Human trafficking is torture w/out borders, w/out statute of limitations

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
When thinking how miserable our lives are, think of sex slaves, gang-raped children.

Comfort children
Two hundred thousand women, at least that number, in their childhood and youth were forced into sexual slavery during World War II. These women — girls as young as 10 and 15 — were abducted then gang raped daily.

The Japanese army kidnapped Yi Okseon and sent her to China to become a sex slave (a “comfort woman”), Radio Netherlands notes this week in its airing of “The State We’re In.” Yi Okseon was 15 years old. They subjected her to three years as a sex slave, sometimes requiring her to “service more than fifty Japanese soldiers” a day.

Japanese historian Hirofumi Hayashi uncovered in 2007 official documents confirming that the Japanese government was directly involved in forcing women across Asia into sexual slavery. Yi Okseon is now in her 80s and is still waiting for a full apology from the Japanese government.

Human trafficking museum “Journey” in The Hague October 14-24

A dramatic installation bringing together creativity and the art of survival to show what it means to be bought, sold and exploited, “Journey” demonstrates how one woman’s story can help us understand a subject that is as painful as it is incomprehensible.

Its most powerful and shocking container is ‘Bedroom’ depicting “the kind of dingy room in which trafficked women are forced to service up to 40 or 50 men a day. The filthy bed squeaks as if sex were taking place, the groans of a man are audible, and a pungent stench of vomit, urine, semen and sweat overpowers visitors.”

“Journey” is comprised of seven shipping containers that describe each stage of the trafficking victim’s experience.

Internationally acclaimed actor and human rights activist Emma Thompson, associated with the Helen Bamber Foundation, opened The Hague exhibition of “Journey” based on the story of Elena, a young woman of 18 who was trafficked from Moldova to England and forced into prostitution.

Human trafficking is torture, Thompson says, “and not enough people know about it. Not enough governments have enough information about the practice to be able to prosecute the perpetrators. It’s a huge and hidden area and all of us need to take action now.”

Eighty-five “comfort women” from the Second World War era are believed to be alive and waiting. Human Trafficking is a crime without borders, crime without statutes of limitations.


Sources and notes


Helen Bamber Foundation notes
Journey The Hague in support of the Helen Bamber Foundation aims to bring the reality of the sex trafficking industry to the forefront of social consciousness and empower people to take action.


Shackles bind perpetrators to victims, and victims to the punters [customers, patrons] who exploit them. The links extend to every level of society even to the organizations that care for the victims. They extend down the halls of governments that pledge to act and pass laws to stamp out trafficking. The links form an invisible chain that binds us all together. It is the chain of modern day slavery, http://www.helenbamber.org/AboutJourney.html


Journey is on display at Plein, The Hague, through October 24, 2010, The arrival of Journey in The Hague coincides with the ten-year anniversary of The Office of the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings.


Journey is a dramatic installation that brings together creativity and the art of survival to show what it means to be bought, sold and exploited. It demonstrates how one woman’s story can help us understand a subject that is as painful as it is incomprehensible.


Trafficking is a crime without borders. Trafficked people become illegal, stigmatized and invisible. Because of its status as a political, legal and human rights focused capital, The Hague is ideal for giving these issues a worldwide platform, http://www.helenbamber.org/Journey_Hague.html


The Helen Bamber Foundation is a UK-based human rights organization, formed in April 2005 to help rebuild lives and inspire a new self-esteem in survivors of gross human rights violations, http://www.helenbamber.org/OurPurpose.html


Radio Netherlands Worldwide
“Emma Thompson opens human trafficking exhibition in The Hague.” October 15, 2010, http://www.rnw.nl/english/video/emma-thompson-opens-human-trafficking-exhibition-hague


The Hague exhibition ‘Journey’ coincides with the 10th anniversary of the establishment of a Dutch National Rapporteur on the Trafficking of Human Beings and a debate in the Dutch parliament about the crime. It comes on the eve of the European Day against Human Trafficking.


The State We’re In — ‘For the record,’ October 16, 2010, http://www.rnw.nl/english/radioshow/record


Britannica note
The Republic of Moldova lying in the northeastern corner of the Balkan region is bordered by Ukraine on the north, east, and south and Romania on the west. England is bounded on the north by Scotland; on the west by the Irish Sea, Wales, and the Atlantic Ocean; on the south by the English Channel; and on the east by the North Sea.

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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY] Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]

No one feast while anyone hungers

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

For many people World Food Day “is another No Food Day,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Although the number of hungry people has fallen from last year’s historic high of more than 1 billion, there are still 925 million hungry people in the world.

“We are continually reminded,” he said, “that the world’s food systems are not working in ways that ensure food security for the most vulnerable members of our societies.” Millions in this year alone have been thrown into life-threatening hunger — by the earthquake in Haiti, drought in the Sahel, floods in Pakistan.

Twin food and financial crises continue to affect the world’s most vulnerable. “Food prices remain volatile and recently hit a two-year high.” The UN Secretary General was speaking in advance of the October 16, 2010, World Food Day.

When people are hungry, they cannot break the crippling chains of poverty, and are vulnerable to infectious diseases … Hungry children cannot grow, learn and develop.

“Let us unite against hunger and ensure food and nutrition security for all.”

World Food Day is commemorated every year on October 16, marking the 1945 founding date of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The agency’s 1billionhungry.org campaign encouraging governments to make eliminating hunger their top priority has surpassed 1 million signatures.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food says there is little to rejoice about on World Food Day and calls for a shift to low-carbon agriculture to ensure there is enough food for all, especially in the face of climate change.… “Current farming methods focus on the provision of chemical fertilizers and a greater mechanization of production.

“Such efforts are far distant from the professed commitment to fight climate change and to support small-scale, family agriculture [and are] a ‘recipe for disaster.’”


Sources
“UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s message to mark World Food Day, to be observed on October 16: ‘Calling for Comprehensive Approach to Ensuring Food Security,’ Secretary-General in World Food Day Message Urges Global Community to ‘Unite against Hunger,’” October 13, 2010, Department of Public Information News and Media Division New York, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2010/sgsm13180.doc.htm


“On World Food Day, UN calls for united front against hunger,” October 15, 2010, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36456&Cr=hung&Cr1=

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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY] Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]

Celebrating the harvest — with Sandburg

Thanksgiving begins in Canada
Compilation and editing by Carolyn Bennett

Days of thanksgiving in Canada originated in the colonial period, arising from European traditions of gratitude for safe journeys, peace, and bountiful harvests. The earliest celebrations were reportedly held in 1578 when Seaman Martin Frobisher held a ceremony in what is today Newfoundland to give thanks for a safe arrival in the New World. The Parliament in 1879 established a national Thanksgiving Day on November 6. The date varied over the years and since 1957, Thanksgiving Day has been celebrated in Canada on the second Monday of October [Britannica note].

Carl Sandburg’s poetic thoughts seem apt tribute to autumn, to those who sow and who bring the harvest, to Thanksgiving and to those who labored so that 33 Chilean miners trapped 65 days in the collapsed San José mine might soon be free. Because I like Carl Sandburg’s work.

(1)

Under the harvest moon—
When the soft silver

Drips shimmering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers

Under the summer roses —

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk

Of the wild red leaves,

Love, with little hands,

Comes and touches you

With a thousand memories,

And asks you

Beautiful, unanswerable questions

(2)

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of —

I heard it in the air of one night when I listened

To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry

in the darkness.

(3)

A lone gray bird,

Dim-dipping, far-flying,

Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults

Of night and the sea

And the stars and storms.

Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers,

Out into the gloom it swings and batters,

Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,

Out into the pit of a great black world,

Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown,

Love of mist and rapture of flight,

Glories of chance and hazards of death

On its eager and palpitant wings.

Out into the deep of the great dark world,

Beyond the long borders where foam and drift

Of the sundering waves are lost and gone

On the tides that plunge and rear and crumble.

(4)

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.

(5)

Stuff of the moon

Runs on the lapping sand

Out to the longest shadows.

Under the curving willows,

And round the creep of the wave line,

Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters

Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

(6)

I asked a gypsy pal

To imitate an old image

And speak old wisdom.

She drew in her chin,

Made her neck and head

The top piece of a Nile obelisk

     and said —

Snatch off the gag from thy mouth, child,

And be free to keep silence.

Tell no man anything for no man listens,

Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

Sources and notes


Martin Frobisher
English navigator and early explorer of Canada’s northeast coast, Martin Frobisher was born circa 1535, Yorkshire, England and died November 22, 1594, Plymouth, Devon. Frobisher went on voyages to the Guinea coast of Africa in 1553 and 1554, and during the 1560s preyed on French shipping in the English Channel under a ‘privateering’ license from the English crown; he was arrested several times on charges of piracy but never brought to trial.… Frobisher is credited with being one of the ablest seamen of his time but lacked the capacity for patient factual investigation as an explorer.

Newfoundland
This island named by 15th-century explorers the New Found Land lies diagonally to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It is separated from Labrador by the narrow Strait of Belle Isle and from Nova Scotia, to the southwest, by Cabot Strait. Labrador is bordered to the west and south by the province of Quebec.


Newfoundland is a province of Canada composed of the island of Newfoundland and a larger mainland sector, Labrador, to the northwest. It is Canada’s newest province, having joined the confederation only in 1949; its name was officially changed to Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001.


Newfoundland and Labrador is the most eastern part of North America. Its position on the Atlantic gives it strategic importance in transportation and communications. Its capital city, St. John’s (on Newfoundland) is closer to the coast of Ireland than it is to Canada’s Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Sandburg's poems
(1) “UNDER THE HARVEST MOON,” Carl Sandburg, Poets’ Corner, http://theotherpages.org/poems/sandb02.html
(2) “HOME,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(3) “FROM THE SHORE,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(4) “THEME IN YELLOW,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(5) “NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt
(6) “GYPSY,” Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt

Carl Sandburg
CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967) wrote poetry, biography, autobiography, fiction and newspaper articles. He was a lecturer and folk-singer as well. His newspaper coverage of social unrest in 1919 resulted in a book called The Chicago Race Riots. The stories he invented for his three daughters became The Rootabaga Stories. When he was 70, he published his first and only novel, Remembrance Rock.

CARL SANDBURG THE FOLK SINGER
Beginning in 1903, Sandburg spent a lot of time traveling around the country to lecture to school and college audiences and to the American public at large. He played the guitar and sang, read his poetry aloud, and talked about his dreams for America. Because he loved the language of the ordinary American, he collected sayings, slang and folk lore; stories and songs people shared with him in the small towns, cities, and farms he visited.


BOOKS BY CARL SANDBURG
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (one-volume ed.)
Always the Young Strangers
The American Songbag
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg
Harvest Poems: 1910-1960
Honey and Salt
The People, Yes
Remembrance Rock
Selected Poems
The Carl Sandburg Historic Site Galesburg, Illinois, http://home.grics.net/sandburgsite/sandbio.htm
http://home.grics.net/sandburgsite/
American poet, historian, novelist, and folklorist Carl Sandburg was burn January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois and died July 22, 1967, in Flat Rock, N.C.


CHICAGO POEMS by Carl Sandburg, New York: Henry Holt And Company. Copyright 1916 by Henry Holt and Company, Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg; digitized by Cardinalis Etext Press, C.E.K.; posted to Wiretap June 1993, as chicago.txt — Text in the Public Domain. PREFATORY NOTE: Some of these writings were first printed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Chicago. Permission to reprint by courtesy of that publication, http://poetry.eserver.org/chicago-poems.txt






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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]

Defend Public Education 10-7

Students and Workers on Thursday October 7 are participating in the Second National Day of Action to Defend Public Education.

Students returning to classes are beginning another tumultuous school year wrought with massive cuts, and the struggle to defend public education has just begun.

Thursday’s action links growing movements beginning with the fall 2009 action out of California and the March 4, 2010, First National Day of Action for Public Education.

Local Actions for October 7!
Alabama Arizona California Colorado Florida Georgia Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island Tennessee Texas Vermont Virginia Washington (state) Washington, DC Wisconsin

October 7Actions are listed at http://www.defendeducation.org/?page_id=1073
http://www.defendeducation.org





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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]

U.S. Constitution staggers but stands under terror mongers

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
“The constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction.”

U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan today in the case of Ahmed Ghailani barred testimony of a government witness whose identity was obtained through torture.”

Human Rights First’s Daphne Eviatar reported from the court —

Judge Kaplan “upheld a longstanding principle of the rule of law, barring testimony derived from the torture of the defendant. The issue here is not that the testimony has been barred, but that the defendant was tortured. The fact that [the judge] recognizes that evidence derived through torture is inadmissible also strengthens the view that civilian federal courts — not military commissions — can best handle difficult terrorism cases.”

The barred testimony in the Ghailani case is not the only evidence the government will present in this case. The government convicted four of Ghailani’s alleged co-conspirators in the same federal court, without the testimony of [the barred] witness. The significance of Judge Kaplan’s decision signals “that the court will not countenance evidence derived from torture.”

Judge Kaplan issued his written three-page ruling after a hearing three weeks ago in which the prosecution witness, Hussein Abebe, testified about his dealings with authorities.

“Abebe was identified and located as a close and direct result of statements made by Ghailani while he was held by the CIA,” Al Jazeera reports. “The government has elected not to litigate the details of Ghailani’s treatment while in CIA custody,” the judge said. “It has sought to make this unnecessary by asking the court to assume in deciding this motion that everything Ghailani said while in CIA custody was coerced.”

Defense counsel had asked the judge to exclude Abebe’s testimony on the grounds that it would be the product of statements made by Ghailani to the CIA under duress. The judge concluded that the government had failed to prove that Abebe’s testimony was sufficiently attenuated [thinned, separate and apart] from Ghailani’s coerced statements to permit the testimony into evidence.

“The court has not reached this conclusion lightly, Judge Kaplan wrote of his decision. [The court] is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live.… [But]

“The constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction.”


Sources and notes


Ahmed Ghailani is accused of assisting in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa. Two hundred and twenty-four (224) people died, hundreds suffered wounds. Ghailani is the first former Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian U.S. federal court.


Human Rights First, a New York and Washington D.C.-based non-profit, nonpartisan international human rights organization publishes a mission of building “respect for human rights and the rule of law and helping to ensure the dignity to which everyone is entitled and to stem intolerance, tyranny, and violence,” http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/usls/2010/alert/665/; http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/about_us/about_us.aspx


Amnesty International wrote before Kaplan’s latest ruling —


The decision to prosecute Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in an ordinary court instead of continuing to hold him in indefinite detention without criminal trial or trying him before a military commission is a welcome decision. However, a shadow lies over the proceedings.


The trial serves as a reminder that Ahmed Ghailaini remains the only Guantánamo detainee to have been transferred to the U.S. mainland for prosecution. Nearly a year after the U.S. Attorney General announced that five other detainees would be brought to New York to be prosecuted in relation to the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, the five men, along with more than 150 others, remain in Guantánamo without charge or trial. Many of detainees and survivors of the attacks “continue to wait for justice.”


Although the U.S. government has succeeded in seeing off defense motions to have charges against Ahmed Ghailani dismissed, government has failed “to ensure accountability and remedy for such human rights violations – including the crimes under international law of enforced disappearance and torture” – leaving an injustice that must be addressed urgently and thoroughly.


“The trial of Ahmed Ghailani, who was arrested in Gujarat in Pakistan on July 24 or 25, 2004, and secretly handed over to U.S. custody on a still classified date the following month, could and should have occurred years ago. However, U.S. authorities chose to subject Ghailani to two years in the secret detention program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).


“During that time, he was subjected to enforced disappearance and to detention conditions and interrogation techniques that violated the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. He was transferred to indefinite military custody in Guantánamo in early September 2006 before being charged for trial by military commission in March 2008.


“Four months after President Barack Obama took office (May 21, 2009), the Department of Justice announced that Ahmed Ghailani would be tried, not by military commission but in federal court under an indictment that had been pending against him (since March 2001) in the District Court for the Southern District of New York. On June 9, 2009, he was transferred from Guantánamo to New York and charged with complicity in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people were killed and many more injured. He faces a life sentence if convicted.”


“USA: Shadow over justice— Absence of accountability and remedy casts shadow over opening of trial of former secret detainee accused in embassy bombings — The trial of a Tanzanian man transferred last year from the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to the U.S. mainland for prosecution is set to begin in New York on October 4, 2010.” Amnesty International USA, October 1, 2010, http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGUSA20101001001&lang=e


Lewis A. Kaplan (b. 1944, in Staten Island, NY), Federal Judicial Service: Judge, U. S. District Court, Southern District of New York, nominated by William J. Clinton May 5, 1994, to a seat vacated by Gerard Louis Goettel, confirmed by the Senate August 9, 1994, received commission on August 10, 1994
Education: University of Rochester, A.B., 1966, Harvard Law School, J.D., 1969
Professional Career: Law clerk, Hon. Edward McEntee, U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, 1969-1970
Private practice: New York City, 1970-1994
Special master: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 1982-1983
http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/nGetInfo?jid=1226&cid=999&ctype=na&instate=na


“U.S. judge bans Guantanamo witness — Court delays start of the first civilian trial for a Guantanamo Bay detainee citing irregularities with state witness,” October 6, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/10/2010106152441461929.html


United States District Court Southern District of New York
United States of America against
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, Defendent

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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; The Book Den Ltd: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net[DanvilleNY]

Paranoid War Gov'ts burn book, assault women

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

In Perpetual war times —
U.S. Pentagon suppresses memoir.
Israel beats woman, bans Peace laureate.

Army Times and others are reporting today “the Pentagon paid $47,300 in taxpayer money for the 9,500 books that constituted almost the entire first print run of [Operation Dark Heart by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer].” The U.S. government “had the volumes destroyed on September 20, while the publisher, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, issued a second edition on September 24 with roughly 200 words or passages blacked out.”

However, St. Martin’s Press had already sent an estimated ’60-70’ advance copies of the first edition to news organizations and others who may compare original versions with censored editions. A comparison, says the Times, “reveals that the Pentagon was eager to keep numerous missions against al-Qaida hidden from the public although the most recent operations described in the book occurred 6½ years ago.”

Pentagon representative Lt. Col. Rene White of the Air Force told the Times that the Department of Defense “has no plans to purchase editors’ review copies”; they had “hoped to recover these review copies before they became publicly available”; but recent events have made this “more difficult.”

WOMEN —
From theaters of perpetual war, government paranoia, tactics of suppression

JERUSALEM (AFP) “A grainy video of a male Israeli soldier belly dancing around a bound and blindfolded female prisoner — a video that went viral overnight — today provoked a furious response from the Palestinians.”

The clip, screened originally on Israel’s private Channel 10 television late on Monday, AFP reports, shows a soldier gyrating to a rhythmic drumbeat of an Arabic track while a woman wearing a headscarf huddles against a wall. The woman’s hands are bound in front of her, her eyes bound with white cloth.

JERUSALEM (AFP) “Israel’s supreme court yesterday rejected an appeal by Northern Irish Nobel peace laureate and activist Mairead Maguire against her deportation.” Maguire had arrived in Israel but “was denied entry at Ben Gurion airport because she had been deported in June for trying to reach the Gaza Strip by boat in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade.” The peace laureate had appeared on Monday before three Supreme Court justices in a bid to overturn Friday’s lower court decision ordering her deportation within 48 hours.


Sources and notes


“Censored book masks sensitive operations — The Defense Department’s 11th-hour effort to censor an intelligence officer’s memoir of his tours in Afghanistan has removed much, but not all, of the book’s most eye-catching previously unreported material” (Sean D. Naylor, Staff writer, Army Times), October 4, 2010, http://www.armytimes.com/news/2010/10/army-book-100410w/


“The Book the Pentagon burned — The Pentagon spent $50,000 of our money to buy up the first edition of ‘Operation Dark Heart’ by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and destroy every copy. The second printing has many words blacked out. WikiLeaks claims to have a first edition, but hasn’t shared it. However, reading the bleeped-through version reveals plenty” (Submitted by davidswanson Thursday September 30, 2010, http://warisacrime.org/content/book-pentagon-burned
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1010/S00011/david-swanson-the-book-the-pentagon-burned.htm


http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20101005/twl-israel-palestinians-military-abuse-y-4bdc673.html
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20101004/twl-israel-conflict-gaza-blockade-deport-4bdc673.html



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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]

U.S. War with Self, Southwest Asia

Compiled and edited with comment by Carolyn Bennett
No one escapes casualty or consequences.
War leaves no innocents.
Nothing exists unscathed.

U.S. v.Afghan civilians September 28
Thirteen civilians died and eight suffered wounds last Sunday when NATO forces bombed Afghanistan's northeastern Laghman province. NATO disputed the numbers.

U.S./NATO v.Afghan children September 29
Four children died and three adults suffered wounds when NATO on Wednesday conducted raids into Afghanistan’s eastern Ghazni province.

The chief of Andar district, Sher Khan Yousafzai, reportedly told the local Pajhwok Afghan News that helicopter-borne NATO forces fired on local people in an orchard near one of the district’s towns, also named Andar.

U.S. v. Afghanistan/Pakistan October 1
Unidentified assailants in the Pakistani town of Shikarpur in Sindh province set fire to tankers carrying supplies for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The incident came a day after Pakistani authorities blocked a supply route for NATO troops. Anger had risen among Pakistanis following the Thursday killings of three Pakistani soldiers in two cross-border strikes as NATO troops were chasing anti-government fighters in Pakistan’s northwestern Kurram region. Most supplies to troops in Afghanistan travel through Pakistan.

U.S. partnering w/ mercenaries October 2
Though the now-U.S. State Department Secretary promised in her bid for the White House to stop awarding military contracts to Blackwater (the felonious private security contractor), Mrs. Clinton’s State Department “has recently awarded the company another lucrative contract.”

On a list of eight firms bundled into the government-contracted Worldwide Protective Services is said to be one of Xe’s [Blackwater became Xe after a string of legal cases had been brought against the company in the U.S. and Iraq] fronts, International Development Solutions LLC (IDS). The total government outlay for the group of eight companies rises to $10 billion.

Blackwater’s U.S. Training Center (formerly known as Blackwater Lodge and Training Center) is part of IDS. Two former Blackwater employees are currently on trial in the U.S. on charges of murdering Afghan civilians and keeping human remains as trophies. The charges stem from a 2009 incident in Kabul. In 2008, five Blackwater guards were charged [though charges were ultimately dismissed] in the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians, who were shot in Baghdad’s al-Nisoor Square in 2007. Another employee of Triple Canopy (another contractor in the new Worldwide Protective Services contract) was charged with killing at least one Iraqi after he fired into a civilian vehicle for ‘sport.’ Blackwater agreed in August of this year to pay $42 million in fines for weapons export violations.

Afghanis v. mercenaries October 3
Private security companies are reportedly being terminated in Afghanistan based on a plan drawn up by that country in August. Government officials report they are shutting down eight firms and seizing more than 400 weapons. The move is part of a larger plan by President Hamid Karzai to assume all Afghan security responsibilities by 2014.

Forty thousand Afghans, according to Kabul estimates, are employed by private security companies — a common sight on Afghan streets, their heavily armed guards forcing a route through traffic — maintaining parallel security operations and operating beyond government control. Though these private firms have been accused of killings, crimes and scandals, they are rarely punished and many Afghans see them “as operating with impunity.”

U.S. v. Pakistan October 2
Sixteen people died when missiles suspected to have been fired by U.S. drones landed on Pakistan’s North Waziristan province.

The first raid on Saturday reportedly killed nine people after missiles hit a house in the Datta Khel area, close to the Afghan border. Seven other people died in another raid in the same region later on Saturday.

Datta Khel has been the scene of several U.S. raids on Taliban, al-Qaeda fighters, and local supporters accused of targeting NATO and US forces in Afghanistan.

The United States is believed to have launched in the past five weeks at least 22 missile attacks in Pakistani territory. Western officials have said some of the drone attacks have been aimed at disrupting a ‘terror plot’ against European cities.

Public outrage has also risen over recent NATO incursions from across the Afghan border. It hit a peak on Thursday, when two NATO helicopters crossed into Kurram tribal region and killed three Pakistani paramilitary soldiers they believed were firing at them from the ground.

In apparent retaliation for the killings, Pakistan has cut off a key U.S. and NATO supply line on its soil. About 150 trucks on Saturday were waiting for Pakistan to reopen the border crossing at Torkham so they could deliver their supplies to Western troops in Afghanistan.

U.S. v. U. S. civil liberties October 3
Activists from U.S. cities of Minneapolis and Chicago received judicial subpoenas to appear this month before a grand jury investigation. The actions follow September 24 coordinated U.S. police raids.

Though authorities searched and seized activists’ computers, check books, mobile phones, documents and photographs, they laid no charges of crimes against the activists.

U. S. “White Power” v. U.S.  September 29-October 4
“Racially motivated threats against [U. S. President Barack] Obama rose to new heights in the first months of his presidency, Al Jazeera reports. “The United States saw nine high-profile race killings in 2009. Meanwhile white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups claim their membership is growing and that visits to their websites are increasing.”

Al Jazeera’s People and Power program looked at an earlier report that investigated “whether the racial undercurrent that has long structured U.S. politics was reasserting itself.” In the process, reporters “uncovered links between white nationalists and a conservative movement that has since become a force within more mainstream politics.”

How many (est.) in two-theater

U.S.-led

WAR DEAD?

Casualty sites reporting

October 3, 2010 (accurate totals unknown)

• Anti-war dot com Casualties in Iraq since March 19, 2003

[U.S. war dead since the Obama inauguration January 20, 2009: 196]

Wounded 31,951-100,000

U.S. veterans with brain injuries 320,000

Suicides [estimated] 18 a day

Latest update on this site September 27, 2010

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

• Iraq Body Count figures

98,171 – 107,153

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

• ICasualties IRAQ: 4,424 U.S., 4,742 Coalition

AFGHANISTAN: 1,311 U.S., 2,124 Coalition

http://icasualties.org/oif/

Sources and notes


“NATO raid kills ‘Afghan civilians’— Residents fleeing village in Laghman province tell Al Jazeera that Sundays raid killed13,” September 28, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/video/asia/2010/09/2010928123526920458.html


“‘Afghan children’ die in NATO raid — Local official contradicts NATO claim of insurgents being killed, saying four children have died in Ghazni attack,” September 29, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/09/2010929114014622446.html


“NATO lorries set ablaze in Pakistan—Attack on tankers carrying supplies to troops in Afghanistan follows deaths of Pakistani soldiers in NATO strikes,” October 1, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/10/20101014133433742.html


“‘Blackwater’gets new U.S. contract — Private security firm now known as Xe has a slice of a new $10bn state department contract despite repeated violations,” October 2, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/10/201010117237790858.html


“Afghanistan begins disbanding private security firms” (Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters), October 3, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6920N820101003


“Deaths in Pakistan ‘drone’ attacks — Sixteen people reportedly killed by missiles fired by suspected U.S. drones in North Waziristan,” October 2, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/10/201010274744564994.html


“FBI targets U.S. Palestine activists — Searches, subpoenas, but no charges for anti-war activists ‘providing support to terrorists’ in Colombia and Palestine,” October 3, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/09/201092993840748931.html


“White Power USA — Is the US heading toward a future of racial tolerance or racially-motivated violence?”(Filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen went inside the white nationalist movement to investigate), People & Power episode airing Wednesday, September 29- Monday October 4, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2010/01/201015124739316797.html




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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]