11 a.m. at Paramount Today! Obama, Escucha, Estamos en la Lucha!

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Oscar Grant’s Family Wins $1.3 Million Settlement

Tweet http://www.care2.com/causes/oscar-grants-family-wins-1-3-million-settlement.html

BART, the Bay Area transit agency, has agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by the family of Oscar Grant.

Grant, a 22-year-old father from Hayward, was killed by former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on New Year’s Day 2009 after he and several friends were detained. Grant, who was unarmed, was lying face down on the train platform when Mehserle pulled out his gun and shot him in the back.

After a cell phone video of the shooting was released online, a mass public outcry led to several large protests, and Mehserle, who resigned from the force a week after the incident, was charged with murder. His trial, which was eventually moved to Los Angeles, ended with his conviction for involuntary manslaughter, the least serious option for conviction. Mehserle faced up to 14 years in prison but the judge handed him a two-year prison sentence, which was also the minimum punishment he could have received.

The settlement with BART did not include an admission of fault by the agency or the officers who were also sued.

“If I got $1 or $100 million, it still wouldn’t bring Oscar back. My heart still grieves for my son,” Grant’s mother Wanda Johnson said yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “The loss was unnecessary, and I just pray that as officers go around, and they have to make decisions, that they would choose the right decision. It didn’t have to be this way.”

BART previously agreed to pay $1.5 million to Grant’s daughter, Tatiana Grant, who is now seven years old.

The Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant has been calling on the Department of Justice, which opened a probe into the incident last year, to file charges against Mehserle for civil rights violations.

Mehserle was released from jail two weeks ago after serving 11 months of a two-year prison sentence. He is currently free on unsupervised parole.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/oscar-grants-family-wins-1-3-million-settlement.html#ixzz1YuiVJEs8

George Thorogood & The Destroyers - Let's Work Together

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http://youtu.be/dKVO5xbqBUs

Dedicated to Fateh & Hamas

"Losing Liberty for Security with the Padilla Case" -- by Jacob Hornberger

Tweet http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29195.htm

September 23, 2011 "FFF" -- The Jose Padilla case is back in the news. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the 17-year sentence handed down by the presiding district judge was too lenient. The court has ordered the case remanded to the judge with instructions to consider a much higher sentence.

Although it might be little-known among the American people, the Jose Padilla case is quite possibly the most important legal case in our lifetime in terms of the freedom that Americans lost on 9/11.

The greatest power that any dictator can have is the power to seize a person, cart him away to a prison, concentration camp, or dungeon and keep him there for as long as the dictator wants and to torture, abuse, humiliate, or even execute him, perhaps after some sort of kangaroo trial. Of course, this is not to suggest that the dictator does these things himself. He has a powerful military, an intelligence force, or national police who loyally carry out his orders to do these things.

That’s the power that Middle East dictators have had for decades, justifying them under emergencies dealing with drugs and terrorists. In fact, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, a longtime friend and ally of the U.S. government and whose military and the U.S. military worked closely together, wielded this emergency power for some 30 years, given that drugs and terrorism continued threatening the national security of Egypt during that period of time. It was that emergency power, among others, that the Egyptian protestors wanted eliminated. Even after Mubarak’s fall, the military regime in Egypt refuses to relinquish this extraordinary dictatorial power over the citizenry. .

That is the power that the president of the United States now wields — the same power that the U.S.-supported dictator Hosni Mubarak wielded — the same power that dictators have wielded throughout history. President Obama, like President Bush before him, now wields the emergency, post-9/11 power to use U.S. military forces to take any American into custody, hold him indefinitely, and torture and abuse him.

Are there any conditions on the exercise of such power? One — that the person be labeled a terrorist by the military, the CIA, or the president. Once that label is affixed onto the person, the dictatorial power is unleashed.

How did such extraordinary dictatorial power come to be acquired by the president of the United States in what purports to be a free country? No, not through legislative enactment, as Mubarak did it. And no, not through constitutional amendment, as our system requires. Bush simply decreed after 9/11 that he now wielded such power as a military commander in chief waging war — the “war on terrorism.” In such a war, the entire world is the battlefield and the enemy can consist of anyone, including American citizens, U.S. officials said.

Would the courts actually uphold the assumption of such extraordinary dictatorial power? They already have. That’s what the Padilla case was all about. That’s why statists have celebrated ever since that case was decided. They knew what many Americans do not know — that the ruling in Padilla didn’t just apply to him but rather to all Americans.

Jose Padilla is an American citizen. He was taken into custody and labeled a terrorist. The president removed him from the jurisdiction of the federal courts and placed him in the custody of military officials, who promptly placed him in isolation into a military dungeon, where they kept him for more than 3 years. As a result of the torture, the likelihood is that Padilla has suffered permanent mental damage.

At no time did any military officials refuse to participate in the arrest, incarceration, and torture of Jose Padilla. Like in Egypt under Mubarak, the military loyally followed orders to treat this American citizen in that way. In their minds, the troops were “defending our freedoms” when they loyally obeyed the orders of the president to do this to Padilla.

As Padilla’s petition for writ of habeas corpus was working its way through the federal courts, government lawyers were telling federal judges that national security turned on treating Padilla as an enemy combatant rather than a criminal defendant.

But it was all a lie. As soon as the government received a favorable ruling from the court of appeals, the government immediately converted Padilla to criminal defendant status. The military, after loyally following orders to treat Padilla as an enemy combatant, loyally followed orders to release him to the jurisdiction of the federal courts.

What was the benefit to the government of doing this shifting and maneuvering? U.S. officials knew that they now had a federal appellate court holding saying that the president of the United States, together with his military forces, now wields this extraordinary power. Since Padilla was appealing that holding to the Supreme Court, there was the possibility that the Supreme Court could overturn the ruling. By quickly converting Padilla to criminal-defendant status, the Supreme Court was denied jurisdiction to consider the case. That left the Court of Appeals decision intact.

That means that the government now wields the legal authority under the Padilla decision to do to Americans what they did to Padilla. All they need is the right “crisis” and they’ll have the same power that Mubarak had — the power that dictators throughout history have wielded.

Sure, the Supreme Court could ultimately overturn that ruling but that would take a long time, most like more than a year — plenty of time to brutally torture and abuse people labeled as “terrorists.”

It’s been said that 9/11 changed the world. That is most definitely true when it came to the president’s dictatorial power to arrest, incarcerate, torture, and abuse Americans. Just ask Jose Padilla, who was treated as an “enemy combatant, where he was subjected to indefinite incarceration and torture by the military, and ended up as a criminal defendant with a 17-year sentence that has now been adjudged as too lenient.

White House Petition for Leonard Peltier

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A petition in favor of granting clemency to Leonard Peltier is now on the We the People portion of the White House Web site. We have 30 days (until October 22) to get 5,000 signatures in order for our petition to be reviewed by the White House. This petition may only allow US signatories.

Sign the petition here:

http://tinyurl.com/3qq4muc

Due to heavy site traffic, you may have trouble accessing the petition. Keep trying until you succeed. Try during off-peak hours.

Email our petition to your friends, family and others who care about this issue.

Facebook: Post our petition to your Facebook wall to let folks know about it. Here’s a sample message you can cut and paste into your Facebook status: Petition for Leonard Peltier on the White House site, We the People. Will you sign it?

Twitter: Tweet about your petition. Here’s a sample tweet you can use: Leonard Peltier petition on th e White House site, We the People. Will you sign it?

Let's do it!

"All of the Different Irvine 11 Verdicts" -- Sami Kishawi at Sixten Minutes to Palestine

Tweet http://smpalestine.com/2011/09/23/all-of-the-different-irvine-11-verdicts/

A verdict has been reached. All ten of the Irvine 11 students have been found guilty on two misdemeanor counts of conspiring to disrupt and then disrupting a speech given by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California – Irvine in February 2010. The judge has recessed for the moment and will sentence the students (originally eleven at the start of the trial) when court resumes at a later time.

But that wasn’t the only verdict reached today.

The court’s decision complements traditional American policy towards Israel and its supporters. The excuse that Israel is forever under existential threat has embedded itself within the framework of the Constitution of the United States. First Amendment rights are no longer guaranteed if an individual is tried for being on the wrong side: for not supporting Israel’s policies in the Middle East, its occupation, its abandonment of the most fundamental form of justice, or its perception of public nonviolent dissent as institutionalized death-wishing festivities. So in a very obvious sense, the verdict is that Israel’s interests stand above the right to express, to speak, to engage, and to openly challenge the injustices confirmed by Oren’s words.

In another relevant and disturbing understanding of the verdict, the court’s decision reflects that “Muslims are permanent foreigners, at least in Orange County,” according to Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. In yet another blow to Muslim freedoms and civil liberties here in the United States, the ten students have been publicly denied of their right to free speech. The Muslim Students Association chapter at UC Irvine will continue to face both legal scrutiny and a heavily watchful eye — unnecessarily and undeservedly, of course — from campus authorities and anti-Muslim groups in the area. This entire case has become a breeding ground for the most virulent and bigoted anti-Islam sentiment shielded by the courthouse’s roof (and, ironically, “free speech”).

If the Irvine 11 are conspirators, then we are all a part of this conspiracy. The students represent themselves, yes, but they also represent the upturning of the lobby to secure support for the continued occupation of Palestine. Although the court has attempted to physically silence the Irvine 11, we will continue to keep our voices raised. This is not an issue of Islamic principles, the way the prosecution attempted to frame it as, nor is this an issue of butting ideologies. This is an issue of free speech — a universal right, highly regarded in the United States but not afforded to those who see through the veil of Israeli propaganda.

It is comforting to know that the prosecuted students have shown us that people are willing to face even the most unjust consequences for the sake of defending our rights and values. Let this be a lesson to all.

"This Poem will Not End Apartheid" -- Remi Kanazi

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We Are All Troy Davis

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Troy Davis -- Presenté


Thanks to the cowards President Obama & the Supreme Court.

"Film noir: Troy Davis and the American Way" -- Pubali Ray Chaudhuri

Tweet http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29163.htm

EXCERPT:

Let us face for once what so much of white America truly feels in its innermost heart but cannot admit because such an admission is no longer socially acceptable. But just because a thing is no longer spoken of aloud does not mean it has ceased to exist in the hearts of men and women. White America (or a significant part of it) distrusts, despises and dislikes black America, thinking of the latter as a horde of freeloaders, drug-pushers, and hustlers, as cutthroats waiting to relieve you of your wallet or your life on a dark night or on a lonely street—in short, as a dark, amorphous, undifferentiated mass in which no trace of humanity is any longer distinguishable and which can therefore evoke no spark of reciprocal human sympathy to lighten its formlessness. Once we understand this prevailing attitude of one race towards another, it becomes a lot easier to grasp why so many black men are imprisoned for long periods for minor offenses and why so many are put to death in spite of their guilt being less than certain.

There you have a very real, and very seldom acknowledged reason, why Troy Davis, an African-American, has been held in prison for over 20 years and now may suffer the ultimate brutality of having his life snuffed out for a crime he may well never have committed. There you have the reason why this man, for whom no physical evidence exists linking him to the crime, and in whose case key witnesses have since recanted, is still to die. And why Johannes Mehserle, a white police officer who shot an unarmed black man, Oscar Grant, in broad daylight as the victim lay face down, surrounded by law enforcement, in the presence of numerous witnesses, walked free in a few months. This is the American reality four decades after the Civil Rights Movement.

It is necessary that a few black men die every so often for our pleasure, so that we can continue to beat our collective ego-chests and congratulate ourselves on justice being done, even as we perpetuate our long tradition of paradoxes that seem to define us as a people: the “greatest” country in the world is nothing but its greatest terror and bully; freedom is predicated (literally) on the legacy of slavery and domination, what we view as justice is too often its horrific miscarriage.

Troy Davis must die so that our illusions about ourselves may live.

Let me make a humble suggestion. If we are so proud of what we are doing to Davis, why not let this noble deed be performed in the open, as in the good old days? If justice is all that’s being done, then the more people to witness it the better, right? Don’t we want to bask in the admiration of the international community, whose leaders we proudly claim to be? Surely they can learn from our example. Once exposed to the awesome and solemn spectacle—the might of American justice, they may well feel inspired to rush off and adopt our ways themselves. At the very least, such a spectacle would be educational. Besides, as I have said earlier, we just like vengeance, or, as we like to call it, justice, in this country. Yes, sir, we’re great sticklers for doing the right thing here. A public execution might even improve tourism, and it would certainly be a fun show, and we could all look as solemn as we liked at the regrettable necessity that compels us to perform and/or witness this very sad deed.

How about it, then? Take this show on the road, but stop calling it justice. Call it what it is; a party—a lynching party.

Bring the kids.

911 - GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE PEACE WALK - "THESE ARE NOT OUR WARS! WE DEMAND PEACE!"

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http://www.baycitizen.org/blogs/citizen/911-terror-war-victims-join-hands-golden/

UN: Gaza Blockade is Collective Punishment

Tweet http://bikyamasr.com/42321/un-gaza-blockade-is-collective-punishment/

EXCERPT:

However, the UNHRC [UN Human Rights Council] panel said the four-year Israeli blockade deprived 1.6 million Palestinians living in the coastal enclave of their fundamental human rights.

In a joint statement, the experts said that “in pronouncing itself on the legality of the naval blockade, the Palmer Report does not recognize the naval blockade as an integral part of Israel’s closure policy toward Gaza which has a disproportionate impact on the human rights of civilians.”

A previous fact-finding mission appointed by the UNHRC to probe the Gaza Freedom Flotilla massacre also concluded in a report in September that the Israeli blockade violates international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross has also said the blockade violates the Geneva Conventions.

According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, the occupier is bound to “ensure the food and medical supplies of the population” as well as “agree to relief schemes on behalf of the… population” and maintain “public health and hygiene.”

Richard Falk, who is a UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and one of the five UNHCR experts, said the Palmer report’s conclusions were “aimed at political reconciliation between Israel and Turkey. It is unfortunate that in the report politics should trump the law.”

Another expert, Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said that about one-third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 percent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to Israeli blockade.

He added at least two-thirds of Gazan households lack secure access to food.

“People are forced to make unacceptable trade-offs, often having to choose between food or medicine or water for their families,” Schutter said.

The other three experts were the UN special rapporteurs on physical and mental health, extreme poverty and human rights, and access to water and sanitation.

The Israelis have confined 1.6 million people in a 360-square-kilometer coastal territory and besieged them from three sides.

[Libya] Legal Fig Leaf: 'Some Civilians Are More Equal than Others'

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Reminder: Vigil for a Free Palestine - End the Siege of Gaza- This Saturday at Westlake

Tweet Join us this Saturday to call for an end to the Israeli and Egyptian siege on Gaza. Come support the Palestinian people in their struggle for Justice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEIbUoSSiV4

Saturday Sept.17

12:00 - 2:00pm
Westlake Plaza, 4th & Pine downtown Seattle

====================================

Amin Odeh
VoicesofPalestine.org

"Stand up for what is right, even if you are standing alone"

"Protecting Americans? President Obama's Shameful Silence in the Face of Israel's Murder of a Young American" -- Dave Lindorff

Tweet http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/765
via Aletho News

Among the many shameful and cowardly things that President Barack Obama has and has not done, few can rival his complete unwillingness to express outrage at the Israeli military’s murder of a young American teen executed at close range during the Israeli Defense (sic) Force assault on the Turkish-flagged aid ship the Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea back on May 31, 2010.

Furkan Dogan, born in the US to Turkish parents, both legal residents of the U.S., and educated in the US, was a volunteer on the Mavi Marmara, the flag ship in a six boat aid flotilla that tried to sail with humanitarian aid from Turkey to the Israeli prison colony known as Gaza only to be stormed and captured and pirated to Israel.

When IDF forces boarded the ship from helicopters and speed boats they shot and killed nine people, one of them young Dogan.

When the assault occurred, there was no protest from the White House, even though an American citizen had been killed. (There was little reporting on the murder either in the U.S. corporate media, which consistently referred to him as Turkish-American--a designation usually reserved for immigrants--despite his being native born in the U.S.).

Nor was there any protest from the White House when the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine reported a month later that the autopsy conducted on Dogan showed that, like most of the other eight IDF victims, he had been shot in the back and in the back of the head, as well as in the face -- hardly the kind of killing that would have resulted had he and the others -- as the Israeli government claimed, been “attacking” the IDF boarders. (In fact a smuggled video [1] shows two IDF officers brutally kicking a person identified by the filmer as Dogan while he is lying on the deck of the ship, and then shooting him repeatedly with their weapons, which my colleague Linn Washington says appear to be pump-action Remington 870 shotguns -- a deadly gun popular around the world and among police for “riot control” actions. The weapon is part of the IDF arsenal.)

A UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who investigated the IDF assault on the Mavi Marmara concluded that Dogan, far from “assaulting” IDF forces, had been trying to video-tape their slaughter of others when he was attacked and slain.

As for President Obama, who is forever echoing his predecessor George W. Bush about his important job of “protecting Americans”?
Furkan Dogan, American teen murdered by Israeli troops, ignored by President Obama and the US government

Far from expressing outrage at the murder of a US youth, he and his State Department, as I disclosed in an article in ThisCantBeHappening! on Sept. 27, 2010, hid news about the forensic evidence of Dogan’s execution after it was provided by Turkey, first to the U.S Embassy in Ankara, and then to the White House directly.

As I wrote at that tim [2]e:

Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, says it sent the autopsy report to the US via the US Embassy in Turkey, as soon as it was completed, assuming the US would want to prosecute Israel for his death. Instead, the Obama administration and the US Justice Department sat and continue to sit on the information, saying nothing. A request by ThisCantBeHappening for information from the Justice Department about the autopsy elicited only a brief “We have no comment for you,” from DOJ spokesman Dean Boyd.

Now the president has been roundly condemned for his callous disregard for the brutal slaughter of one of his country’s own young citizens by no less than the prime minister of Turkey, one of America’s NATO allies. Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan reported on September 10 that in a recent meeting with the U.S. president, he told Obama that Turkish medical examiners had determined that the nine victims had been hit by a total of 35 bullets, most fired at close range and -- as we know from the reports -- from the back. He later told reporters, “I asked President Obama whether the reason he showed no interest in one of his nationals being killed was because [the victim] was [ethnically] Turkish - he didn’t reply.”

No U.S. corporate media reporters have ventured to ask Obama about this shocking silence. Nor was Erdogan’s account mentioned in the mainstream media -- even in the New York Times, where on Sept. 12, reporter David D. Kirkpatrick actually wrote a report on Erdogan’s new assertiveness in which he mentioned the Turkish PM’s “faulting” of the U.S. for failing to demand an apology from Israel “for the killing of its citizens” in the May 31, 2010 raid.

Failing to mention at such a point that Erdogan had leveled an even more explosive charge directly against the president himself is simply journalist malpractice on Kirkpatrick’s and the Times’ part. (Compare the Times and other US media outlets' coverage of the plight of two captured U.S. hikers in Iranian captivity, who have not been killed or even treated badly by U.S. prison standards, to the non-coverrage of Dogan's murder.)

Where does the account of Erdogan’s comment to President Obama appear? In the Jewish Daily Forward [3], a publication printed in New York City, which had an article titled “Rift Between Israel and Turkey Puts White House on the Spot.”

Of course, this would not be the first time that a U.S. president had failed to condemn a brutal murder of an American by Israel. President Johnson famously covered up Israel’s monstrous attack on the U.S. Navy spy ship Liberty during the 1967 Six-Day War--an unprovoked attack on a vessel of its key ally, which killed 34 U.S. sailors and injured another 170.

But this murder of Dogan, while minor in size compared to the attack on the Liberty, is in another way perhaps worse, as it was an attack on a peaceful ship in international waters and involves the murder of an unarmed young man who was doing nothing but trying to document an ongoing atrocity.

For President Obama to maintain his silence in this case is not just a shameful act -- it is a message to the rest of the world that where Middle East issues are concerned, he and the rest of the U.S. government are completely in the control of the right-wing Israeli government and of its zionist backers in the U.S., even to the point of being willing to alienate the entire 75 million people of Turkey.

The president’s shame is only matched by the equally shameful behavior of the U.S. corporate media, which have likewise blacked out this Israeli atrocity against an innocent young American.

Unending “9/11s”: “A Sad Kind of Freedom.” -- Felicity Arbuthnot

Tweet http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26478

EXCERPT:

Tripoli, of course was the site of the vast US Air Force base, appropriated in 1943, when Libya was ruled by the British backed King Idris. The then US Ambassador to Libya had called it: “A little America on the sparkling shores of the shores of the Mediterranean.”

The base, renamed “Wheelus”, remained American until Quaddafi overthrew Idris’s regime in 1969 and closed all foreign bases.

The base became Tripoli international Airport, now bombed.The liberators will surely award themselves the rebuilding contracts and planning for the re-opening of the base is, equally surely, underway.

The US had, of course, under the project of AFRICOM, offered African governments money to “host” American bases. Quaddafi, reportedly, offered them twice as much not to, resulting in a formal rejection of AFRICOM by the African Union, in 2008.

It was a prescient Tripoli taxi driver, who told the LA Times: “I have a fear that one day we will be like Iraq, wishing for the days of Muammar Quaddafi.”

Afghanistan, bombed and invaded less than a month after 9/11 to free it from a “repressive” and “tyrannical” regime, now has 400 US and “coalition” bases. (vii) Iraq, also freed from the “Butcher of Baghdad” by US-led largesse, based on a pack of lies about as ridiculous as the pack of “Most Wanted” playing cards, now has 14 city sized bases and a list of others, near inexhaustible. (viii) The “coalition” are there to stay.

In an interview this week, “Middle East Peace Envoy”, former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, still not in the International Criminal Court in the Hague, in spite of the best efforts of some towering legal minds, made it clear that Syria and Iran were next, firmly in US/UK sights.

General Wesley Clarke, of course, told “Democracy Now” (2nd March 2007) that in 2001, after 9/11, he was told by a Pentagon official that the US planned to attack seven countries in five years. They were: “Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran.” Bombing Afghanistan was already underway.(iv)

And the contractors are already queuing to re-arm that which they sold Libya, now destroyed, and to rebuild. Britain, now under Prime Minister “this will be a Libyan led transformation, we have learned from Iraq” Cameron. “Libya – The Future” is a not to be missed Conference, to be held in London, 26th and 27th September:

“The race is on for countries and businesses to create strategic alliances with the Libyan National Transitional Council regime. Government body, UK Trade and Investment, plans an invitation only Conference, Tuesday 27th September.

“You really need to be at ‘Libya – The Future’, at the prestigious QE11 Conference Centre, in the heart of Westminster.” At up to £3,000 a delegate. (x)

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, Abdul Hakim Belhadji, allegedly formerly on US and UK terrorist lists, moved to Tripoli to be Libya’s new leader, backed by the same US and UK. This as his “rebel forces” are reported to have entirely ethnically cleansed, Tawarga, a town of 10,000 people, which now lies entirely empty. (xi)

After 9/11: “The US enjoyed an outpouring of global sympathy. Within a couple of years, that sympathy had been squandered”, wrote Rupert Cornwell, in the Independent this week.

A friend who has spent every waking hour since the Iraq invasion of 2003, trying to put back the lives of Iraqi refugees who fled the invasion, perhaps said it all for invasions since, and planned:

“Dear USA, Your 9/11 is our 24/7.”

Please Call Regarding Leonard's Placement in Solitary! He Is 67 Today!

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Calls are being heard at Judiciary Committee. Please call them and ask them to investigate Leonard's placement in solitary and question why he cannot be transferred to a prison near his family. Video above by one of his former guards explains much.

35 years on trumped up evidence! Phone: 202-224-7703

"Lakota Grandmother Arrested at White House" -- Censored News

Tweet http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2011/09/lakota-grandmother-activist-arrested-at.html

EXCERPT:

WASHINGTON -- Debra White Plume, activist and grandmother, of Owe Aku, Bring Back the Way, was arrested at the White House protesting the tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline headed for Indian country between Canada and Texas, including the massive Ogallala aquifer.

White Plume, Lakota grassroots leader, with Owe Aku, an Oglala Lakota organization in South Dakota working on revitalization of Lakota culture and on 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty rights.

“This is an issue of the full recognition of our right to say no, as sovereign independent indigenous nations. The colonial US government doesn’t have our best interest in mind, nor the rights of Mother Earth. Our Lakota people oppose this pipeline because of the potential contamination of the surface water and of the Oglala aquifer. We have thousands of ancient and historical cultural resources that would be destroyed across our treaty lands," White Plume said.

“The traditional government of the Great Sioux Nation, as well as the elected leadership have all taken official action to oppose the tar sands oil and the pipeline and have communicated this to the U.S. government. The Native people of the land have not been consulted and we have not given our consent for this pipeline. The right to free prior and informed consent as articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as well as the rights affirmed in treaties with the US government and Native Nations are continually being violated. It’s my responsibility as a mother and grandmother to stand with Mother Earth against male dominated corporate greed. Where will President Obama stand?”

The highly corrosive oil is an environmental disaster in the making. Protesters were arrested for two week, totaling 1,252 people arrested, to send a message to President Obama to halt the tar sands pipeline.

The tar sands mining is already destroying First Nation homelands in Alberta, Canada.

Egyptian Protesters Storm Israeli Embassy in Cairo & Take Down Flag -- Ahram Online

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http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/20791.aspx

Protesters have managed to scale the 15 story apartment building which houses the Israeli embassy for a second time in a month and remove the Israeli flag.

The four protesters climbed the building, some struggling along the way. One of the daring four managed to reach the flag and rip it, pole and all, from its base. The crowd below erupted with joy.

The thousands of protesters gathered in front of the embassy have made no indication that they are leaving. They have stated that they will not leave until the Israeli ambassador is expelled, pointing to recent diplomatic sanctions by Turkey against Israel. In the meantime, protesters continue to proceed towards the embassy from Tahrir.

At 5:00pm, thousands of protesters converged in Giza, Cairo in front of the embassy. Many had marched from Tahrir Square. They immediately set upon tearing down the recently erected barrier which security forces put in place to protect the embassy. With hammers, crow bars and bare hands, the protesters began breaking the wall bit by bit until hours later it remained in ruins.

A heated confrontation between protesters and CSF troops followed shortly after, but soon died down. The CSF troops have completely evacuated the area as protesters completely block off University Bridge from all traffic.

Ahead of the day’s protest, the military council had published a statement warning against any excesses on the part of protesters. Thus far, the ruling military council have not offered up any responses to the day’s tense and agitated events.

Nice Juxtaposition: Seattle times Article About Workers Being Squeezed with Pic of Worker Being Squeezed to the Left

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Cartoon Du Jour - By Khalil

Tweet http://www.bendib.com/newones/2011/August/small/8-10-If-You-Have-to-Ask.jpg?utm_source=Bendib+Cartoon+-+Weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Bendib+Cartoon+-+Weekly

"Indefinite Solitary Confinement Persists in California Prisons" -- Jack Dolan, LA Times

Tweet http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-solitary-confinement-20110906,0,5130414,full.story

EXCERPT (via Prisonmovement Blog):

Reporting from Sacramento—

U.S. prisons typically reserve solitary confinement for inmates who commit serious offenses behind bars. In California, however, suspected gang members — even those with clean prison records — can be held in isolation indefinitely with no legal recourse.

Indeed, hundreds have been kept for more than a decade in 8-by-10-foot cells, with virtually no human contact for nearly 23 hours per day. Dozens have spent more than two decades in solitary, according to state figures.

It's a harsh fate even by prison standards: Under current policy, an inmate who kills a guard faces a maximum of five years of isolation.

Long abandoned by many states, the practice of indefinite solitary confinement persists in California as a last resort for prison officials struggling to thwart gang activity and extract information from the most hardened gang members.

The policy attracted international attention earlier this summer, when thousands of protesting California inmates joined a three-week hunger strike by prisoners at the state's maximum-security lockup at Pelican Bay.

Administrators say the violent gang culture is so entrenched in state prisons that isolation is the only way to keep leaders from ordering killings, rapes and assaults on staff and other inmates.

But critics say the unending confinement amounts to torture.

Isolated inmates frequently descend into "hopelessness, desperation and thoughts of suicide," said Craig Haney, a psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz, who has studied men held alone in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay. Many become paranoid, while others lose the ability to interact in social situations without severe anxiety.

"It's worse than prisoners in any civilized nation anywhere else in the world are treated," Haney told lawmakers during an emotional four-hour hearing in Sacramento, where hundreds of inmate advocates and family members packed the gallery to protest the isolation policy.

Indigenous US Activist Peltier Wins Rights Prize

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MONTEVIDEO — Leonard Peltier, an indigenous rights activist jailed in the United States for decades, has received the first Mario Benedetti Foundation international human rights prize, the group said Monday.

The group called Peltier, a Native American activist convicted in 1977 for the murder of two US FBI agents, the longest serving political prisoner in the Americas. The case stemmed from a shootout at a reservation in the US state of South Dakota.

"Leonard Peltier, who on September 12, 2011 will turn 67, has spent more than half his life in prison. He is a symbol of resistance to repressive state policies by the United States, where there are people in jail for ethnic, racial, ideological and religious reasons," a foundation statement said.

Ricardo Elena, a member of the foundation's honorary board, said Peltier's case "is one that is repeated over and over: violation (of rights); persecution, eviction, invasion and expropriation of the indigenous people from the time it was 'discovered' until now.

"It did not just happen in the United States; it is happening in southern South America with the (indigenous) Mapuche people, and with indigenous people in North America," he stressed.

Peltier, whose family is indigenous Chippewa and Lakota, fled to Canada after the shooting and was later extradited. He was convicted in part based on the testimony of a woman, Myrtle Poor Bear, who claimed she was his girlfriend and witnessed the shootings. Poor Bear however admitted later she was pressured to make the testimony, but a judge blocked her testimony.

Elena took a swipe at the United States saying it "likes to think it is the seat of democracy, but it has political prisoners just like a dictatorship might have."

The Mario Benedetti Foundation was set up to support human rights and cultural causes in synch with the work of the Uruguayan writer who died in 2009.

Dr. Margaret Flowers on Importance of October 2011 Movement

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[Sept.6] Palestinian Gandhi Evening with Journalist Pam Bailey and Dr. Dorothy Naor

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When: September 6, 2011
7-9 pm

Where: Keystone Church
5019 Keystone Place N, Seattle, 98103

Hope you can join us for an enlightening evening with two knowledgeable speakers having first-hand information about conditions in Palestine and Israel, journalist Pam Bailey and Dr. Dorothy Naor.

Pam Bailey is working on a documentary, The Palestinian Gandhi Project, which you can sample here: http://vimeo.com/channels/palestiniangandhiproject#24959088 Pam will speak about her extensive work in Palestine initiated by two life-changing trips to to the area (with Global Exchange in 2007 and as an International Solidarity Movement volunteer in 2008). Pam joined Codepink: Women for Peace on its first delegation to Gaza for International Women's Day in 2009. Since then, she has returned to Gaza three times, for longer and longer stays. In addition to her own filming and writing, Pam reports for InterPress Service, Electronic Intifada and Truthout.org, as well as for progressive radio.

Joining Pam will be Dr. DorothyNaor, Israeli educator and activist with New Profile (a feminist organization working against Israeli militarism) and Boycott from Within (an Israeli organization that supports the Palestinian call for bds). Dr. Naor, who works tirelessly on these issues in Israel, will speak about the realities and costs of the Israeli occupation, both to Israelis and Palestinians.

Dr. Naor was also an invaluable member of the support team for Cindy and Craig Corrie during their recent case against the IDF in Israel for Rachel's killing.

**** This event is presented by Voices of Palestine.

======================================================

Amin Odeh
VoicesofPalestine.org

"Stand up for what is right, even if you are standing alone"

Israel Occupied Territory! Carlos Latuff

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Keiser Report: Cheap Slaves of Deflation (E178)

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In which Isa Blumi explains why we in the west need to embrace the Yemeni resistance!

Ode to Boycott

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"Libya - the Criminal Face of Imperialism" -- Editorial, The Herald (Harare)

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EXCERPT:

The pretense that this was a war to protect civilians has been exposed as a moral obscenity, with the death toll in Tripoli alone climbing into the thousands and NATO bombs and missiles continuing to fall in heavily populated areas.

One has to go back to the 1930s when, as today, world capitalism was gripped by a desperate economic crisis to find fitting parallels. Then, mankind was stunned by the savage aggression unleashed in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler's backing of the Sudeten Germans to achieve the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, and the dispatch of the German Condor Legion to bomb Spain on behalf of Franco's fascist insurgency.

At that time, these violent acts of aggression were seen as part of world capitalism's descent into barbarism. Today in Libya, similar acts are proclaimed to be a flowering of "humanitarianism" and "democracy."

During that period, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appealed to the democratic sensibilities of the American people-while no doubt positioning the US for the pursuit of its own imperialist aims-by demanding a "quarantine" of fascist aggression.

He declared in 1937, "Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.

Nations are fomenting and taking sides in civil warfare in nations that have never done them any harm. Nations claiming freedom for themselves deny it to others. Innocent peoples, innocent nations, are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy which is devoid of all sense of justice and humane consideration."

Those words from three quarters of a century ago read like an indictment of the Obama administration and the governments of Cameron, Sarkozy and Berlusconi.

The Nuremberg trials after the Second World War established aggressive war as the "supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

This conception was incorporated into the United Nations, which barred "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

Yet today within the political establishment there is virtually no criticism of the aggressive war carried out by the NATO allies. The scoundrels of the media have fully integrated themselves into the imperialist war machine, literally stepping over corpses and concealing the camera-shy Western dogs of war to better fashion their propaganda about "revolution" and "liberation" in Libya.