Iraq veteran Kelly Dougherty speaks of the realities of life in Iraq and the growing movement against the occupation

At war

Kelly Dougherty has seen more of the world than the average 27-year-old American. A native of Cañon City, Dougherty joined the National Guard during her senior year at Cañon City High School. To her surprise, she was deployed overseas twice during her eight-year service period: first in 1999 to the Balkans, then in 2003 to Kuwait and, ultimately, to Iraq.

Now Dougherty is seeing her own country, crisscrossing the U.S. to attend rallies, give speeches and demonstrate against the war in Iraq and current American military policy.

Who's the Looter?

One of the icons of the catastrophe in New Orleans sadly became the looted television. In the days following the levee break, any expression of sympathy, any presumption of blame, was repeatedly coupled with the image of looted guns, rum, and TV's. (Editorial, September 1, 2005, Washington Post, "The Great Flood of '05.") Although we could have hoped that ample resources would have been put in place beforehand, they were not, and chaos inevitably followed. But who is the looter? The desperate, possibly deranged and traumatized miscreant who raided Wal-Mart, more likely for diapers and food than DVD s? Or the Congress and the Administration who knowingly turned a blind eye to what Homeland Security indicated to be one of the three great national security risks facing this country, the vulnerability of New Orleans to a Category 5 hurricane, (along with a terrorist attack, or an earthquake in San Francisco,); while blithely cutting funding to the Army Corps of Engineers for levee maintenance and wet land mitigation that had already been put in place?

But then, as Donald Rumsfeld said after the looting of Baghdad, "Bad things do happen in life, and people do loot." Is the tragedy of New Orleans yet another example of the price we have to pay for this Administration's idea of freedom? As with Baghdad one may well ask, who is the looter?


Red Captain

Physician who told Cheney to go Fuck Himself Lost his Home in Katrina, Detained, Cuffed by Cheney's M-16-carrying Goons

Dr. Ben Marble, a young emergency room physician who plays in alternative rock bands and does art on the side, needs our help. Since he was the one who told Dick Cheney to "go fuck yourself" on Sept. 8, that's the least we can do.

When he, like thousands of others, lost his home due to Hurricane Katrina last week, it was the single most traumatic week of his life. That led to his Sept. 8 confrontation with the man who best represents the worst of the most callous, heartless, shittiest administration in U.S. history.

Katrina; relocation or ethnic cleansing?

FEMA has been entirely reshaped under the Bush Administration. It's no longer designed to meet the needs of a natural disaster but, rather, to advance the political agenda of the current regime. This is clear by the way that FEMA employees did everything in their power to undermine relief operations for the people stranded by Hurricane Katrina. Their orders simply corresponded with Washington's intention to put the city under federal control and to forcefully-evacuate the victims to locations around the Southwest.

Most of us have already heard the damning accusations of Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parrish, LA, who said on Meet the Press that FEMA had cut off supplies of water, food and fuel to hurricane victims, as well as, cutting "all of our emergency communications lines."

Apartheid America and the Right of Return

To give you some idea of the climate in which it could be politically acceptable to use the people of New Orleans as hostages - pawns in some bigger game of corruption played by Bush and his cronies - read the cover story in this month's Harpers, "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid" by Jonathan Kozol. The significant progress made in race relations in the 1960's and 1970's has completely collapsed under the onslaught of Reagan-Bush politics, and that collapse is reflected in the fact that the United States now has two completely separate education systems, one well-funded one for whites, and one much less well-funded one for everybody else. The annual Human Development Report of the United Nations has just come out and states that parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, and America's black children are twice as likely as white children to die before their first birthday. The way that the people of New Orleans have been treated is just a reflection of how they are treated trying to survive in today's America. The only difference is that the obvious injustice of it all received a little publicity from the journalists down to cover what they thought was a telegenic storm.

End the kidnapping!

ONE week after the announcement of an open letter to the U.S. Attorney General demanding the immediate release of the five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters, given the annulment of the rigged trial that convicted them in Miami, more than 3,000 artists, writers, political and social leaders and Academics from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania have made that demand theirs.

Cuba’s damning exposé of attempts to definitively subjugate the UN

UNITED NATIONS, September 8.—Cuba exposed here today that the UN General Assembly’s attention has been diverted toward a supposed reform that, far from making it more democratic, seeks to subject it all the more to the interests of the powerful, PL reports.

The extraordinary session of the UN General Assembly of next week has been "completely diverted and its original intention hijacked," stated Ricardo Alarcón, president of the Cuban Parliament, in a speech read out by Ambassador Orlando Requeijo.

Alarcón should have attended the 2nd Parliamentary Presidents Conference that began yesterday at the UN headquarters, but was refused a visa by the U.S. authorities.

'Bush — the man with a snafu plan'

"A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished." -- Michael Rivero

It's a good thing President George Bush doesn't read newspapers or watch TV. If he did, even he could see that people from one end of this nation to the other are rapidly reaching zero tolerance with his bumbling ineptitude each time he is faced with a crisis. Those who watched in amazement as Bush sat paralyzed in a Florida elementary school on the morning of September 11, 2001 as planes were ramming into the World Trade Center and Pentagon -- who watched in dismay as he zigzagged across the country from one hidey hole to another throughout the day -- were not surprised that he dropped the ball when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast on August 29.

How United States Intervention Against Venezuela Works, part 2 of 3

Use of a Private U.S. Corporate Structure to Disguise a Government Program

C. Venezuela: Some Examples of the Current U.S. Intervention Against the Bolivarian Revolution

In Venezuela the administration of George W. Bush is intervening in the political process with a combination of activities very similar to those the U.S. carried out in Nicaragua in the 1980s, but without a terrorist war on the scale of the Contras, and—at least until mid-2005—without an economic embargo. These activities, with a 2005 budget approaching $10 million, masquerade as “civic education,” “support for the electoral process,” and “strengthening the democratic system.” In reality, all these programs, carried out almost silently, support the opposition against President Chávez and his coalition.

Power to the victims of New Orleans by Naomi Klein

With the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city. On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. "The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funnelled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans."

Turning tide -- the racism and cynicism of the Bush administration

In the wake of the catastrophic Katrina, United States President George W Bush seemed as keen to grab a place in history as Saddam Hussein. The deposed Iraqi leader devastated the natural habitat of the Marsh Arabs of the Tigris and Euphrates Delta. Bush was caught following in Saddam's footsteps: abandoning the African Americans of the Mississippi Delta. The contempt in which the Bush administration holds human life, at home and abroad, comes as no great surprise to America's long-suffering underdogs. Yesterday they were lynched, today they are washed away in cities that have metamorphosed into corpse-clogged cesspools. African Americans are angry. They don't want to be consigned to the same dread bin as the Marsh Arabs. They are speaking out, and are being heard.

Covering Katrina: Has a More Critical Press Corps Emerged?

"It's hard to decide which is more troubling: that it took the national press corps five years to summon up enough courage to report, without apology, that what the Bush administration says and does are often two different things, or that it took the sight of bodies floating facedown in the streets of New Orleans to trigger a change in the press's behavior."

Bolivia on the Train of Life. The Elections and the Social Movements Today

LA PAZ: Nearly three months have passed since the uprising that paralyzed Bolivia last May and June, that brought the government to its knees and forced an abrupt end to Carlos Mesa’s presidency. Four weeks of protests exploded after the approval of the new Hydrocarbons Law, which raised the payment of taxes and royalties from the foreign companies that extract gas in Bolivia. For the people of South America’s poorest nation, this law was unacceptable.

Within a few days, one of the biggest mobilizations in Bolivia’s recent history began to take shape. The coca growers held a week-long march from the town of Caracollo to La Paz (the seat of national government), and trucks loaded with miners began to arrive as well, at the same time that thousands of people from El Alto – La Paz’s radical neighbor – descended into this city in grand marches. The people of El Alto declared a general civic strike that began once again to slowly suffocate La Paz. Hundreds of kilometers away, rocks, barbed wire, and logs where laid down on the country’s few highways, blocking imports, exports, and all travel by land. At the vanguard of these massive demonstrations were the El Alto residents and the indigenous Aymara of the northern highlands, but hundreds of thousands of others – schoolteachers, coca growers, students, taxi drivers, workers, miners – joined in the struggle.

“Knowledge is Power” Science and technology for endogenous development

Modernity brought the idea that progress goes hand in hand with technological advances, closely linked with scientific activity. The search for knowledge is not a “neutral” activity. Far from the image of the platonic value of knowledge as something good or beautiful “per se”, contemporary history shows us knowledge as power and scientific activity and its connection with technological innovation and the economic and political models socially established at world level. Professors Marianela Lafuente and Carlos Genatios analyze the Venezuelan development program in a national scientific environment and the challenges it poses.

El duelo Washington-Teherán

Desde hace cincos años los neoconservadores vienen preparando la invasión de Irán. Los argumentos que usaron para justificar su propia ambición han sido desmentidos, uno tras otro. Pero se niegan a renunciar a sus amenazas. Mientras tanto, gracias al apoyo de sus electores, las fuerzas políticas iraníes han logrado evitar el enfrentamiento directo y hacer que cualquier operación militar resulte demasiado costosa para Washington, observa Thierry Meyssan.

Eight Big Lies About Katrina

Big Media has given ample space for administration officials and conservatives to spread falsehoods about relief efforts.

In the past week, Bush administration officials and conservative commentators have repeatedly used the national media to spread misinformation about the federal government's widely criticized response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

It's Accountability Time By Scott Ritter

If anything, Hurricane Katrina has stripped away the many layers of deceit, deception and misinformation that have been peddled to the American people by the White House, Congress and the mainstream media regarding the true state of our national security.

The power and fury of Hurricane Katrina has momentarily pushed to the side the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. However, to fully understand the ramifications of Hurricane Katrina, and the failings on the part of our government to protect us from harm, we must not forget that before Katrina there was an event we were told “forever changed the world we live in.”

Shameless

MILITARY RECRUITMENT - 9/7 JOB FAIR IN THE ASTRODOME
NO SCAVENGING THE GULF COAST CRISIS TO BOOST THE DEPLETED RANKS OF THE MILITARY!
Stop the military from preying upon the vulnerable! Come educate youth dislocated from their lives and communities – facing homelessness, joblessness and often hopelessness – about the false promises of recruiters!

Doling out food to the hungry crowds overflowing Houston’s Astrodome, the National Guard has engaged in ad hoc recruiting in recent days. Tomorrow, September 7, 2005, the U.S. military is conducting a Job Fair in the Astrodome in a blatant effort to exploit the despair of masses of Americans evacuated from the Gulf Coast.

Hiding Bodies Won't Hide the Truth

Cadavers have a way of raising questions.

When people see them, they wonder, how did they get dead?

When a lot of people see a lot of dead bodies, politicians begin thinking of damage control.

Echoing a Defense Department policy banning the photographing of flag-draped coffins of American troops, representatives from the much-maligned Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Tuesday that it didn't want journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims, because "the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect." An agency spokeswoman told Reuters, "We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media."

Whatever the objective, those pesky questions about accountability are not going away. And a full-scale political storm over the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina continued to rage around the White House this week, despite the best efforts of the president's supporters to deflect criticism by tagging it as partisan - even though many of the critics are themselves Republicans.

"There were two disasters last week: first, the natural disaster, and second, the man-made disaster, the disaster made by mistakes made by FEMA," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters this week.

And her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) raised the question, "How much time did the president spend dealing with this emerging crisis while he was on vacation?"

Both have demanded a wide-ranging investigation of the response to Katrina.

After Katrina Fiasco, Time for Bush to Go

The disastrous federal response to Katrina exposes a record of incompetence, misjudgment and ideological blinders that should lead to serious doubts that the Bush administration should be allowed to continue in office.

When taxpayers have raised, borrowed and spent $40 billion to $50 billion a year for the past four years for homeland security but the officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot find their own hands in broad daylight for four days while New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast swelter, drown and die, it is time for them to go.

When funding for water works and levees in the gulf region is repeatedly cut by an administration that seems determined to undermine the public responsibility for infrastructure in America, despite clear warnings that the infrastructure could not survive a major storm, it seems clear someone is playing politics with the public trust.

When rescue and medical squads are sitting in Manassas and elsewhere in northern Virginia and foreign assistance waits at airports because the government can't figure out how to insure the workers, how to use the assistance or which jurisdiction should be in charge, it is time for the administration to leave town.

When President Bush stays on vacation and attends social functions for two days in the face of disaster before finally understanding that people are starving, crying out and dying, it is time for him to go.

Lessons From Hell By: John Chuckman

Amid death and destruction, Bush not as Nero, but as Caligula's Horse Incitatus

If he is alive, Osama bin Laden surely is enjoying some hearty laughter. Nothing he could imagine, short of the virtually-impossible task of obtaining a tactical nuclear weapon and detonating it in an American city, compares to the damage just inflicted upon the United States by its own President. Ten thousand dead is the estimate of New Orleans' mayor. A morticians' emergency measures organization is ready for forty thousand corpses. We won't know for weeks, maybe months, as attics, basements, sewers, canals, and dumpsters are searched. The economic damage is nothing less than colossal.

When Maxims Mislead

NEW YORK, MADRID, LONDON: TERRORISM STRIKES ANEW.”

Versions of this headline adorned many of the world’s newspapers on July 8, the day after the explosions in London. They didn’t mention either Afghanistan or Iraq. Weren’t—aren’t—the bombings there also terrorist attacks, which in the case of Iraq occur daily? Isn’t it always, or almost always, the working class that suffers casualties in these attacks and in war? Don’t they deserve the same respect and the same compassion as the victims of any expression of disdain for human life?

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence of the United States affirmed that all men are created equal. Then a few years later the first Constitution refined this notion, establishing that for the purposes of the census, each black would be counted as three-fifths of a person. What fraction of a person are Iraqis counted as today?

Some people are more equal than others? So they say

New Orleans and Fallujah have a lot in common

I think that New Orleans and Fallujah have a lot in common. They are both cities that have been raped by the American neo-con establishment with the help of our national guards and American military. Fallujah was bombed mercilessly, even though there were no known "terrorists" there; there were people who lived there who fought back against the illegal American attack on their city. But even the U.S. commanders admitted publicly that even if Al Zarqawi was there--he would have been gone before the American rape and pillaging of that city.

In New Orleans, people who want to stay and live off of canned food and bottled water are being forcefully evacuated to who knows where and with what possible future! Why is this being done, other than it having parallels to the Japanese during WWII as well, forcefully taking people from their homes in order to take over a city and a people's property and belongings. Our citizens have the right to stay where they are, just as they do in other situations, it's their right and their responsbility--and not the right of the national police force, the national guard or the New Orleans police to roust them out and pack them out of town. How would you like it if it was done to you.

Katrina + Oil = Profits for Our Kings

How are you feeling about your government’s response to Hurricane Katrina? The fact that the people who should have been there to help your desperate neighbors instead are off killing and being killed in Iraq? Along with all that equipment your taxes bought.

How do you feel about oil prices? The fact that Exxon Mobile Corp, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, reported a 32 % jump in profits during the second quarter of 2005, while the rest of us dug deep into our pockets to fill our tanks. And Royal Dutch Shell, with a 34% rise in profits? Or ConocoPhillips, with a 51% increase. All of these in just 3 months! Wouldn’t you like to have a shot at that kind of investment?

Howard Zinn, The Outer Limits of Empire

Tomdispatch: You and Anthony Arnove just came out with a new book, Voices of a People's History of the United States, featuring American voices of resistance from our earliest moments to late last night. Now, we have a striking new voice of resistance, Cindy Sheehan. I was wondering what you made of her?

Howard Zinn: Often a protest movement that's already underway -- and the present antiwar movement was underway even before the Iraq War began -- gets a special impetus, a special spark, from one person's act of defiance. I think of Rosa Parks and that one act of hers and what it meant.

Censored!

Project Censored presents the 10 biggest stories the mainstream media ignored over the past year.
Just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious British medical journal published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les Roberts, a widely respected researcher. Roberts concluded that close to 100,000 people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Most were noncombatant civilians. Many were children.

But that news didn't make the front pages of the major newspapers. It wasn't on the network news. So most voters knew little or nothing about the brutal civilian impact of President George W. Bush's war when they went to the polls.

That's just one of the big stories the mainstream news media ignored, blacked out, or underreported over the past year, according to Project Censored, a media watchdog group based at California's Sonoma State University.

UN Raises Alarm on Death Squads and Torture in Iraq

Baghdad - The United Nations raised the alarm on Thursday about mounting violence in Iraq blamed on pro-government militias and urged the authorities to look into reports of systematic torture in police stations.

In a bi-monthly human rights report, released on a day when 14 more victims of "extrajudicial executions" were found near Baghdad, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq also said "mass arrests" by US and Iraqi forces, and long detentions without charge, could damage support for the new political system.

"Corpses appear regularly in and around Baghdad and other areas. Most bear signs of torture and appear to be victims of extrajudicial executions," it said, noting incidents reported after arrests by "forces linked to the Ministry of Interior".

"Serious allegations of extra-judicial executions ... underline a deterioration in the situation of law and order."

Let the Dead Teach the Living

They have turned a gigantic warehouse into a makeshift morgue in the Louisiana town of St. Gabriel. Doctors and forensic specialists wait there for the bodies to come in, bodies with no identification, bodies that have spent days submerged in water, bodies gnawed by dogs and rats and 'gators. The doctors have posted a hand-lettered sign on the wall: "Mortui Vivis Praecipant." It means, "Let the dead teach the living."

What Kind of Extremist Will You Be?

Early morning, April 4, a shot rings out in the Memphis sky,
Free at last, they asked for your life,
But they could not take your pride.
In the name of love, one more in the name of love.
-- U2: Pride (In the name of love)

Most everyone who is reading this knows what happened to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Some of you may even know what happened to my son, Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan on April 4, 2004. If you don't know, Dr. King and Casey were murdered by the same malevolent entities: people and ideologies that say we have to be mortally afraid of the "ism" du jour and we, as Americans who have the "moral high-ground" in the world, can send our innocent children to invade innocent countries and kill innocent people to fight the "ists" that go with the "isms." In Vietnam we were fighting the evil Communists, and in Iraq we are fighting the evil terrorists. Our war against Communism out-stayed its welcome in the 1980s and the military industrial war complex was running out of excuses to build bombs, tanks, bullets, ships, submarines, and soldiers; so in 2001, our leaders who serve the war machine had to switch our enemy of the state to terrorism.

El 11º Grito de los Excluidos se escuchó por todo el país

Por el fin de la corrupción, por democracia directa, por la ética en la política y por el fin de la exclusión social, el eco del 11º Grito de los Excluidos/as se escuchó por todo el país. Con el lema “Brasil, en nuestras manos el cambio”, miles de personas -desempleados, jóvenes, niños/as de la calle, migrantes, campesinos, indios, jubilados, trabajadores de la economía informal, etc.- ocuparon calles y plazas de casi todas las capitales y varias ciudades del país. El Grito era por un nuevo modelo económico que cree empleos, distribuya la renta y que privilegie las inversiones públicas en las áreas sociales; por un programa emergente de superación de la miseria y de la pobreza; por el combate a la desigualdad social; por una reforma política profunda y radical que devuelva al pueblo el derecho a decidir y, también, por una soberanía nacional que garantice los intereses del pueblo brasileño sobre nuestra economía, territorio, riquezas y biodiversidad.

UC Regents lose control of nuclear weapons program. Five admirals, Carlyle Group and Rand take over

“I think some of these folks would put nuclear tips on ice cream cones if they could.” - U.S. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., on efforts by Bush administration officials to repeal a research ban on low-yield nuclear weapons, quoted in Global Security Newswire May 19, 2003

UC and nuclear weapons: the kiss of death

The top-secret Manhattan Project was laid out by Robert Oppenheimer the night Ernest Lawrence took him to the Bohemian Club during World War II. It was a part of California’s brutal rise to economic and political power described in “Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin” by Gray Brechin.

Michael Moores Office Has Moved

RESPONSE TO MY LETTER
The response to today's letter has been overwhelmingly generous. Thank you, all of you, who have contributed to Camp Casey-Covington in Covington, Louisiana. Over 200,000 dollars was donated in the first few hours and the mail indicates that thousands of you are shipping the much-needed emergency items to our relief center on the shores of Lake Ponchatrain.

Republicans Blaming Hurricane Victims

In a effort to shield the Bush Administration from justified and severe criticism concerning the failures of the federal government concerning the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Republican spin machine has gone into full spin mode blaming local government, state government and the poor citizens of the Gulf Coast.

a key aim of the Bush administration's takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access

At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it's pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration's takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.

First, there were the FEMA orders barring members of the press from photographing anything to do with the recovery of the bodies of the dead.

The Demise of Compassionate Conservatism. Bush finds himself up a creek without a political philosophy.

We Have a Loser: Earlier this week, neo-con Bill Kristol told the Washington Post that almost every Republican he had spoken to was disappointed in Bush's performance. By evoking broad disdain for the administration's response from Republicans and Democrats alike, Bush has finally kept his promise to be a uniter, not a divider.

Usually, the blame game is a loser for both parties. However, when Republicans and Democrats can make common cause against a common enemy, like the federal government or hapless FEMA Director Michael Brown, there is more than enough blame game to go around.

The New Orleans Population has the Right of Return

The people of New Orleans have a right to return. It is not too early to say so. In fact, it is imperative that we demand the Right of Return now, before the circumstances of the displacement of this population create facts on the ground that cannot be reversed. We have seen, elsewhere in the world, how those who have been displaced are effectively shut out from returning to their origins, and how quickly the public says, well, that’s just water under the bridge – or over the levee. Others, newcomers, will benefit from the tragedy of the previous population’s displacement. This cannot be allowed to occur in New Orleans.

Not only does the Black two-thirds of the city have the right to return, but the federal government has an obligation to direct every resource to making it possible and practical for them to return, and to live productive lives in the city from which they were driven.

FEMA and Katrina: REX-84 Revisited

If you believe the corporate media, FEMA is simply a bungling and inept emergency management agency and its director, Michael Brown, according to the Washington Post, is simply an "accidental director" and "the failed head of an Arabian horse sporting group who was plucked from obscurity to become President Bush's point man for the worst natural disaster in U.S. history" and, as the Boston Globe notes, "got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.... Brown -- formerly an estates and family lawyer -- this week has made several shocking public admissions, including interviews where he suggested FEMA was unaware of the misery and desperation of refugees stranded at the New Orleans convention center." In short, the corporate media would have us believe Brown is a clueless lawyer and former horse trader and FEMA an unresponsive federal bureaucratic leviathan wrapped up in red tape. But this does not explain the following:

FEMA refused evacuation help from Amtrak; it turned away experienced fire fighters and first responders; it turned back Wal-Mart supply trucks; refused to allow the Red Cross to deliver food; blocked a 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid; turned away generators and other equipment (see this page with links to news stories). In other words, FEMA went out of its way to deny aid and allow people to die from dehydration, starvation, and lack of medicine and medical help. In addition to denying aid, and thus killing an as of yet (and possibly forever) unknown number of people, FEMA is attempting to control media access to the worst natural disaster in American history (see Journalist Groups Protest FEMA Ban on Photos of Dead). Moreover, journalists and photographers have been assaulted by troops and had their notebooks and cameras confiscated (see The Eye of the Hurricane by Matthias Gebauer).

"Go Fuck Yourself, Mr. Cheney!" - LIVE on CNN

I'm not kidding you. In Mississippi, during a press conference, after telling the press that what needs to be done, gets done. A resident walked up to the gaggle and said this:


"Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney!! Go fuck yourself!!!
Cheney looked pissed. Really pissed.

A reporter then asked him, "Do you get that a lot, Mr. Cheney?"

He replied, "That's the first time I've heard it. Must be a friend of John er.. uh.. never mind."

It sounded as though he was pushed away (probably by the secret service). CNN would not show this guy.

--------------

Is this a sign? Are we starting to hear the people revolt? I am thinking about this spontaneous event and I'm thinking that this moment should be repeated many, many times!!!

Wayne Madsen Report

September 8, 2005 -- Some evacuees are being treated as "internees" by FEMA. Reports continue to come into WMR that evacuees from New Orleans and Acadiana who have been scattered across the United States are being treated as "internees" and not dislocated American citizens from a catastrophe. Some FEMA facilities are preventing these internees from leaving on their own. Reports of mandatory registration and the issuing of FEMA ID cards suggest that FEMA, an agency that is rife with right-wing security goons and severely lacking in humanitarian workers, has other motives in treating poor and destitute American citizens as prisoners in their own country.

Meanwhile, WMR is receiving reports that mercenary private military contractors (PMCs) are now operating in the New Orleans metropolitan area. These may include foreign nationals with questionable human rights records in their native South Africa, Israel, Colombia, El Salvador, Britain, and Australia. PMCs have been extremely active in occupied Iraq, especially under the aegis of massive Pentagon omnibus contracts awarded to Halliburton and its Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary. Joseph Allbaugh, the former FEMA director under Bush and current FEMA director Michael "Brownie" Brown's college roommate, is currently a registered lobbyist for disaster relief business for Kellogg Brown & Root. Allbaugh's lobbying firm is called the Allbaugh Group. Halliburton has recently been awarded lucrative contracts to repair U.S. Naval bases damaged by Katrina.

The presence of PMCs is worrisome. There are unconfirmed reports of mercenaries shooting residents of New Orleans and that mercenaries are involved in burning the bodies of victims in makeshift crematoria set up throughout the city. The reported burning of bodies could be an attempt by the White House to suppress the total death count to an "acceptable," "manageable," and "spinnable" level.



FEMA is anything but a humanitarian rescue and recovery organization. It is once again a hotbed of security goons as it was under Reagan and GHW Bush. The past is prologue.

A little history on FEMA: " When Ronald Reagan took over the presidency in 1981 he named his old California National Guard chief, retired General Louis Giuffrida as his emergency czar. Giuffrida had a tainted image as California's National Guard commander. He drew up lists of 'militant negroes' who were to be rounded up in emergencies. He designed 'Operation Cable Splicer,' which kept track of political dissidents in California, especially anti-Vietnam War protestors. When Giuffrida took over at FEMA, he began to embark on similar projects. FEMA began to store some 12,000 names it had obtained from the FBI's domestic intelligence files. FBI Director William Webster was so outraged at this interference in FBI matters he forced FEMA to turn the list back to the FBI. FEMA's surveillance lists may have included at least 100,000 U.S.A. citizens that were assumed to be potential threats to security. These included the names of survivalists and tax protestors." -- Wayne Madsen, Handbook of Personal Data Protection, Stockton Press (NY) and Macmillan (London), 1992.

Rechaza Bush la oferta de ayuda cubana para víctimas del huracán

Washington, 7 de septiembre. El gobierno de George W. Bush rechazó hoy implícitamente el ofrecimiento de ayuda de Cuba para asistir a las víctimas del huracán Katrina, con el envío de más de mil 500 médicos y 34 toneladas de medicinas, al responder que su deseo es que el presidente Fidel Castro "ofrezca libertad a su pueblo".

Este fue el comentario del vocero de la Casa Blanca, Scott McClellan, quien añadió no obstante que es el Departamento de Estado el que está a cargo del manejo de las ofertas de ayuda internacional, que a la fecha suman un total de 94 países y de organizaciones diversas.

The Great New Orleans Land Grab

Los Angeles, Alta California - September 7, 2005 - (ACN) There were numerous incidents that occurred during and immediately after Katrina struck that point to the "unthinkable". It now appears that a sophisticated plan was implemented that utilized the "cover of a hurricane" to first destroy and than take over the City of New Orleans? As the world watched the events unfolding, one could not help think that something was terribly afoot concerning the rescue by FEMA of the city's poor and predominate Black population. It seems that a well laid out plan was put into effect to grab valuable real estate from well established but poverty stricken Black families of New Orleans? What is being implemented now is nothing less than a sophisticated scheme to purge and ethnically cleanse what Whites have termed "Black and 'welfare bloated' New Orleans".

Among the most telling anomalies pointing to something terribly afoot is the gun battle, killing 5, that occurred at the breeched levy between the New Orleans Police Department and, what have now been identified as US military agents. An Associated Press report, which has now disappeared, stated that at least five USA Defense Department personnel where shot dead by New Orleans police officers in the proximity of the breeched levy. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said later that those killed were "federal contractors" on their way to "repair" a canal. The "contractors" were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to "fix" the 17th Street Canal, according to the Army Corps of Engineers spokesman. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans later reported that his policemen had shot at eight suspicious people near the breeched levy, killing five or six.

Bush accepts aid from Mexico, silent on Venezuela but rejects help from Cuba

Los Angeles, Alta California - September 8, 2005 - (ACN) For the first time since 1846, the Mexican Army will be operating in Aztlan territory. A 35 vehicle Mexican Army convoy carrying water treatment plants, mobile kitchens and food supplies for the victims of Katrina is presently rumbling north to Houston, Tejas. The convoy is due to cross into Laredo, Tejas, early today, said a spokesman for President Vicente Fox.

Professor Javier Oliva, a political scientist at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) said that the convoy has "a very high symbolic content". He added, "This is a very sensitive subject, for historic and political reasons." The army trucks will also include 195 unarmed Mexican soldiers, officers and specialists, who will provide water and hot meals for the Black victims that were evacuated from the New Orleans area.

The convoy includes two mobile kitchens that can feed 7,000 people a day, three flatbed trucks carrying mobile water treatment plants and 15 trailers of bottled water, blankets and medicine. It also includes military engineers, doctors and nurses.

Mexico has also sent a Mexican navy ship to the Mississippi coast with rescue vehicles and helicopters. The ship "Papaloapan" left the Mexican port of Tampico on Monday and will be docking in the Mississippi River near Biloxi, Mississippi. Mexico has sent disaster relief aid to other Latin American countries, but this is the first time it has done so to the USA.

In 1846, Mexican troops advanced north of the Rio Grande in Tejas, a rebel state that had joined the United States. Mexico did not then recognize the Rio Grande as the U.S. border. Soon after the Mexican-American War began and this led to the theft of half of Mexico's territory in 1848

De víctimas a bandidos: los medios de comunicación y Nueva Orleáns

Durante breves horas, pero de forma espectacular, los fracasos políticos que convirtieron a Nueva Orleáns y a otras muchas ciudades y pueblos del Golfo de México en una catástrofe humana hicieron añicos los lazos de amistad que existían entre los medios de comunicación y el gobierno del país. Periodistas críticos describieron el fiasco del sistema de seguridad nacional para evacuar a ciudadanos pobres y la ausencia de alimentos básicos y agua para las víctimas. Los medios compararon al presidente Bush (de fiesta con sus amigos republicanos en California), al vicepresidente Chaney (jugando al golf), a la secretaria de estado Rice (de compras en Manhattan) y al jefe de la seguridad nacional Chertoff (asegurando que la ayuda gubernamental funcionaba a la perfección) con los gritos de desesperación y la penuria de decenas de miles de necesitados y hambrientos afroestadounidenses y blancos pobres, que apenas sobrevivían en un oscuro y nauseabundo centro de convenciones y en un estadio deportivo.

From victims to vandals: mass media and New Orleans - James Petras

Briefly, but dramatically, the political failures that turned New Orleans and many other Gulf cities and towns into a human catastrophe, shattered the bonds of conformity between the mass media and the government. Critical reporters described the failure of the government’s Homeland Security to evacuate vulnerable poor people and the absence of basic food and water for the victims. The media contrasted Bush partying with Republican cronies in California, Vice President Chaney on the golfing green, Secretary of State Rice shopping in Manhattan and Homeland Security boss Chertoff claiming that disaster relief was in excellent shape with the cries of desperation and destitution of tens of thousands of poverty-stricken and hungry African Americans and poor whites barely surviving in a dark, filthy convention center and sports arena.

New Orleans becomes a war zone. A dress rehearsal for martial law?

The disaster that struck New Orleans and the southern Gulf Coast has given rise to the largest military mobilization in modern history on US soil. Nearly 65,000 US military personnel are now deployed in disaster area, transforming the devastated port city into a war zone.

Squads of combat-equipped troops toting assault rifles and columns of humvees with gunners at the ready crisscross its flooded streets. Soldiers with bayonets mounted have begun house-to-house canvassing of the city to enforce the complete removal of its civilian population.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the disastrous delay in providing aid to the city’s beleaguered citizens was in large part a matter of waiting until this massive military force was ready to deploy.

Livro que revela a conexão terrorista do FBI de Miami

ENQUANTO Marwan Al´Shehhi e o chefe do comando de Al Qaeda, seu primo Mohammed Atta, com doze de seus cúmplices se infiltravam no sul da Flórida e começavam seu treinamento para o fatídico 11 de setembro, a alguns quilômetros daí, nos escritórios da Segunda Avenida, esquina da rua 163, em Miami, o Agente Especial Héctor Pesquera, se consagrava a maltratar cinco cubanos, encerrados em suas jaulas de castigo e a chantagear suas famílias.

O livro Miami-Washington: la fillière terroriste du FBI (Miami-Washington: a conexão terrorista do FBI), do jornalista canadense Jean-Guy Allard, explica como Pesquera e seus especialistas da contra-inteligência não deram a menor atenção às atividades dos terroristas que destruíram as Torres do World Trade Center para orientar todos seus esforços em satisfazer as exigências dos cabecilhas de grupos miamenses da extrema direita. O livro será lançado proximamente na capital francesa.

Petrocaribe: columna vertebral de la integración

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica.— Cuando este 6 de septiembre, en conmemoración del aniversario 190 de la Carta de Jamaica escrita por Simón Bolívar, se reunieron aquí jefes de Estado y Gobierno de la región del Caribe fundadores de Petrocaribe, se estaba haciendo práctica la integración de nuestros pueblos como única forma de ser más libres y más respetados.

Incógnitas sobre el once de septiembre

A las críticas que llueven sobre la Administración de George W. Bush por su imprevisión e inacción ante la amenaza real del huracán Katrina que asoló varios estados de la Unión, se suman revelaciones que crean verdaderas incógnitas al cumplirse cuatro años de los atentados contra las Torres Gemelas de Nueva York y el Pentágono, con el saldo de millares de víctimas.

UN hits back at US in report saying parts of America are as poor as Third World

Parts of the United States are as poor as the Third World, according to a shocking United Nations report on global inequality.

Claims that the New Orleans floods have laid bare a growing racial and economic divide in the US have, until now, been rejected by the American political establishment as emotional rhetoric. But yesterday's UN report provides statistical proof that for many - well beyond those affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - the great American Dream is an ongoing nightmare.

America’s Pretenses Washed Away

Everyone has been affected by the news of Hurricane Katrina and it’s victims who happen to be largely of color. The media has made no attempt to hide its racist practices by portraying the economically disenfranchised Black people that live there, whose lives have been devastated and destroyed, as thugs, criminals, and lawless rouges while the fairer “victims” of Katrina are portrayed as helpless and defenseless survivors trapped in dehumanizing conditions. Down in Louisiana, with its vicious racist policies that allowed 30 percent of New Orleans’ residents of color to live below an acceptable standard of living and educational opportunity, with its governor having her lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, calling her own devastated constituents hoodlums and lawbreakers, the receding waters have revealed a frightening reality in this so-called land of opportunity.

There’s no million-dollar prize at the end of this game of Survivor, there’s dehydration, starvation, and death for the losers and the winners get unimaginable nightmares that will haunt them for the rest of their natural lives.

Unbearable Crime on the Mississippi

When I woke up today, the only thought that came to mind was Reverend Jesse Jackson's indignant cry, "This is the bottom of the slave ship we are looking at."

I think Jesse actually put his finger on what happened to all of us this week. Those shots we've seen are, as he said, the bottom of the slave ships. I think that really goes to why all the rest of us watching are so traumatized. And I think it is necessary to repeat what he has said about how the people in this country have a high tolerance for viewing "black pain." Yes, while we are asking the unheard question as to why a third of New Orleans' population is poor and all black, everyone from the president on down is comfortable with these realities of our ongoing unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, neighborhood crime and despair.

Jesse's metaphor is also so apt in that you only had to listen to five minutes of reporting to know families had been separated in ways that could be irreparable – across states, even mothers from month-old babies...just evacuating babies without contact with the parents is such a nightmare, I hate even hearing about it. These are the people who were marginalized from the Internet as well; are they going to run to a computer site?

Blasphemy About New Orleans:A God With Whom I am Not Familiar

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:

You don't know me. But I know you. "It isn't God that kept me from turning around and beating your lily white privileged ass."

I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.

You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal – and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word – morally scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck. Then you attacked them – all of them, without distinction it seemed...

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury on New Orleans: "Americans Are Being Brainwashed"

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Regan administration.

Roberts followed up his commentary Impeach Bush Now, Before More Die with an interview on The Alex Jones show on Monday 5th September 2005. The former Assistant Secretary had noted of the New Orleans disaster "If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history." and went on to spell out how the disaster was left to happen. He succeeded these comments on Monday by laying out the facts again and asserting that the Federal government has been criminally negligent and should be held up to accountability.

Bush rejects Chávez aid

An offer of aid from the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, which included two mobile hospital units, 120 rescue and first aid experts and 50 tonnes of food, has been rejected, according to the civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson.
Mr Jackson said the offer from the Venezuelan leader, whom he recently met, included 10 water purification plants, 18 power generation plants and 20 tonnes of bottled water.

Estados Unidos frente a la realidad

Más allá del excepcional fenómeno climático y de la catástrofe humana que provocó, el huracán Katrina tendrá graves consecuencias políticas. Al poner bruscamente al desnudo la ausencia de Estado en Estados Unidos, Katrina reveló la verdadera política de la administración Bush: privatización del Estado, nepotismo, desvío de medios públicos para ponerlos al servicio de las compañías petroleras. Para Thierry Meyssan, el huracán, no la guerra, será el catalizador de las tensiones internas en Estados Unidos.

Martial Law, Curfews Make New Orleans a War Zone

Hurricane KatrinaNew Orleans is under military occupation as well as underwater. As in a war zone, military bases are being established in a city divided into sectors, while the navy has moved warships up the Mississippi for helicopter operations. Martial law and curfews are in force. One military commander says over 30,000 people remain. Confusion mounts about what will happen if residents ignore instructions to evacuate the area.

Project for the New American Colonies (A Neoconned American Revolution)-humor

It is the middle of the 18th Century. King George II has died and his mad grandson, George III ascends to the British throne. But wait! this is a quasi-historical political polemic! A palace coup takes place and, and... there's another, equally mad King George wearing the crown, and he's surrounded by neoconservative administrators, advisers and sycophants. They have a plan for imperial Great Britain to dominate the world and they have a Project for the New American Colonies. This, then, is history as it might have been.

Bush pretende investigar "errores" de su gobierno ante la catástrofe

Solecito Sólo encuentren "al idiota del nivel más alto", señala el presidente del condado Jefferson

Solecito Halliburton, dueña del contrato para evaluar los daños de Nueva Orleáns: Houston Chronicle

Barbara Bush: It's Good Enough for the Poor

Finally, we have discovered the roots of George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism."
On the heels of the president's "What, me worry?" response to the death, destruction and dislocation that followed upon Hurricane Katrina comes the news of his mother's Labor Day visit with hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston.

Commenting on the facilities that have been set up for the evacuees -- cots crammed side-by-side in a huge stadium where the lights never go out and the sound of sobbing children never completely ceases -- former First Lady Barbara Bush concluded that the poor people of New Orleans had lucked out.

The New IEDs

Irreversible Ecological Decline, Irreparable Economic Damage and Indigenous Emigration and Displacement

As the agonizing similarities between the Bush administration’s failures in both gulfs continue piling up here’s one more to consider: the devastating toll of IEDs.
In Iraq, the story is well-known: Rumsfeld et al’s failure to respond to early information about the insurgency’s use of IEDs, not to mention pleas for armored Humvees, has taken a huge toll on U.S. troops, potentially causing hundreds of preventable deaths and thousands of lost limbs.
In the U.S., the devastation caused by Katrina forces us to confront not only the domestic costs of a diversion of resources to imperialistic adventurism, but also a harbinger of the devastating consequences to come from Bush’s denial of global warming and oil-industry-friendly energy policies: Irreversible Ecological Decline.

Still Clueless in Crawford, Witless in Washington

You've probably heard of the ubiquitous, 'The guy' in the story, who on being asked, "Does the Sun rise in the East or the West?", replies, "Don't know...I'm still new to town".

I'm pleased to tell you the 'The guy' now has an identity.

He gave himself away (once more?) when he told Diane Sawyer, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

No Paper Trail Left Behind: The Theft of the 2004 Presidential Election

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (Through the Looking Glass)


In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1)

From Project Censored - The News That Didn't Make The News.

September 7, 2005 -- Right-wing media continues to refer to Americans as "refugees."

Bush on the Gulf Coast in his role as Slim Witless, the yodeling moron. At least Saddam Hussein didn't play the guitar while he killed his own people.

September 7, 2005 -- Right-wing media continues to refer to Americans as "refugees." The once respected United Press International (UPI), now owned by the loonie Moonie Unification Church of megalomaniac Korean "Reverend" and ex-convict Sun Myung Moon, continues to refer to Americans from New Orleans as "refugees." A Sep. 6 story stated, "troops scouring New Orleans for survivors and victims reported finding at least 40 mutilated bodies in the Convention Center refugee center." Webster's Dictionary's definition of a refugee: "one who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution." So, in other words Louisiana, "Welcome to America!"

Falluja and New Orleans: Hide the Dead

Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Falluja and New Orleans: Hide the Dead


From Reuters, it appears that FEMA is more concerned with public relations than the provision of disaster relief:
The U.S. government agency leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina said on Tuesday it does not want the news media to take photographs of the dead as they are recovered from the flooded New Orleans area.


The Bush administration also has prevented the news media from photographing flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, which has sparked criticism that the government is trying to block images that put the war in a bad light.


And, one is compelled to add, the news media was also prevented, to the extent it was inclined to escape its embedded escorts, from establishing the number of people killed during the attack upon Falluja last November. In the old South, African Americans were at least legally construed as 3/5 of a person. In New Orleans, FEMA is trying to render them invisible, as the US military does with civilian casualties in Iraq.

Fox's NY affiliate refuses Bush 'no clothes' ad

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A local affiliate of the Fox television network has rejected a campaign advertisement for a Democratic politician that lampoons President George W. Bush by superimposing his head on a naked torso.

The ad, produced by Brian Ellner, an openly gay candidate for Manhattan borough president, opens with a close-up of Bush's face and zooms out to show the torso from the hips up, with a voice-over saying, "New Yorkers know the emperor has no clothes."

Ellner also introduces his male partner during the 30-second commercial.

La intervención silenciosa de los EE.UU. contra la revolución bolivariana

Philip Agee
Rebelión
El gobierno de los EE.UU. está llevando a cabo un programa de operaciones a favor de la oposición política venezolana para remover del poder al Presidente Hugo Chávez Frías y a la coalición de partidos que lo apoya. El presupuesto para este programa, iniciado por la administración de Bill Clinton e intensificado bajo George W. Bush, ha subido de unos $2 millones en 2001 a $9 millones en 2005, y las actividades se disfrazan como “la promoción de la democracia,” “la resolución de conflictos,” y “el fortalecimiento de la vida cívica”. Consiste en proveer dinero, capacitación, consejo y dirección a una amplia red de partidos políticos, ONG, medios de comunicaciones, sindicatos y empresarios, todos determinados a terminar con el proceso revolucionario bolivariano. El programa tiene claros propósitos de corto, mediano y largo plazo, y se adapta fácilmente a los cambios en el proceso político venezolano en constante flujo.

How United States Intervention Against Venezuela Works By: Philip Agee

It is no secret that the government of the United States is carrying out a program of operations in favor of the Venezuelan political opposition to remove President Hugo Chávez Frías and the coalition of parties that supports him from power. The budget for this program, initiated by the administration of Bill Clinton and intensified under George W. Bush, has risen from some $2 million in 2001 to $9 million in 2005, and it disguises itself as activities to “promote democracy,” “resolve conflicts,” and “strengthen civic life.” It consists of providing money, training, counsel and direction to an extensive network of political parties, NGO’s, mass media, unions, and businessmen, all determined to end the bolivarian revolutionary process. The program has clear short, medium, and long-term goals, and adapts easily to changes in the fluid Venezuelan political process.

Telesur alcanza Europa, África y Estados Unidos

La Telesur, en tanto red latinoamericana, ya comienza a alcanzar parte de Europa, el norte de África, y hasta Estados Unidos, con sus 45 millones de latinos. La información es del responsable de la nueva Televisión del Sur en Brasil, Beto Almeida, en una entrevista para el periódico Hora do Povo.

The real costs of a culture of greed

WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.

Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.

Katrina y la Norteamérica oculta

"Pereyra, míreme a la cara./ ¿Por qué este castigo, Eulogia? ¿Por qué tanta crueldá?". (Roberto Fontanarosa)

El huracán Katrina ha revelado al mundo que la indolencia, la división de clases y el racismo siguen siendo parte implícita de la vida cotidiana de la única superpotencia del mundo, Norteamérica. Ha sucedido igual como en 1927 cuando la Gran Inundación de Missisippi azotó Nueva Orleans y fue cubierta por el agua. Los que tenían dinero abandonaron la ciudad con anticipación, mientras los desposeídos tuvieron que quedarse a merced de la naturaleza y recién, varios días después fueron trasladados a refugios miserables que carecían de toda infraestructura necesaria para una emergencia.

Las mentiras de Reporteros Sin Fronteras

La ONG francesa Reporteros Sin Fronteras, consagrada a la defensa de la libertad de la prensa, es hoy objeto de polémica. Para algunos, constituiría un vector eficaz de libertad en el mundo, para otros –entre los que nos encontramos– se ha convertido en correa de transmisión del Departamento de Estado y manipula una causa al servicio de la estrategia de Estados Unidos. Salim Lamrani, investigador de la universidad de la Sorbona, analiza detalladamente acusaciones y respuestas y devela el alcance de la superchería.

Brazil's problem is the neoliberal model

In recent weeks, a corruption scandal has engulfed the government of Luis Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva in Brazil, with demonstrations from both the Left and the Right against the president and the current regime.

Joao Pedro Stedile, who spoke in Vancouver in the fall of 2003, is an economist and a central leader of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the world’s largest and most dynamic social movements. On September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, the MST is organizing mass mobilizations as part of its efforts to put forward a popular political project in opposition to neo-liberalism.

The real heroes and sheroes of New Orleans

LARRY BRADSHAW and LORRIE BETH SLONSKY are emergency medical services (EMS) workers from San Francisco and contributors to Socialist Worker. They were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. They spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city. Here, they tell their story.

George W. Bush Investigates!

Rick Santorum says that hurricane victims who remained in their homes should be penalized. The Republicans are rushing to get the first of the relief dollars to... Mississippi, where Trent Lott's highly acclaimed front porch once existed. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Homeland Security are getting their major catastrophe information from newspaper headlines that don't exist other than in Karl Rove's imagination -- and making decisions (or not) based on those imaginary headlines.

And George W. Bush, the man responsible for appointing and/or supporting these criminally negligent excuses for "protectors of the homeland", is going to oversee an investigation into what went wrong.

No Direction Home

"How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home…."
-- Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"

Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past week -- the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease -- will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.

Where's Dick Cheney?

AS IF THE antebellum antics of Senator Trent Lott and President Bush were not enough, the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina can be measured even more profoundly by the disappearance of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Lott is the senator who romanticized himself right out of the Senate majority leadership by praising the late Senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for president on a segregationist platform. Lott was one of those people who lost his Gulf Coast home to Katrina. That brought Lott no closer to understanding the human misery in Katrina's wake.

While New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was pleading in expletives for help from the White House and predicting that thousands of lives would be washed away, Lott had the gall to say, ''I am pleased with the federal government response."

Bush launches inquiry and puts himself in charge of it

FRAUD AND COVERUP - WHAT ELSE COULD YOU EXPECT! President George Bush's political agenda - indeed his very standing as his country's leader - was on the line as Congress returned yesterday with anger and embarrassment at the botched response to Hurricane Katrina stretching across normal party divides on Capitol Hill.

United States warships turn towards Venezuela as US military takes control of Hurricane devastated regions

Russian journalist Sorcha Faal writes: Russian Military Analysts are reporting today that a 'significant' portion of the US Navy Armada that had been heading towards their country's devastated southern regions have turned towards South America.

Reports state a planned Invasion of Venezuela to overthrow its President and reassert 'control' over Venezuela's vast oil reserves.

The Venezuelan President having been notified of this most troubling development has ordered his military forces to be on top alert and has 'vowed' a 100-year war against the military leaders of the United States..

Cómo se gestó la no aceptada ayuda cubana

Cuba, la pequeña isla antillana, la rebelde, la sitiada, tal vez haya sido el primer país del mundo en ofrecer su ayuda generosa al gobierno de EEUU.

Tal vez sea el único país de la tierra que el mismo día de conocerse el saldo de muerte y destrucción dejado tras el paso del huracán Katrina, guardó un minuto solemne de silencio, un minuto de dolor, por los hombres, mujeres y niños norteamericanos que perdieron sus vidas. No lo hizo en cualquier lugar, sino desde su más alta instancia, el Parlamento Cubano, el Congreso de la República, la Asamblea Nacional del Poder Popular, reunida en esos días.

Haunted by Hesitation

Haunted by Hesitation

By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON

It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the destruction of New Orleans.
Let's play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those who lost their families.

Iran knocks Europe out

THE ROVING EYE
Iran knocks Europe out
By Pepe Escobar

TEHRAN - In the high-stakes nuclear poker game between Iran and the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), Tehran has decided to call the EU's bluff and turn the game around.

An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush

An Irate Soldier’s Open Letter Regarding George W. Bush

By Michelle J. d’Entremont
2LT, US Army Reserves Engineer Corps

09/05/05 "ICH" -- -- If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.

George Bush is going to go down in history as the President Who Destroyed America.

Oh sure, there were problems before he ever took office. Every nation has problems. But in the year 2000, the USA was at a fairly high point. The economy was growing. Science was moving forward. International relations were fairly good. The future looked bright. And then, an election was rigged, and a "President" who was never properly elected took office.

Bush and Third World America

Bush and Third World America

By Manuel Valenzuela

09/06/05 "ICH" -- -- The images coming out of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans in particular have been nothing short of unfathomable, nightmarish visions of anarchy and misery, a ghoulish reality haunting our minds and lives. For what we see on our television sets is a devastation of humanity never before seen or experienced or felt within American shores. It is a surreal and up close glimpse of natural and human made destruction reserved almost exclusively for those peoples living in the underdeveloped nations of the south, those far removed from our gluttonous and privileged lives.

What we see right before our eyes no Hollywood movie could ever reproduce and no bestselling author could ever conjure up because what is transmitted into our monitors is real and tangible and historical, a region inside America utterly devastated, its citizens’ lives made barren and impotent by a catastrophe the most creative and troubled minds could never conjure up.

After Katrina, a government adrift

After Katrina, a government adrift
Godfrey Hodgson
6 - 9 - 2005

The aftermath of Katrina reveals how sectarian conservative politics have brought disrepair and neglect to the heart of American politics, says Godfrey Hodgson – democratic government must be revived.

It is not just the levees of New Orleans that are weak. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush’s predicament reveals serious breaches in the way the American government works – weaknesses that result from the domination of sectarian conservative politics in the country’s administration and culture.

It would be nice to think that the conservative ascendancy is the democratic consequence of mass conversion of a majority of the American electorate to conservative shibboleths in law, economics, religion and foreign policy. It would be truer to say that it is the result of a quarter-century of political manipulation by a surprisingly small coterie of conservative activists.

A través del Golfo

A través del Golfo

Fernando Martínez Heredia


No voy a hablar del horror que se ha abatido sobre Luisiana y Mississippi: los datos e imágenes llenan los medios de comunicación. Tampoco hablaré de la falta asombrosa de previsión, de recursos, de defensa civil, de sensibilidad ante sus conciudadanos, de humanidad, que compromete a las instancias superiores del país, ni de la conducta del Presidente: eso lo están haciendo los norteamericanos, en medio de la ira y la vergüenza. Sólo quiero decir lo que siento, de este lado del Golfo que siempre las relacionó, acerca de La Habana y Nueva Orleans, de Cuba y Luisiana, hoy que reinan la muerte y la destrucción de aquel lado.

on Planet New Orleans

Tomgram: Bill McKibben on Planet New Orleans

Last week, I took a six-hour drive south to New York City on a day when New Orleans had just gone under water and the President was stumbling to address the nation. The headlines on the morning paper I tossed in the front seat next to me read: "New Orleans Is Inundated As 2 Levees Fail; Much of Gulf Coast Is Crippled; Toll Rises."

I began my day by pulling into a local gas station where I found myself paying $2.67 a gallon for regular unleaded -- in two pit stops that day, I would pour over fifty bucks into the tank of my recently purchased 2003 Subaru Outback. Regretting that I didn't have a Prius, I still felt like a low-level lottery winner, like the last customer to stumble upon a bargain that would never again exist. (Twenty-four hours later, my wife would report that the same station had the same gas for $2.93 -- up 22 cents and rising like mercury on a hot day.)

Political humor of the day - Bush to oversee probe into what went wrong

Well, that should take about as long as it takes for him to pass the first mirror. Although, even in the extraordinarily unlikely event that he were to conclude that he himself was to blame, I doubt he'd see the real problem, as described on a banner seen at a recent demonstration:BUSH is the symptom. CAPITALISM is the disease. REVOLUTION is the cure. Some may think there is another cure. But there can be no doubt about the disease.
Actually, to be more accurate, Bush isn't the symptom, he's the carrier, the annoying mosquito infecting his victims with the disease he carries within. The symptom, and the victim of that disease, is a flooded city filled with the dead and dying, and a country filled with the dispossessed.

Oh, and for a little additional bit of humor, the article above also informs us that Dick Cheney is going to appear in the "region" on Thursday, a mere ten days after the hurricane struck. There are some people who seriously think that Cheney is going to run for President in 2008. I think not.

Bush Brings the False Intelligence Game to South America

On August 23, the Rev. Pat Robertson called for the US government to suspend the Fifth Commandment and assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. While the Bush White House quickly distanced itself from the suggestion, the fact is that Robertson’s outburst builds on months of White House tale-spinning and conspiracy theories about South American politics.

From its highest levels the Bush administration has been trying to convince anyone who will listen that Chavez and Fidel Castro are trying to launch a Marxist rebellion right here in Bolivia.

After four years of largely ignoring Latin American politics the Bush administration wants back in the game and it is using the same card that it used to get us into Iraq, false intelligence.

The Clinton-Bush Hurricane Fund Public Relations Scam

Bill "Bubba" Clinton is one sick human specimen. "Our government failed those people [in New Orleans and the Katrina-stricken Gulf states] in the beginning, and I take it now there is no dispute about it," Clinton told CNN. "One hundred percent of the people recognize that -- that it was a failure."

Then Came the Humans - The Zapatistas Refine the Revolutionary Art of Listening

“He who proposes assumes responsibility.”
– Caravana Para Todos Todo (“Everything for Everyone”)
DOLORES HIDALGO, AUTONOMOUS MUNICIPALITY OF SAN MANUEL, CHIAPAS, MEXICO, SEPTEMBER 2005: Then came the humans.

This past weekend, for the first time in the twelve years since the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, in its Spanish initials), human beings without organizational affiliation were handed the microphone. It marks an evolution in Zapatista history. And it results to be a profoundly revolutionary act.

A Failure of Leadership : "Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"

THE BUSH ONE-FINGER SALUTE. Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president’s failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.

Katrina Bush

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT - KATRINA AND OCCUPATION

Filed under: General, Military, Race & Nation, Ecology & Env Justice, Energy War, The Chickenshit Press, Repression & Resistance, Class — Stan @ 9:58 pm
I haven’t been sure how to respond to the aftermath of Katrina, or its coincidence with the almost 1,000 Iraqis who were killed during a panic stampede when a bridge suffered a structural failure. I go back and forth, between abject killing rage and nearly despondent sadness.

What a Disaster