In reality, IRF is an extrajudicial terror squad, the existence of which has been documented since the early days of Guantánamo. IRF has rarely been mentioned in the United States media or in congressional inquiries into torture. On paper, IRF teams are made up of five military police officers who are on constant standby to respond to emergencies. “The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if [there is] the possibility of a weapon . . . in the cell at the time of the extraction,” according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for Camp Delta at Guantánamo. The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Major General Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually “Gitmoizing” Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons.

Student Researcher:

• Scott Macky (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:

• Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to “Darth Vader” suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg. According to the SOP document, the teams are to give verbal warnings to prisoners before storming the cell: “Prior to the use of the IRF team, an interpreter will be used to tell the detainee of the discipline measures to be taken against him and ask whether he intends to resist. Regardless of his answer, his recent behavior and demeanor should be taken into account in determining the validity of his answer.” The IRF team is authorized to spray the detainee in the face with mace twice before entering the cell.

David Hicks, an Australian citizen held at Guantánamo, said in a sworn affidavit, “I have witnessed the activities of the IRF, which consists of a squad of soldiers that enter a detainee’s cell and brutalize him with the aid of an attack dog. . . . I have seen detainees suffer serious injuries as a result of being IRF’ed. I have seen detainees IRF’ed while they were praying, or for refusing medication.”

Binyam Mohamed, released in February 2009, has also described an IRF assault: “They nearly broke my back. The guy on top was twisting me one way, the guys on my legs the other. They marched me out of the cell to the fingerprint room, still cuffed. I clenched my fists behind me so they couldn’t take prints, so they tried to take them by force. The guy at my head sticks his fingers up my nose and wrenches my head back, jerking it around by the nostrils. Then he put his fingers in my eyes. It felt as if he was trying to gouge them out. Another guy was punching my ribs, and another was squeezing my testicles. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more. I let them take the prints.”

On January 22, 2009, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an executive order requiring the closure of Guantánamo within a year, and also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there, requiring “humane standards of confinement” in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But one month later, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a report titled “Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law,” which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantánamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting “a ramping up in abuse” since Obama was elected, including “beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force-feeding detainees who are on hunger strike.”

A year after Obama’s election win, Al Jazeera reports that despite the new president’s pledge to close the prison and improve the conditions of detainees held by the US military, prisoners believe that their treatment has deteriorated on his watch. While the dominant media coverage of the US torture apparatus has portrayed these tactics as part of a “Bush-era” system that Obama has now ended, when it comes to the IRF teams that is simply not true. “Detainees live in constant fear of physical violence. Frequent attacks by IRF teams heighten this anxiety and reinforce that violence can be inflicted by the guards at any moment for any perceived infraction, or sometimes without provocation or explanation,” according to the CCR.

The CCR has called on the Obama administration to immediately end the use of the IRF teams at Guantánamo. However, the abuse continues, and the White House and powerful congressional leaders from both parties fiercely resist the appointment of an independent special prosecutor to investigate the abuses.

Ahmed Ghappour, who represents several Guantánamo prisoners, has lodged several requests to initiate investigations since President Obama took office. “I have requested four investigations regarding prisoner abuse just this past year,” he said. “The military responded to my first request indicating that they would investigate, but have been radio silent since then.”

Released after a federal court found him to be entirely innocent, Mohammed el Gharani is now adjusting to life outside prison. He reports that the allegations made by current inmates match his experience of Guantánamo during the months leading up to his release. ”I recognize all of this,” he said. “There are still more than two hundred people in Guantánamo. Since Obama became president, less than twenty have been released. I don’t know why, but he has broken his promises.”

Sources:

Jeremy Scahill, “Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama,” AlterNet, May 15, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/story/140022.

Andrew Wander, “Guantanamo Conditions ‘Deteriorate,’” Al Jazeera English, November 10, 2009, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/11/10-0.

The post 25. Prisoners Still Brutalized at Gitmo appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher:

• Cristina Risso (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:

• Elaine Wellin (Sonoma State University)

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour Hersh claims that the Bush administration ran an executive assassination ring that reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and that Congress had no oversight of it whatsoever. The JSOC team would go into countries, without talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, find people on a to-be-killed list, execute them, and leave. There was an ongoing list of targeted people, cleared by Vice President Cheney’s office, who had committed acts of war or were suspected of planning operations of war against the United States. Hersh asserts that there have been assassinations in a dozen countries in the Middle East and Latin America. “There’s an executive order, signed by President Ford, in the ’70s, forbidding such action. It’s not only contrary—it’s illegal, it’s immoral, it’s counterproductive,” he added.

JSOC was also involved in war crimes, including the torture of prisoners in secret “ghost” detention sites. Camp Nama in Iraq was one such “ghost” facility hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the international body charged under international law with monitoring compliance with the Geneva Conventions, and given the right to inspect all facilities where people are detained in a country that is at war or under military occupation. On July 22, 2006, Human Rights Watch issued a report, titled “No Blood, No Foul,” about American torture practices at three facilities in Iraq. One of them was Camp Nama, accused of some of the worst acts of torture, and operated by JSOC, under the direction of McChrystal. McChrystal, then a Major General, was officially based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but he was a frequent visitor to Camp Nama and other bases in Iraq and Afghanistan under his command.

An interrogator at Camp Nama described locking prisoners in shipping containers for twenty-four hours at a time in extreme heat, exposing them to extreme cold with periodic soaking in cold water, bombardment with bright lights and loud music, sleep deprivation, and severe beatings. When he and other interrogators went to the colonel in charge and expressed concern that this kind of treatment was not legal, and that they might be investigated by the military’s Criminal Investigation Division or the ICRC, the colonel told them he had “this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.” The interrogator said that he did see McChrystal visiting the Nama facility on several occasions. “I saw him a couple of times. I know what he looks like.”

In describing why no other press had covered the story, Hersh stated, “My colleagues at the press corps often don’t follow up, not because they don’t want to but because they don’t know who to call. If I’m writing something on the Joint Special Operations Command, which is an ostensibly classified unit, how do they find it out? The government will tell them everything I write is wrong or that they can’t comment. It’s easy for those stories to be dismissed. I do think the relationship with JSOC is changing under Obama. It’s more under control now.”

However, according to Press TV, the decision by Obama’s administration to appoint General McChrystal as the new commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan, as well as the continuation of the military commission for the detainees held in the Guantánamo Bay prison, are unfortunately examples of the Obama administration continuing to walk in Bush’s footsteps.

Update

Rock Creek Free Press reported in their June 2010 issue that Seymour Hersh, speaking at the Global Investigative Journalism conference in Geneva in April 2010, had criticized President Barack Obama and alleged that US forces are engaged in “battlefield executions.” “Those we capture in Afghanistan are being executed on the battlefield,” Hersh claimed.

Sources:

Seymour Hersh, “Secret US Forces Carried Out Assassinations in a Dozen Countries, Including in Latin America,” Democracy Now!, March 31, 2009, http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/31/seymour_hersh_secret_us_forces_carried.

Seymour Hersh, “You Can’t Authorise Murder,” interview with Abbas Al Lawati, Gulf News, May 12, 2009, http://gulfnews.com/news/region/palestinian-territories/you-can-t-authorise-murder-hersh-1.68504.

PressTV, “McChrystal Was Cheney’s Chief Assassin,” May 16, 2009, http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=94884&sectionid=3510203.

The post 24. War Crimes of General Stanley McChrystal appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher:

• Dani Wright (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:

• Peter Phillips (Sonoma State University)

With recent announcements that troops from such diverse nations as Colombia, Mongolia, Armenia, Japan, South Korea, Ukraine, and Montenegro are to join those of some forty-five other countries serving under the command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), there will soon be military personnel from fifty nations and five continents serving under a unified command structure.

NATO’s fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington DC in 1999 welcomed the first expansion of the world’s only military bloc in the post–cold war era, absorbing former Warsaw Pact members such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Two years later, after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC, NATO activated Article 5—in which the “Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”

The main purpose of invoking NATO’s mutual military assistance clause was to rally the then nineteen-member military bloc for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the stationing of troops, warplanes, and bases throughout South and Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Flyover rights were also arranged with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and newly acquired airbases in Bulgaria and Romania have since been used for the transit of troops and weapons to the Afghan war zone.

The 1999 war against Yugoslavia was NATO’s first “out of area” operation—that is, outside of North America and those parts of Europe in the alliance. The war in Afghanistan, however, marked NATO’s transformation into a global war fighting machine. NATO officials now employ such terms as global, expeditionary, and twenty-first century to describe NATO and its operations.

NATO members who have deployed troops to Afghanistan include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, as well as ten European nations that had never before been part of a military bloc—Austria, Bosnia, Finland, the Republic of Ireland, Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, Serbia, Sweden, and Switzerland. The twenty-eight full original NATO members all have troops there as well.

All of the new members were prepared for full NATO accession under the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, which demands weapons interoperability (scrapping contemporary Russian and old Warsaw Pact arms in favor of Western ones); increasing future members’ military spending to 2 percent of their national budget no matter how hard-hit that nation is economically; purging of “politically unreliable” personnel from military, defense, and security posts; training abroad in NATO military academies; hosting US Alliance military exercises; and instructing the officer corps in a common language—English—for joint overseas operations.

In calendar year nine of the war in Afghanistan, and now with the expansion into Pakistan, NATO has built upon previous and current joint military deployments in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Sudan, and off the coast of Somalia. In Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, NATO has conducted maritime surveillance and boarding operations, and in the autumn of 2009, NATO deployed its first naval task force off the coast of Somalia.

At the 2004 NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey, NATO upgraded its Mediterranean Dialogue, whose partners are Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia, with the so-called Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, which also laid the groundwork for the military integration of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The last named is the only Arab state with troops in Afghanistan to date.

The Afghan war has also led to another category of NATO partnership, that of Contact Countries, which so far officially include Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

NATO also has a Tripartite Commission with Afghanistan and Pakistan for the prosecution of the dangerously expanding war in South Asia, and defense, military, and political leaders from both nations are regularly summoned to NATO headquarters in Belgium for meetings and directives. Afghan and Pakistani soldiers are trained at NATO bases in Europe, and from July 20 to 24, 2009, senior leaders of the American and Pakistani armed forces met in Atlanta, Georgia, at a counterinsurgency seminar. The director of the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, Colonel Daniel Roper, said of the proceedings: “This week we presented some lessons learned in counterinsurgency. We used those lessons to stimulate conversation and took our previous experiences in Iraq and applied them to our current status. We exchanged our viewpoints on the challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia at large.” South Asia at large includes not only Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

Included in the West’s Greater Afghan war is not only “South Asia at large,” but also Central Asia and the Caspian Sea Basin. In both instances nations already involved in providing bases for US and NATO forces (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) and those supplying troops and ancillary services are being pulled deeper into the NATO web. On August 7, 2009, Pentagon chief Robert Gates expressed his gratification that Kyrgyzstan, which earlier that year evicted US and NATO troops from the air base at Manas, had proven susceptible to bribery and allowed the US military to conduct transit again through the same base. The new arrangement “will enable the US and Kyrgyzstan to continue their highly productive military relations created earlier.”

Additionally, the penetration of Kazakhstan, a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace, by the Pentagon and NATO would simultaneously insert a hostile Western military presence onto both Russia’s and China’s borders.

In Kazakhstan’s Caspian neighbor to the south, Turkmenistan, the Pentagon has been no less active of late. At the end of July, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns announced plans for what was described as an intergovernmental commission for regular consultations with Turkmenistan which “marks progress in . . . the contribution to stability in Afghanistan and across the region.” Turkmenistan is quietly developing into a major transport hub for the northern supply network, which is being used to relay nonlethal supplies to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

It was recently announced that Mongolia was sending an initial contingent of 130 troops to serve under NATO in Afghanistan. Mongolia’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has helped cement its alliance with the United States. The South Asian war is being exploited by Washington and Brussels to intrude their military structures into Mongolia and other nations neighboring Russia and China, such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, to further encircle two of the West’s main competitors in that region and the world.

The Afghan war is no ordinary war. The German army has engaged in its first combat operations since the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945. Finnish soldiers have engaged in combat for the first time since World War II, and Swedish forces for the first time in almost 200 years. The only beneficiary of this conflagration is a rapidly emerging global NATO.

Source:

Rick Rozoff, “Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army,” Global Research, August 9, 2009, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14707.

The post 23. Afghan War: Largest Military Coalition in History appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher:

• Danielle Caruso (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:

• Rashmi Singh (Sonoma State University)

India’s red tape is legendary: citizens have dozens of types of identity verification, ranging from electoral rolls to ration cards, yet almost none can be used universally. The new system will be a national proof of identity, effective for everything, from welfare benefits to updating land records. Forty-two percent of India’s population is below the poverty line and citizens frequently move in search of jobs. The government believes the ID system will help citizens because they will no longer have a problem identifying themselves. The biometric identity number will be entered every time someone accesses services from government departments, driver’s license offices, and hospitals, as well as insurance, credit card, telecom, and banking companies. By bringing more people into the banking system, Indian officials also hope to raise the number of people paying income taxes; currently, less than 5 percent of the population pays income taxes.

The head of Oxfam India, Nisha Agarwal, says a lack of identity verification is a major problem, especially for urban migrants. As a result, they are excluded from dozens of government programs, which offer cheaper food, jobs, and other benefits for poor people. “They remain treated as temporary migrants and, without that piece of paper, some form of identification, they are not able to access many of these government schemes that exist now, that have large funds behind them and could actually make a huge difference in poor people’s lives.”

The scheme is the brainchild of Nandan Nilekani, one of India’s best-known software tycoons and now head of the government’s Unique Identification Authority. “We are going to have to build something on the scale of Google, but it will change the country . . . every person for first time [will] be able to prove who he or she is. . . . We are not profiling a billion people. This will provide an ID database which government can access online. There will be checks and balances to protect identities,” said Nilekani, who has also been in talks to create a personalized carbon account so that all Indians might buy “green technologies” using a government subsidy.

The government also plans to use the database to monitor bank transactions, cell phone purchases, and the movements of individuals and groups suspected of fomenting terrorism. In January 2010, the Ministry of Home Affairs began collecting biometric details of people in coastal villages to boost security; the gunmen in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which killed 165 people, sneaked into the country from the sea.

Critics say the project will turn India into an Orwellian police state that will spy on citizens’ private lives. “We do not want an intrusive, surveillance state in India,” said Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer who has written and lobbied against the project. “Information about people will be shared with intelligence agencies, banks and companies, and we will have no idea how our information is interpreted and used.” Civil liberty campaigners fear the ID card will become a tool of repression. Nandita Haskar, a human rights lawyer, said, “There is already no accountability in regards to violations of human and civil rights. In this atmosphere, what are the oversight mechanisms for this kind of surveillance?”

India’s plunge into biometric identification comes as countries around the globe are making similar moves. In 2006, Britain approved a mandatory national ID system with fingerprints for its citizens before public opposition prompted the government to scale back plans for a voluntary pilot program beginning in Manchester. United States senators have proposed requiring all citizens and immigrants who want to work in the country to carry a new high-tech social security card linked to fingerprints as part of an immigration overhaul.

Sources:

Randeep Ramesh, “1.2 Billion People in India to be Given Biometric ID Cards,” Guardian, September 16, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/16/india-population-biometric-id-cards.

Anjana Pasricha, “India Begins Project to Issue Biometric Identity Cards to All Citizens,” Voice of America News, September 24, 2009, http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/a-13-2009-09-24-voa18-68709357.html.

Corporate Media Source:

Rama Lakshmi, “Biometric Identity Project in India Aims to Provide for Poor, End Corruption,” Washington Post, March 28, 2010, A8.

The post 22. 1.2 Billion People in India to be Given Biometric ID Cards appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researchers:

• Abbey Wilson and Jillian Harbin (DePauw University)
• Anne Cozza (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators:

• Tim Cope and Kevin Howley (DePauw University)
• Buzz Kellogg (Sonoma State University)

Pachauri offered a wide-ranging proposal—including legal requirements, economic disincentives, and government subsidies—to lead Western society toward a more sustainable future. Among Pachauri’s suggestions is that hotels be held accountable for the energy use of their guests. The energy consumed by guests in hotels could be metered and then charged to guests’ bills. Pachauri’s proposal also includes measures to regulate travel by land and air. For instance, Pachauri argues that automobile travel could be “curbed” through pricing schemes that discourage the use of private transportation. Likewise, Pachauri suggests that governments tax air travel to encourage citizens to travel by rail—a mode of transportation that is significantly lower in cost and environmental impact.

Travel and tourism are but one feature of an increasingly unsustainable Western lifestyle. As the Internet becomes an indispensable feature of modern life, the costs and environmental impact associated with Internet usage is on the rise. According to recent estimates, there are over 1.5 billion people online around the world. As a result, the Internet’s energy footprint is growing at a rate of more than 10 percent each year. As the Net’s appetite for electricity grows, Internet companies like Google are having a hard time managing the costs associated with delivering Web pages, video, audio, and data files. This situation not only threatens the bottom line of Web firms, but may compromise the long-term viability of the Internet. According to Subodh Bapat, vice president of Sun Microsystems, a leading manufacturer of computer servers, “In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the Internet . . . we need to rein in the energy consumption.”

Energy consumption associated with Western lifestyles has been linked with melting glaciers around the world. Dr. Shresth Tayal of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), India’s leading environmental institute, selected three of approximately eighteen thousand glaciers in the Himalayas as benchmarks to measure the rate of the glaciers’ retreat. According to Dr. Tayal, the glaciers, which feed rivers across India and China, providing fresh water to more than two billion people during the dry season, are disappearing at an alarming rate. As Dr. Tayal bluntly assessed in the Times, “The glacier is dying.” Tayal’s findings support the contention made in 2007 by the IPCC that glaciers could disappear by 2035. The IPCC warns that a shortage of fresh water will cause “famine, water wars and hundreds of millions of climate change refugees.”

Climate change is also taking a toll on the quality of Alaska’s marine waters, where cooler oceans absorb and hold more gas than do warmer waters. Jeremy Mathis, a chemical oceanographer at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, found that Alaskan waters are turning acidic from the absorption of greenhouse gases. Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to ocean acidification, as nearly 30 percent of greenhouse gases emitted by humans gets absorbed into the ocean each year. According to Mathis, the same qualities that make Alaskan waters some of the most productive in the world—cold, shallow depths and an abundance of marine life—make them especially vulnerable to acidification. Mathis notes that ocean acidification stunts the growth, development, and reproductive health of some species of crabs and fish. This situation has enormous implications, not only for marine life in Alaskan waters, but for the broader Alaskan ecosystem, and the state’s $4.6 billion fishing industry.

Despite growing evidence that Western lifestyles contribute to global climate change, it may take a generation before the new value system Pachauri calls for takes hold. Nevertheless, Pachauri believes that young people will recognize the need to adopt some of the radical changes he recommends. “I think they will be far more sensitive than adults, who have been corrupted by the ways we have been following for years.”

Update by Bobbie Johnson

It is nearly impossible to calculate the impact the Internet has had on the world over the decades since it was first created. With more than a quarter of the global population now online, it has become a central part of the lives of millions of people around the planet, revolutionizing everything from communication and retail to our day-to-day social lives along the way.

This growth, combined with the power demands of Internet data centers, convinced me that more attention needed to be paid to the issue. After all, the most voracious of the Internet’s energy demands are the parts of the Internet that are usually hidden from the sight of ordinary Web surfers. My story, titled “Web Providers Must Limit Internet’s Carbon Footprint, Say Experts,” was largely intended to highlight the question of the Internet’s energy footprint, and to act as a corrective to some of the misinformed and confusing reports published in the past. The article elicited a direct response from Google—somewhat unusual for an issue of this kind—but the mainstream press remained fairly ambivalent to it, preferring to focus on the next big product launch or another overhyped Internet start-up.

Experts suggest that the Internet’s energy footprint continues to grow at least 10 percent each year, and major companies continue to build vast new server farms at a rapid clip. Indeed, just upriver from Google’s plant in The Dalles, Oregon, Amazon is hard at work on a $100 million, one hundred thousand-square-feet monster of a data center. And Facebook, now the world’s second-largest Web site, announced in January that it was breaking ground on its first custom data center—also in Oregon. It will, surely, be the first of many.

And on top of this expansion comes the even more chilling realization that this is not a problem that can be solved merely through national regulation or even agreement between the Internet’s most powerful companies. Thanks to the speedy expansion of the Internet population in countries like China and India, hordes of corporations are building new data centers that have fewer rules intended to keep their power usage in check.

It’s a looming crisis everywhere—and despite the valiant attempts on all sides to ignore the issue, our desire to be more connected than ever means that the Internet’s appetite for electricity is not a problem that will be going away any time soon.

Sources:

James Randerson, “Western Lifestyle Unsustainable, Says Climate Expert Rajendra Pachauri,” Guardian, November 29, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/29/rajendra-pachauri-climate-warning-copenhagen.

Bobbie Johnson, San Francisco bureau, “Web Providers Must Limit Internet’s Carbon Footprint, Say Experts,” Guardian, May 3, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/03/internet-carbon-footprint.

Jeremy Page, “Scientist’s Himalayan Mission Provides Unwelcome Proof: Glaciers Are Dying,” Times (UK), December 5, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6945249.ece.

Dan Joling, “Global Warming Threatens Alaska’s Waters with Acidification,” AlterNet, September 9, 2009, http://www.alternet.org/water.

The post 21. Western Lifestyle Continues Environmental Footprint appeared first on Project Censored.

Charter schools are often marketed as incubators of educational innovation, and they form a key feature of the Obama administration’s school reform agenda. But in some urban communities, they may be fueling de facto school segregation and undermining public education.

Student Researchers:

• Kelsey Harris and Gina R. Sarpy (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators:

• Laura Watt and Sheila Katz (Sonoma State University)

A University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) Civil Rights Project study, “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards,” reported that charter schools, particularly those in the western United States, are havens for white re-segregation from public schools. “The charter movement has flourished in a period of retreat on civil rights,” stated UCLA professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the project.

In many charter schools, 90 to 100 percent of the population is minority students, close to twice the rate of traditional public schools. But even a charter school with a social mission of promoting economic and racial equity still runs up against the limits posed by selectivity and exclusion.

Obama’s national education policy supports the expansion of charter schools to undermine public education and schoolteacher labor unions. Obama wants to tie teachers’ pay to student performance, which would be measured through test scores. Merit pay based on performance is strongly opposed by teachers’ unions nationwide. Teachers want equal pay for equal work and assurances that funding for low-income schools will be fair. Charters are known for resisting teacher unions, which means they drive segregation not only in the student population but in the school workforce as well.

As a junior senator from Illinois, Obama doubled the number of charter schools in his state, despite reservations from teachers, community leaders, and unions. Obama seems to have latched onto the ideological rhetoric that charter schools are somehow engines of innovation that promise to raise all public schools performance, even though, in actuality, the expansion of charter schools is a process of privatizing public schools. Some argue that this is not improving schools but rather replacing public schools with non-union for-profit and nonprofit private institutions. Charter schools are often accused of “cherry picking students” to build higher test scores, leaving low-income and difficult-to-teach students in inadequately funded public systems. Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, closed seventy neighborhood schools while he was Superintendent of Schools in Chicago, resulting in a loss of six thousand Chicago teachers’ union members.

On July 30, 2009, the US Senate Appropriations Committee voted for a $40 million increase in federal charter school program (CSP) funding, bringing the total to $256 million for fiscal year 2010. Also included in the bill were significant educational reform investments strongly aligned with the Obama administration’s priorities. The unprecedented payout takes a bead on the teachers unions: money will flow to districts that alter pay and seniority provisions in union contracts and states that roll out the carpet for (mostly non-union) charter schools.

Public schools will now be forced to choose stimulus money over policy, a form of economic extortion and increased federal and corporate control over decision making, especially at a time when many of these states are financial insolvent. Nonprofit and private charter school operators stand to make big gains from the federal incentive package. Several states have already amended their laws to expand charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed.

The Obama administration’s actions, in tandem with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is part and parcel of typical neoliberal policy making: wielding federal stimulus funds as a financial weapon to force all states to increase the number of charter schools they host, as well as to force states that do not have them to pass legislation authorizing their creation. Through financial arm-twisting at a time of disastrous economic crisis, the Obama administration plans to use the power of the federal government to create a much larger national market for charter school providers, be they for profit or nonprofit, virtual charters, educational management organizations (EMOs), or single operators.

Using government to create market opportunities for business interests is at the heart of neoliberal economic policies; as a result, market adherents both need and relish government for its role in legislating and unleashing favorable public policies that benefit businesses’ ability to maximize private capital while charging private costs to the public.

The real story and prospects for the nation’s future education policy can be best revealed by Arne Duncan’s historical involvement in support of neoliberal policies created in Chicago under the Renaissance 2010 project. Renaissance 2010 is a corporate project to reform both the city and its public schools, with the intent of creating schools and geographical spaces that serve to attract the professionals believed to be needed in a twenty-first-century global city. Renaissance 2010 places public schooling under the control of corporate leaders who aim to convert public schools to charter and contract schools, breaking the power of unions and handing over the administration of the newly created charter schools to “providers” beholden to corporations, philanthropists, and business interests. Duncan, as the former CEO of the Chicago public schools (CPS), was an efficient manager for the neoliberal policies and legislative necessities dictated by the corporate elite corporations and their political representatives.

Duncan personally oversaw the attempted closure of twenty Chicago public schools in low-income neighborhoods of color in 2004. He did so with little or no community input—managing, at least for a time, to snub the meddlesome outsiders, like parents and their children, who might have raised objections to the CEO’s plans for the schools, or at the very least offer suggestions in the spirit of community decision making.

In fact, rapid increases in military programs in Chicago public schools actually did occur largely under Duncan’s tenure as CEO of CPS. The Chicago public school system has five military high schools, more than any city in the nation, and twenty-one “middle school cadet corps” programs. The military high schools teach military history and have military-style discipline. Students wear military uniforms, perform military drills, and participate in summer boot camps. The hierarchical authority structure mirrors the army, navy, and marines, with new students (“cadets”) under the command of senior students who had worked their way up and require obedience from those in “lower ranks.” All but one of the military high schools are in African-American communities, and all the middle school cadet programs are in overwhelmingly black or Latino schools. (See the honorable mentions in chapter 1, Censored 2010.)

The charter school takeover has been achieved quietly in Detroit and Washington DC, where around half the school kids in each city are now enrolled in charters. Under the emergency control of a state-appointed manager, Detroit opened twenty-nine fewer schools in fall 2009 and put many high schools under the control of private management groups. The next target is the teachers’ contract. In late August 2009, thousands of Detroit teachers protested proposed 10 percent wage cuts, elimination of step increases, and increased fines for work stoppages from $250 to $7,500 per day.

The Obama education policy hardly differs from the Bush administration’s policy of hitching student and teacher performance to what many in the educational community and beyond call inauthentic assessments, which force teachers to teach to the test and do little to encourage critical thinking or collaborative problem solving. The Obama policy is also quite similar to Bush’s in its goals for the rapid expansion of charter school networks and nonprofit with for-profit providers to run them.

Update by Danny Weil

When I wrote “Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse” for CounterPunch back in August of 2009, it was obvious that a corporate takeover of education was ginned up, triggered, and in process. The insidious experiment was initially fully launched in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, under the tutelage of Paul T. Hill’s “Diverse Strategies” model. Since the publication of the CounterPunch article, the corporatization of education has continued at rapid speeds, with public school closures occurring daily and student and teacher dislocation becoming the norm.

“Race to the Top,” the new brand name for No Child Left Behind conjured up by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is now cannibalizing urban areas in the same way venture capitalists descended on New Orleans and privatized the educational system after the hurricane. Arne Duncan—along with his philanthropic friends who make up the Department of Education (DOE) and the business entrepreneurs who are anxious to get their greedy hands on the 5.6 percent of the national economy that education represents—is simply mouthing the same themes enunciated more than twenty-five years ago in the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, and for many of the same reasons.

They say the US cannot compete globally without an educated workforce; they tell us that America is falling behind in the economic global race to the top; they say US competition is failing and thus the entire enterprise of America stands held hostage to the unforgiving failures of American public education that can be pinned on the teacher’s unions.

The American public is now witnessing the wholesale privatization of education as cities, municipalities, and states are suffering from budget woes caused by the pillage and social failures of financial monopoly capitalism and its devastating policies that are intent on privatizing everything public, from schools, to the military, to health care, to public housing. With the public sector virtually bankrupt, Race to the Top is now forcing states to bend their knees and adopt the “four assurances” that underlie the radical new program Duncan is proposing, or close to their public schools and face massive losses of revenues and the denial of public services to children and decent, livable wages to teachers.

For states to be eligible for the $4.3 billion that Duncan has pocketed in federal funds to dole out to states that meet his criteria, they must show they are progressing toward meeting the four assurances. If they do not, then the states will not qualify for the funds and their political representatives will be forced to tell their constituencies that there are no monies for education and face the wrath of voters. As a result, many states are clamoring to meet Duncan’s “standards” and are doing all they can to become victims of Duncan’s extortion demands.

To begin with, teachers and schools must accept and “assure” what are called “high quality standards and assessments,” as explained by the International Center for Leadership and Education.

These standards and assessments are not the product of teachers’ collaborative thinking, but are instead the progeny of the well-heeled Wall Street bankers and their “turnaround” artists who have decided what our children should learn and how teachers must teach. The standards are inauthentic and laced to the vicious No Child Left Behind law inherited from the bipartisan Congress, signed into law by the Bush administration, and now chest held by the Obama administration. Although Obama blasted the tests as no way to measure student performance, as I indicated in the piece for CounterPunch, this was mere rhetoric designed to fool the public, as the standards and assessments are now the providence of private companies who work with the DOE.

Certainly charter chains would prefer national standards; that is why they look to the government to assure they have a highly profitable landscape to scrape up the contracts. This would allow them to use prepackaged curricula across their charter outlets no matter the location—it’s highly conducive to expanding their “market share,” for dummied down, standardized curricula keep costs down, and the dispensation is formulaic and repetitive. This is the Wal-Mart model of education.

The second assurance that states must meet to qualify for the federal monies is to tie teaching to material incentives for the purposes of what Duncan calls “teaching effectiveness.” Nowhere can this be seen more clearly and directly than in the merit pay schemes being flown as trial balloons in many cities in an effort to destroy teacher unions and collective bargaining.

The third assurance is “turning around low performing schools,” which means opening up the floodgate for charter schools, state by state, by forcing states to either initiate charter legislation and/or to raise the caps on the number of charter schools that can be opened in their states without being in violation of state law. In other words, using government legislation as a fulcrum to assure that the financial monopoly class has the ability to start “charter retail chains” without any blockage by meddlesome state laws or unions limiting their opening and expansion.

It also means closing public schools, city by city. According to a survey conducted last fall by the school administrators’ association, nationally 6 percent of districts closed or consolidated schools for the 2009–10 school year, double the number from the 2008–09 school year. The ranks of public school closures are expected to grow to 11 percent for the 2010–11 school year.

Closing schools is good news for privatizers looking to make a buck, for it actually increases the school system’s ability to qualify for state construction dollars that can be turned over to private corporations. As a result, the contracts to build new schools are given to Wall Street corporate financial interests and developers who profit off the devastation left by the Wall Street crash and theft of public funds. This sordid “assurance” is all bundled up as “school choice,” the favored language of the educational prevaricators.

It is important to understand that Arne Duncan and the Obama administration have bought the notion of public school choice and corporate education as a panacea for what ails public education. Like his predecessor under George W. Bush, former secretary of education Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan and President Obama espouse the common rationale given for neoliberal educational reforms: competition provides the best or most efficient motor for change and reform. The contention is similar to the private voucher argument that traditional public schools (TPS) can be best improved by competitive market mechanisms.

Like private choice, the public choice rationale maintains that all public schools, and student learning in general, improve when schools have to compete for students, when students and their parents have the right to choose. Such an environment sends the message to teachers that they too need to compete, and then values such as solidarity, diversity appreciation, equity and equal opportunity, and participatory democracy all go out the window. They are not valued in the new “scheme of things.”

Race to the Top embraces a new but old business language, the language of competition rather than the language of collaboration, until what is posited is a scarcity environment: of winners and losers, no one in between.

Finally, the fourth assurance is to adopt “data systems to inform instruction.” These data systems come in the form of longitudinal testing and tracking systems for students, from kindergarten to workforce. This assurance is now moving rapidly, galloping across the educational terrain as testing companies see a virtual bonanza in preparing and selling tests, training teachers and students for the state tests with privatized for-profit test prep kits, as well as using the tests as Wall Street rating devices pointing to exciting new privatized educational opportunities and “best practices.”

Sadly, the results of the new national and state testing regime will be fed into an expanded data system used to evaluate teachers, to see if they are meeting the “measured outcomes,” the free-market “targets” they have been hired to accomplish. Reduced to “clerks in the classroom,” teachers could expect to devote themselves to “professional development” days, to be told by corporate spokespeople how to use the data kits, computer-generated graphs, tables, and more to figure out if their students are meeting the mandatory measured outcomes under No Child Left Behind.

It is now time to resist this regimented individualism through as combination of understanding, solidarity among working people, critical dialogue, and direct collective action. Otherwise, we will look to a society inhabited by more war, militarism, regimentation, authoritarianism, competition, penalty, and social decline. We will hollow out the moral body of our citizenry by forcing them to feed at the trough of illegitimate learning—a body blow to the body politic. It is time to stand up for public education, no matter the level of the educator, for as solidarity tells us, we are all in this together, and if the bridge goes down we all go down. The good news is that the responses to my article and many more like it are having a compelling effect.

Public schools in Detroit, Washington, DC, throughout New Jersey, and many other diverse cities and states across the nation are struggling back with high school and middle school student walkouts—16,000 in New Jersey alone. Student leaders are emerging, and their presence will no doubt increase as shown in the occupation of Governor Jennifer Granholm’s office in Detroit.

Also in Detroit, students defeated a plan by Wal-Mart; the retailer attempted to worm its way into four high schools by offering “internships” for course credit. Students will be at the forefront of the battles that will take place as the unfavorable policies go forward and the economy continues to affect the population, especially Latinos and Blacks in urban centers throughout the nation.

Corporate news coverage of the events is virtually nonexistent. Surreptitiously each day, Arne Duncan and his close allies on Wall Street continue to collect tax dollars under the radar of most citizens who are too busy trying to cope with a deracinated economic and social landscape that has left them bereft of any public safety net during a time of economic meltdown and job loss. Reportage of the carnage caused by Race to the Top and the new corporate model for education has been left to progressive reporting online or through organizational organizing and efforts by such groups as By Any Means Necessary, and any others who are fighting privatization and the destruction of educational opportunities for our nation’s youth.

We can only hope further education regarding the new corporate educational model will lead to stiff resistance and block the plans of the “turnaround” artists, venture capitalists, and Wall Street money makers. If not, then education will be reduced to training and teachers reorganized as “at-will” associates in the long march toward corporatocracy and the Walmartization of Education.

Update by Paul Abowd

President Obama has made good on another one of those campaign promises that many progressives had wishfully chalked up to an electoral strategy of “playing to the center.” It turns out that Obama’s vision for public education goes way beyond electioneering, and has turned into an aggressive federal schools initiative revealing the administration’s abiding faith in market principles to resolve issues of public concern.

Obama’s Race to the Top contest has awarded only two states thus far, but has compelled nearly every state to alter its education code in anticipation of winning a piece of the several billion dollar federal aid package.

While the federal plan proceeds apace, resistance to it has grown—most notably in Chicago. A progressive slate of teachers is poised to take over the third largest teachers’ union in the country this summer. In an effort to connect the union with a broader community movement to revitalize public education, the Chicago teachers are putting up perhaps the most promising opposition to the privatization of public education—in the city where Obama’s education plan was hatched.

In Detroit, a foundation-funded schools manager appointed by the governor is finding community resistance and a legal challenge to his school closure plan, while DC teacher reformers are knocking on the door in union elections. In Los Angeles, teachers won their first battle against the city’s attempt to put public schools up for bid. Parents’ and teachers’ proposals for union-run schools beat out charter operators for control of dozens of contested campuses.

The summer 2009 national meeting of teacher reformers in Los Angeles was important in coalescing a national strategy for opposing Obama’s schools plan—and it has produced significant victories along the way. However, unions are still scrambling to find a unified response to attacks from a president they wholeheartedly supported. Because now, the work of saving public schools is not only about resisting and reacting, but proactively putting forth an alternative—lest teachers’ unions face charges of obstructing progress that the mainstream media is all too ready to level against them.

Luckily, the blogosphere is becoming a valuable resource as battles over public education continue. Current and former teachers themselves are broadcasting their experiences, their insider knowledge, and the dirty tricks of administrators and corrupt union officials alike. Some recommended blogs and independent news outlets on education include the Web sites for NYC Educator, Education Notes, Substance News, the Washington Teacher, and the Caucus of Rank and File Educators.

Sources:

E. Frankenberg, G. Siegel-Hawley, and J. Wang, “Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards,” Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, University of California–Los Angeles, http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/pressreleases/pressrelease20100204-report.html.

Danny Weil, “Obama and Duncan’s Education Policy: Like Bush’s, Only Worse,” CounterPunch, August 24, 2009, http://counterpunch.org/weil08242009.html.

Michelle Chen, “Equity and Access in Charter School Systems,” Race Wire, August 19, 2009, http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/08/special_education_equity_and_a_1.html.

Paul Abowd, “Teacher Reformers Prepare for Battle Over Public Education,” Labor Notes, October 13, 2009, http://www.labornotes.org/node/2472

References:

• By Any Means Necessary Web site, www.bamn.com.
• A. Duncan, “Elevating the Teaching Profession,” American Educator 33, no. 4 (Winter 2009–10).
• A. Greenblatt, “Schools Across US Grapple With Closures,” National Public Radio, March 11, 2010, http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/mar/11/schools-across-us-grapple-closures.
• Barbara Martinez, “D.C. Deal Puts Merit Pay for Teachers on the Syllabus,” Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303591204575170280501458008.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_us.
• D. Simmons, “DC Teacher Contract Includes Merit Pay,” Washington Times, April 8, 2010, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/08/merit-pay-deal-included-in-dc-teacher-contract.
• K. Spak, “D.C. Teacher’s Union Agrees to Merit Pay,” April 9, 2010, http://www.newser.com/story/85502/dc-teachers-union-agrees-to-merit-pay.html.
• International Center for Leadership in Education, “The Impact of the Four Assurances on Classrooms and Schools, Getting to the finish line in Race to the Top,” April 2, 2010, www.leadered.com/pdf/Race to theTop4.2.10.pdf.
• D. Weil, “On the Future of Education if Bill Gates and Arne Duncan Get Their Way,” CounterPunch, January 1, 2009.
• D. Weil, “Tenure, Merit Pay and Teachers: Washington D.C. and Florida Set to Lose Tenure, Adopt Merit Pay and Create At-will Employees Just Like Wal-Mart’s Greeters,” April 10, 2010, http://dailycensored.com/2010/04/10/tneure-merit-pay-washington-d-c-and-forida.
• D. Weil, “New Jersey Students Walk Out of Public Schools,” April 29, 2010, http://dailycensored.com/2010/04/29/new-jersey-students-walk-out-of-public-schools.
• D. Weil, “Pass It On! Students and Activists Arrested at Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm’s Office Over the Decimation of Public Education in Detroit,” May 12, 2010, http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/12/students-and-activists-arrested-at-governor-of-michigan-jennifer-granholms-office-over-the-decimation-of-public-education.
• D. Weil, “Yvette Felarca Must Replace the Current American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten,” June 5, 2010, http://dailycensored.com/2010/ 06/05/yvette-felarca-must-replace-the-current-american-federation-of-teachers-aft-president-randi-weingarten.

The post 20. Obama’s Charter School Policies Spread Segregation and Undermine Unions appeared first on Project Censored.

The April G20 meeting in London secured a lot of positive media attention after world leaders announced a global package of $1.1 trillion for economic recovery and reform, mostly for the IMF. The plan, however, did not include specific information about the much needed operational reforms to the IMF and the World Bank.

Student Researchers:

• Meg Carlucci and Marissa Warfield (Sonoma State University)
• Abbey Wilson and Jillian Harbin (DePauw University)

Faculty Evaluators:

• Laurie Dawson and Elaine Wellin (Sonoma State University)
• Tim Cope and Kevin Howley (DePauw University)

Speaking five months later on the eve of the September 2009 G20 summit, Geithner called for higher regulatory standards:

As you know, the United States Congress has a very aggressive schedule to legislate sweeping changes to our financial system that are going to make—provide greater protection for consumers and investors to create a more stable financial system and to try to make sure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook in the future to bear the burdens of financial crises. But we can’t do this alone. If we continue to allow risk and leverage to migrate where standards are weakest, the entire US global financial system will be less stable in the future. We need to see competition for stronger standards, not weaker standards.

How far will the G20 go on the regulation of financial markets? A September 2009 report from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch emphasized that the World Trade Organization (WTO) has long advanced extreme financial deregulation under the guise of trade agreements that will undermine the current professed push for increasing regulation.

Lori Wallach of Public Citizen warned of the incredible contradiction: “While the summit communiqué is going to, on one hand, talk about regulating finance, at the same time, they’re going to talk about adopting the Doha WTO expansion, and a huge part of that agreement is deregulating finance.” Wallach continued, “The problem is that the G20 commitments aren’t binding. It’s a commitment of faith on the countries about what they’re going to do domestically. But the WTO rules are very binding and enforceable by sanctions. And so, it’s hard to know if it’s ignorance or it’s cynicism, but if the Doha round goes into place, all of the world’s countries will have a commitment not only to keep in place the existing WTO deregulation dictates on finance, but to deregulate further, right in the midst of what seems to be a global commitment to re-regulate.”

The WTO has an agreement called the Financial Services Agreement that explicitly applies to over a hundred countries and mandates major deregulation. For instance, it has a rule that you cannot have a domestic law that limits the size of a financial service firm—insurance, banking, securities—even if it applies equally to foreign and domestic companies. So while everyone talks about putting into place rules regarding being “too big to fail,” there is a WTO dictate that forbids such regulation.

In short, these binding WTO rules require countries to maintain the same policies that led to the financial crisis. This agreement was never brought to a vote in any Congress.

Jesse Griffiths, coordinator of the London-based Bretton Woods Project, under the International Finance for Sustainability program of the Mott Foundation’s environmental division, said, “The ideology of the IMF and World Bank has failed and the accompanying structures have failed.” He added, “In addition to the current enormous economic instability, the system has failed to create equity and eradicate poverty; it has failed to ensure that human rights are protected, and it has failed to address environmental issues.”

The failures of these global entities have not prevented President Obama from allowing their relatively free reign in relation to the US government. In June 2009, President Obama used his sixth signing statement to negate provisions of US legislation that would have compelled the World Bank to strengthen labor and environmental standards. When signing the $106 billion war-spending bill into law, Obama included a five-paragraph signing statement with the bill in which he also refused to require the Treasury Department to report to Congress on the activities of the World Bank and the IMF.

The sections rejected by Obama would have required his administration to direct its World Bank representatives to pressure that institution into using metrics that “fairly represent the value of internationally recognized workers” rights. Organized labor groups had pushed for a revision of those standards.

Another section rejected by Obama would have pushed the World Bank to account for the cost of greenhouse gas in pricing projects and to more fully disclose operating budgets.

Yet another section rejected by Obama in this signing statement would have required Geithner to develop a report with the heads of the World Bank and IMF, “detailing the steps taken to coordinate the activities of the World Bank and the Fund,” to eliminate overlap between the two.

Obama said in a statement that “provisions of this bill . . . would interfere with my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations by directing the Executive to take certain positions in negotiating or discussions with international organizations and foreign governments.” He added, “I will not treat these provisions as limiting my ability to engage in foreign diplomacy or negotiations.”

Sources:

Lori Wallach, “Report: US-Initiated WTO Rules Could Undermine Regulatory Overhaul of Global Finance,” Democracy Now!, September 25, 2009, www.democracynow.org/2009/9/25/report_us_initiated_wto_rules_could.

Public Citizen, Global Trade Watch, “New Report: No Meaningful Safeguards for Prudential Measures in WTO Financial Service Deregulation Agreements,” Public Citizen, September 23, 2009, http://www.citizen.org/hot_issues/issue.cfm?ID=2374.

Michael O’Brien, “Obama Issues Signing Statement on $106B War Bill,” Hill, June 26, 2009, http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/48019-obama-issues-signing-statement-on-106b-war-bill.

Maggie Jaruzel Potter, “NGO to G-20 Leaders: ‘World Bank and IMF Ideology Has Failed,’” Charles Stewart Mott Foundation Web site, April 24, 2009, http://www.mott.org/news/news/2009/G20.aspx.

The post 19. Obama Administration Assures World Bank and International Monetary Fund a Free Reign of Abuse appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher:

• Kelley Zaino (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators:

• Stephanie Dyer and Sascha von Meier (Sonoma State University)

What Chevron’s annual report does not reveal is the true cost paid for those financial returns: lives lost, wars fought, communities destroyed, environments decimated, livelihoods ruined, and political voices silenced. Nor does it describe the global resistance movement gaining voice and strength against these operations.

Thus, the communities, and their allies, who bear the consequences of Chevron’s oil and natural gas production, refineries, depots, pipelines, exploration, offshore drilling rigs, coal fields, chemical plants, political control, consumer abuse, false promises, and much more, have prepared an Alternative Annual Report for Chevron.

The alternative account reveals the true impact of just a handful of Chevron’s operations in the US in communities across Alaska, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, the Gulf Coast, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Utah, and Wyoming; and internationally across Angola, Burma, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, Ecuador, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and the Philippines. These accounts are demonstrative, not inclusive. We would need one hundred reports to document all such impacts. These accounts include active lawsuits against the company from around the world, totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, which threaten its vaulted financial gains—for when a company operates in blatant disregard for the health, security, livelihood, safety, and environment of the communities within which it operates, there can be real financial repercussions.

Chevron buys political influence and control at the local and national levels at each of its operational sites, in order to circumvent or trump laws that would protect people and environments from the company’s destructive practices.

In California, Chevron is the state’s largest corporation and the dominant oil industry force before the state legislature, led by chief lobbyist Jack Coffey, and with the support of the Western States Petroleum Association. As Coffey explained, Chevron’s money is spent “to be sure our business opportunities can continue in the way we want them to continue.” As one of the major players in what is increasingly recognized as a rogue industry, above any government control, Chevron buys assurances that government representatives will look the other way as the health of communities and environments around the planet are destroyed.

This alternative report shows Chevron’s pattern of hiring harsh military “protection” against local residents, evidenced in Iraq, the Niger Delta, Chad, Cameroon, Angola, and Burma, where massive increases in military presence and widespread abuses of human rights—including forced labor, murder, rape, forced relocation of villages, and more—are ongoing against communities living in and around Chevron projects.

In Cabinda, the heart of Angola’s oil production, twenty-four-hour oil operations are, as lawyer and journalist Daphne Eviatar wrote, “what financed the government’s army during a civil war. . . . And they’re the most obvious sign of the West’s relentless tentacles reaching into Angola today.” Like in other Chevron “company towns” around the world, extractive industry practices in Cabinda only stress and deepen poverty levels as Chevron pollutes and destroys the environment, accentuates social injustice, stops development, and sows frustration. The report quoted Angola resident Agostinho Chicaia: “The solution? Discontinue Chevron’s oil exploration in Cabinda, as it is the mother of our disgrace, bringing poverty, environmental problems, and armed conflict.”

Chevron’s Chad–Cameroon project has fueled violence, impoverished people in the oil fields and along the pipeline route, exacerbated pressures on indigenous peoples, and created enormous environmental problems. The money from the oil has paid for arms that have fueled Chad’s civil war and the associated conflict in neighboring Darfur.

In what is likely the Earth’s most oil damaged region, the Niger Delta, Chevron continues to employ the notoriously brutal Nigerian military to provide it with security services. The military is known to violently repress peaceful protest by villagers from the Delta communities.

In Ecuador, Texaco (now Chevron) oil production has irreversibly altered and degraded an environment that people have called home for millennia. Indigenous peoples who knew the forest intimately and lived sustainably off its resources for countless generations have found themselves forced into dire poverty, unable to make a living in their traditional ways when the now toxic rivers and forests are empty of fish and game. The physical ailments they suffer from oil pollution are accentuated by the cultural impoverishment that the oil industry has brought to the region, in many cases amounting to the almost total loss of ancient traditions and wisdom.

As affected Amazon residents battle Chevron for accountability, Chevron has engaged in repeated attempts to subvert the judicial process, ranging from the use of deceptive sampling techniques in scientific studies of the contamination, to lobbying efforts in Washington to tie the renewal of Ecuador’s trade privileges to its dismissal of the case.

In Iraq, one invasion and seven years of occupation later, Chevron negotiated for two oil fields. Iraq’s five trade union federations released a statement rejecting “the handing of control over oil to foreign companies, which would undermine the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the Iraqi people.” A confidential intelligence report on the Iraq Oil Law prepared for US officials and leaked to ABC News concluded that “if major foreign oil companies were going to go to work in Iraq, they would need to be heavily underwritten by the US government.” The report further concluded that if and when US oil companies got to work in Iraq they would require protection—most likely that of the US military.

The world sits on a precipice. Oil is running out. The oil that is left is found in more environmentally, socially, and politically sensitive areas and is more hotly contested. Chevron contended in its 2008 annual report that “meeting future demand will be one of the world’s great challenges—but one that Chevron is convinced can be met in an environmentally responsible way.” Nothing in the report actually supports such a contention. Nor does it indicate that Chevron is seeking to do so in a manner that protects social, political, or human rights.

While spending, at best, less than 3 percent of its capital and exploratory budget on green energy in 2008, Chevron marketed itself as an “alternative energy” company that is “part of the solution,” but few truly believe the hype. Rather, the movements to embrace real energy alternatives and to hold Chevron fully accountable for its disastrous actions is gaining far greater currency than the company’s billions can ultimately withstand.

Update by True Cost of Chevron Authors

In April 2010, Chevron released its 2009 annual report. It would not take long for the cover design—Chevron’s Gulf of Mexico ultra-deepwater drillship, the Discoverer Clear Leader—to seem a terribly poor choice.

Just days prior to publication, 18,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a Chevron-operated pipeline in the Delta National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Louisiana.

A far worse disaster struck less than two weeks later. The largest blowout in thirty years of an oil and gas well in the Gulf of Mexico killed eleven people and saturated the surrounding areas in a blanket of oily destruction. The rig was owned and operated by Transocean, the same company with which Chevron has a five-year contract to operate the Discoverer Clear Leader, among other Chevron offshore rigs.

While the cover image of Chevron’s annual report features a pristine rig, perhaps the more appropriate photo for Chevron will prove to be the image on page two: the sun setting on the Chevron Way.

Chevron’s 2009 annual report celebrated 130 years of Chevron operations. In it, the company declared that the “values of the Chevron Way” include operating “with the highest standards of integrity and respect for human rights,” a deep commitment “to safe and efficient operations and to conducting our business in an environmentally sound manner,” and the building of “strong partnerships to produce energy and support communities.”

We—the communities and our allies who bear the consequences of Chevron’s offshore drilling rigs, oil and natural gas production, coal fields, refineries, depots, pipelines, exploration, chemical plants, political control, consumer abuse, false promises, and much more—have a very different account to offer. Thus, we have once again prepared the Alternative Annual Report for Chevron.

Written by dozens of community leaders from sixteen countries and ten states across the US where Chevron operates, the sixty-page report encompasses the full range of Chevron’s activities, from coal to chemicals, offshore to onshore production, pipelines to refineries, natural gas to toxic waste, lobbying and campaign contributions to greenwashing.

On May 25, 2010, forty authors of the alternative report authors appeared at a press conference in Houston to address the true cost of Chevron’s operations in their communities. On May 26, they delivered the report directly to Chevron inside the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) while supporters rallied outside. Chevron had five protesters arrested from the site, including the report’s lead author and editor, Antonia Juhasz. Chevron also refused entry to another two dozen people from Chevron-affected countries around the world, like Nigeria, Ecuador, and Burma. Those denied entry held legal shareholder proxies.

See the 2010 Alternative Report at www.TrueCostofChevron.com.

Source:

Antonia Juhasz, “The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report,” True Cost of Chevron, May 27, 2009, http://truecostofchevron.com/report.html.

The post 18. The True Cost of Chevron appeared first on Project Censored.

Personal products you may use daily and think are harmless—cosmetics, suntan lotion, socks, and sports clothes—may all contain atom-sized nanotech particles, some of which have been shown to sicken and kill workers in plants using nanotechnology. Known human health risks include severe and permanent lung damage. Cell studies indicate genetic DNA damage. Extremely toxic to aquatic wildlife, nanoparticles pose clear risks to many species and threaten the global food chain.

Student Researchers:

• Jody Lempa, Tina Shaerban, Katherine Tellez, and Jillian Wolande (DePaul University)

Faculty Evaluator:

• Marla Donato (DePaul University)

Nanotech particles have been embraced by industry as the wonder ingredient in personal hygiene products, food packaging, paints, medical procedures and pharmaceuticals, even tires and auto parts, among burgeoning numbers of other consumer products. Cosmetic companies add titanium dioxide nanoparticles to sun creams to make them transparent on the skin. Sports clothing firms have introduced odor-free garments containing nanosilver particles that are twice as toxic to bacteria than bleach. Auto industry companies have added carbon nanofibers to tires and body panels to strengthen them.

According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN), health and fitness items continue to dominate available nanotech products, representing 60 percent of products listed. More products are based on nanoscale silver—used for its antimicrobial properties—than any other nanomaterial; 259 products (26 percent) use silver nanoparticles. PEN’s updated inventory represents products from over twenty-four countries, including the US, China, Canada, and Germany.

Yet, nanomaterials are so poorly understood that scientists are unable to predict how they will behave and are unsure of how to check their safety. Over one thousand consumer products made with nanoparticles, which can be one hundred times smaller than a virus, are already on the market, despite an almost complete lack of knowledge of the dangers they pose to human health and the environment. And while these atomic-sized particles may be beneficial in certain medical applications, scientists and environmentalists are calling for more studies. Until now, few adverse effects have been found for this virtually unregulated technology. Yet, that may simply be due to the relatively few studies that have been done in the rush to find ever more and profitable nanotech applications.

Nanotechnology, the science of the extremely tiny, is an important emerging industry with a projected annual market of around one trillion dollars by 2015. It involves manipulating or building new materials from atoms and molecules; silver and carbon are now the most important building blocks.

The nanomaterials are far smaller than a human hair and can only be seen with powerful microscopes. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, while a human hair is about eighty thousand nanometers wide. An atom is roughly one-third of a nanometer across, and nanoparticles are groups of atoms that are typically smaller than one hundred nanometers. The tiny-sized materials often have unique properties that differ from the properties of their larger scaled versions. Nanoparticles lend their success to the extraordinary, and sometimes highly unusual, properties they have. For example, tennis rackets made with carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong, while the larger pieces of graphite easily shear apart. The medical industry is investing heavily in nanoparticles to create precision drugs that can target specific tissues, such as cancer cells. While some of these new materials may have beneficial applications in medical procedures, wound dressings, and pharmaceuticals, concerns are growing that they may have toxic effects. In particular, nanoparticles have been linked to lung and genetic damage.

In a new British study, researchers discovered an unforeseen process, dubbed “toxic gossip,” by which metal nanoparticles inflict genetic damage to DNA, even through walls of tissue that were not physically breached. Researchers called the finding “a huge surprise,” particularly since the billionth-of-a-meter-scale particles appear to have wreaked their havoc indirectly.

Now, for the first time, a scientific study has established a clear and causal relationship between human contact with nanoparticles and serious health damage. According to an article published in the European Respiratory Journal by a group of Chinese researchers headed by Yuguo Song, from the Department of Occupational Medicine and Clinical Toxicology at the Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, seven young female workers fell seriously ill after working in a paint factory that used nanotechnology. The workers suffered severe and permanent lung damage, and face and arm eruptions. Two of them died, while the other five have not improved after several years.

Around five hundred studies have shown nanotechnology toxicity in animal studies, in human cells, and in the environment. Although Song’s article finds evidence of clinical toxicity in human beings for the first time, according to researcher Silvia Ribeiro, this finding could be only the tip of the iceberg of an extremely risky industry.

Nanoparticles behave unlike lumps of the same materials—stronger, more toxic, and with radically different properties. What makes them so useful also makes their safety so uncertain. Immediate, further research into nanoparticle toxicities and its dissemination is needed. Effects on human health and the environment result from nanoparticles reaching waterways through wastewater treatment and disposal sites, affecting the organisms that live in the water and the people who drink and cook with water.

Three types of nanoparticles are of particular concern: nanosilver particles; carbon nanofibers; and “buckyballs,” or microscopic, football-shaped cages of carbon.

Nanosilver is known to be highly toxic to aquatic life. While silver is safer for people than other toxics such as lead and chromium, for aquatic organisms, the story is quite different. Silver is more toxic to many fresh- and salt-water organisms, ranging from phytoplankton (at the bottom of the food chain) to marine invertebrates—such as oysters and snails—to different types of fish, especially in their immature stages. Many species of fish and shellfish, as well as their food, are susceptible; widespread exposure to silver impacts and disrupts ecosystem health. Nanosilver is significantly more toxic than lumps of silver because the tiny particles’ huge surface area increases their ability to interact with the environment. Nanosilver has been shown to break down and leach into water systems when, for example, sports garments incorporating silver nanoparticles for odor control are agitated in washing machines. In one study of silver nanoparticles used as antimicrobials in fabrics, of seven nanoparticle fabrics tested, four of them lost 20 percent to 35 percent of their silver in the first wash, and one brand lost half of its silver content in just two washings—all of which drained directly into the environment. Many waterways are just recovering from high levels of silver introduced by the photography industry during the twentieth century. New silver nanoparticle products may result in highly toxic levels of silver being reintroduced into rivers and lakes through water treatment facilities.

Carbon nanofibers, which are added to tires and woven into clothing to produce different colors without using dyes, are also likely to be shed where they can be inhaled and cause lung damage. In a study published in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, Chinese researchers discovered that a class of nanoparticles being widely developed in medicine—ployamidoamine dendrimers (PAMAMs)—cause lung damage by triggering a type of programmed cell death known as autophagic cell death. And finally, carbon-based “buckyballs” have shown to be absorbed by simple organisms, raising concerns that toxicities contaminate the food chain at the most damaging lower levels.

Today, according to PEN, over one thousand nanotechnology-enabled products have been made available to consumers around the world. The most recent update to the group’s three-and-a-half-year-old inventory reflects the increasing use of the tiny particles in everything from conventional products like non-stick cookware and lighter, stronger tennis racquets, to more unique items such as wearable sensors that monitor posture.

“The use of nanotechnology in consumer products continues to grow rapidly,” says PEN director David Rejeski. “When we launched the inventory in March 2006 we only had 212 products. If the introduction of new products continues at the present rate, the number of products listed in the inventory will reach close to 1,600 within the next two years. This will provide significant oversight challenges for agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and Consumer Product Safety Commission, which often lack any mechanisms to identify nanotech products before they enter the marketplace.”

More information on nanotechnology:

www.fda.gov/ScienceResearch/SpecialTopics/Nanotechnology/FrequentlyAskedQuestions/default.htm.

Nanotech products listing:

www.nanotechproject.org/inventories/consumer/browse/products.

Update by Paul Eubig and Wendy Hessler, Environmental Health News

We found this story interesting because the research is an initial step toward defining how much consumer products contribute to silver nanoparticles in the environment. Knowing the amount of a chemical entering the environment is a necessary step in estimating the risk the contaminant poses to the environment and to human health. On a larger scale, this story also intrigued us because the questions it raises reflect unanswered concerns about nanotechnology in general.

This story was not widely reported. Short write-ups appeared in the New York Times and Chemical & Engineering News. Environmental Health News reported on an interesting follow-up in Particle and Fibre Toxicology, which found that silver nanoparticles are released from nanoparticle-treated fabrics when exposed to artificial human sweat. So a picture is emerging of silver nanoparticles exiting consumer products, exposing humans and entering wastewater to a greater extent than may have been intended. Meanwhile, in articles in Environmental Health Perspectives and Small, other researchers have demonstrated the adverse effects of silver nanoparticles on developing nerve cells and fish embryos, respectively.

The intent is not to target silver nanoparticles but rather bring attention to a broader topic: the safety of nanotechnology. The great potential of nanotechnology to revolutionize a broad array of fields—including energy production and management, health care, and manufacturing—is gradually being realized.

Yet, nanotechnology also provides great challenges in safety assessment. The composition, size and structure of nanoparticles are some of the numerous factors that influence how they act in the body or in the environment. Additionally, nanoparticles of a particular type, such as silver, do not necessarily act as individual molecules or atoms of the same substance, such as free, ionic silver.

Unfortunately, regulatory agencies have been slow to contend with the rapid emergence of nanotechnology in the workplace and in the home, as well as in the environment in a broader sense, resulting in a dizzying catch-up game in which the applications of nanotechnology continue to multiply while the regulatory playing field has still not been established. Current debate centers on whether existing safety data is sufficient for nanoparticle-containing products, or whether further assessment of the impacts on human and environmental health needs to be performed.

The past century provides numerous examples of chemicals—lead, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to name a few—that were considered a great boon initially, but were later shown to have adverse effects on human or environmental health that outweighed their benefits. Our reporting aspires to help society remember the lessons of the past and to exercise caution as it embraces the promise of the future.

Sources:

Carole Bass, “Tiny Troubles: Nanoparticles are Changing Everything From our Sunscreen to our Supplements,” E Magazine, July/August 2009, http://www.emagazine .com/view/?4723.

Janet Raloff, “Nanoparticles’ Indirect Threat to DNA,” Science News, November 5, 2009,http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49191/title/Science_%2B_the
_Public__Nanoparticles_indirect_threat_to_DNA.

L. Geranio, M. Heuberger, and B. Nowack, “The Behavior of Silver Nanotextiles During Washing,” Environmental Science & Technology, September 24, 2009, http://pubs.acs .org/doi/abs/10.1021/es9018332.

Paul Eugib, DVM, and Wendy Hessler, “Silver Migrates From Treated Fabrics,” Environmental Health News, January 7, 2010, http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/newscience/silver-migrates-from-nanoparticle-treated-fabrics.

David Rejeski, “Nanotech-enabled Consumer Products Top the 1,000 Mark,” Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, August 25, 2009, http://www.nanotechproject.org/ news/archive/8277.

Y. Song, X. Li, and X. Du, “Exposure to Nanoparticles Is Related to Pleural Effusion, Pulmonary Fibrosis and Granuloma,” European Respiratory Journal, August, 20, 2009, http://www.erj.ersjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/3/559.

Science Daily Staff, “Health Risks of Nanotechnology: How Nanoparticles Can Cause Lung Damage, and How the Damage Can Be Blocked,” Science Daily, June 11, 2009, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610192431.htm.

Science and Technology Committee, “Nanotechnologies and Food, House of Lords Media Notice,” January 8, 2010, http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/lords_press_notices/pn080110st.cfm.

Ian Sample, “Attack of the Tiny Nano Particles—Be Slightly Afraid,” Organic Consumers Association, November 15, 2008, http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_15621.cfm.

George John, “Silver Nanoparticles Deadly to Bacteria,” Physorg.com, March 10, 2008, http://physorg.com/print124376552.html.

Nanowerk Spotlight, “Problematic New Findings Regarding Toxicity of Silver Nanoparticles,” Nanowerk.com, June 6, 2008, http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=5966.php.

R. J. Aitken et al., “Nanoparticles: An Occupational Hygiene Review,” Institute of Occupational Medicine, Health and Safety Executive (Edinburgh), 2004, http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/rr274.htm (accessed November 2006).

Additional Resources:

• O. Bar-Ilan et al., “Toxicity Assessments of Multisized Gold and Silver Nanoparticles in Zebrafish Embryos,” Small 5, no.16 (2009): 1897–1910 [doi:10.1002/smll.200801716], www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/nanosilver.
• K. Kulthong et al., “Determination of Silver Nanoparticle Release From Antibacterial Fabrics into Artificial Sweat,” Particle and Fibre Toxicology 7, no. 1 (2010): 8 [doi:10.1186/1743-8977-7-8], http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/ newscience/fabrics-release-silver-nanoparticles-into-artificial-sweat.
• C. M. Powers et al., “Silver Impairs Neurodevelopment: Studies in PC12 Cells,” Environmental Health Perspectives 118, no. 1 (2009): 73–79 [doi:10.1289/ehp.0901149], http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/newscience/silver-is-potent-neurotoxicant.
• A. Halperin, “Nanosilver: Do We Know the Risks?” New Haven Independent, March 17, 2010, http://newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/regulating_nanosilver_a_very_small_puzzle/id_24412.
• National Nanotechnology Initiative FAQs: http://www.nano.gov/html/facts/home_facts.html
• US Environmental Protection Agency’s Fact Sheet for Nanotechnology Under the Toxic Substances Control Act: http://www.epa.gov/oppt/nano/nano-facts.htm
• US Environmental Protection Agency’s Nanotechnology White Paper, EPA 100/B-07/001 (February 15, 2007): http://www.epa.gov/OSA/nanotech.htm
• US Food and Drug Administration’s Nanotechnology Web site: http://www.fda.gov/ScienceResearch/SpecialTopics/Nanotechnology/default.htm
• Researcher who studies the environmental, health, and safety impacts of nanotechnology: Stacey L. Harper, Oregon State University, 1007 ALS, Corvallis Oregon 97331, (541) 737-2791, stacey.harper[at]oregonstate.edu

The post 17. Nanotech Particles Pose Serious DNA Risks to Humans and the Environment appeared first on Project Censored.

Student Researcher:

• Crystal Schreiner (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator:

• Mickey Huff (Diablo Valley College)

Spain had been a venue for bringing high crimes charges against human rights violators in Guatemala, Argentina, China, Israel, and elsewhere. Most of the lawsuits have been against individuals linked to the untouchable political right, such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, the Argentine military officer Adolfo Scilingo, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and six of his senior advisors, and most recently, former George W. Bush administration officials.

Calls to reign in the judges increased when Spanish magistrates announced probes involving Israel and the United States.

In January 2009, Spanish National Court Judge Fernando Andreu announced he would investigate seven current or former Israeli officials over a 2002 air attack in Gaza that killed a top member of Hamas and fourteen other people. In March 2009, Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s most high-profile judge, invoked the principle of universal jurisdiction when he sought to investigate six former Bush administration officials for giving legal cover to torture in the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And in May 2009, another Spanish high-court judge, Santiago Pedraz, declared he would charge three US soldiers with crimes against humanity for the April 2003 deaths of a Spanish television cameraman and a Ukrainian journalist. The men were killed when a US tank crew shelled their Baghdad hotel.

Activist judges like Garzón, Andreu, and Pedraz have created a big diplomatic headache for the Zapatero government. China has warned Spain that bilateral relations could be damaged over a case regarding Tibet, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told Spain that it risks being sidelined in the Middle East peace process.

But the Spanish government is most worried about the negative impact the Guantánamo probe may have on relations with the United States. Zapatero has raised expectations of Spanish voters with the promise he can forge warm ties to the Obama administration. Indeed, other European leaders have distanced themselves from the Spanish position, fearful of jeopardizing future relations with Washington.

Reporter Glen Ford noted that the world’s biggest potential defendant for war crimes and crimes against humanity is the United States, whose record of direct and indirect involvement in torture and mass killings has been unmatched by any other nation since at least World War II. It was primarily US pressure that forced Spain to close off its courts from international jurisdiction cases.

A motion separate from Judge Garzón’s was filed on April 27, 2010, by the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is seeking to intervene as a party in the criminal investigation currently pending into the US torture program in Guantánamo. The investigation focuses on the torture and abuse of four former Guantánamo detainees with strong ties to Spain. CCR determines that, because of the nature of the alleged crimes and Spain’s obligations as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture in particular, Spain should retain jurisdiction over this case.

“For eight long years we have fought to redress the brutal, inhumane and illegal acts perpetrated against our clients but have been blocked at every turn by both the Bush and Obama administrations,” said CCR President Michael Ratner, who filed the first habeas corpus petition brought on behalf of a Guantánamo detainee in 2002. “We come to Spain in pursuit of nothing less than justice, which, sadly, is not available in the United States.”

One day before the change in Spanish law, a number of members of the BRussells Tribunal, acting under the umbrella of the International Initiative to Prosecute US Genocide in Iraq, filed charges of crimes against humanity and genocide against four presidents of the United States and four prime ministers of Great Britain. The charges cite 1.5 million Iraqi deaths over the course of nineteen years of American and British attacks, including two full-scale wars of aggression, the “most draconian sanctions regime ever designed,” and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Half a million of the dead, according to the charges, were children.

In parallel, Iraq’s rich heritage and unique cultural and archaeological patrimony has been wantonly destroyed. In order to render Iraq dependent on US and UK strategic designs, successive US and UK governments have attempted to partition Iraq and to establish by military force a pro-occupation Iraqi government and political system. They have promoted and engaged in the massive plunder of Iraqi natural resources, attempting to privatize the property and wealth of the Iraqi nation. So massive and systematic were the assaults on Iraq, stretching for roughly a generation, the accusers charge the US and the UK with the deliberate destruction of a nation.

The defendants are George Herbert Walker Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Anthony Blair, and Gordon Brown. The suit holds that each has played a key role in Iraq’s intended destruction—that they instigated, supported, condoned, rationalized, executed and/or perpetuated, or excused this destruction based on lies and narrow strategic and economic interests, and against the will of their own people. The BRussels Tribunal asserts that allowing those responsible to escape accountability means such actions could be repeated elsewhere.

The global clearinghouse for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide is the International Criminal Court. However Ford notes that in recent years that court has prosecuted no one but Africans and is increasingly exposed as a tool of Western hegemony. The United States refuses to join the International Criminal Court, and thus claims immunity from prosecution.

Update by Glen Ford

Lawless United States has been offered a job as International Court enforcer. The impunity with which the United States and Britain caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4.7 million more during two decades of uninterrupted aggression (1990 to present), is eclipsed in scale of slaughter by the genocide in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). An estimated 6 million Congolese have died since the main US proxies in the region, Uganda’s dictator Yoweri Museveni and Rwanda’s ruling Tutsi military, poured across the DRC’s borders in pursuit of approximately 1 million Rwandan Hutus displaced in the 1994 Rwandan civil war, including the defeated Hutu militia.

Ugandan and Rwandan military commanders quickly established control over mining operations in the mineral-rich region, providing raw materials to US- and Europe-based extraction corporations—a mutually profitable business relationship that thrives in an environment of terror and massacre. Despite the fact that their activities in eastern Congo have resulted in a holocaust equal to that under the Nazis, Rwanda and Uganda enjoy impunity as Washington’s most loyal clients in Black Africa. US corporate media, led by their collective noses by the US State Department, find genocidaires lurking everywhere in Africa except among the US proxies in Kampala and Kigali.

Having failed to prosecute anyone but Africans since its creation in 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) now actively woos the US, the world’s most prolific perpetrator and sponsor of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, as global enforcer of ICC indictments. The US refuses to join the ICC, for fear it might be prosecuted for its own crimes (only the 111 nations that have ratified the treaty fall under its jurisdiction). Yet ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo openly lobbies for the US to head up a “coalition of the willing” to deploy “special forces” as the enforcement arm of the Hague-based court.

Moreno-Ocampo apparently believes the global quest for justice would be empowered by access to the “rare and expensive capabilities” of the world’s most active war-maker, as reported by scholar-journalists Adam Branch and Samar Al-Bulushi in the African journal Pambazuka. The US also sees no contradiction in acting as enforcer of international laws it neither respects nor recognizes as binding. Stephen Rapp, US ambassador at large for war crimes, said Washington “can support this court constructively when it works in our interest. And so far in the cases it is taking on, they are in our interests and in the interest of all of humankind.”

The US was the center of attention, although officially only an observer, at the ICC’s latest conference (May 31–June 11) in Kamala, Uganda. “It’s hard to emphasize how happy countries are to see us here,” said State Department legal adviser Harold Koh. “They felt very distressed at the period of US hostility to the court.” Washington remains, of course, unalterably opposed to any limits on its superpower prerogatives, but welcomes Moreno-Ocampo’s invitation to enforce the ICC’s highly selective indictments.

The world’s biggest bully—a nation that proudly proclaims that the law ends where its own interests begin—is being offered the marshal’s badge. Justice cannot possibly be served.

Update by Ad Hoc Committee For Justice For Iraq

In October 2009, we filed in Madrid—on behalf of Iraqi victims—a legal case against four US presidents and four UK prime ministers under laws of universal jurisdiction for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Iraq. Our case spans nineteen years, including thirteen years of sanctions proven to have an overwhelmingly destructive impact on Iraqi public health, and the launching of an illegal war of aggression against Iraq based on deliberate falsification and systematic efforts to hide from the general public, in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, the true objectives of the war. Sanctions led to an estimated 1.5 million excess Iraqi deaths, including 500,000 children under five. To date, estimates of violent deaths among Iraqis post-2003 run to 1.2 million. Some 5 million Iraqis have been displaced inside and outside the country—a fifth of the entire population.

Despite the enormity of the crimes, the high profile of those accused, and a full press campaign on the case, the filing got zero publicity in the mainstream English-speaking media. In Spain, it was reported once in the margins. Only the alternative media carried our press releases, and only those who listen to alternative media heard of the case. The mainstream continued to propagate the lie—supposedly a criticism—that the US-led foray into Iraq was a blunder. But it was not a blunder. Nor did the US wander blind into a quagmire. Our case charts the synchronicity of crimes committed—including the destruction of civil infrastructure, indiscriminate bombing and use of depleted uranium, and promotion of sectarianism and corruption, destruction of state institutions, urbicide, plunder, promotion of torture—all leading to, and resulting in, the intended destruction of the Iraqi state and nation. The humanitarian disaster that is present-day Iraq was an end in itself. This is what the mainstream media cannot say and conceals.

We knew when we filed our case that public pressure would be instrumental. Based on years of research and analysis, our case was filed one day before the Spanish Senate voted, under external pressure, to radically circumscribe the practice of universal jurisdiction in Spain. The silence of the mainstream media surely contributed to the result. The new law, imposed retroactively, led to the closing of our case and others. Though Spanish courts had been open to hearing human rights grievances from those unable to find redress in their own countries or by other means, and though Spain had been taking a lead role in efforts to address impunity in international affairs, that window closed, virtually without comment. In real terms, our case was censored. But not only our case that was censored: in effect, Iraq, too, has been censored.

How important is this failure of the mainstream media? The war on Iraq is not only an attack on a sovereign country, it is a frontal attack on international law. If the destruction of Iraq goes unaccounted for, what is happening to Iraq could happen anywhere. Thus we remain committed to working toward the prosecution of crimes in Iraq perpetrated by the US and the UK. Though Spain had been the clearest route for legal redress, new routes can be opened. Just as we look for allies in this work, we are ready to assist similar initiatives taken up by others.

For more information, visit www.USgenocide.org.

Sources:

Glen Ford, “Four U.S. Presidents and Four UK Prime Ministers Charged With Genocide,” Black Agenda Report, October 13, 2009, http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/four-us-presidents-and-four-uk-prime-ministers-charged-genocide.

“Justice for Iraq: Legal Case Filed U.S. Presidents and UK Prime Ministers,” Brussels Tribune, October 7, 2009, http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/printer_57154.shtml.

Center for Constitutional Rights, “CCR Seeks to Intervene in Spanish Court’s Investigations into Bush Administration’s Torture Program,” press release, April 27, 2010, http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ccr-seeks-intervene-spanish-court%E2%80%99s-investigations-bush-administration%E2%80%99s-tor.

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