DemocracyNow
Female troops serving in Iraq are reporting a lurking enemy in their own camps: fellow American soldiers who sexually assault them.

So far, 176 female troops have reported being sexually-assaulted by fellow service members in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of sex crimes in the military is probably much higher since a large number of cases go unreported.

Among the most disturbing trends, is the military’s treatment of sexual assault cases. Women have reported poor medical treatment, lack of counseling and incomplete criminal investigations – some say they were even threatened with punishment after reporting assaults.

A task force appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called for sweeping changes in May, but victim advocates expressed alarm, saying emergency needs of women overseas were basically ignored.

Rumsfeld ordered the investigation in February after The Denver Post first reported that dozens of female troops were returning from the war zone seeking counseling at civilian crisis centers.full article/interview

Spain Mobilizes Against the Scourge of Machismo: New York Times
MADRID, July 10 – The men, it seems, are killing their women.

…Some conservative newspaper commentators have argued that men are also victims, since they sometimes kill themselves after they murder their women.

Spain’s Conference of Catholic Bishops, meanwhile, issued a manifesto on sexual morality in February that blames the sexual revolution for the abuse of women. “The sexual revolution has separated sex from marriage, and procreation from love,” it said. Its “bitter fruits” are “domestic violence, sexual abuse, and homeless children.”full article

“Their” women? Why does the author use this pronoun? Would she have used it if she were referring to American women? Does even the title suggest that the abuse of women is a quaint Hispanic cultural problem?
When are we going to come clean about those generic terms ‘sexual violence,’ ‘domestic violence’? These two stories are about MALE violence. The vast majority of the violence in the world is MALE violence. If we can’t even pinpoint the proper adjective how can we begin to deal with this issue, the issue of MALE violence, which lies at the root of thousands of years of bloodshed? Is it progressive and enlightened to invite females onto the battlefield alongside the males only for them to be victims of rape by their comrades? ‘Feminism’ is a dirty word, and we are advised to be on the lookout in our neighborhoods for ‘terrorists’, when for most raped and battered women, the terrorist sleeps in her bed.

‘Property of the US Army’. I guess so.

by Christopher Wills The Guardian UK
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) – Eager to showcase new faces at the party’s national convention, Democrats have picked just about the newest face around to deliver the keynote address: Illinois Senate candidate Barack Obama.

Obama could become only the fifth black senator in U.S. history. Tapping him to deliver the keynote address suggests the party sees a bright future for the 42-year-old law professor and state senator.

“What an extraordinary expression of confidence by the national party in his ability to command that stage,” said David Wilhelm, the former head of the Democratic National Committee.

…Obama, whose father was black, has made a splash on the national scene since his March victory in the Illinois Senate primary, partly because he was able to win the support of many white voters as well as an overwhelming number of blacks.

“At a time when so much of our politics seems divided, the fact that, at least within the Democratic Party, we were able to pull together a broad-based coalition is encouraging to Democrats,” he said Wednesday.

Obama often says he is part of the black community but not limited by it.

His father was from Kenya. He met Obama’s mother, who was white, when both were students at the University of Hawaii. When Obama was 2, his father left the family and returned to Kenya, where he eventually became a senior economist in the Ministry of Finance.

Obama was raised, mostly in Kansas, by his late mother and grandparents. He graduated from Columbia University in New York and received his law degree from Harvard Law School. He became the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review and later worked as a civil rights lawyer and as a community organizer in New York and Chicago.full article

New Kerry Ads Aim at Black Voter Turnout: The Guardian UK
“…There are some subtle cues that we have tested that resonate with African-American voters,” Morrison said. Such cues include the introduction of more African-American characters and a voiceover that is “talking to us, not at us,” he said…

“Kerry and Edwards:White America’s Dream Team

Reuters/NY Times
NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) – Kenya’s government is arrogant, greedy and instead of fighting corruption “eats like a glutton,” Britain’s ambassador said in a rare, blistering attack that led to him being summoned by the foreign minister Wednesday.

Edward Clay, British high commissioner (ambassador) in Nairobi, expressed outrage over what he termed “new corruption” since President Mwai Kibaki came to power in December 2002 pledging an all-out war on graft.

Corruption may account for $188 million and donors were unlikely to fund the 2004/2005 budget due to fresh graft, Clay said.

“Evidently the practitioners now in government have the arrogance, greed and perhaps a desperate sense of panic to lead them to eat like gluttons,” he said in the speech delivered at a private British business lunch in Nairobi Tuesday.

“But they can hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes.” Clay’s speech was published in full in the East Africa Standard Wednesday. full article

The white Western press carries stories like this without irony: imagine a British ambassador in Kenya accusing the black government of arrogance and greed. Ones might think to protest and say ‘but he told the truth.’ Irrelevant. Whites have given up the right to be a voice of moral indignation anywhere. And that is the stark and terrible truth.

It’s good to see the democratic impulse alive and well somewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
Reuters/NY Times
LIMA, Peru (Reuters) – Thousands of Peruvians, some burning effigies of President Alejandro Toledo, took to the streets nationwide on Wednesday to tell his unpopular government bluntly: change your policies or go.

Peru’s first general strike since 1999 began with scuffles between protesters and the police in the capital, Lima, and 52 people were arrested across the country, officials said. At least six were injured, including two babies, radios reported.

Fearing a repeat of a day of arson and looting in the southern city of Ayacucho earlier this month in protests the government said were hijacked by the Shining Path terror group, 93,000 police were on alert and 600 troops helped guard installations such as electricity plants and hospitals.

The main square, where the government palace is located, was cordoned off with metal barriers for the one-day action.

Demonstrators blocked roads in a poor district on the edge of Lima and Aymara Indians did the same near the southern border with Bolivia, where a mob lynched a mayor accused of corruption in April.

“The demand for Toledo to go is massive. This demonstration is a rejection of the government’s economic policies and the whole privatization process,” said Julio Lopez, a 28-year-old student in the southern city of Arequipa.full article

The Guardian UK
Six hours after Jamal Mirsaidov met with the British ambassador, the limp and mutilated corpse of his grandson was dumped on his doorstep. The body was battered and one arm appeared to have been immersed in boiling fluid until the skin had begun to peel off. Mirsaidov is a literature professor in the ancient city of Samarkand. His mistake had been to write a letter to Tony Blair and George Bush alerting them to the daily torture meted out to dissidents in Uzbekistan, their new ally in the war on terror.

Mirsaidov and the ambassador, Craig Murray, doubt the letter was ever delivered but Murray ensured his message was. And though the local prosecutor concluded that the 18-year-old had died of a drug overdose, Murray is convinced he paid the ultimate price for his grandfather’s dissent. “The professor has no doubt at all that his grandson was murdered in response to my visit. I wrestle with my conscience greatly over whether I caused that boy’s horrible death.”

Murray has paid a more direct price for his decision to step out of the bubble of isolation and immunity in which most diplomats live and challenge such abuses. His distinctly undiplomatic assessment of Uzbekistan’s human rights record propelled him into a lengthy battle with the Foreign Office. He was subjected to a humiliating disciplinary investigation, had his personal life publicly shredded and suffered a string of health problems. He became the rogue ambassador. Not so much Our Man in Tashkent as Our Uzbekistan Problem.

…Murray was determined not to let the regime’s abuses be drowned out by the country’s newfound strategic importance. Uzbekistan had allowed the Pentagon to hire a vital military base in the southern town of Kharshi to aid the hunt for Osama bin Laden in neighbouring Afghanistan. In return, Tashkent got about half a billion dollars in aid a year. Some of the aid itself highlighted American double standards. In 2002, $79 million went to the Uzbekistani security forces and law enforcement (in 2002, the US aid budget to Uzbekistan was $220 million in total) – the same people whom the State Department accused of “using torture as a routine investigation technique”.Full Article

Pentagon Papers Whistleblower [Ellsberg] Calls for National Security Leaks-commondreams.org

by AL Kennedy The Guardian UK
Native Americans lose their land as our presidential hero revives old-time nuclear tensions with Moscow

So glad that our Tony has now slithered himself a plucky and important millimetre away from Bush – “I now feel I can only agree absolutely with 99% of what the lovely president thinks and does”. Sturdy chap, our premier. But if he’s looking to improve his personal popularity – we can hardly expect him to be acting out of conscience – he still has to deal with the difficulty that if Bush and Blair together are the Laurel and Hardy of demonic foreign policy, Bush and Blair apart are quite evil enough to provoke spontaneous vomiting in small children.

Now, like many British citizens, I’d rather not think about our ghastly leader, but Bush is rather harder to blot out. It’s that whole terror thing. I’ve been waking up screaming since I was five, so I find I am slightly susceptible to terror. Not the $60bn-earmarked-for-next-year, civil-rights-dissolving, Orange Alert type of terror – I mean real terror.

And it’s not as if the genuine terror of Bush is hard to notice. Within hours of coming into office, he’d started approving oil exploration in national parks, cutting support for disadvantaged children, raising the levels of arsenic in drinking water… Being an utter bastard with numbing consistency is his only speciality beyond mangling his native language and playing golf like an unhinged Muppet in times of crisis.

But Team Bush could never be happy just tormenting its own (non-millionaire) citizens – the misery must spread. So we in the rest of the world get to be alarmed by the whole sabotaging Kyoto thing, the murdering strangers for fun and profit thing and the screwing the Middle East in hopes of Armageddon thing. But what gets slightly less attention is the reviving the cold war arms race thing.

It seemed momentarily puzzling when the US withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty and started developing cuter, smaller types of “battlefield” nukes when there didn’t seem to be a cold war any more. These things were of little or no help against mobile terror cells and the Pentagon had proved itself completely unable to protect even its own troops from the radiation produced by existing DU weapons. But, of course, all this lucrative US nuclear development was bound to alarm the Russians and therefore justify itself retrospectively. Hence, Mr Putin’s obliging announcement that his scientists have developed a vigorous response to America’s ballistic missile defence. The fact that BMD won’t work as advertised is, of course, balanced by the fact that it gets nukes very close to Russia and is supposed to be pre-emptive not defensive. Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense – it makes money, which is much more important.

And the new cold war is why US military nuclear facilities (which have been closed down as unsafe by the FBI in the past) are now immune from environmental legislation. Better yet, plans for the Nevada test site now include sexy, actual testing of nuclear weapons. Needless to say this is really pleasing everyone in Las Vegas, which is only 65 miles away, and everyone in Utah – soon to be renamed Downwind, the Malignantly Mutating State. Naturally, attempts to amend the relevant Defence Authorisation Act failed.

But the Bushies’ joy doesn’t end there, because the Nevada test site isn’t even on United States land – it’s on territory which belongs to the Western Shoshone nation and is protected by treaty (should you feel that treaties between the US and indigenous peoples are in any way binding). The Yucca Mountain site earmarked for America’s nuclear waste depository is also on Western Shoshone land, as is the planned Federal Counterterrorism Facility. And what is probably the world’s third largest gold-producing area. Full Article

Western Shoshone Defense Project
by: Jerry Reynolds / Washington D.C. correspondent
Indian Country Today
WASHINGTON – One of the largest ongoing seizures of Indian land in modern times will move forward following President George W. Bush’s signing of the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill on July 7.

Under provisions of the bill, Western Shoshone claims to 24 million acres of land in Nevada, Utah, California and Idaho, based on the Ruby Valley Treaty of 1863, are officially subsumed through payment by the U.S. government. The bill will forcibly distribute approximately $145 million in funds awarded the tribe by the Indian Land Claims Commission. Most of it will go to 6,000 or so eligible tribal members, with a separate revenue stream set aside for educational purposes.

The commission acted on findings that following the Ruby Valley Treaty, which permitted non-Indian miners access to the tribal lands, a “gradual encroachment” took place that supposedly nullified the treaty. According to the government the “gradual encroachment” theory obviated any need for official cession of land by sovereign Western Shoshone governments, a sticking point to this day with foes of the funds distribution.

The commission based its original $27 million award (enacted by its successor organization, U.S. Court of Federal Claims) on land valuation in effect in 1872 – 15 cents an acre, with no interest on the loss over time.

Because acceptance of the award would create the perception that any claims to their land have been relinquished, the majority of Western Shoshone governments have steadfastly refused the money. Despite the July 7 signing, several Western Shoshone tribes and tribal members said they will continue to rely on the Ruby Valley Treaty to press their land claims.

This has never been easy for them. Another sticking point in the process of seizure has been a court ruling that the tribe could not litigate the award once its trustee, the Interior Department, accepted receipt of it.

Although tribal sovereignty is not vested in individuals but in tribes, Congress has relied on individual votes, cast in rather stage-managed proceedings, to determine that a “majority” of Western Shoshone tribal members favor distribution of funds and the resulting extinction of their land claims. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and his Republican ally in the House of Representatives, fellow Nevadan James Gibbons, persuaded their colleagues to pass the embattled bill mainly on the strength of vote tallies in proceedings that had no official sanctioning process across all the Western Shoshone tribes, but concentrated on Nevada tribes.

The Ruby Valley Treaty lands are rich in resources, including gold, water and geothermal energy. Multinational mining companies are standing by to operate within the Ruby Valley lands through “privatization” bills brought forward by Gibbons. Gibbons and Reid are among Congress’ leading recipients of mining company contributions.

In addition, President Bush has designated Yucca Mountain, a site within the Ruby Valley lands, as the nation’s nuclear waste repository. full article

by Jeffrey Gettleman New York Times
A PROFILE IN TERROR

AMMAN, Jordan, July 10 – Ten years ago, fellow inmates remember, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi emerged as the tough-guy captain of his cellblock. In the brutish dynamic of prison life, that meant doling out chores.

“He’d say, ‘You bring the food; you clean the floor,’ ” recalled Khalid Abu Doma, who was jailed with Mr. Zarqawi for plotting against the Jordanian government. “He didn’t have great ideas. But people listened to him because they feared him.”

According to American officials, Mr. Zarqawi has come a long way from his bullying cellblock days and is now the biggest terrorist threat in Iraq, accused of orchestrating guerrilla attacks, suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings.full article

This is truly a ‘Profile in Terror’. According to this article, Zirqawi used to have one leg but now has two, used to be left-handed but now is right-handed, was at one time a journalist despite being illiterate, and is now a stupid thug with an apparent abundance of charisma. Sort of a Nelson Mandela/Idi Amin-type. The fact that he is apparently capable of regenerating limbs should be a real cause for concern.

by Edith M. Lederer The Guardian UK
UNITED NATIONS (AP) – The U.N. Mideast envoy on Tuesday said the Palestinian Authority has made no progress toward combating terror attacks against Israel and is “in real danger of collapse.”

Terje Roed-Larsen’s assessment received a rebuke from the Palestinians and praise from the Israelis, despite his criticism of Israel’s lack of progress in dismantling new settlements and freezing settlement activity.

U.S. Ambassador John Danforth called it “a good … balanced presentation” which stressed that progress toward peace must come through the political process and the road map endorsed by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.

He said the U.N. envoy’s view of the Palestinian Authority’s weakness raised an “alarm” and “a question of whether it’s possible to have a negotiated peace if one side is so weak that there isn’t anything to negotiate with.”

Roed-Larsen painted a grim picture of lawlessness in the Palestinian Authority, its failure to institute critical reforms, and he blamed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

He lamented that there was “no sign” of the bold leadership needed to tackle Palestinian reform and move toward peace.

“The Palestinian Authority, despite consistent promises by its leadership, has made no progress on its core obligation to take immediate action on the ground to end violence and combat terror, and to reform and reorganize the Palestinian Authority,” he said.

…Nasser Al-Kidwa, the Palestinian U.N. observer, disagreed, saying Roed-Larsen presented “a completely distorted picture.”

“The Palestinian Authority has serious problems, but I would say that this is the direct result of Israeli policies and Israeli actions,” he said. “We have occupation. We have an occupying power that has been engaged on a daily basis in illegal activities, war crimes.”

“It’s strange for him to play the role of the cheerleader, basically, of Mr. Sharon,” the Palestinian envoy said of Roed-Larsen, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Al-Kidwa also criticized the U.N. envoy’s support for Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and his failure to urge Israel to comply with the world court’s advisory opinion calling for the destruction of the barrier it is building to seal off the West Bank.

As for peace, Al-Kidwa warned that “there is no road map without a cessation of settlement activities and a cessation of the construction of the wall.”

By contrast, Israel’s deputy ambassador Arye Mekel called Roed-Larsen’s statement “very reasonable.”

“Not that we agreed with every word,” he said, “but maybe for the first time we heard a very clear and a very sharp criticism of the Palestinian Authority.” full article
NEWS FLASH
Media Coverage “Tends to” Reflect Israeli Perspective Guardian UK

by Sarah Boseley The Guardian UK
America was yesterday accused by France of blackmailing developing countries into giving up their right to produce cheap drugs for Aids victims.

In a move that may strain already tense relations between the two countries, the French president, Jacques Chirac, said there existed a real problem of favourable trade deals being dangled before poor nations in return for those countries halting production of life-saving generic drugs.

These cheap drugs compete with identical but more expensive patented varieties made by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

“Making certain countries drop these measures in the framework of bilateral trade negotiations would be tantamount to blackmail, since what is the point of starting treatment without any guarantee of having quality and affordable drugs in the long term?” Mr Chirac wrote in a statement that was read to the International Aids conference in Bangkok yesterday.

Although the president did not name the Bush administration in his attack, French officials later explicitly named the US as being at the heart of the problem.

Mireille Guigaz, France’s global ambassador on Aids, said: “It is a question between the United States and developing countries, and the way the US wants to put pressure on developing countries who try to stand up for their own industries. We do not wish countries’ hands [to be] tied by bilateral agreements.” full article

A devastating article.

by Mike Davis New Left Review
Future history of the Third World’s post-industrial megacities. A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs of the dispossessed.

…The evolution of the new urban poverty has been a non-linear historical process. The slow accretion of shanty towns to the shell of the city is punctuated by storms of poverty and sudden explosions of slum-building. In his collection of stories, Adjusted Lives, the Nigerian writer Fidelis Balogun describes the coming of the IMF-mandated Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the mid-1980s as the equivalent of a great natural catastrophe, destroying forever the old soul of Lagos and ‘re-enslaving’ urban Nigerians.

The weird logic of this economic programme seemed to be that to restore life to the dying economy, every juice had first to be sapped out of the underprivileged majority of the citizens. The middle class rapidly disappeared, and the garbage heaps of the increasingly rich few became the food table of the multiplied population of abjectly poor. The brain drain to the oil-rich Arab countries and to the Western world became a flood. [52]

Balogun’s complaint about ‘privatizing in full steam and getting more hungry by the day’, or his enumeration of SAP’s malevolent consequences, would be instantly familiar to survivors, not only of the other 30 African SAPs, but also to hundreds of millions of Asians and Latin Americans. The 1980s, when the IMF and World Bank used the leverage of debt to restructure the economies of most of the Third World, are the years when slums became an implacable future, not just for poor rural migrants, but also for millions of traditional urbanites, displaced or immiserated by the violence of ‘adjustment’.

As Slums [a UN report] emphasizes, SAPs were ‘deliberately anti-urban in nature’ and designed to reverse any ‘urban bias’ that previously existed in welfare policies, fiscal structure or government investment. [53] Everywhere the IMF—acting as bailiff for the big banks and backed by the Reagan and Bush administrations—offered poor countries the same poisoned chalice of devaluation, privatization, removal of import controls and food subsidies, enforced cost-recovery in health and education, and ruthless downsizing of the public sector. (An infamous 1985 telegram from Treasury Secretary George Shultz to overseas usaid officials commanded: ‘in most cases, public sector firms should be privatized’.) [54] At the same time, SAPs devastated rural smallholders by eliminating subsidies and pushing them out, ‘sink or swim’, into global commodity markets dominated by First World agribusiness. [55]

As Ha-Joon Chang points out, SAPs hypocritically ‘kicked away the ladder’ (i.e., protectionist tariffs and subsidies) that the OECD nations historically employed in their own climb from agriculture to urban high-value goods and services. [56] Slums makes the same point when it argues that the ‘main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state’. In addition to the direct SAP-enforced reductions in public-sector spending and ownership, the UN authors stress the more subtle diminution of state capacity that has resulted from ‘subsidiarity’: the devolution of powers to lower echelons of government and, especially, NGOs, linked directly to major international aid agencies.

The whole, apparently decentralized structure is foreign to the notion of national representative government that has served the developed world well, while it is very amenable to the operations of a global hegemony. The dominant international perspective [i.e., Washington’s] becomes the de facto paradigm for development, so that the whole world rapidly becomes unified in the broad direction of what is supported by donors and international organizations… [57]full article