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Citing Withheld Evidence, Supporters Of Mumia Abu-Jamal Call For Civil Rights Investigation
By Hans Bennett
On April 6, 2009, the US Supreme Court refused to consider an appeal from death-row journalist and former Black Panther, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of white Philadelphia Police Officer, Daniel Faulkner, at a 1982 trial deemed unfair by Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the Japanese Diet, Nelson Mandela, and numerous others. Citing the Supreme Court denial and several instances of withheld evidence, Abu-Jamal’s international support network is now calling for a federal civil rights investigation into Abu-Jamal’s case.
Afghanistan's Operation Phoenix
by Stephen Lendman
On June 15, AP reported that "Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a four-star American general with a long history in special operations, took charge of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan (today), a change in command the Pentagon hopes will turn the tide in an increasingly violent eight-year war."
McChrystal is a hired gun, an assassin, a man known for committing war crime atrocities as head of the Pentagon's infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) - established in 1980 and comprised of the Army's Delta Force and Navy Seals, de facto death squads writer Seymour Hersh described post-9/11 as an "executive assassination wing" operating out of Dick Cheney's office.
The exaggerated global warming scare is becoming downright silly
Bjørn Lomborg
The continuous presentation of scary stories about global warming in the popular media makes us unnecessarily frightened. Even worse, it terrifies our kids. Al Gore famously depicted how a sea-level rise of six meters would almost completely flood Florida, New York, Holland, Bangladesh, and Shanghai, even though the United Nations estimates that sea levels will rise 20 times less than that, and, therefore, will do no such thing in terms of flooding.
When confronted with these exaggerations, some of us say that they are for a good cause, and surely there is no harm done if the result is that we focus even more on tackling climate change. A similar argument was used when George W. Bush's administration overstated the terror threat from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
But this argument is astonishingly wrong. Such exaggerations do plenty of harm. Worrying excessively about global warming means that we worry less about other things, where we could do so much more good. We focus, for example, on global warming's impact on malaria - which will be to put slightly more people at risk in 100 years - instead of tackling the half-billion people suffering from malaria today with prevention and treatment policies that are much cheaper and dramatically more effective than carbon reduction would be.
Exaggeration also wears out the public's willingness to tackle global warming. If the planet is doomed, people wonder, why do anything? A record 54 percent of American voters now believe the news media make global warming appear worse than it really is. A majority of people now believes - incorrectly - that global warming is not even caused by humans. In the United Kingdom, 40 percent believe that global warming is exaggerated and 60 percent doubt that it is man-made.
The International Court of Justice must investigate the Iraq war
Christopher King
[DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES: An Iraqi family reacting to the arrival of troops at their home.]
The evidence is that war crimes have been committed
Gordon Brown’s inquiry into the Iraq war will:
| ► Be in private, that is, secret ► Be held by privy councillors ► Not seek to apportion blame |
None of this is in the public interest or the interests of the country.
No More Pretense for Health Reform
By Kevin Zeese
CBO Estimates 36 million will still be uninsured ten years from now under most robust Democratic Plan
Well, cloudy rhetoric of “universal health care” is being clarified with the first Congressional Budget Office initial scoring of a health care bill. The two key issues of cost and coverage are not going to be solved with the health care reform being considered.
The CBO scored the Kennedy-Dodd proposal, the most robust of the reform proposals actually being considered, and the bottom line is that it will leave 36 million without coverage a decade from now. That is not what the Democrats and Obama have been promising. It is nowhere near universal coverage.
Neo-Nazis are in the Army now
Matt Kennard
On a muggy Florida evening in 2008, I meet Iraq War veteran Forrest Fogarty in the Winghouse, a little bar-restaurant on the outskirts of Tampa, his favorite hangout. He told me on the phone I would recognize him by his skinhead. Sure enough, when I spot a white guy at a table by the door with a shaved head, white tank top and bulging muscles, I know it can only be him.
Over a plate of chicken wings, he tells me about his path into the white-power movement. "I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a Nazi," he says. At his first high school, near Los Angeles, he was bullied by black and Latino kids. That's when he first heard Skrewdriver, a band he calls "the godfather of the white power movement." "I became obsessed," he says. He had an image from one of Skrewdriver's album covers — a Viking carrying a staff, an icon among white nationalists — tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after he had a Celtic cross, an Irish symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, emblazoned on his stomach.
At 15, Fogarty moved with his dad to Tampa, where he started picking fights with groups of black kids at his new high school. "On the first day, this bunch of niggers, they thought I was a racist, so they asked, 'Are you in the KKK?'" he tells me. "I said, 'Yeah,' and it was on." Soon enough, he was expelled.
Are You Ready For War With Demonized Iran?
Paul Craig Roberts
How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the US media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?
Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the US media.
The US media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded "revolution."
In response to Netanyahu’s speech
The Palestinian Return Centre
In a key policy speech coming at the back of seeming US pressure for a move towards peace in the Middle East, the right of return, a fundamental pillar for lasting peace in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, is gravely threatened as the Israeli Prime Minister; Benjamin Netanyahu, lays out his vision of a Palestinian State.
Stating for the first time that he would accept an independent Palestinian State, his overtures to peace, warmly greeted in the US, is full of conditions on the Palestinian side, with no substantial concessions on the Israeli side. The “right of return”, which Netanyahu so easily dismissed in his speech, is for Palestinian refugees, a core pillar for any lasting peace recognised by various UN resolutions and international law. ‘These are the fundamental rights of Palestinians, behind which is the force of the world community and any peace initiative which detracts from this formula will fail miserably’, said Majed Al Zeer, Director of the Palestinian Return Centre.
Polling Predicted Intimidation -- and Not Necessarily Ahmadinejad's Victory
Nate Silver
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, who work for a nonprofit group called Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, are out with a comment in today's Washington Post which claims that their poll of 1,001 Iranians conducted last month predicted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory.
Ballen and Doherty are doing admirable and important work. Regular readers will know how difficult it is to conduct a good poll in the United States. Take that difficulty to the fifth power, and you'll have some sense for how difficult it is to conduct a good poll in Iran.
Unfortunately, while the poll itself may be valid, Ballen and Doherty's characterization of it is misleading. Rather than giving one more confidence in the official results, the poll raises more questions than it resolves.
Time to Emancipate the Airwaves: The Airwave Abolition Movement
Paul Scott
Back in 1865, two years and some change after Abe Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves in Texas finally got the memo that chattel slavery had been abolished. Better late than never I suppose. However, if the right wing talking heads had their way, black folks would still be picking cotton in 2009.
This is the week of Juneteenth week (June 15-19th) a time when African Americans celebrate the end of the last vestiges of that peculiar institution. It is a time to celebrate the freedoms of this country that were so long denied African Americans.
But some things are still in bondage; the airwaves.
While this country prides itself as being a diverse melting pot of ideals and a plethora of differing opinions, the airwaves have long been dominated by a right wing conspiracy to control all conversations concerning race, class and all things political.
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