No. 251, Nov. 6-12, 2003

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NATION BRIEFS


 

Antiwar hecklers ruffle Bush hawk

One of the leading members of the Bush administration has come under fire at an American university only days after resistance fighters blasted his Baghdad hotel with a rocket attack.

US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was visibly shaken as he fended off hecklers at Georgetown University during a speech.

The smooth-talking politician, who kept his cool under fire in Baghdad some days earlier, appeared ruffled and at one point snapped back at the hecklers.

“We hate your policies!” shouted one young woman, standing ten meters from Wolfowitz who went pale and clenched his jaw.

Two other students among the dozen that had lined up to speak to the man held up as the Bush administration mastermind of the Iraq war also attacked US policy there.

A visibly shaken Wolfowitz caught his breath to tell one of them, “You and I should both calm down.”

He later said that the Iraq war was “not an ideological, but a moral issue.”

“There is not much question in my mind about the morality of having gotten rid of this regime.” (Aljazeera.Net)

Senate faults White House over Iraq documents

The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee singled out the White House for failing to meet a noon deadline on Nov. 1 to turn over documents about intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction used to justify the US invasion.

But Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas said the CIA and State Department had provided a “good faith response” and the committee expected to receive “a quantity of documents” from both agencies by the end of the day.

The Senate Intelligence Committee this week sent letters to top administration officials demanding documents be turned over and interviews with officials be scheduled by the deadline.

Congressional officials said that step was intended to prod the administration to provide information the panel had requested as long as five months ago for its review of the quality of US intelligence on Iraq leading up to the war.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that even though the Senate committee has no jurisdiction over the White House, it has been working to help with the panel’s Iraq review. “We are talking with them and we will continue working with them,” he said from Crawford, Texas.

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee want to finish the review by year-end and focus on the intelligence agencies, while Democrats are seeking a broader scope to include a look at how the White House used the intelligence. (Reuters)

Senate boosts AIDS funding over Bush objections

Rejecting calls by President Bush, the Senate voted 89-1 to approve an amendment to the $18.4 billion foreign-aid bill for 2004 that will add almost $300 million dollars to the global fight against HIV/AIDS.

If approved by a House-Senate conference committee, which will hash out their different versions of the underlying bill over the coming days, the Senate action would make $2.4 billion available to anti-AIDS programs, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, in the coming year.

The House version caps anti-AIDS spending at $2.1 billion, the amount that Bush asked for in his initial budget request last winter.

The Senate vote was hailed by AIDS activists as a major victory in their fight to have Washington contribute more money to containing and eventually rolling back the disease, which is currently killing about 8,000 people worldwide every day.

At the same time, activists warned that getting the additional $289 million approved by the Senate past the conference committee may prove a difficult fight in light of the Republican leadership’s stronger loyalty to Bush in the House of Representatives. (OneWorld)

Security agency displays ID system, a work in progress

The public got its first look on Oct. 28 at fingerprinting and photo equipment that will be installed at 115 airports and 14 seaports to check identities of millions of foreign visitors.

The equipment, which goes into use Jan. 5, will allow inspectors to check identities of visitors against those on terrorist watch lists.

The system consists of a small box that digitally scans fingerprints, and a spherical computer camera that snaps pictures. It will be used for the estimated 24 million foreigners traveling on tourist, business and student visas who enter through an airport or seaport.

The “exit” portion of the system - to ensure that visitors leave when required - is still being developed, but officials showed off an electronic kiosk, much like those used to dispense e-tickets at airports. The kiosk would allow foreigners to scan documents and provide fingerprints as they leave.

A General Accounting Office report issued last month called the system “a very risky endeavor” with daunting goals, likely high costs, and details that had yet to be worked out. The GAO said the system could lead to long lines at ports of entry. (AP)

Number of hungry families in US rising

About 12 million American families last year worried that they couldn’t afford to buy food, and 32 percent of them actually experienced someone going hungry at one time or another, the Agriculture Department said on Nov.1.

It was the third year in a row that the department has seen an increase in the number of households experiencing hunger and those worried about having enough money to pay for food.

Based on a Census Bureau survey of 50,000 households, the department estimated that 3.8 million families were hungry last year to the point where someone in the household skipped meals because they couldn’t afford them. That’s an 8.6 percent increase from 2001, when 3.5 million families were hungry, and a 13 percent increase from 2000.

Also, more and more families are unsure if they can afford to eat or don’t have enough food in their cupboards.

Last year, 11 percent of 108 million families were in that situation. That’s up 5 percent from 2001 and 8 percent from 2000. Most poor families struggling with hunger tried to ensure their children are fed, the report said. Nonetheless, one or more children in an estimated 265,000 families on occasion missed meals last year because the families either couldn’t afford to eat or didn’t have enough food at home.

The Agriculture Department said surveys since 1995 show that low-income households most likely to suffer from hunger are Hispanic and black, single-mother families, and those in inner cities and southern and western states. (AP)

Report indicates Blacks and Latinos incarcerated at record rates

Kweisi Mfume, President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called on Oct. 23 for racial/ethnic impact studies to document the overrepresentation of African Americans and Hispanics in Maryland prisons. Mfume’s comments are based on a report released today by the Justice Policy Institute titled, “Race and Incarceration in Maryland.”

The study cites African Americans comprise 28percent of the general population, but total 76% of the prison population. African American men in Maryland are imprisoned at nearly eight times the rate of white men. As for drug offenses, whites and African Americans use drugs at similar rates, but Blacks represent 68percent of those arrested, and 90percent of those incarcerated.

The report recommends updating parole practices to include increased access to treatment and its duration, return sentencing discretion to judges by abolishing mandatory sentences, create “racial and ethnic impact statements” that would require lawmakers to mandate a quantitative analysis of the affects the new laws have on people of color and society at large. (NAACP)

Inuit battle to shut US air base

Inuit hunters are to ask Denmark’s Supreme Court on Monday to close down one of America’s most secretive and strategically important military bases.

The Inuit claim they were illegally evicted from traditional grounds in northern Greenland and they are demanding the right of return.

The US would like to use Thule air base as a site for the controversial “Star Wars” National Missile Defense System.

Lawyers representing the Inuit claim that their very survival is at stake as the territory to which they were exiled no longer has sufficient food stocks to sustain them.

In 1953 the Danish authorities forcibly evicted the Inuit from their ancestral lands in Northern Greenland where for thousands of years they hunted whales, polar bears and other arctic creatures.

Their removal enabled the Americans to establish a vital arctic outpost.

Four years ago, a Danish High Court ruled that the Inuit had been illegally exiled but denied them the right of return.

The Supreme Court justices now have to decide whether or not they have the legal right to go home.

The Inuits’ lawyers believe if they win the Danish authorities may have to order the Americans to move their base.

Since the Cold War ended Thule has evolved into America’s ear on the northern hemisphere.

The Americans will not be represented in court as this dispute is technically between the Inuit and the Danish Government but a spokesman for the US embassy in Copenhagen said it was keeping a close eye on the case. (BBC)

House nixes anti-profiteering penalties in Iraq spending bill

The final version of the $87 billion spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan is missing provisions the Senate had passed to penalize war profiteers who defraud American taxpayers. House negotiators on the package refused to accept the Senate provisions.

The Senate provision was authored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Richard Durbin (D-IL). It was one of the last major sticking points this week as negotiators worked through the compromise appropriations bill. The conferees narrowly defeated the amendment after lengthy debate, with House negotiators offering no substitute and no willingness to compromise, despite repeated offers from Senate conferees to negotiate the language. Republican and Democratic Senate conferees consistently supported the provision, which had been unanimously accepted during the Senate Appropriations Committee markup of the bill.

US fraud statutes protect against waste of tax dollars at home, but none expressly prohibit war profiteering and none expressly confer extraterritorial jurisdiction overseas. (US Newswire)

DU protesters found not guilty of trespass at weapons assembler

On Oct. 17, a Hennepin County jury declared that International Law can trump the local private property/no trespass law. At the height of the recent war against Iraq, on Apr. 2, 2003, 28 Minnesotans “crossed the line,” entering the world headquarters property of Alliant TechSystems Corporation (ATK) in Edina, MN with the express purpose of conducting a “citizens weapons inspection.”

The letter they carried demanded that they have access to the books and records of ATK to see if they had completed any studies on the medical and environmental effects of the depleted uranium (DU) munitions they produce.

The defendants contended that there is significant evidence that the DU penetrator munitions produced by ATK are a prime suspect in escalating rates of cancers and birth defects among residents of southern Iraq and US troops who served in the first Gulf War.

Using provisions from the US Constitution and International Humanitarian Law, the defendants successfully argued that the “manufacture, sale, stockpiling, as well as the use of weapons containing this radioactive waste [DU]” is illegal.

The US Constitution declares that International Treaties signed by the government become “the supreme law of the land.” The Hague and Geneva Conventions and its protocols and subsequent treaties are clear that weapons which cannot discriminate between civilians and military combatants are prohibited from, use, manufacture, and sale. (The Pulse of the Twin Cities)

US court blocks payouts to ex-POWs

The Bush administration is quietly piling up victories in a legal battle to block payments to 17 US combat veterans who were captured and tortured in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and won a suit against Iraq for nearly $1 billion.

The former POWs — whipped, beaten, burned, electrically shocked, and starved by their Iraqi captors in 1991 — say they are baffled by the administration’s refusal to let them collect any of Iraq’s assets now under US control, and by the Justice Department’s efforts to overturn a federal court decision upholding their claims to compensation.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy referred all questions about the dispute to the Justice Department, where officials would not comment because the matter is still in litigation.

In court filings, the government asserts sweeping presidential power to block the claims because of the “weighty foreign policy interests at stake.”

The former POWs launched their lawsuit in April 2002 under a 1996 law that allows terrorist nations, so designated by the State Department, to be sued for personal injuries to US nationals, including prisoners of war. They argued that they were tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions’ ban on mistreatment of POWs.

Their position was strengthened last November when Congress passed and Bush signed into law a terrorism insurance bill allowing Americans to collect court-ordered compensatory damages from frozen assets of terrorist states. (Newhouse News Service)

US dissident says Bush needs fear for reelection

US linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said on Wednesday that President Bush will have to “manufacture” another threat to American security to win reelection in 2004 after US failure in occupying Iraq.

Chomsky, attending a Latin American social sciences conference in Cuba, said that since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration had redefined US national security policy to include the use of force abroad, with or without UN approval.

“It is a frightened country and it is easy to conjure up an imminent threat,” Chomsky said at the launching of a Cuban edition of a book of interviews published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, when asked how Bush could get reelected.

After the “disaster” of the US invasion of Iraq, Bush could turn his sights on Communist-run Cuba, which his administration officials have charged with developing a biological weapons research program, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of linguistics said.

Chomsky, a leftist icon who is better known today for his critique of US foreign policy that for his revolutionary theory of syntax and grammar in the 1960s, gave a lecture on the US politics of domination on Tuesday night that was attended by Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Chomsky praised Cuba’s defiance of US hostility and trade sanctions for four decades. But he also criticized the jailing of 75 Cuban dissidents earlier this year by Castro’s government. (Reuters)

Bush faces majority who disapprove of war strategy

For the first time, a poll has found that a majority of Americans disapprove of President George Bush’s handling of Iraq, even before the devastating helicopter attack of Nov. 2.

The poll was taken over last week, during which the mounting US casualties were denting the public’s confidence in the Bush administration’s grasp on events. The increasing cost of the occupation has further added to disillusionment.

The Washington Post-ABC poll released yesterday shows the number who approve of Bush’s handling at 47percent, a fall of 28 points on the end of April.

Those who disapproved had climbed to 51percent, the first time the figure has broken 50 since the war began.

The poll showed the unity displayed after September 11 and again at the beginning of the war almost completely dissipated, giving way to a public increasingly split on partisan lines.

Some 54percent said the war was worth fighting and 44percent said it was not. In March the figures were 70 percent and 27percent respectively.

One year away from the presidential election, the poll showed Bush only marginally ahead of any Democratic candidate and with his approval ratings on the economy and healthcare also falling. (Guardian (UK))

Bid to trim Bechtel’s tax

Bechtel Corp., Halliburton Co., and other large engineering firms could win a substantial tax break under legislation meant to defuse a $4 billion trade fight with the European Union.

As part of a bill awaiting debate in the House of Representatives, their taxes would be trimmed on income earned in the United States. Bechtel’s industry, which also includes such heavyweights as Fluor Corp. and Parsons Corp., would save an estimated $280 million to $350 million during the next 10 years.

The bill, which faces stiff opposition from House Democrats, would wipe out and replace an old export tax break that has run afoul of the World Trade Organization. Europe has threatened to heap $4 billion in tariffs on American exports if Washington doesn’t eliminate the old break.

Bechtel and its competitors have benefited from the old system for years, receiving a tax break on some income earned overseas.

Bechtel, however, stands to save more cash under the proposed domestic cut, because the company makes most of its money in the United States. A former IRS commissioner is lobbying lawmakers on Bechtel’s behalf. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Soldier faces charge of cowardice

A soldier with Fort Carson’s 10th Special Forces Group has been charged with cowardice for allegedly refusing to do his duty in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Georg Pogany, 32, a Special Forces interrogator, is charged with showing “cowardly conduct as a result of fear, in that he refused to perform his duties,” according to his charge sheet.

A cowardice charge is extremely rare, military law experts say. Army officials couldn’t say the last time it had been filed.

Pogany said he is wrongly charged.

The soldier said he experienced a “panic attack” after seeing the mangled body of an Iraqi man and told his superior he was heading for a “nervous breakdown.”

Pogany said he asked for help but was denied the care soldiers with “combat stress” are supposed to receive.

Instead of help, Pogany said, one of his superiors told him to “get his head out of his ass and get with the program.”

His commander ordered him back to Colorado Springs to face a court-martial for “misbehavior before the enemy.”

If convicted in a court-martial, the soldier faces prison time and a dishonorable discharge. He was charged Oct. 14. His first court appearance is Nov. 7 at Fort Carson. (Colorado Springs Gazette)

Growing use of private police network raises concerns

Since 2001, the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association has been quietly linking the case files of law enforcement agencies around the state to build a searchable system police can use to share information on people that their officers have had contact with.

More than 175 agencies that collectively police two-thirds of the state’s population are now participating in the Multiple Jurisdictional Network Organization (MJNO), sharing nearly eight million records. Though still owned by the chiefs, in March the state took over running it.

For police, the system’s appeal is in the depth of information. Unlike a database run by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the MJNO network doesn’t just tell police if a person has been convicted of a crime. It also tells whether they’ve ever been arrested or if they appear in police files as a victim, a suspect, a complainant or a witness. It has juvenile files.

Agencies in neighboring states have begun to join the network and some officers have access to it from their squad cars.

Now, spurred by citizens who’ve found themselves scrutinized because of the system, the network is facing questions. At least one lawmaker is planning hearings and an attorney is exploring a lawsuit with the hope of shutting MJNO down. (AP)