zionist forces from their homes in 1948, when 75% of the Palestinians were made homeless and Zionist colonists occupied 78% of Palestine. Many are refugees twice, the second time when they were dispossessed in 1967. Some are three and four times refugees, as they are made homeless by U.S.-supplied and sanctioned bulldozers time and time again, up to this very day as they continue to face the Zionist colonial occupation of their land.
The Role of Arab and International Solidarity and the US Peace Movement
The NCA affirms that without Arab depth and without an international solidarity movement that squarely realizes the significance of the Palestinian struggle and supports their movement for liberation, the victimization of the Palestinian Arab people will continue unabated.
Furthermore, the U.S. peace movement has the moral duty to take a consistent position in solidarity with the Palestinian people to prevent the wanton destruction that is currently taking place with the explicit support and reinforcement of the U.S. government. Our community should not have to argue for the inclusion of Palestine in the anti-war movement, nor should we be subjected to the disgraceful removal of Palestinian symbolism from any anti-war protest stage. To place Palestine aside to please any of the US political parties is morally corrupt and helps to produce the sort of isolation that enables such destruction in Palestine to take place.
The Arab American and the Palestinian community cannot stand silent as some of our own organizations malign the struggle of the Palestinian Arab people and systematically introduce the notions of defeat into our young. Such organizations seek an obedient position at the doorstep of the US State Department and stand outside the Arab consensus. They must not and can not speak on our behalf.
Take Action
The NCA calls on our community to stand together at this difficult time. We call on all to join the planned protests in their various cities across the US and to express their views in media outlets.
NCA National Office
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
email: nationaloffice@arab-american.net
phone: 530.756.5548
web: http://www.arab-american.net
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
The New History of the Weather Underground
The New History of the Weather Underground
by Ron Jacobs
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Jacobs is an anti-imperialist activist and a writer. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso, 1997).
Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity(San Francisco: AK Press, 2006), 450 pages, paperback, $20.00.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite its many detractors and small numbers, the Weather-man/Weather Underground Organization has emerged in the past ten years as a major topic in the growing history of the 1960s. Many of those who knew the group during its existence—personally or in name only—often wonder why this is so. After all, goes this train of thought, Weatherman/Weather Underground represented all that was wrong with the movement against the war in Vietnam and against racism. The group encouraged violence and represented the epitome of arrogance. What about the rest of us?
As the author of the first of a number of recent books about the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), I heard this refrain quite often during the small book tour I took after the publication of my book back in 1997. The only answer I felt necessary to provide then was that if we truly wanted to understand history, then we must examine it all. This meant that WUO was worth examining along with the New Mobe, SCLC, the Black Panthers, and all the other organizations and coalitions that were part of the historical period known in the United States as the sixties. This answer is still met with resistance by those historians and nostalgia buffs that like to pretend that groups like the Panthers and WUO were aberrations and represent the “bad sixties” as opposed to the “good sixties” of Martin Luther King Jr., the early SDS, and George McGovern. Besides the obvious superficiality of this perception, it is also antipolitical.
The most recent book related to the WUO is Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. In his introduction, Berger, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, political radical, and writer, makes it clear that he does not subscribe to the good sixties, bad sixties paradigm. Indeed, Berger understands quite well that “the ‘dream’ was killed, mostly by the state or by those acting in its interest....At the same time, cities across the country rose up in rebellion after rebellion. Therein lies one of the greatest fallacies of the Tale of Two Sixties: it obscures why people embraced radicalism and militancy. Without understanding the impact of state repression, radical movements don’t make sense.” This historical accuracy informs Berger’s text as he winds through the history of WUO and its successors. Furthermore, it informs his discussion of the meaning of that history for today’s anti-imperialist activists.
The facts presented here are well-documented and were derived from a multitude of primary and secondary sources, as well as from personal interviews with former members of the WUO. The interviewees represented various positions within the organization itself and lend a credible insider’s look at life in the political underground of the United States of the 1970s. In addition, the text denotes the larger debates within the movement and insists that people do make life-altering decisions based on politics—even in the United States of America.
Like any vibrant left organization, Weatherman/WUO constantly debated politics and tactics. This is reflected in their brief history. While the role of political violence (and the shape that violence should take) was fundamental to the group’s formation and existence, even more important was its relationship with the struggle for black liberation in the United States. Indeed, not only was that relationship the reason for the group’s birth, it was also the reason for the group’s death according to Berger and those former members with whom he seems to agree.
So, what was the intended relationship between Weatherman/WUO and the black revolutionary struggle in the United States? If one takes a look at their founding document “You Don’t Need a Weatherman...” one finds these words:
The only third path is to build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks don’t have to do the whole thing alone. In other words, the primary role of the white revolutionary organization was to support the black revolution for liberation. This, in turn, meant that one’s concept of black people’s position in the United States and within the U.S. working class was the basis for any type of solidarity with other revolutionaries and activists. Were they just part of the working class? Did they experience a special oppression due to their race? Were they a separate nation? Weatherman subscribed to the latter argument: that African Americans were indeed a separate nation based on their special history and the nature of their oppression.
Once this relationship was understood within Weather, everything else followed. Its use of political violence was partially intended to take some heat off of revolutionary black groups like the Black Panthers, while its struggle “against the people” in the fall of 1969 was intended to draw a line between those who were willing to fight and die for the black revolution and those who weren’t. Much like John Brown and his soldiers, Weatherman/WUO attempted to offer themselves to the struggle for black freedom in the United States.
After a Weatherman-sponsored week of protests and street fighting in Chicago in October 1969—a week that became known as the Days of Rage—Weather retreated and regrouped, ultimately deciding to wage a campaign of bombings and other armed attacks on law enforcement and the U.S. government. This meant that many members would go underground, many would leave the group, and some would operate as aboveground supporters. This entire process was accelerated when three members of the organization died in an explosion that occurred while one of the group was making bombs in the basement of a New York City townhouse on March 6, 1970. These deaths not only forced the remaining members underground, they also forced an organization-wide reevaluation of political violence, with a decision being made that the group would no longer adhere to their belief that the most violent action was necessarily the most revolutionary.
This decision was not lightly taken, and according to Berger’s research, this decision widened some differences in the group between those who supported it and those who saw it as essentially taking advantage of their class and race position to lessen their personal danger. Apparently, part of the argument of those who disagreed with the decision was that they viewed their use of violence as a measure of sincerity and commitment to the black liberation struggle.
Berger begins each chapter of Outlaws of America with a quote from former member and prisoner David Gilbert, who is serving a seventy-five-year-to-life sentence for his role in the failed 1981 Brink’s robbery outside of Nyack, New York. This expropriation was a joint effort of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Organization and resulted in the deaths of three police officers after the robbers were stopped during the getaway. Both of these organizations were small in numbers and committed to armed struggle. In addition, both were descended from the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground Organization, respectively. Gilbert was a Columbia University student when he joined SDS and was one of those Weather members most committed to both armed struggle and the theory that white-skinned people in the United States had no choice but to support the black revolutionary struggle as the only true revolutionary struggle.
The insistence that the oppression of black people in the United States was one of the fundamental (if not the fundamental) issues that white-skinned revolutionaries in the United States had to deal with was a position in the New Left that had to be confronted. It ultimately tore apart WUO as the organization tried to construct an approach to communist organizing that would work in the political climate after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Berger’s book subscribes to the argument that Weather’s betrayal of its original pledge to build a “white revolutionary movement” to support the black revolutionary movement was the primary internal reason for the group’s demise.
As mentioned previously, this argument holds that the reaction to the March 6, 1970, deaths and subsequent attempts to organize the political element of the sixties counterculture constituted but one more example of a U.S. leftist organization turning its back on the black struggle. To this element of the group, the prime example of this betrayal was the freeing of drug guru Timothy Leary from a California prison in September 1970. Why should Weather free a drug guru and not an imprisoned black liberation fighter? This analysis considered that “betrayal” to be exacerbated by the “New Morning” communique in December of that year—a statement full of counterculture rhetoric and language extolling the youth movement and its use of marijuana and psychedelics. The communique was criticized by the New York wing of the Panthers, whose communal experience with drugs was quite different than that of white middle-class youths.
By the time 1974 and 1975 rolled around, this critique had extended to WUO’s attempts to provide a theoretical basis for its future via their publication known as Prairie Fire. This book, which is a succinct and reasonable examination of the state of the United States and the anti-imperialist movement, was seen as another betrayal of the group’s original commitment to the black revolution. The Hard Times economic conference and the documentary film Underground were also attacked for similar reasons. Of course, by this time, it was not the primarily white counterculture that was the focus of WUO’s organizing efforts. Like almost every other leftist formation in the United States by that time, their focus was shifting to the working class of the United States. Despite their analysis that acknowledged the multiracial makeup of the working class (as opposed to other groups like the Revolutionary Union that continued to view it as primarily white and male), the organization was sharply criticized as racist by an ad hoc people of color caucus at the Hard Times Conference who took aim at their aboveground allies, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). For an organization that defined its very essence by its antiracism this criticism caused major cracks. Some WUO members continued to argue for a more traditional class-based organizing approach—an approach that removed much of the nation status previously ascribed to black people in the United States by WUO. The other members continued to insist on adhering to their revolutionary black nationalist–inspired analysis. Meanwhile, this ongoing debate was overshadowed by the necessity of individuals to stay together and help each other hide from law enforcement. The combination of the two phenomena led to a non-political period within the organization.
One of the advantages given Berger due to the timing of his research was the greater openness of former WUO members to talking about their experiences. Another was the greater availability of government documents detailing law enforcement operations against them and other antiwar and antiracist organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Berger takes advantage of this and provides the reader with useful information and details about these actions. In today’s world where government spying, torture, and persecution are the stuff of daily headlines, this information makes it clear that today’s headlines are not new or aberrations. Indeed, they are business-as-usual for law enforcement, only with modern technological enhancements. Berger argues that the repression suffered by the black liberation and antiwar movements was a good part of the reason groups like WUO came into being. Not only were nonviolent and open tactics being shown to be ineffective, went the reasoning of those who went underground, they were providing the police with easy targets for arrest, harassment, and, in some cases, murder. The subsequent history of WUO and other such organizations, however, might seem to prove that their turn toward armed struggle rendered them even less effective than they were before they took that route.
Berger subtitles his book, The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. This is what most clearly separates this text from previous books about the WUO. Berger, being of the generation of radicals that came of age in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, obviously has a different context than those who gained political awareness in earlier times. This is important because it informs the approach he takes in the book and also because it naturally leads to differing emphases regarding the period of history from which Weather sprang.
Berger’s book is one of a very few current books that stresses the politics of racial solidarity. Although the movement against global capitalism is worldwide in scope and includes people of many nations (and consequently many skin tones), it has yet to span the racial divide in the United States in any noticeable way. The same can be said for the movement against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—although there are considerably more U.S. people of color involved in opposing the wars than in the movement against global capitalism.
However, as Berger points out, much of the impetus for today’s struggle against U.S. imperialism and its excesses comes from “people of color, from Porto Alegre to Port-au-Prince, from Caracas to Chiapas, Durban to Detroit, Buenos Aires to Brooklyn, the West Bank to Washington.” This is in part, as the WUO and other anti-imperialist groups of the early 1970s had already pointed out, because U.S. imperialism is the number one cause of injustice in the world.
Berger writes that the WUO’s analysis of the role of prisons in capitalist society, the making of political prisoners, and the need for solidarity with prisoners remains as pertinent today as it was then. As the prison system run by the United States and its client states expands its role beyond serving as a dumping ground for those members of society no longer needed by capitalism into also serving as a holding-pen for those individuals singled out by the state as linked to potentially subversive and “terroristic” activities, the need to insist on the end of such prisons increases. Indeed, the ongoing revelations of mistreatment and murder at the various secret prisons run by the U.S. regime around the world make this insistence a matter of life and death for hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals whose primary crime is often merely being Muslim or Arab.
Outlaws of America measures the Weather Underground by its own yardstick: revolutionary solidarity with third world revolutionaries is the pathway to ending U.S. imperialism. By that definition, this means that the primary role of radicals in the United States is to support those revolutionaries, including those who comprise the black nation in the United States. Although one might disagree with this analysis and its limits, Berger argues that it was the attempt to follow through on this analysis that created the Weather Underground. Likewise, it was the attempt to follow through that caused its demise.
by Ron Jacobs
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Jacobs is an anti-imperialist activist and a writer. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso, 1997).
Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity(San Francisco: AK Press, 2006), 450 pages, paperback, $20.00.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite its many detractors and small numbers, the Weather-man/Weather Underground Organization has emerged in the past ten years as a major topic in the growing history of the 1960s. Many of those who knew the group during its existence—personally or in name only—often wonder why this is so. After all, goes this train of thought, Weatherman/Weather Underground represented all that was wrong with the movement against the war in Vietnam and against racism. The group encouraged violence and represented the epitome of arrogance. What about the rest of us?
As the author of the first of a number of recent books about the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), I heard this refrain quite often during the small book tour I took after the publication of my book back in 1997. The only answer I felt necessary to provide then was that if we truly wanted to understand history, then we must examine it all. This meant that WUO was worth examining along with the New Mobe, SCLC, the Black Panthers, and all the other organizations and coalitions that were part of the historical period known in the United States as the sixties. This answer is still met with resistance by those historians and nostalgia buffs that like to pretend that groups like the Panthers and WUO were aberrations and represent the “bad sixties” as opposed to the “good sixties” of Martin Luther King Jr., the early SDS, and George McGovern. Besides the obvious superficiality of this perception, it is also antipolitical.
The most recent book related to the WUO is Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. In his introduction, Berger, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, political radical, and writer, makes it clear that he does not subscribe to the good sixties, bad sixties paradigm. Indeed, Berger understands quite well that “the ‘dream’ was killed, mostly by the state or by those acting in its interest....At the same time, cities across the country rose up in rebellion after rebellion. Therein lies one of the greatest fallacies of the Tale of Two Sixties: it obscures why people embraced radicalism and militancy. Without understanding the impact of state repression, radical movements don’t make sense.” This historical accuracy informs Berger’s text as he winds through the history of WUO and its successors. Furthermore, it informs his discussion of the meaning of that history for today’s anti-imperialist activists.
The facts presented here are well-documented and were derived from a multitude of primary and secondary sources, as well as from personal interviews with former members of the WUO. The interviewees represented various positions within the organization itself and lend a credible insider’s look at life in the political underground of the United States of the 1970s. In addition, the text denotes the larger debates within the movement and insists that people do make life-altering decisions based on politics—even in the United States of America.
Like any vibrant left organization, Weatherman/WUO constantly debated politics and tactics. This is reflected in their brief history. While the role of political violence (and the shape that violence should take) was fundamental to the group’s formation and existence, even more important was its relationship with the struggle for black liberation in the United States. Indeed, not only was that relationship the reason for the group’s birth, it was also the reason for the group’s death according to Berger and those former members with whom he seems to agree.
So, what was the intended relationship between Weatherman/WUO and the black revolutionary struggle in the United States? If one takes a look at their founding document “You Don’t Need a Weatherman...” one finds these words:
The only third path is to build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks don’t have to do the whole thing alone. In other words, the primary role of the white revolutionary organization was to support the black revolution for liberation. This, in turn, meant that one’s concept of black people’s position in the United States and within the U.S. working class was the basis for any type of solidarity with other revolutionaries and activists. Were they just part of the working class? Did they experience a special oppression due to their race? Were they a separate nation? Weatherman subscribed to the latter argument: that African Americans were indeed a separate nation based on their special history and the nature of their oppression.
Once this relationship was understood within Weather, everything else followed. Its use of political violence was partially intended to take some heat off of revolutionary black groups like the Black Panthers, while its struggle “against the people” in the fall of 1969 was intended to draw a line between those who were willing to fight and die for the black revolution and those who weren’t. Much like John Brown and his soldiers, Weatherman/WUO attempted to offer themselves to the struggle for black freedom in the United States.
After a Weatherman-sponsored week of protests and street fighting in Chicago in October 1969—a week that became known as the Days of Rage—Weather retreated and regrouped, ultimately deciding to wage a campaign of bombings and other armed attacks on law enforcement and the U.S. government. This meant that many members would go underground, many would leave the group, and some would operate as aboveground supporters. This entire process was accelerated when three members of the organization died in an explosion that occurred while one of the group was making bombs in the basement of a New York City townhouse on March 6, 1970. These deaths not only forced the remaining members underground, they also forced an organization-wide reevaluation of political violence, with a decision being made that the group would no longer adhere to their belief that the most violent action was necessarily the most revolutionary.
This decision was not lightly taken, and according to Berger’s research, this decision widened some differences in the group between those who supported it and those who saw it as essentially taking advantage of their class and race position to lessen their personal danger. Apparently, part of the argument of those who disagreed with the decision was that they viewed their use of violence as a measure of sincerity and commitment to the black liberation struggle.
Berger begins each chapter of Outlaws of America with a quote from former member and prisoner David Gilbert, who is serving a seventy-five-year-to-life sentence for his role in the failed 1981 Brink’s robbery outside of Nyack, New York. This expropriation was a joint effort of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Organization and resulted in the deaths of three police officers after the robbers were stopped during the getaway. Both of these organizations were small in numbers and committed to armed struggle. In addition, both were descended from the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground Organization, respectively. Gilbert was a Columbia University student when he joined SDS and was one of those Weather members most committed to both armed struggle and the theory that white-skinned people in the United States had no choice but to support the black revolutionary struggle as the only true revolutionary struggle.
The insistence that the oppression of black people in the United States was one of the fundamental (if not the fundamental) issues that white-skinned revolutionaries in the United States had to deal with was a position in the New Left that had to be confronted. It ultimately tore apart WUO as the organization tried to construct an approach to communist organizing that would work in the political climate after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Berger’s book subscribes to the argument that Weather’s betrayal of its original pledge to build a “white revolutionary movement” to support the black revolutionary movement was the primary internal reason for the group’s demise.
As mentioned previously, this argument holds that the reaction to the March 6, 1970, deaths and subsequent attempts to organize the political element of the sixties counterculture constituted but one more example of a U.S. leftist organization turning its back on the black struggle. To this element of the group, the prime example of this betrayal was the freeing of drug guru Timothy Leary from a California prison in September 1970. Why should Weather free a drug guru and not an imprisoned black liberation fighter? This analysis considered that “betrayal” to be exacerbated by the “New Morning” communique in December of that year—a statement full of counterculture rhetoric and language extolling the youth movement and its use of marijuana and psychedelics. The communique was criticized by the New York wing of the Panthers, whose communal experience with drugs was quite different than that of white middle-class youths.
By the time 1974 and 1975 rolled around, this critique had extended to WUO’s attempts to provide a theoretical basis for its future via their publication known as Prairie Fire. This book, which is a succinct and reasonable examination of the state of the United States and the anti-imperialist movement, was seen as another betrayal of the group’s original commitment to the black revolution. The Hard Times economic conference and the documentary film Underground were also attacked for similar reasons. Of course, by this time, it was not the primarily white counterculture that was the focus of WUO’s organizing efforts. Like almost every other leftist formation in the United States by that time, their focus was shifting to the working class of the United States. Despite their analysis that acknowledged the multiracial makeup of the working class (as opposed to other groups like the Revolutionary Union that continued to view it as primarily white and male), the organization was sharply criticized as racist by an ad hoc people of color caucus at the Hard Times Conference who took aim at their aboveground allies, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). For an organization that defined its very essence by its antiracism this criticism caused major cracks. Some WUO members continued to argue for a more traditional class-based organizing approach—an approach that removed much of the nation status previously ascribed to black people in the United States by WUO. The other members continued to insist on adhering to their revolutionary black nationalist–inspired analysis. Meanwhile, this ongoing debate was overshadowed by the necessity of individuals to stay together and help each other hide from law enforcement. The combination of the two phenomena led to a non-political period within the organization.
One of the advantages given Berger due to the timing of his research was the greater openness of former WUO members to talking about their experiences. Another was the greater availability of government documents detailing law enforcement operations against them and other antiwar and antiracist organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Berger takes advantage of this and provides the reader with useful information and details about these actions. In today’s world where government spying, torture, and persecution are the stuff of daily headlines, this information makes it clear that today’s headlines are not new or aberrations. Indeed, they are business-as-usual for law enforcement, only with modern technological enhancements. Berger argues that the repression suffered by the black liberation and antiwar movements was a good part of the reason groups like WUO came into being. Not only were nonviolent and open tactics being shown to be ineffective, went the reasoning of those who went underground, they were providing the police with easy targets for arrest, harassment, and, in some cases, murder. The subsequent history of WUO and other such organizations, however, might seem to prove that their turn toward armed struggle rendered them even less effective than they were before they took that route.
Berger subtitles his book, The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. This is what most clearly separates this text from previous books about the WUO. Berger, being of the generation of radicals that came of age in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, obviously has a different context than those who gained political awareness in earlier times. This is important because it informs the approach he takes in the book and also because it naturally leads to differing emphases regarding the period of history from which Weather sprang.
Berger’s book is one of a very few current books that stresses the politics of racial solidarity. Although the movement against global capitalism is worldwide in scope and includes people of many nations (and consequently many skin tones), it has yet to span the racial divide in the United States in any noticeable way. The same can be said for the movement against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—although there are considerably more U.S. people of color involved in opposing the wars than in the movement against global capitalism.
However, as Berger points out, much of the impetus for today’s struggle against U.S. imperialism and its excesses comes from “people of color, from Porto Alegre to Port-au-Prince, from Caracas to Chiapas, Durban to Detroit, Buenos Aires to Brooklyn, the West Bank to Washington.” This is in part, as the WUO and other anti-imperialist groups of the early 1970s had already pointed out, because U.S. imperialism is the number one cause of injustice in the world.
Berger writes that the WUO’s analysis of the role of prisons in capitalist society, the making of political prisoners, and the need for solidarity with prisoners remains as pertinent today as it was then. As the prison system run by the United States and its client states expands its role beyond serving as a dumping ground for those members of society no longer needed by capitalism into also serving as a holding-pen for those individuals singled out by the state as linked to potentially subversive and “terroristic” activities, the need to insist on the end of such prisons increases. Indeed, the ongoing revelations of mistreatment and murder at the various secret prisons run by the U.S. regime around the world make this insistence a matter of life and death for hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals whose primary crime is often merely being Muslim or Arab.
Outlaws of America measures the Weather Underground by its own yardstick: revolutionary solidarity with third world revolutionaries is the pathway to ending U.S. imperialism. By that definition, this means that the primary role of radicals in the United States is to support those revolutionaries, including those who comprise the black nation in the United States. Although one might disagree with this analysis and its limits, Berger argues that it was the attempt to follow through on this analysis that created the Weather Underground. Likewise, it was the attempt to follow through that caused its demise.
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