a new cartoon for the next issue of the defenestrator

a cartoon regarding nutter's so called "doomsday budget". It seems that we have sacrificed working class people on the altar of corporate profits.

change and regime change: obama and the national endowment for democracy

an interesting exploration of the NED (national endowment for democracy) and its use to leverage foreign elections by US intelligence agencies.

http://www.narconews.com/Issue55/article3405.html

david graeber: an fascinating history of debt and capitalism

I thought this was a fascinating read. Anthropologist David Graeber researches the history of debt to unravel how capitalist societies function and to uncover the history of capitalism.... Fascinating.

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years

article from mexican la jornada on narco-terrorism

an insightful article from La Jornada of Mexico. The author discusses how supposed analysis of narco-gangs and the escalating violence in Mexico overlooks the devastating effects that globalization has had on the Mexican economy.

http://leftturn.mayfirst.org/?q=node/1230

20/20 segment on poverty in appalachia ignores coal mining

apparently diane sawyer did a 20/20 segment on poverty in eastern kentucky without even mentioning coal mining. odd.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/diane-sawyer-talk-to-ashl_b_168239.html

The Sound of Silence: The media establishment and the death of journalism

published in the defenestrator dec 2006

The Sound of Silence

The media establishment and the death of journalism

by eian weissman

2006 has been, so far, the deadliest year on record for Journalists worldwide. The numbers seem to be in dispute, with some sources reporting as few as 50 confirmed deaths, some as high as 76 or more. It is said that, in war, the first casualty is truth. Unfortunately, those that report it too often get caught in the crossfire.

In an open letter addressed to Reporters Without Borders (RSF)—one of the largest "press freedom" advocacy organizations— Al Giordano, the publisher of the Narco News Bulletin writes:

" These are difficult times for the profession of journalism and for journalists, because, increasingly, the threats to our safety and free speech are coming from within the industry itself: from the corporate owners of TV, radio, print and commercial Internet news organizations."

In his letter, Giordano criticizes RSF for its misrepresentation of the election of Hugo Chavez, his subsequent overthrow in a short lived military coup and reinstatement and Chavez's supposed curtailments of press freedom while in office.

Despite its apparent biases, the RSF does provide some good analysis in regard to suppressions of press freedom worldwide, despite the fact that its supposed objectivity is tarnished by its receiving government funding for its work. A case in point is the rating of the USA at 56^th place out of 168 countries, as a result of recent prosecutions of journalists for refusing to divulge their sources. It seems ironic that, generally speaking, the US is the source of so much rhetoric in support of press freedom, yet the destination of so much of the product of the world drug-trade, and yet not the recipient of world scrutiny.

Headlines, Frontlines and Bottom Lines

In a pamphlet entitled "headlines, frontlines and bottom lines", the Philadelphia based media literacy group Media Tank details a laundry list of conflicts of interest present in todays increasingly monolithic media establishment.

These conflicts range from the de facto conflict of entertainment companies peddling news through various media holdings to the conflicts of cross ownership, such as case of General Electric owning various media outlets while producing weaponry for the US military.

Perhaps the Lockheed Martin slogan sums up this conflict of interest of media companies tied to commercial and military industries: "We never forget who we're working for."

Impunity reigns

Ironically enough, the causes of death in many of these cases are murky and very few of the perpetrators of their killing have been apprehended. While the impunity of their killers is maintained, the fact of their deaths seems enough to indicate a general attack on press freedom.

In Latin America, press freedom has been curtailed, in large part by corruption following the flow of narcotics through the region. Particularly in Mexico in the last few years, a number of Journalists have been intimidated and killed by "narcotrafficantes" and perhaps even by corrupt authorities in some instances, who have certainly helped to preserve the impunity of their killers if nothing else.

According to Reporters without Borders:

"Sixteen journalists have been killed [in Mexico] or have vanished while doing their job since 2000. Three others were killed in 2005 but not apparently because of their work..."

In the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, "Relations between the media and the authorities are very tense in Oaxaca, where allies of Governor Ulíses Ruiz Ortiz frequently obstructed the operations of the local daily Noticias de Oaxaca from June 2005 onwards." This has culminated with the recent, ongoing occupation of the Oaxaca city center by a striking teachers union along with a number of activists from various parts of Mexico in response to repression by the Ortiz regime. Recently, an independent US journalist working for Indymedia(.org) was shot to death by Mexican Police and paramilitaries in their hire while filming a Oaxaca barracade.

Drug traffic, however, has been responsible for suppression of the press, reports RSF,

"Organised crime, often linked with corrupt local officials, is the main reason for worsening press freedom in Mexico, especially along the border with the United States, where smugglers reign. Many journalists, seeing colleagues killed, choose self-censorship to avoid being the target of reprisals.
Since the June 2004 killing of Francisco Javier Ortíz Franco, of the weekly paper Zeta in Tijuana, on the northwestern border with the US, federal officials have formally been in charge of investigating murders of journalists. However, a special prosecutor's office to handle crimes against the media promised by the federal government has never been set up, so the murder enquiries have made no progress and impunity has increased."

Public Relations and Self Censorship

Here in the first world, press freedom has been repressed from above by increasing consolidation of its distribution network and the gradual erosion of laws governing cross-ownership and from below by the self-censorship of journalists and the inaction by the American Public. As detailed in the book Sultans of Sleaze, this is the culmination of deeply rooted patterns of media manipulation by Corporate America through the Public Relations industry. Its author details the pioneering of PR by tactics such as the Press Release (read: manufactured news) and news conferences, implemented—in one early instance—in the defense of John Rockefeller after the Ludlow Massacre in an attempt to spin the slaughter of striking workers by the National Guard.

One more recent case in point is the case of Gary Webb, the reporter that broke the infamous "Dark Alliance" series in 1996 which detailed how funds from crack sales across the US were being funneled, with the knowledge and even complicity of the CIA, to the right wing Contra anti-Sandinista terrorists in Nicaragua. In their recent book, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb Nick Schou and Charles Bowden detail the concerted attack by the US media on Webb. Nearly every major paper in the US published lengthy rebuttals of Webb's article, slandering him and eventually blackballing him from further employment in the media establishment.

In an article published in Le Monde Diplomatique, by Serge Halimi entitled, His Masters Voice detailing the state of press freedom in France, he quotes the historian Patrick Eveno:

"...the French media have regained their operating freedom by cutting the ties that bound them to the state. The press is in better shape not only because advertising has been on the upswing, but also because the print media have plans for both the editorial and commercial domains. ... The French media have entered the era of modern democratic capitalism. ...The only way for newspapers to preserve their independence is to keep both readers and shareholders satisfied"

And, in this age of "modern democratic capitalism" where press freedom is bound to the whims of the market, the mercenaries of global capitalism call the shots. With their private security, private ministerial meetings the heads of global corporations that increasingly own the world's media outlets are making the America's and the world beyond its shores a great big gated community. We in the general public are not invited.

In an increasingly privatized world, as our government is outsourced to the corporations it ought to oversee, the press will censor itself.

August Spies, one of the Haymarket Martyrs hung in Chicago for allegedly conspiring to incite the death of police officers during the Haymarket riot in May of 1886, stated on ascending the gallows, "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today." Alas, his words seem more relevant than ever.

torture flights and black sites: official admissions of torture

published in the defenestrator feb 2006

Torture Flights and Black Sites

The official admissions of torture

Recently, it was alleged by a number of European newspapers including Le Figaro (French), The Guardian (UK), Berliner Zeitung (Germany) that the CIA has been operating secret “torture flights” to eastern Europe and certain Middle eastern nations as well as operating secret interrogation centers—in some cases at the sites of former Soviet interrogation centers. Despite these new revelations, the practice of Extraordinary Rendition—which entails extraditing suspects to a third party for interrogation—seems to have been practiced by US intelligence agencies for some time now.

A former CIA counter terrorism expert named Michael Scheuer, recently told the New Yorker magazine that he helped to found the rendition program in the aftermath of the first World Trade Center attack. The program “…was begun in desperation…” during the scramble to apprehend Al Qaeda suspects said Scheuer.

At first the rendition program was used with restraint, but 1995 changed all that. That year the CIA, unsatisfied with the methodical interrogation strategy of the FBI, forged a new relationship with the Egyptian Mukhabarat. The Mukhabarat—the Egyptian security force—had been frequently cited for torturing its prisoners in human rights reports issued from the US State Department itself¹.

In September of that year, the first major cooperation between the CIA and the Mukhabarat took place in Croatia, with the apprehension of a suspect in the assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Saddat in 1981. The suspect was extradited to Egypt where he disappeared and was believe to have been executed. A similar operation occurred in the summer of 1998, with four Al Qaeda suspects thought to have been involved in the first World Trade Center attack sent to Egypt. One was killed during the operation while two more were later executed in Egypt. All were allegedly tortured severely during their captivity. In August of that year, in retaliation for this operation, Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224 people. ²

At this point the rendition program expanded, with many such operations happening in the next few years. During this time, US intelligence agencies were careful to delegate the actual torture to foreign security forces.

9/11

Five days after September 11^th, in an appearance on Meet the Press, Dick Cheney presaged the change in policy that would lead to Abu Ghraib when he stated that we would have to “work through, sort of, the dark side… And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” This was confirmed a year later when Cofer Black, then CIA director, stated that “…After 9/11, the gloves came off.”

Then there was the famous set of legal memos.

In January of 2002, John Yoo of University of California Law School, then serving temporarily in the State Department, penned a memo creating a new category of prisoner in the war on terror. He redefined terror suspects as “unlawful enemy combatants” in an attempt to exempt them from the Geneva Conventions and to exempt us officials from the US Federal War Crimes Act of 1996 (which carries the death penalty.

Shortly thereafter, Alberto Gonzales, then serving as legal council to the White House, penned the notorious memo calling the Geneva Conventions “obsolete” and “quaint”⁴.

After these memos were leaked to the press, Bush issued a directive stating that even though his administration did not consider the Geneva conventions to apply to prisoners in the war on terror, detainees should be treated “humanely.” The CIA was exempted from this directive. Then, as if to confirm the general suspicions, in February of 2004, the CIA obtained a formal exemption from this pledge.

Then, in August of that year, another memo penned by John Yoo and assistant attorney general Jay S. Bybee redefined torture as inflicting pain that was the “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” There is an ancient Roman law stating that the testimony of a slave may only be admitted to a court of law if, and only if, it is extracted with torture—a slave cannot be trusted to speak truthfully without coercion. John Yoo seemed to reflect the spirit of that law when he stated, in a phone interview with the New Yorker,

“Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system? …What were pirates? They weren’t fighting on behalf of any nation. What were slave traders? Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws. There were no specific provisions for their trial, or imprisonment. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn’t deserve the protection of the laws of war.” He also gave a historical precedent, “The Lincoln assassins were treated this way, too…They were tried in a military court, and executed.”

The Politics of Torture

An interview with Dr. Denise Michultka of the Liberty Center for Survivors of Torture.

By eian weissman

Denise Michultka, Ph.D. is the director of the Liberty Center for Survivors of Torture. The Liberty Center, located at 231 N. 63rd Street in Philadelphia, provides services to survivors of torture such as: assisting with legal representation, referring medical and mental-health treatments for survivors, and social rehabilitation. The Liberty center also does educational work to broaden understanding of “pertinent human rights and protection issues surrounding survivors of torture and to provide restorative services under a social justice model to needy immigrated survivors of torture in the tri-state (PA, DE, NJ) areas.”

Denise: The reason that we have torture—the reason that torture has existed—is that it’s really effective. It’s not effective in the way that we generally believe…

The torture is really not about the target of torture. It is not about getting rid of that person or getting info; it is about planting the seed. If you know that person or hear about that person [who was tortured] it plants a seed. And you think to yourself “it could be me; it could be my family.” And that seed is what is powerful. That changes the way that we behave. You start thinking, “I wont go to that meeting; I won’t go to that service; I won’t do whatever it takes to make sure that this doesn't happen to me...”

There is a change in personal relationships. It changes what I do when I hear the door slamming next door and hear screaming and gunshots. You don't call the police; you don't go see what’s happening. In many of these cultures that is extremely unusual. Normally, if there's a hole in the street everyone is there helping and there has to be a society wide de-motivator to make people change, to make people not trust each-other.

Philly IMC: In my research I came across one guy-I think his name was James Scheuer-- that seems to have defected from the CIA, in a sense. He was involved in the original extraordinary rendition program from when it started right after the first WTC bombing. He said that the FBI made some headway with the us embassy bombings in Tanzania where the FBI was involved in the intelligence activity and interrogated the Al Qaeda detainees. They do use coercion—the bad cop good cop kind of thing--but its not torture; their methods are focused on creating a rapport with the person that you are interrogating.

Denise: Any health professional will tell you that. With people that are abused, torturing doesn't get crap, for intelligence.

Abusive parents are like that. I love you one minute and the next...

PhillyIMC: The people that they brought in—Al Qaeda suspect—were surprised to be treated well, to have rights.

Denise: Exactly….

PhillyIMC: With the perpetrators too, they are affected by torture...

Denise: It is hard to work with survivors of torture. But there is no known workable treatment for torturers.

My talks have changed after the whole Abu Ghraib thing. It used to be that I would say, “torture is bad” and they would all agree. But now its like, “torture is bad” and they are like, “well who is being tortured and why are they being tortured?” What I tell them about is... to talk about perpetrators of torture... we are all a part of it; all our hands are dirty.

These are our young people doing this. And it’s not that hard to shake someone [soldiers] up. When they are told that they are hated and they will be killed…

PhillyIMC: There are those two experiments: (the milligram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment) that show that we all seem to have the capacity to torture.

Denise: Yes... it’s not hard to push them...

It’s a community thing; if I am okay with it then you are okay with it... Its like the emperor has no clothes because if I don't say and anything and you don't say anything then you assume that everyone is okay with it. It gets progressively worse once you cross the line...

PhillyIMC: I remember reading about the Israeli defense forces that when they declared “mild physical coercion” to be legal that it got out of control... they had to stop it and change the law...

Denise: Right there were prisoners being killed

Once it starts it is a spiral and you have to justify yourself, “are these evil people or am I bad?”

They [soldiers] come back [and receive] no psychological care whatsoever. How do you make it okay? How do you say this is what I had to do?

Torture is hard because it gets at what it is that makes you human. And you don't, you shouldn't, ever have to do that. You make them rape someone’s wife. People walk around with that and feel horrific. They feel unclean and how do you get cleansing.

Then you see a lot of violence when they get back: a lot of intra-family violence, domestic abuse. Then there is extraneous violence: getting arrested for a robbery. The military is trying to keep them quiet, but these are the direct results of the training that they are given.

PhillyIMC: You are talking about the US military in Iraq here, right?

Denise: Yes. And when the first gulf war happened…

PhillyIMC: When i was in Guatemala, the summer before last, the Ex-PAC [civil auto-defense patrols—paramilitary forces that the Guatemalan Gov't forced to do their dirty work during the civil war] demanded money.

Denise: Yes. Thats because Rios Montt [former Military Dictator of Guatemala during early 1980’s] promised them—and this could never happen—he promised them military pensions to get the vote.

PhillyIMC: And in another article I was reading, it said 1600 women murdered and tortured in Guatemala City over last 4 years. They showed signs of torture in fitting with this... with the techniques of security forces.

Denise: Its one way when you are in a country where that happens but them you come back here. And there is no way to process that information. They go to the VA hospital and they give them tons of medications. There is no way that they can justify who they are and give them treatment at the same time. It has to be nothing.

PhillyIMC: It would be an admission by the military...

Denise: Yes, exactly... In fact I was called [by the military]. They wanted me to come down to the military base in Delaware. They had reentries and they wanted me to train the doctors there. I thought it was a setup [laughter]. They'd let me in and never let me out ... and I think “what am I possibly going to tell them. That they are a victim of a capitalist society? [laughter] I doubt that. They ended up not hiring me. I'm not sure that I am the person that you want and my therapy is about being socially active. A model we developed from Nicaragua...

That is, that [torture] is not a random thing. It doesn't happen like this—randomly. We cant go around thinking that horrible things happen all the time because we would go crazy.

So if you take a global explanation because this happens because of capitalism: this is what happens to poor people that are organized. And, when you give them a context it helps them to get better and then you give them their hands back. They feel powerful, that their testimony is powerful and it is a blow to the people that tortured you. That is our model: a social justice model. This is about restoration.

There is a whole movement [in the USA] about refugee resettlement where we take poor little refugees and we resettle them. We are about justice: saying that it was not random or because you are a bad person [that you were tortured].

PhillyIMC: Refugees are used in a political way. To...

Denise: Exactly. “Asylees”--people asking for assylum—refugees are people that are in a different country and

are claimed by them as refugees. There are the Mung. There are tons of Mung refugees the Mung fought with the us against the Vietnamese army. Then we took them with open arms. They are used to populate rural places where they need a workforce.

PhillyIMC: I was reading something about Hatians—an essay by Chomsky—under Arisitide we loved Hatian refugees. They were political capital. Now we don't want them. We love taking people from Cuba because it is political capital.

There was mention in Jennifer Harbury's book, Searching for Everardo, of her working in Texas with refugees from the dirty wars. Their asylum requests were denied...

Denise: TPS. They were given Temporary Protected Status. That says “we know if we send you back you'll be killed but we don't want to hear your story right now. We don't want you r story in court; we don't want them stamped with a notary's stamp. We'll let you stay here and we'll let you work but you cant bring your family and you cant move. You're here per our graciousness not because it is your right.” Even though it is an international law. It is a right. “And then when we are done we will send you back. Whenever we want to.”

Immigration law is based on foreign policy entirely. In Guatemala and when no one was winning every single [asylum] case included a letter from the state department saying “there is no war in Guatemala.” What judge is going to go against the state department and say “I believe that there is a war, according to this poor Campesino who has no education.

Unlikely.

PhillyIMC: Have you had direct experience with that?

Denise: Every single case. I was in the sanctuary movement in Texas... the letters were part of every file. .01% of every Guatemalan was winning [asylum] and .05 of every Salvadorean was winning asylum. At that time working in the Florence (??) detention center. People were held outside in tents.

PhillyIMC: What I want to do here is to place this in a context, in a historical context.

It seems that this [policy of torture] has been a policy for decades. People are even aware of this but don't have a sense of its wrongfulness.

Denise: Yes.

The [politicians] won’t say that torture is a bad thing. The only way they said that was “it’s a tiny bit bad.” I watched how quick those stories got squashed. They say “Torture is bad because if we torture them then our people will be tortured.” They seemed to think they couldn't say that it was bad. Even people with a conscience say that a majority people don't get it—they are not interested.

When Gerardi was killed in Guatemala [Guatemalan Clergyman who headed the REMI human rights Condemning the Guatemalan Government for genocide during the Guatemalan civil was 1960-1996] there was nothing.

And during the Liberian conflict the US would not send Peace-Keeping forces in. We kept them on boats. In protest [against US inaction] the Liberians piled dead bodies in front of the US embassy. The Liberians were convinced that everyone in the US saw that. But no one saw that. It was only a few years a go.

Literally there is footage, a movie done by the BBC where there is footage of them [small number of security forces deployed] walking around the bodies and bringing beers to the embassy.

The Liberians felt that people in the US did not care.

PhillyIMC: With Gerardi... the case is unsolved. He was bludgeoned to death outside his home...

Denise: First they said that it was a dog or that it was a 70 year old priest that they had in prison. But nobody said anything. There was no demand for justice. All the international rights groups were in Bosnia and Serbia and they were like “y que?” (so what?) “Another Central American Priest.”

And if it doesn't get press here, then it doesn't get press elsewhere. Their hand are tied, they tie their own hands. The only activism that gets press is the violent activism and most people don't relate and so we don't see positive problem focused activism.

PhillyIMC: And even when it starts to work, like the campaign against the US Army School of the Americas, [notorious US army school which allegedly teaches torture and interrogation techniques to foreign military officers] then the Army goes and changes the name of the school. It was changed to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Denise: I will stick up for the SOA program that is a movement that has maintained numbers. But you are right in the bigger picture there are 10,000 people there and it is the biggest act of civil disobedience in the country. But [the school] still continues [to operate].

We go into communities at risk and talk to [torture survivors]. They get really freaked out and dis-empowered by their own mental problems. In my opinion, there is no Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—it is not a disease. It is that we weren't made to have these things happen to us. We do not absorb these things well.

When you have these nightmares your body is saying it should not have happened... [survivors of torture] feel crazy and that is what the perpetrators of torture want them to think. They don't want to talk about it and it gets worse. We work with TASSC (another organization that helps survivors of torture).

Some of [the victims] are continuing work but because of torture they stop their activism and to me that is the saddest thing. Some of them, they want to do advocacy about different issues here. They don't have medical care, or with immigration... we do as much as we can to help maintain their passion for social change and social activism. It is good for the world... it would be bad to lose these people we can learn a lot from them. After the torture they say, “I will never raise my voice again. And I say, “that is unacceptable” and that is the kind of activism that we do.

PhillyIMC: In my experience in Guatemala... to me it seem that there, in small communities, there is progress happening. I stayed near Santa Anita where a group of refugees from the war got their own land...

But the situation if frightening now. Recently Donald Rumsfeld spoke in Quito Ecuador at these security talks and he said that they need to go back to the dirty wars.

So I wonder, for you, what is effective. How can we—and i know that you can't Make people care—but how to get across to people that this is bad?

Denise: Depends on the audience what makes sense to tell them that there is something to do. That they can get involved or donate time as a professional to help win an immigration case. Just to make them see a real live human being that is like them; that is the only way to make headway.

I am the worst offender sometimes, I go in and I finger point, but then you don't get anywhere. There is a real dilemma. The other thing is ignorance about the immigration system that is, when i say how it is they go “ooooh thats how it works!”

PhillyIMC: The truly sad thing is that, and I know that they were not moral pillars by any means, but there was headway with human rights and preventing torture under Clinton. There were civil suits happening, the laws were being applied. Then 9-11 happened.

Denise: Yes, that was totally an excuse to go back. It has set us back a lot, But you know, I have been working long enough with this to see that these things are cyclical. Things get better and then they get worse...

PhillyIMC: I was reading, with Nixon and the coup in Chile during Nixon which brought Pinochet to power... after Watergate there was the Church Report which helped to Reign in the executive branch of the government. I feel like we've had our watergate. But where is the Church committee?

Denise: Yes.

The Red Cross went to Abu Graib and didn't make a report about the torture.

You have to focus on single people... You have to build off the small communities you have to have the big battles. We're not just trying to fix them up so they are well enough to be tortured again, or to move them so they are silent again.

PhillyIMC: What I really wanted to talk about, too, was that it is beyond debate that we have tortured people for years and that it is policy. It' s not like they're not admitting it.

But how can people help change this and get involved? People seem to have the sense of outrage or would have it but they don't know or want to know, or feel helpless.

Denise: We teach and we can come out and speak. We are a positive social resource for people that are tortured. We help to get them with activists from other countries. We need all kinds of volunteers. They come here and they are never around other activists. Hanging out with them and having coffee, or whatever... Sometimes, working with them we think we came up with an idea that will solve world problems. But they are like, “No. I've tried that. No.” To have international activists, to have that experience is important.

PhillyIMC: It seems good to be faced with direct impacts of torture.

Denise: Yes...when you are confronted

There was, we had Rufina, the lone survivor of El Mozote [in December 1981, about 900 civilians were slaughtered by army forces in El Salvador]

I remember, people were like “wow she is a real person.” And she is this amazing, little, old woman and she's so bossy... There are whole books about her but then she's like “I am one with the people all the time but this is my one week of vacation.”